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515: The Elder Programmer Look

 

00:00:00   Hey, have we ever recorded this show before noon?

00:00:04   I would be surprised if Jon has ever recorded a podcast before noon.

00:00:08   No, I've done a bunch of morning ones for usually like people in the UK and stuff.

00:00:12   Have you even shaved yet?

00:00:13   What are you talking about? I don't think you understand my shaving schedule.

00:00:18   Yeah, maybe. You've completed the morning shave, but not the evening shave.

00:00:22   Right, right.

00:00:23   No, that's not... I shave like once a week-ish.

00:00:27   I thought I figured you know your thick Italian heritage is just like just constant.

00:00:32   It is, oh it is.

00:00:34   It's just I don't feel the need to shave it off now that I'm not going into an office

00:00:38   all the time.

00:00:39   Even when I was going to an office honestly it was pretty hit or miss in the later years.

00:00:44   You slowly become like the elder programmer look.

00:00:48   Right?

00:00:49   Yeah, because one or two days it's like stubble and then people start asking you whether you're

00:00:54   throwing a beard, and then you shave,

00:00:55   and then just repeats.

00:00:56   (laughing)

00:00:57   - By the way, if anybody asks,

00:01:00   today is not December 26th, it's December 24th.

00:01:03   And I figure if Roman emperors were able to dictate

00:01:08   whatever they felt like the calendar doing,

00:01:10   I feel like I can do it too.

00:01:12   So today is really actually December 24th in our family,

00:01:15   and we have our own custom calendar, only for this year.

00:01:18   Because this has been,

00:01:22   oh, this has been an experience.

00:01:25   So we drove halfway upstate on the day before Christmas Eve,

00:01:32   on Friday, this past Friday.

00:01:34   The idea was to drive the rest of the way upstate

00:01:36   to our family's place on Saturday, Christmas Eve day.

00:01:41   And we woke up on Saturday morning,

00:01:43   and our kid had a massive fever.

00:01:46   And we were like, oh, no.

00:01:48   So here we are scheduling to go up to visit

00:01:53   the whole family, including his grandparents,

00:01:56   who were, you know, we wanna be careful

00:01:58   with what we bring to them.

00:01:59   And so we were like, oh no, we gotta,

00:02:02   we can't go up like this.

00:02:03   We can't bring this very fevery kid.

00:02:07   First of all, we can't make him sit in a car

00:02:09   for three hours.

00:02:11   That's not super great when you're feeling sick.

00:02:13   Second of all, we don't wanna get them sick.

00:02:15   So we're like, oh God, what do we do?

00:02:16   It's Christmas Eve.

00:02:18   And so we worked out this plan where we were basically

00:02:21   gonna wait until the fever broke and talk to a doctor

00:02:24   and see when it's safe and everything.

00:02:26   And then so as we're working this out,

00:02:27   we get reports from all of his,

00:02:30   from some of his school classmates' parents.

00:02:33   His whole class basically has flu A.

00:02:36   It's the whole class.

00:02:37   - Cool. - It's the real flu.

00:02:39   Many of them got tested.

00:02:40   It's influenza A, real flu,

00:02:43   and now he's showing flu symptoms and we're like,

00:02:44   oh crap.

00:02:46   And it's Christmas Eve, may I remind you.

00:02:48   It's not like anything's easily accessible or open.

00:02:51   So we do like a telehealth thing,

00:02:53   which thank God that even exists.

00:02:55   I mean, that's an amazing thing.

00:02:57   I'm so happy that that's,

00:02:59   like I think one of the,

00:03:01   if there is such a thing as a silver lining

00:03:03   for the COVID era,

00:03:04   it's that I think we have way more access

00:03:07   to virtual services than we used to.

00:03:08   And even though telehealth existed before COVID,

00:03:11   it was a much smaller and less commonly available thing

00:03:13   for most insurance plans and stuff.

00:03:15   So now it's super easy.

00:03:17   So we did telehealth,

00:03:18   and then we had to get a prescription.

00:03:21   And by this time,

00:03:22   the time that we had done the telehealth and done all this,

00:03:25   it was 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

00:03:28   - Ugh.

00:03:28   - So try getting a prescription filled

00:03:30   at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

00:03:31   (laughing)

00:03:33   So we eventually found like a 24-hour pharmacy

00:03:36   that was open Christmas Eve, had it sent there.

00:03:39   It was a whole thing, but we got it.

00:03:42   Anyway, so we've had it,

00:03:44   And we're like, all right, the good thing about Christmas

00:03:47   is that unlike, for example, Halloween,

00:03:50   if you are sick on Halloween, you just miss everything

00:03:53   because Halloween is a holiday that depends

00:03:55   on the rest of the surrounding community

00:03:57   celebrating it at the same time you are celebrating it.

00:04:00   Otherwise, you can't really go trick or treating.

00:04:02   If you just show up on strangers' doors

00:04:03   and knock on them on November 3rd,

00:04:05   you're gonna have a bad time, I think.

00:04:08   But Christmas, it really just depends

00:04:11   on when your family wants to celebrate it.

00:04:14   It's basically within your own household for the most part.

00:04:16   And so you can kind of celebrate it whenever you want.

00:04:19   So we just delayed it.

00:04:20   So yesterday we sat inside and played video games all day.

00:04:23   Big fan of Project High Rise right now.

00:04:25   It's like a modern Sim Tower.

00:04:27   It's fantastic.

00:04:28   - Oh, I loved Sim Tower.

00:04:29   - Yeah, yeah.

00:04:30   But yeah, and so we just played video games all day.

00:04:33   They tried to teach me how to play Don't Starve together

00:04:35   and I starved.

00:04:36   Well, no, I died almost instantly.

00:04:40   I think I lasted maybe 90 seconds in the game

00:04:43   before dying, so that might not be a strength of mine, but certainly SimTower-like games

00:04:49   are, I'm enjoying. So we just did all that yesterday, and this afternoon we are driving

00:04:53   upstate and today is fake Christmas Eve and tomorrow is fake Christmas and we're gonna

00:04:58   celebrate it, dammit. Anyway, so I'm very thankful for Modern Medicine and for our flexible

00:05:04   family in their scheduling. And yeah, it's been a time. Oh, and 24 Hour Pharmacy is also

00:05:11   Thankful for that.

00:05:12   - Did you give Adam COVID tests?

00:05:15   - Yes, and no.

00:05:17   - And had he gotten his flu shot yet?

00:05:21   - No, this is the thing.

00:05:22   So he had COVID on Halloween.

00:05:25   So that's why I'm such an expert

00:05:27   in what it's like to miss Halloween.

00:05:29   That was awful.

00:05:30   And because we thought we might be exposed to it,

00:05:33   we didn't get any boosters or anything yet,

00:05:35   'cause we're like, all right,

00:05:36   now let's wait two months, like they say,

00:05:37   and then we'll get all of our boosters.

00:05:39   and that puts us about now.

00:05:42   - Whoops.

00:05:43   - Yeah, I always remember when they would start advertising

00:05:46   the flu shots and they'd be advertising them

00:05:48   and before Halloween I'd be like,

00:05:50   "That seems a little early for flu shots,"

00:05:52   but I eventually gave in and said,

00:05:53   "All right, well I'll just get it as soon as it's available

00:05:55   so I'll let this be a lesson to the listener."

00:05:58   Even though sometimes it seems like they're giving out

00:05:59   the flu shots way too early

00:06:00   and it's not even close to flu season yet,

00:06:02   it's a good idea to get them when you can

00:06:03   'cause it's easy to forget.

00:06:05   - Yeah, yeah, last year we got them all regularly on schedule

00:06:08   and we had a totally fine, smooth winter.

00:06:10   I mean, you know, and I know it's on 100% or whatever,

00:06:13   but at this point, I'll take any improvement in chances,

00:06:17   even if it's on 100%, I'll take it.

00:06:20   - All right, let's do some follow-up,

00:06:23   and it starts with Brad Crittenden, who writes,

00:06:24   "I got a butterfly keyboard class action lawsuit

00:06:26   "settlement notice.

00:06:28   "It claims that they will pay 300 to $395.

00:06:31   "I have no recollection of this flying by.

00:06:33   "I probably filled it out and just don't remember,

00:06:35   "but I have zero recollection of this."

00:06:37   So here's the thing, I'd never filled it out

00:06:39   and I got one, or rather I got the notice

00:06:41   saying I'm entitled to one or whatever,

00:06:42   but I'm not gonna submit it because,

00:06:45   see I never, as far as I can recall,

00:06:48   I think I only got it repaired once,

00:06:51   or even, did I ever get it repaired or did I just not?

00:06:54   See I can't even remember

00:06:55   if I actually ever got one repaired.

00:06:57   So that's why I'm like, you know,

00:06:58   it's 'cause the class action is basically like

00:07:01   if you got a butterfly keyboard laptop repaired by Apple,

00:07:05   depending on how many times you got it repaired,

00:07:07   you have a certain payout of 100 bucks

00:07:11   or 200 or 300 bucks apparently,

00:07:12   but it's not a huge amount of money.

00:07:15   'Cause I mean, look, the real problem

00:07:17   with the butterfly keyboards,

00:07:18   well, there were two real problems.

00:07:19   Number one, people getting them repaired out of warranty

00:07:21   had to pay quite a lot of money, and more than that.

00:07:24   Remember, the price was, I believe,

00:07:25   like over $500 to get one repair out of warranty.

00:07:29   So there's that issue, which this, I guess,

00:07:32   partially addresses but doesn't fully address.

00:07:35   The other issue is any replacement you got

00:07:38   would have the same problem eventually.

00:07:40   And so really the whole laptop

00:07:43   was incredibly devalued over time.

00:07:46   That was the big problem.

00:07:48   And so, you know, this is, I'm glad Apple, you know,

00:07:52   got sued over the butterfly keyboards

00:07:53   'cause frankly they should have.

00:07:55   One issuance of that keyboard was bad enough

00:08:00   and then to keep issuing it year after year

00:08:02   after year after year claiming they'd fixed it

00:08:04   was beyond negligent and borderline fraudulent.

00:08:08   So they should have been held liable for that

00:08:11   and it seems like they've been held

00:08:12   a little bit liable for that.

00:08:14   But ultimately, if you were an owner

00:08:16   of a butterfly keyboard laptop,

00:08:18   this kind of helps a little bit,

00:08:20   but it doesn't really address the actual value

00:08:23   that you lost by having that laptop

00:08:25   and having to eventually sell or trade it in

00:08:27   or get it repaired out of warranty.

00:08:29   I was excited to get my money for this

00:08:31   and then I realized, oh wait,

00:08:32   my butterfly keyboard that broke wasn't mine,

00:08:34   it was on my work's laptop.

00:08:35   It was annoying though.

00:08:36   - Oh no.

00:08:37   - You gotta get your work laptop taken away

00:08:38   and you gotta have a replacement

00:08:40   and all your stuff is on it.

00:08:40   It's even more annoying with all the work

00:08:42   'cause they own the machine

00:08:43   so it's not like you can just copy stuff off of it

00:08:45   'cause they don't let you attach external drives

00:08:47   and blah, blah, blah.

00:08:47   So anyway, I hope my old workplace gets the money

00:08:51   they have coming to them

00:08:52   for all the butterfly keyboards that broke.

00:08:55   - Yeah, I didn't end up getting any of these repaired.

00:08:57   In fact, I'm trying to remember.

00:08:59   So we still have, you know, Aaron, what was my adorable now, Aaron's adorable in the house,

00:09:03   and every great moment, like once every few months, she'll be like, "Oh, my such and such

00:09:07   key is sticking."

00:09:08   Yep, sure is.

00:09:09   I bet you're right.

00:09:11   But anyways, but that never got a repair.

00:09:14   And then I think the one or two other MacBook Pros that I had during the butterfly era were

00:09:19   either works or have already been sold off.

00:09:22   So yeah, I'd never had a repair, and that probably explains why I never got this notice.

00:09:26   But I'm glad to hear that this is a thing,

00:09:28   and I agree with you Marco that,

00:09:30   you know, it's one thing to release a keyboard

00:09:32   that's flawed and maybe you didn't know it,

00:09:34   maybe you thought, oh it'll work itself out,

00:09:36   and okay fine.

00:09:38   The thing that bothered me about this whole fiasco,

00:09:40   well one of the things that bothered me

00:09:41   about this whole fiasco was the fact that,

00:09:43   like you said, they just kept saying,

00:09:44   no, no, no, it's fine, no, it's fine,

00:09:47   no it's fine, no, it's fine.

00:09:49   - This time we fixed it.

00:09:50   - Oh yeah, oh we added a gasket or whatever it was,

00:09:52   I don't remember the details,

00:09:53   we added a gasket, that'll fix it.

00:09:55   Because you're right, they were also saying,

00:09:57   "Nothing's wrong, keep changing it.

00:09:58   "Nothing's wrong, oh wait, we changed it again.

00:10:00   "Nothing's wrong, what are you talking about?

00:10:02   "There's no flaw, we fixed the flaw.

00:10:03   "What are you talking about?

00:10:04   "There's no flaw, oh, we fixed it again."

00:10:05   Like, yeah, it was a rough time.

00:10:08   - Huge Apple energy.

00:10:09   - Not to mention the fact that it sucked

00:10:10   even when it was working, but we'll move beyond that for now.

00:10:14   - I mean, what are you gonna do?

00:10:14   But no, I'm glad to see that this is finding,

00:10:19   as late as it is, I'm glad to see it's finding

00:10:20   some sort of resolution for regular people.

00:10:23   - Two related things to this.

00:10:24   I don't know we don't couldn't find this feedback for the show

00:10:26   But we did get some feedback from somebody through some channel live streams that said

00:10:30   That they had a Mac with a butterfly keyboard

00:10:33   And it went bad and they brought it to the Apple store

00:10:36   And they were informed that oh the Apple repair program for the butterfly keyboards that said hey if you have a problem

00:10:42   You know whatever it's called the extended repair program if you have a problem or replace it that program has ended

00:10:46   So this person had a butterfly keyboard

00:10:48   Brought it in and and they're no longer

00:10:51   eligible to get it repaired for free or for cheap because the Apple, we talked about this

00:10:54   when Apple rolled out the program, it's like, okay, at a certain point, Apple says, yeah,

00:10:58   we have this repair program because we realized we put out a defective keyboard, but at a

00:11:01   certain point, we just want to stop paying for that, so we're going to.

00:11:03   And I think we're past that point now, which is pretty crappy, so if you do want it repaired,

00:11:07   you're on the hook for whatever the, you know, $500 repair bill, really just probably want

00:11:11   to throw that laptop into the sea at that point.

00:11:13   And the second thing is that, just from some brief Googling, I believe I still have a butterfly

00:11:19   keyboard Mac that's in semi-active use. The original Retina MacBook Air had it, right?

00:11:25   The Intel one? Yeah, the first one, the 2018 model. But the

00:11:29   2019 did not. Yeah, maybe I got the 2019 one, I'll have

00:11:33   to look it up. There was an Intel MacBook Air Retina that

00:11:37   didn't have the butterfly keyboard. Yeah, I'll double check, but I was thinking,

00:11:42   "Oh, maybe if that one ever goes bad, I'll get paid," but apparently I won't, again,

00:11:45   according to that feedback that I can't find. So that's pretty crappy. I understand the

00:11:49   the repair programs can't last forever, but it's kind of like, what's the point of the

00:11:53   repair program if you're saying, "We're sorry for putting out a defective laptop, but we

00:11:56   have a timer on the lifetime of your computer."

00:11:59   So, I mean, it seems like the keyboard is even more likely to fail after the three or

00:12:04   four or five or however many years after that time period is up, but they're just saying,

00:12:07   "Yeah, we can't pay for that forever," because we basically know that there's probably some

00:12:11   graph of over time, what are the odds that a keyboard will fail, and at a certain point,

00:12:15   it becomes like ruinous, not ruinous,

00:12:16   but very expensive for Apple to repair

00:12:19   because the percentage of them that are gonna go bad

00:12:21   after 10 years is approaching like 25% or something.

00:12:25   - Well, but it does make sense to have a time limit on it.

00:12:28   I just think this time limit was probably too short.

00:12:31   'Cause at some point they have to stop manufacturing

00:12:33   and keeping the parts and the service equipment

00:12:36   and stuff like that.

00:12:36   So it does make sense to have an expiration date,

00:12:39   but that expiration date should be however many years

00:12:43   their products are expected to be in use

00:12:45   that number of years after they stop being for sale.

00:12:49   And so maybe it's like seven years, you know,

00:12:51   whatever it is, like as long as they can expect

00:12:53   a laptop to reasonably still be in use by most people,

00:12:57   it should have covered that duration, and it didn't.

00:13:00   - They don't have to keep making

00:13:01   the butterfly keyboard parts,

00:13:02   like that's not the only solution available to them.

00:13:05   They can do what they have done in the past,

00:13:06   which is that you bring something in to get repaired,

00:13:08   and they're like, oh, we don't make parts for that anymore,

00:13:11   and we don't make that product anymore,

00:13:13   but we recognize that you've got a broken thing

00:13:15   and it's our fault, so here is the new version.

00:13:17   We've heard lots and lots of stories of Apple doing that.

00:13:19   Like they basically give you a new laptop

00:13:20   or a new iPod back in the day.

00:13:22   That's not the one that you had

00:13:23   that is better than the one you had,

00:13:24   but it's the only option available to them

00:13:26   because they don't make the old one anymore.

00:13:27   They could always do that,

00:13:28   but of course that would cost money.

00:13:30   - And that would cost way more money.

00:13:32   'Cause like-- - Yeah.

00:13:33   Well, you stopped shipping a defective keyboard for years.

00:13:35   - I know, but like, but you know,

00:13:36   this was not a small number of affected products,

00:13:39   even though they kept saying,

00:13:40   "It's only a tiny percentage,

00:13:42   but we all know it's a much bigger percentage.

00:13:44   - A tiny percentage after six months,

00:13:46   is it a tiny percentage after six years?

00:13:47   - Right, yeah, that's the thing.

00:13:49   This would have been a massive number

00:13:52   if they actually did that.

00:13:52   And I've heard of that happening,

00:13:55   and one time it even happened for me

00:13:57   back in the white plastic MacBook days.

00:14:00   But it's not super common.

00:14:03   I feel like you have to have a fairly exceptional case,

00:14:05   and I think it has to go through some levels of approval

00:14:08   before they just give you a new thing

00:14:11   replace your old broken thing. So it's not that common of a thing.

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00:16:14   - Let's move on and talk about stable diffusion, baby.

00:16:20   And apparently artists can now opt out

00:16:23   of the next version of stable diffusion.

00:16:26   This is an article on the Technology Review.

00:16:28   Artists will have the chance to opt out

00:16:29   of the next version of stable diffusion.

00:16:30   The company behind it has announced stability.ai

00:16:32   will work with Spawning, an organization founded

00:16:35   by artists couple Matt Dreiherst and Holly Herndon,

00:16:37   who have built a website called Have I Been Trained.

00:16:40   That's in the spirit of Have I Been Pwned, isn't it?

00:16:42   That's so good.

00:16:42   - Oh, all right. - That allows artists

00:16:43   to search for their works in the dataset

00:16:47   that was used to train stable diffusion.

00:16:49   Artists will be able to select which works

00:16:51   they want to exclude from the training data.

00:16:53   - I mean, you don't even need to read the summary

00:16:54   or the article, just the headline,

00:16:56   which I've copied and pasted directly into the notes,

00:16:57   just the headline is enough for you to,

00:16:59   it's kind of like the Ian Beteridge law,

00:17:00   if you're a user, just say no.

00:17:02   Artists can now opt, no, you're not getting it.

00:17:05   The idea is not, oh, we'll steal all your stuff

00:17:07   and build a commercial product off of it and make money,

00:17:10   but you can always track us down,

00:17:12   find out we're doing that and tell us to stop.

00:17:14   Everything's fine now, right?

00:17:16   No, it's not.

00:17:17   We'll siphon money from your bank account slowly over time,

00:17:20   but if you catch us doing that and tell us to stop,

00:17:22   we'll stop.

00:17:24   Everything's fine now, right?

00:17:25   No problem anymore?

00:17:26   No, this is not the solution.

00:17:28   You can't take people's stuff, use it,

00:17:30   and say, "But we'll stop if you ask us to."

00:17:33   It should not be an opt-out.

00:17:34   Would you like to opt out

00:17:35   of having your intellectual property stolen?

00:17:37   Please offer that plan to Disney.

00:17:39   Hey, Disney, we'll be using your intellectual property,

00:17:41   but if you ask us to stop, we will.

00:17:43   - I can't.

00:17:45   - It's hilarious that someone thought this was a good idea.

00:17:48   - Well, I can, I mean, look,

00:17:51   I know this is probably unpopular,

00:17:52   so maybe I shouldn't even bother,

00:17:54   but I think the issue of copyright and rights

00:17:59   in terms of whether AI can be trained

00:18:02   on your copyrighted material is a weird blurry situation.

00:18:06   I don't think it's clear cut.

00:18:08   'Cause if you think about what training is

00:18:11   and how it might relate to real world analogs

00:18:13   to which we have precedent,

00:18:14   I am able to view a copyrighted work

00:18:19   if it's being shown to me in a legal way.

00:18:21   I'm able to view it and remember it and learn from it.

00:18:25   Artists everywhere are able to look at other artists' work

00:18:29   be inspired by them and generate new things in their spirit.

00:18:33   And so it is kind of a weird blurry line

00:18:36   in the sense that the AI models

00:18:38   that are being trained in this data,

00:18:39   they're not making illegal copies

00:18:41   and distributing illegal copies of the original works.

00:18:45   They are, in a way, viewing them.

00:18:47   - But they're not people, so they're not.

00:18:49   - Right, and so that's,

00:18:50   and I know there was recently a court thing somewhere

00:18:52   that said that they basically failed,

00:18:54   that AI stuff, the output of AI models

00:18:57   does not qualify for copyright

00:18:58   'cause it was not created by a human.

00:19:00   And I think that's also gonna be worked out over time

00:19:02   in the core systems, I think that's also probably--

00:19:05   - I think that's actually, that ruling's actually

00:19:07   more questionable than, in my opinion,

00:19:09   than the whether they're allowed to take your stuff.

00:19:11   Because the not created by a human thing is fuzzy in the,

00:19:14   okay, so the program is in human,

00:19:17   but a human runs the program and tweaks the output

00:19:19   and so on and so forth, so you have to say,

00:19:22   this isn't copyrightable because it wasn't created

00:19:23   by a human, it's like, well, the program didn't create it

00:19:25   on its own, it's just sitting there waiting for a human

00:19:27   It's like saying, "This is not copyrightable because it was created by Photoshop and Photoshop's

00:19:31   not a human."

00:19:32   Well, someone ran Photoshop and used it and clicked around and did stuff, right?

00:19:36   How many tweaks to the output do you have to do for it to suddenly become a copyrightable,

00:19:39   right?

00:19:40   I think that is actually more fuzzy.

00:19:41   What is not fuzzy, in my opinion, and again, who knows what the law will be, but in my

00:19:45   personal opinion, is not fuzzy at all that you cannot take—that you can't take works

00:19:51   that you don't have the rights to and use it to train an AI model.

00:19:54   and I talked about this on upgrade a while back,

00:19:56   like it just, in my opinion, there's no,

00:20:00   like I see where people think it might be fuzzy,

00:20:02   but the difference is that it's not a person doing,

00:20:04   you're feeding it into a program,

00:20:05   and the value of that program is nothing

00:20:08   without being fed input.

00:20:10   You have to feed input into the program.

00:20:12   If I just give you that program and say,

00:20:14   well, it's a program that I wrote,

00:20:15   so anything that comes out of it is mine,

00:20:16   sure, okay, go ahead, but it's like,

00:20:18   okay, well, my program doesn't work unless I feed it data.

00:20:20   Okay, well, now what data,

00:20:21   where are you getting that data from?

00:20:23   I'll just feed it any data I feel like.

00:20:25   The point of the acquisition of data,

00:20:27   you are taking that data and using it.

00:20:29   It's like taking a font and using it to make a sign.

00:20:32   Like fonts, this is more complicated

00:20:34   'cause you can't copyright a font.

00:20:35   But anyway, if you wanna use the official version

00:20:37   of a font or whatever, you have to pay for it.

00:20:39   You can use a clone of the font or whatever,

00:20:41   which gets things complicated.

00:20:42   But anyway, I don't think you can take people's

00:20:45   copyrighted material and use it to train an AI model.

00:20:47   I just don't, without some kind of compensation for them,

00:20:50   because you are directly deriving value from their work.

00:20:55   And I don't think the analogy to people makes any sense

00:20:57   because the program's not a person.

00:20:58   Yes, a person can look at art and make derivative art,

00:21:00   right, but it's not a person.

00:21:02   It's a person using a program, right?

00:21:04   It's like, well, if I use a program to copy this,

00:21:07   I didn't copy your art and resell it.

00:21:09   I used the CP program, and the CP program copied your art,

00:21:12   but then once I had it from the CP program,

00:21:14   then I sold it, but it's fine

00:21:16   because the CP program did just what a person does,

00:21:18   looks at the art, right?

00:21:19   No, it's just a more complicated version of the CP.

00:21:22   Now, will lawyers agree?

00:21:25   I think it really depends on, especially in our country,

00:21:27   how rich the corporation is on each side of the case

00:21:30   when it comes to, like if Disney arrives and says,

00:21:32   "Hey, we see you've trained your AI model

00:21:34   "on all of our intellectual property,"

00:21:35   probably Disney's gonna win, based on the precedent.

00:21:39   And in this case, I think Disney would be right

00:21:41   that you can't train your model on stuff made by Disney.

00:21:45   But as I said, an upgrade, Disney can train an AI model

00:21:48   on stuff made by Disney.

00:21:49   Like I'm not saying AI models are useless.

00:21:51   Disney can train all the models they want

00:21:53   on all their own intellectual property

00:21:55   and use it to generate stuff.

00:21:57   And I think the stuff that Disney generates

00:21:59   from Disney's own intellectual property

00:22:01   should be copyrightable because humans are running that

00:22:04   and doing the prompts and tweaking the output and whatever.

00:22:06   And I think that should be copyrightable.

00:22:08   So, so far, the one legal case that we've heard of

00:22:12   has gone the opposite way as I expected.

00:22:14   But this is a, you know, I think you're right, Marco,

00:22:16   that lots of people have different opinions on this.

00:22:18   I just feel like mine is very strongly against using other people's intellectual property.

00:22:23   And I think the problem with this stable diffusion thing is it's kind of admitting that, hey,

00:22:29   we probably shouldn't be using your stuff because they will immediately stop using it

00:22:32   if you ask them.

00:22:33   So based on that silly policy, they're saying, oh, we understand that you have the right

00:22:38   to make us stop.

00:22:39   Or maybe they're just trying to say we're being nice and we'll stop if you want.

00:22:42   But given my opinion that it is totally wrong for them to be taking that stuff in the first

00:22:46   I think this is a dumb policy.

00:22:48   - I think this is one of those areas where

00:22:51   we're gonna look back at whatever our opinions are now,

00:22:54   we're gonna look back in five or 10 years

00:22:55   and be like, man, we were way off.

00:22:57   And I don't know which direction we're gonna go in,

00:22:59   but I think this is gonna be a rapidly evolving policy

00:23:04   and what's acceptable and what's legal

00:23:08   are both also going to rapidly evolve.

00:23:10   I agree with you on the output being copyrightable.

00:23:15   again, it's like, if you use Photoshop to flood fill an area with a pattern, does that

00:23:19   not qualify for copyright because the program made the pattern and you didn't? So that

00:23:24   obviously, I think using it, I think the output is copyrightable, but I think the input is

00:23:29   really questionable and it's not clear cut. I think one area where it could kind of fall

00:23:37   legally into some kind of settlement is that when you watch a movie and you get the little

00:23:43   FBI warrant at the beginning, there are certain rights that you have and certain rights that

00:23:47   you don't. You are not, for instance, allowed to buy a copy of the movie on Blu-ray or whatever

00:23:53   and then show it to an audience who has paid to be there. You aren't allowed to use it

00:23:57   commercially. You aren't allowed to do public performances. And the same thing applies to

00:24:03   most music and things like that. And so you could argue, if you are a copyright holder,

00:24:08   You could maybe argue, well, the use of your model viewing or listening to my content is

00:24:15   not licensed because it's not personal, private home use or whatever.

00:24:20   So they could maybe get something in there, but I think overall the concept, I still currently

00:24:25   at least, I still fall on the side of the AI is just watching and learning from things

00:24:31   in a similar, well, maybe not too similar, but it's in an analogous way to how humans

00:24:37   might see something and be inspired by it over time.

00:24:40   But what do you have to say about the idea that the program doesn't have any rights?

00:24:43   Because in our law system, computer programs don't have rights right now, right? And I

00:24:48   think this specific computer program definitely shouldn't have rights, because it's not a

00:24:51   sentient being. So yes, it is doing something similar to what humans do, broad strokes,

00:24:56   but it doesn't have any rights, because it is not a sentient being, and all of our laws

00:25:00   apply to sentient beings, right? No, for that, I mean, I guess I agree with

00:25:04   but I don't see this as whether the AI has rights itself.

00:25:09   I see this as like--

00:25:11   - You're trying to give it creative control.

00:25:12   It's saying it created this thing,

00:25:14   therefore now the program has rights to it.

00:25:15   I mean, if you wanted to say that, I would say great.

00:25:17   Now the program can do whatever it wants with it.

00:25:19   You're like, well, the program doesn't wanna do anything

00:25:22   with it, the human that ran the program, though,

00:25:24   wants to sell it for an in and out purchase.

00:25:26   So it's like, okay, if you actually want to assign rights,

00:25:29   assign them to the program, and then you'd be like,

00:25:30   well, that's dumb, the program can't do anything.

00:25:32   - Exactly, that's why I don't have any rights.

00:25:35   - Well, but I think it's more complicated than that.

00:25:38   Like when you dive into the technical part of it,

00:25:40   like okay, well what about when Google indexes

00:25:43   fact data off of pages, and then you do a fact query

00:25:46   and it shows one of those Google knowledge things.

00:25:48   That's a questionable area of copyright as well, right?

00:25:51   But I think that's very, very similar to this.

00:25:53   - It is, but see, here's the thing.

00:25:55   You're saying how this turns out,

00:25:56   it can go a couple different ways.

00:25:58   It really depends on, in the case of the Google thing,

00:26:02   When that case comes--

00:26:03   I don't remember what the resolution of the case--

00:26:05   I think Google won that one.

00:26:06   But when the cases come out, there are two strong forces

00:26:08   here.

00:26:09   One is rich corporations want something.

00:26:12   In this case, Google is the rich corporation.

00:26:14   It wanted to be able to take summaries of web pages

00:26:17   and show them as its own output, which is arguably,

00:26:20   you're right, very similar to what these models do.

00:26:22   But I'm pretty sure--

00:26:23   and we'll have all of this for a moment--

00:26:25   I'm pretty sure Google won that case.

00:26:27   And did they win it because they were right,

00:26:28   or did they win it because they're Google,

00:26:30   and they're rich, and they have a lot of lawyers?

00:26:31   Right.

00:26:32   see also Disney and copyright.

00:26:34   - Right, exactly, right.

00:26:35   So I think, but in using the analogy to what Google does,

00:26:38   I kind of agree that Google, it's a little bit fuzzier,

00:26:42   but because Google's whole thing is there,

00:26:44   every one of their search results

00:26:45   is arguably a summary or whatever,

00:26:47   but Google is trying to be a venue for you to go somewhere,

00:26:51   and by putting the summary things,

00:26:52   they're making you not go there.

00:26:53   When a program is summarizing

00:26:58   and providing like an index or whatever,

00:27:00   If you follow that road too far down, you're like,

00:27:02   oh, you can't have search engines anymore

00:27:03   because you're not allowed to reproduce

00:27:05   any portion of my work, even a summary of it

00:27:07   if it's programmatically generated anywhere.

00:27:08   And that gets absurd.

00:27:09   Obviously, we think we should have search engines,

00:27:11   so let's not make a dumb law like that.

00:27:12   - You can't even have browser caches

00:27:14   if you follow that law too closely.

00:27:16   - Right, but then there, but you know,

00:27:17   this is the kind of technical nuance

00:27:19   that laws aren't great with, okay?

00:27:20   But what about when they take my webpage

00:27:21   and they don't even provide a link to it

00:27:23   and they just summarize the content

00:27:24   and re-smash it through and say, oh, here's the answer

00:27:27   and it's provided by Google

00:27:28   and they don't give credit to my answer

00:27:29   I'm the one who wrote that like, you know, "Grapes are poison to dogs" on my webpage,

00:27:33   and they just took my paragraph and summarized it or massaged it and put it on there, right?

00:27:38   And I, you know, again, I think Google won that case because they're rich, not because

00:27:41   they're right.

00:27:42   I would have decided that differently, but it's a nuanced ruling in that case, very nuanced,

00:27:45   because I don't want to outlaw search engines or browser caches.

00:27:47   In the case of the, you know, Disney finds someone's been training their AI models on,

00:27:52   you know, Marvel superheroes, which absolutely has already happened, I'm sure, right?

00:27:57   And Disney gets angry and sues.

00:27:59   Disney's probably going to win that because they have all the politicians in their pocket

00:28:02   or whatever the paraphrase of the line from The Godfather is.

00:28:07   But on the other side of that, unlike the Google case, there is another side to that

00:28:11   that is potentially just as powerful, which is people like free stuff.

00:28:16   And combined with the fact that it's very difficult to – it's not immediately obvious

00:28:21   what has been used to train an AI model.

00:28:23   And then mixed into that, these sort of academic things, which is like, well, they're not

00:28:26   selling anything that's just part of academic research and they should have broader purview

00:28:32   to do things for non-commercial purposes or whatever, right?

00:28:34   But the fact that it's just going to be like, "Well, Disney can sue, but they can try to

00:28:39   make laws in the US, but the world is bigger than the US and anything that gets on the

00:28:43   internet is everywhere, so good luck trying to stop people from making pictures of pregnant

00:28:47   Sonic."

00:28:48   Right?

00:28:49   Yeah, pictures of pregnant Sonic probably Sega would not like to exist, but people are

00:28:52   going to make them and it's a derivative work.

00:28:54   That's probably a bad example.

00:28:55   But anyway, these AI models are going to create images, and they're going to go everywhere

00:29:01   if people want them.

00:29:02   If it is a useful thing to have, it's going to be so hard to stop them.

00:29:05   So the countervailing force here is at a certain point the case is coming, they're going to

00:29:10   say, "Well, we think this should probably be illegal, but it's just so common and people

00:29:13   really like it."

00:29:14   And I know courts don't put an opinion that says, "Well, everybody does it, so it's fine."

00:29:18   But practically speaking, you can end up with decisions that kind of lean in that direction.

00:29:23   I'm sure there's some legal precedent of like, you know, like people who squat on a piece

00:29:27   of land and at a certain point they own it.

00:29:29   That doesn't make any sense.

00:29:30   You're like, "That doesn't seem fair."

00:29:31   But it's like, "But we have laws like that because it's even more absurd to do the opposite

00:29:34   in some cases."

00:29:35   Well, we've been living on this land for 100 years, but you know, you're going to kick

00:29:38   us off because, well, again, in this country there's terrible analogies for that as well.

00:29:42   Anyway, I'm not doing well with analogies.

00:29:44   It's early in the morning.

00:29:45   What can I tell you?

00:29:46   So it depends on when these cases come out.

00:29:48   I feel like there actually is something that may be equivalent to Disney trying to say,

00:29:54   "Hey," again legally, "Hey, we've decided that this is okay."

00:29:58   Regardless of what the law ends up being, I think it is not right to take people's copyrighted

00:30:02   work, train a model on it, and sell the results of that model's output.

00:30:06   If that model ever becomes a sentient being, which is plausible in the future, then we'll

00:30:10   have a different discussion.

00:30:11   That discussion will be what kind of rights do sentient computer programs have.

00:30:14   And that is a very different discussion,

00:30:16   but I want to be clear,

00:30:17   none of these programs are sentient,

00:30:19   no one is arguing that they are.

00:30:21   So we can set that aside for a sci-fi future,

00:30:24   but that's not what we're dealing with now.

00:30:26   - Yeah, see, I see where you're coming from,

00:30:28   I don't agree.

00:30:29   I still think that--

00:30:30   - Would you agree if you were an artist

00:30:32   and your work was being taken

00:30:33   and then the results of it being sold?

00:30:35   - We are artists.

00:30:36   So what would you think about somebody downloading all,

00:30:39   all episodes of ATP we've ever made,

00:30:40   all the podcasts we've ever made,

00:30:42   and training a model on that?

00:30:44   - Yeah, I don't think that's something,

00:30:45   and selling the results,

00:30:46   I don't think that's something you should do.

00:30:47   What if they took the source code for Overcast

00:30:50   and fed it into a program that tweaked it

00:30:52   and then started selling new copies of Overcast?

00:30:55   - Well, I don't release the source code,

00:30:56   so that's a little bit different, but you know--

00:30:57   - Yeah, it can reverse compile it,

00:30:59   'cause you released the binary

00:31:00   and they can just generate the source code from that.

00:31:01   You've all seen that, and the program doesn't care

00:31:03   what the variable names are all, A, B, C, D, and stuff,

00:31:05   because the program doesn't care about that,

00:31:06   but the program refacto, decompiles it,

00:31:09   refactores it, changes it a little bit,

00:31:11   and sells a new thing.

00:31:12   I said, "Derivative work."

00:31:12   just looked at it just the same way a person would.

00:31:14   - Well see, and that I think, that's why

00:31:17   I'm fairly hesitant to restrict the training side of things

00:31:20   because in my opinion, I would rather use the systems

00:31:24   we already have with copyright and fair use

00:31:27   and trademark also, which is a little bit relevant

00:31:30   in some of these things, but anyway,

00:31:31   I'd rather use the systems we already have

00:31:34   around copyright and fair use to manage

00:31:37   when things go wrong and when things are misused,

00:31:40   rather than say this new kind of technology

00:31:43   that's really exciting and has a lot of good valid uses,

00:31:45   we're gonna make it way harder

00:31:47   and way less practical to create.

00:31:49   Because if somebody uses an AI model

00:31:51   that's been trained on whatever they could find,

00:31:53   if they use that to generate something

00:31:55   that is too close to an existing copyrighted work

00:31:58   or that is clearly a derivative work

00:32:00   of a protected character or franchise or whatever,

00:32:02   then we already have infrastructure in place

00:32:05   to issue takedown notices, to sue for something being

00:32:09   or not being fair use, we already have all those systems.

00:32:12   And I think we are better off relying

00:32:14   on that human judgment side rather than

00:32:17   kneecapping this technology in its early days

00:32:20   in ways that are extremely impractical.

00:32:22   I mean, if you think about, look at a similar problem

00:32:25   that we faced when making web 2.0 and everything else.

00:32:29   We had the rise of user-generated content sites,

00:32:33   places like YouTube and Flickr and Tumblr

00:32:36   and all these places.

00:32:37   And you could say, legally speaking,

00:32:40   you could say it should be impossible

00:32:44   for anyone to ever upload a copy of my work

00:32:47   to these services.

00:32:48   In practice, that's really impractical and limiting.

00:32:51   And so, kind of what you said a minute ago, John,

00:32:54   so really the practice became,

00:32:56   all right, well we're gonna have the structure in place

00:32:57   to manage when there are violations,

00:32:59   but it's not gonna be perfect,

00:33:01   and it's not gonna be the intellectual property ideal

00:33:05   of having it be impossible to break the law,

00:33:07   but we're gonna just make a process in place

00:33:10   so that we can deal with when people do things

00:33:12   that are over the line.

00:33:13   - But their process is they have a program

00:33:15   called Content ID that will immediately detect

00:33:17   if you have music playing in the background

00:33:19   that's copyrighted, even if it's like

00:33:21   this next house over, right?

00:33:22   It is so incredibly fast and automated

00:33:25   and defaults to rejecting.

00:33:26   I mean, the YouTube video I wanted to see about Fusion

00:33:31   that I think I might have mentioned on a past show

00:33:33   was from Real Engineering, I think.

00:33:36   It was rejected by copyright ID from YouTube or whatever,

00:33:40   because the music used in the background was copyrighted.

00:33:44   And the music used in the background

00:33:45   was from a set of licensable music

00:33:47   that the channel had licensed.

00:33:49   So the copyright ID thing is so automated and so strict

00:33:53   and so defaulting to rejection that it says,

00:33:55   oh, this is copyright.

00:33:55   It's like, yeah, and I paid for it.

00:33:57   I paid for it to use on my channel.

00:33:59   But it's like, no, program says no.

00:34:00   So if it becomes possible to programmatically detect if your AI training model was trained

00:34:06   with any copyrighted data, no one will ever be able to upload any AI trained stuff to

00:34:11   YouTube, because YouTube will immediately detect it and reject it, even if you've paid

00:34:14   for the rights, because that's the side they err on because big corporations don't like

00:34:19   it.

00:34:20   It's more like, you know, okay, so that's YouTube, but then what about the wider internet,

00:34:23   like that it'll be everywhere.

00:34:24   And again, I think AI models are still useful and can be useful, particularly for companies

00:34:30   that want to train it on their own intellectual property.

00:34:32   Like it is useful to train things on stuff that you own.

00:34:34   And even an individual might not own enough to train a model,

00:34:37   but there are licensable image sets that you can train on.

00:34:40   That's also legally valid, right?

00:34:42   I don't think, to your point about kneecapping disorder,

00:34:44   I don't think we need any new laws.

00:34:46   My interpretation of the existing laws is,

00:34:48   this is already illegal, but the existing laws

00:34:50   also provide lots of ways that it's legal.

00:34:53   You know, Getty Images can sell image training sets.

00:34:56   There are free public domain image training sets.

00:34:59   if you would like to license an image training set from Disney, maybe they'll sell you one

00:35:03   and then you can train your model on that.

00:35:05   And then we have to have all the automated systems saying, "Okay, I can tell this was

00:35:08   trained on X, Y, and Z images, and X, Y, and Z images are from these licensable sets,"

00:35:13   and then you have to show that you licensed it just the same way the real engineer had

00:35:16   to say, "No, no, I licensed this music thing from this company.

00:35:20   I'm allowed to use it in my video.

00:35:21   This is how the system is supposed to work, YouTube.

00:35:24   Stop rejecting my videos."

00:35:25   Right?

00:35:26   and annoying, but if anything, if there is a programmatic way to enforce existing laws on fair use and intellectual property,

00:35:34   it will be worse for creativity and innovation than humans enforcing it, because computers are really, really good at doing stuff like detecting if there's copyrighted music.

00:35:43   And I presume eventually computers will be pretty good at figuring out if any copyrighted works from some set are part of a training set.

00:35:51   training set, because that's, you know, have I been trained or whatever, and maybe they

00:35:54   just have a database, I don't know how it works or whatever, but once it's programmatically

00:35:57   possible to answer this question, it swings farther in the direction of Disney stopping

00:36:02   you from ever training any image set on Star Wars.

00:36:05   Well, I mean, and again, I think using Content ID on YouTube as an example is, that's kind

00:36:10   of an extreme case, even though it is a highly relevant one, just because Content ID is so

00:36:13   overly aggressive, but you know, that's not, and if you think about also, like, some other

00:36:17   angle of this, you know, if Disney starts using this technology to like, you know, scan

00:36:22   everything that they can find on YouTube and be like, "Oh wait, that's Elsa. Oh, stop,

00:36:26   wait." And like, they can use the AI to detect derivative works even. Disney could start

00:36:31   scanning like DeviantArt and Flickr and stuff for like fan-drawn versions of their characters.

00:36:38   Well, but under existing laws, they have to show it was taken from like one of their actual

00:36:43   Well, drawing's not a picture of Elsa, right?

00:36:45   Although if you do want to put Elsa on a t-shirt and sell it,

00:36:48   you can't say, well, I drew the Elsa myself, so it's fine.

00:36:50   Actually, I don't know where the law is on that,

00:36:52   depending on how derivative the work is.

00:36:54   But anyway, what you would expect for the training thing

00:36:56   and how it would be trained is not just, hey,

00:36:58   you drew a picture of an apple, and there's

00:36:59   a picture of an apple in the training set.

00:37:00   It's like, is it literally your picture of the apple?

00:37:03   And that's where it gets tricky.

00:37:05   Again, I don't know how this have I been trained thing works.

00:37:08   Maybe it is a byte provider-- they

00:37:09   know the checksums of every image that

00:37:12   was part of the data set and you can upload one of your images

00:37:15   and if the checksum matches, then it's the same.

00:37:17   Is it literally byte for byte and if you resize your picture

00:37:20   or change one pixel, it doesn't match?

00:37:22   Or is it fuzzier than that?

00:37:23   This is kind of similar to the CSAM system

00:37:26   of perceptual hashing or whatever.

00:37:28   Because that gets into what you're saying.

00:37:30   It's like, OK, well, it's not from a Disney picture of Elsa.

00:37:33   It's a picture that I drew of Elsa.

00:37:35   And that's different.

00:37:37   And again, with Disney being overly aggressive, saying,

00:37:39   oh, great, we have a way to tell if anyone never

00:37:41   training set on any picture of Elsa.

00:37:44   I'm not sure where that falls under existing laws.

00:37:46   But is that even possible?

00:37:48   Is it possible for them to say,

00:37:50   we can tell that you trained your model on these images?

00:37:53   - I don't know if you can reverse it,

00:37:54   but I assume the people who train the models

00:37:57   know literally every single image that's in the image set.

00:37:59   It's a long list, but they probably,

00:38:01   they have the data somewhere,

00:38:02   and they could build a database based on that data

00:38:05   with either real content hashes, perceptual hashes.

00:38:08   That's how I assume have I been trained is working.

00:38:10   Like they know, if you train it on a data set

00:38:13   and then you delete the data set

00:38:14   and then you can be like, oh well Shrug,

00:38:16   I don't even know what it was trained on.

00:38:17   I think it's difficult to like,

00:38:19   difficult or impossible to reverse it to say,

00:38:21   oh, I can tell by looking at the output

00:38:22   what it was trained on.

00:38:23   I don't think that's possible.

00:38:24   But hopefully you keep around.

00:38:27   This is where you might need new laws.

00:38:28   Like, hey, if you wanna use an AI model,

00:38:30   you have to be able to prove something

00:38:32   about your training set.

00:38:33   And if you have an AI model and you say,

00:38:34   oh, we deleted our training set.

00:38:35   Oh, well, the law would say,

00:38:37   yeah, you can't use any of that.

00:38:38   because part of whatever our laws,

00:38:40   new laws that come out will say,

00:38:42   "Okay, here are the situations

00:38:44   "under which the output of an AI model is copyrightable,

00:38:48   "can be used successfully."

00:38:50   You probably have to be able to prove something

00:38:53   about the training set,

00:38:53   and ignorance would not be a defense of the law of the law.

00:38:56   They're like, "We don't even know

00:38:57   "what the training set was, so everything's fine, right?"

00:38:59   Yeah, probably not.

00:39:00   - I don't know, I'm still on the side of

00:39:02   this is addressing it at the wrong stage of the pipeline.

00:39:04   I mean, 'cause it's gonna be more complicated.

00:39:07   many new models that come out are not based on nothing

00:39:10   and trained from scratch, they're based on initial models

00:39:13   that were pre-trained by somebody else.

00:39:15   (laughing)

00:39:16   - That's part of what's in favor of the chaos

00:39:18   of the internet, it's like now we can't even tell,

00:39:19   what are you gonna do now?

00:39:20   - Right, you know, I think there's gonna be,

00:39:23   I think it's gonna be quickly very difficult

00:39:25   to ever tell how something was trained in completion.

00:39:29   And I think, again, I think this is as unenforceable

00:39:33   as it should be impossible to ever upload

00:39:35   copyrighted material to your platform.

00:39:36   Like that should, it's just impossible.

00:39:39   - But I mean, but that's more of like a practicality.

00:39:42   The legal thing is like, oh, you can't actually,

00:39:44   you don't actually own this copyrighted material.

00:39:46   The law is clear, it's just the practicalities

00:39:48   of the enforcement of the law are not clear.

00:39:49   And here I think the law is not clear yet.

00:39:52   - Right, yeah, because I still think it's definitely

00:39:55   a very open question about like whether training

00:39:58   an AI model on a copyrighted work is itself

00:40:02   a violation of that copyright or not.

00:40:04   Again, 'cause I still don't think it is.

00:40:06   Well, we'll see what the courts say,

00:40:08   but I'm pretty strongly on one side of this.

00:40:10   But, and again, this doesn't mean I'm against AI models.

00:40:12   I think they're super useful,

00:40:13   and I think there's lots of places where they can be used.

00:40:16   It's just that I think there should be some discipline

00:40:19   about the training, that's all.

00:40:20   We'll see.

00:40:21   - We are brought to you this week by Blaze.

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00:41:50   - Ted Shop writes that we would probably get a kick

00:41:57   out of a new Twitter to Mastodon web app,

00:42:00   and this is @mastedon-flock.vercel.app.

00:42:04   I didn't try it past the first screen or two,

00:42:07   but as a former Windows user, oh, the nostalgia.

00:42:11   Oh my word.

00:42:13   This made me laugh quite a bit.

00:42:14   And it looks like a Windows 95 installation wizard.

00:42:17   Big, Nsys, like Nolsoft install system energy.

00:42:21   I remember I used to play with that,

00:42:23   probably around the time that Marco and I--

00:42:24   - No, Nsys was what replaced this.

00:42:26   That was much better.

00:42:27   Wasn't Nsys not full screen?

00:42:29   - That's true, I think you're right.

00:42:30   This is that full screen blue gradient that was used a lot around that time.

00:42:35   And now this is, you could tell that they installed the driver for their GPU before they ran this wizard

00:42:40   because the background gradient is not super dithered in 16 color mode.

00:42:45   I thought this was really interesting because, well, two levels.

00:42:48   One, it is just like Move to Dawn in that it gives you follow on follow links.

00:42:52   So ignore the whole Windows 95 look or whatever.

00:42:54   It is another tool that is like Move to Dawn.

00:42:56   So Move to Dawn never goes away and you want to try something similar,

00:42:59   this does the same thing, it authenticates with all your things, then it gives you follow

00:43:03   buttons for all the people who have the info.

00:43:06   I don't know if it does a better job of scraping or whatever.

00:43:08   But the second thing is, part of the gag of it looking like Windows 95, it's not as far

00:43:15   as I can tell, maybe you can tell me if you're familiar with Windows 95, it's not a pixel

00:43:20   for pixel reproduction, it's almost like it's vector.

00:43:23   They have the Windows 95 look, but they've done it with vector pixels, because it looks

00:43:28   way bigger, it's scaled up, but it is pixel accurate if you imagine the pixels being these

00:43:34   smooth vector-y things.

00:43:36   Well, if you zoom in on the next and cancel buttons, on the corners, you see that they

00:43:41   have like a beveled edge.

00:43:44   Now in actual Windows 95, that would have been probably a one pixel thick line.

00:43:48   And so here they have like a beveled edge in the corners, so obviously it's like a CSS

00:43:51   border trick or something.

00:43:52   Yeah, and I'm on the final page, and I'm looking at the headers of the table, and the headers

00:43:58   have like a 3D gradient on them and you can see that there is like a you know a

00:44:02   dark line on the bottom and lighter line on the left and top and that line is

00:44:06   made of a chunky like would have been like a Windows 95 size pixel but then

00:44:11   the bevel is made with pixels that are 1/8 of that size that would not exist in

00:44:15   Windows 95 right because they're on an angle so I think it's very clever cut

00:44:19   it's a little bit of an uncanny valley thing I'm like this looks like Windows

00:44:22   95 but Windows 95 didn't never look like this down to the pixel anyway I thought

00:44:26   it was a little extra fun sauce on top of a useful tool.

00:44:31   And you can just in case the Move

00:44:33   to Don goes away.

00:44:34   But it's one of the show notes if you want to try another one

00:44:35   or get a little bit of weird uncanny value

00:44:37   Windows 95 nostalgia.

00:44:39   - And while we're on the subject,

00:44:39   Massodon continues to be great, by the way.

00:44:42   It just continues to be awesome.

00:44:44   And it's way better than Twitter right now,

00:44:47   in my view and for my needs and for the people I follow,

00:44:50   it's way better than Twitter.

00:44:52   So I'm happy there.

00:44:54   - Briefly going back to this web app,

00:44:55   Did you notice that if you click the X on the installer,

00:44:58   it actually drops you down to Windows desktop

00:44:59   and it has a privacy policy link.

00:45:02   - Oh my God. - An about link

00:45:03   that opens Windows Explorer,

00:45:06   that opens Internet Explorer.

00:45:07   And then if you click on the home page,

00:45:08   or no, not the home page, what was it?

00:45:10   It was one of these icons.

00:45:11   Oh, I guess it was the bookmarks icon at the top.

00:45:14   Then you go to what appears to be

00:45:16   the author's like old 1999 website,

00:45:20   which is pretty delightful.

00:45:22   Big like GeoCity's energy on this one.

00:45:24   There's a lot more here than I thought.

00:45:25   This is really great.

00:45:26   Oh, that's so cool.

00:45:28   Yeah, isn't that neat?

00:45:30   The other way I would have imagined

00:45:31   doing this that would have been fun

00:45:33   is all the ones that run older operating systems in Web

00:45:37   Assembly in your browser.

00:45:39   There's one for all the versions of Mac OS.

00:45:41   It's like macos-9.app, system7.app, macos-8.app.

00:45:44   Try those URLs.

00:45:46   And those are basically running a virtual machine in JavaScript

00:45:48   that's running the real version of those operating systems.

00:45:52   If you had done that and then wrote

00:45:54   moved it on in Windows 95 and ran it inside the Windows 95

00:45:58   that's running in your browser,

00:45:59   then you wouldn't have to fake any of this stuff.

00:46:01   You could literally just make everything exactly

00:46:05   in Windows 95, although that might be more difficult

00:46:07   trying to authenticate with modern SSL stuff

00:46:10   from Windows 95.

00:46:12   - Yeah, I was gonna say, can you imagine trying to make

00:46:14   just any network request that would work

00:46:16   in the modern era from that?

00:46:18   - I think some, I saw someone who did a 68K Motorola 68K

00:46:22   classic Mac OS Mastodon client, and I think somehow they compiled a version of OpenSSL

00:46:28   or something. They basically found a way to make a TLS connection from classic Mac OS

00:46:33   just to support their idea of doing this funny classic Mac OS client from Mastodon. That's

00:46:38   amazing.

00:46:39   That's pretty good stuff. Alright, and then let's see what else we have. Oh, that's right.

00:46:45   I wanted to make note, this news is actually a little bit old. We spoke about rewind.ai

00:46:50   I don't know, a couple months ago, this is the livestreams thing that John apparently

00:46:54   has always wanted.

00:46:56   It is available to anyone at this point, I believe.

00:46:59   It is 30 days free trial, but then it's $20 a month, which I don't mean to begrudge.

00:47:05   They've written software, they deserve to be compensated for it, but I don't know.

00:47:09   I don't love the idea of this 30 days free, and then you have to come back and remember

00:47:14   to cancel.

00:47:15   So I have not personally tried it, especially since this is not an itch I feel like I need

00:47:18   But for those that are interested,

00:47:21   it's available if you wanted to give it a shot.

00:47:23   - It ain't begrudging anything.

00:47:24   It's just the question of, you know,

00:47:25   do you think the price is worth the value for you?

00:47:28   And I was into this thing.

00:47:30   I'm like, oh, I'm gonna try it out of technical curiosity.

00:47:32   And I actually got in early and they sent the email

00:47:34   and said, hey, it's available for you to try.

00:47:35   I'm like, great, I'll try it.

00:47:36   And then I saw it was one of those free trial

00:47:37   and then we'll start charging you.

00:47:39   And I knew myself well enough to know,

00:47:41   I'm probably gonna forget and then I'm gonna get charged

00:47:43   and then I'm gonna feel bad.

00:47:44   In fact, I did that with the Lenza app, speaking of AI.

00:47:47   make money off other people's stuff.

00:47:49   The Lenza thing, like you signed up for a free trial

00:47:52   of the $50 a month subscription.

00:47:54   - Oh my goodness.

00:47:55   (laughing)

00:47:56   - And then, or it was $50 a month or $50 a year, I forget.

00:48:00   But anyway, you sign up for the free trial,

00:48:01   and then once you sign up for the free trial,

00:48:03   it gives you a discount on the in-app purchases.

00:48:05   And so I made like several $6 in-app purchases

00:48:09   to play with it, right?

00:48:10   But then I'm like, oh hey, I just gotta remember

00:48:11   to cancel this before the $50 thing.

00:48:13   And sure enough, I forgot,

00:48:15   'cause I didn't make a reminder for myself.

00:48:16   And I got a refund for it because I asked for a refund the second it kicked in and Apple

00:48:20   was nice enough to give me a refund.

00:48:22   But anyway, that's why I haven't tried to rewind.

00:48:24   I am curious about it.

00:48:25   I'm like, "I don't want to have to sign up for it and set myself a reminder, remember

00:48:30   to cancel it."

00:48:31   It's just like, for me, that price and that situation was enough of a barrier to not want

00:48:38   to deal with it.

00:48:39   And honestly, since we've talked about it, I'm like, "Oh, I'll try for technical curiosity."

00:48:42   I'm still kind of skeeved out by it.

00:48:44   I'm like, "Well, I'll try it on my laptop.

00:48:45   It's more isolated."

00:48:46   But not that I think they're doing anything nasty.

00:48:48   It's just, I don't know.

00:48:51   I probably will try it eventually as well.

00:48:53   In terms of $20 a month, if I got tons of value from it, I would pay $20 a month if

00:48:57   I felt like I was getting $20 a month worth of value out of it.

00:48:59   That's the question of software.

00:49:01   How do you price it such that enough people will think that price is acceptable?

00:49:05   Casey was also scared away by that price.

00:49:08   But I think none of us are in the situation where we think we would possibly...

00:49:12   The only reason we'd be looking at it is a little bit of curiosity, right?

00:49:14   And so, maybe we'll try it.

00:49:17   I can see this, like I said, this company eventually being spun off into like an enterprise

00:49:21   software because I think lots of companies might like something like this so they can

00:49:25   spy on their employees.

00:49:26   This is a rich and burgeoning market that already has existing players that are probably

00:49:30   worse than Rewind.ai because the technology is newer and better.

00:49:33   But so far, their sales pitch does not seem to be to corporations, it seems to be to individual

00:49:40   users.

00:49:41   If you're an individual user that's already tried it,

00:49:43   write in and tell us what you think.

00:49:45   John, real-time follow-up, you cannot run this on your Mac Pro

00:49:48   because it is not sufficiently powerful.

00:49:50   I have ARM Macs in the house.

00:49:52   OK, well, you said you would run it on your laptop.

00:49:54   I thought you were trying to imply that you would have

00:49:56   otherwise run it on the Mac Pro.

00:49:57   And that is--

00:49:58   The Mac Studio is another choice.

00:50:00   You know, I have a couple of ARM-- yeah, some.

00:50:02   Well, because your Mac Pro is just too old and busted,

00:50:04   doesn't have Apple Silicon, which

00:50:05   is required for rewind.ai.

00:50:07   It's got an immunity to the spyware.

00:50:10   (laughing)

00:50:12   - All right, John, tell me about your iPad mystery.

00:50:17   - My son got a new iPad for Christmas.

00:50:18   He was long overdue for one.

00:50:19   - Which one?

00:50:20   - He was using, well, that's part of the thing.

00:50:21   He was using a really old one.

00:50:23   He'd been using it for years.

00:50:24   I actually, he wanted to draw with the Apple Pencil,

00:50:27   so I had an old, like the original 9.7-inch iPad Pro,

00:50:31   like the very first one that,

00:50:32   I think it was the first one that had pencil support.

00:50:33   - Well, the 12.9, that was the first small one.

00:50:36   Yeah, that's right.

00:50:38   So anyway, I said, here, you can use this,

00:50:40   and use my old, roly Apple pencil,

00:50:41   and laugh at how it gets charged and everything.

00:50:44   And I'm like, well, you should just use that as your new iPad,

00:50:46   because it's better than--

00:50:48   his iPad was so old, it was older than the 9.7-inch iPad

00:50:51   Pro.

00:50:52   But eventually, he said, no, there's

00:50:54   something haunted on your iPad, which I kind of agreed with him

00:50:57   that 9.7 started getting weird in its later years.

00:50:59   I don't know if it's a hardware thing,

00:51:00   or it just doesn't agree with the modern OSes.

00:51:02   But he kept using super-ancient iPads.

00:51:04   So he was due for a new one and I got him a new one.

00:51:07   And I bought it a while ago.

00:51:08   And it was just sitting somewhere and then wrapped it and gave it to him.

00:51:11   And then I was setting it up for him, because that's what dads do.

00:51:14   I was trying to give it a name.

00:51:17   And I wrote general about it and wrote the name of the thing.

00:51:21   I remembered to change the name so it's easy to find.

00:51:24   And the device list.

00:51:25   And I started saying, "Oh, wait a second.

00:51:28   Which iPad?"

00:51:29   Because I like to give it the name of the thing.

00:51:33   My wife says like, you know,

00:51:34   Tina's Apple Watch Series 8.

00:51:36   So I know it's the Series 8 one.

00:51:37   Like, people ask that as an AskATD question.

00:51:39   How do you name your devices?

00:51:40   I name it John's iPad 14 Pro.

00:51:43   Like, 'cause otherwise, or iPhone 14 Pro.

00:51:45   'Cause otherwise I'll never friggin' remember

00:51:47   what the names are and I can't just reuse the same name.

00:51:49   I give them the name that is named with the device.

00:51:51   - Yeah, it's nice too, like when you down the road

00:51:53   when you upgrade that device,

00:51:55   it's nice to be able to like keep the backups straight

00:51:57   and like do the migration correctly and everything.

00:51:59   It makes it very nice.

00:52:00   - Yeah, and I do rename them to be like,

00:52:02   okay now it's Alex's iPhone 14 Pro, right?

00:52:05   But it's still iPhone 14 Pro,

00:52:06   so I know which device we're talking about.

00:52:07   And luckily in the house we tend not to buy

00:52:11   multiple devices of the same type,

00:52:13   just because people end up getting things

00:52:14   at different years, but if we had like two iPhone 12 Pros,

00:52:16   that might be a little bit confusing.

00:52:18   Maybe I would put the color in then.

00:52:20   Anyway, I wanted to give this thing a name of what it was.

00:52:24   So I named it Alex's M2 iPad Pro.

00:52:27   'Cause it was like, I got him the fancy one,

00:52:30   He deserves it.

00:52:31   He's been using an ancient iPad.

00:52:33   I think he was using an original iPad Air maybe.

00:52:35   It was super old.

00:52:37   No face ID, very slow, very old.

00:52:39   And he uses it all the time.

00:52:41   It's a very important machine for him.

00:52:43   So I'm a big fancy one.

00:52:45   But then I went to General About and it said, "iPad Pro 4th Generation."

00:52:51   I'm like, "Is that the M2?

00:52:54   Or did I change my mind and say the M2 is too expensive and get him a cheaper one?"

00:52:58   So I do what I normally do and type in a Google query for whatever, and I usually go to the

00:53:03   Wikipedia page because it's usually straightforward and I know the sidebar is going to have the

00:53:07   name of the SOC in it, and there's some basic information.

00:53:11   It's kind of like why I don't go to IMDB anymore, I just go to Wikipedia, because I want to

00:53:14   just know what's the cast of this thing.

00:53:16   I can find it on the Wikipedia page and IMDB is just a cluster and I can't find anything

00:53:20   on that friggin' site anymore and I hate it.

00:53:22   So bad.

00:53:23   So I go to Wikipedia and I go to iPad Pro 4th generation Wikipedia page and I scroll

00:53:28   down the thing it says system on a chip a12z bionic did I get him something with

00:53:34   an a12z because I would originally looking for a you a refurb m1 iPad Pro

00:53:38   could not find one Apple didn't have them you could find them used at other

00:53:41   places but I wanted to get an app official Apple refurb and Apple was not

00:53:44   selling refurb m1 iPad pros for whatever reason they just didn't have them all

00:53:49   right and so I thought I had decided to get an mm - it's I'm holding the device

00:53:53   in my hand I'm like how annoying is it that I can't tell if this thing has an

00:53:56   M2 in it. Just like, because Apple's thing just says fourth generation and when I

00:54:00   google fourth generation it says A12Z. So I downloaded Geekbench. I'm like look,

00:54:04   I know what the Geekbench numbers should be for an M2 and it's gonna be very

00:54:09   different from the A12Z. First of all Geekbench immediately says in the

00:54:11   sidebar this has an M2. So I'm like, I got the right one. But there was like 20

00:54:16   minutes where I was like did I buy the wrong thing from, I was looking at the

00:54:19   orders like maybe I bought the right thing because the amount looked like an

00:54:22   an M2 amount, it looked like an M2 iPad Pro amount,

00:54:25   but like maybe they charged me for the M2

00:54:27   and shipped me a different one.

00:54:28   So this is just a PSA to let everybody know.

00:54:31   On the Wikipedia pages for iPad Pro,

00:54:33   they have a list of generations

00:54:34   that go up to sixth generation.

00:54:36   The iPad Pro sixth generation on the Wikipedia page

00:54:41   is what Apple calls the iPad Pro 11 inch fourth generation.

00:54:45   So do not be confused,

00:54:46   and I think Wikipedia should really change this.

00:54:48   - 'Cause it's the fourth generation of the 11 inch.

00:54:51   - Exactly right.

00:54:52   And they're called like the main articles,

00:54:55   iPad Pro parentheses fourth generation,

00:54:57   which is exactly what you will see in general

00:54:59   about on your iPad, but it is not right.

00:55:02   So anyway, when in doubt, get Geekbench.

00:55:04   And by the way, I actually ran Geekbench

00:55:05   to make sure the number that came out was the M2 number.

00:55:07   So he has an M2 iPad Pro.

00:55:09   Oh, and the other thing is when I was doubting him,

00:55:11   I'm like, oh, this is an easy way to tell

00:55:12   'cause I got him an Apple Pencil with it

00:55:13   'cause he does a lot of drawing on his iPad.

00:55:15   I tried to do the hover thing.

00:55:17   I'm like, well, I have Procreate, let me launch Procreate.

00:55:19   I know Procreate has the hover

00:55:20   and nothing would work on the hover.

00:55:22   And so I looked at a YouTube video

00:55:23   and I saw people hovering over the icons on the home screen

00:55:27   and they would make, you know, with the pencil

00:55:28   and they would make the icons bigger

00:55:29   and that didn't work either.

00:55:30   And I'm like, is there something I have to enable for hover

00:55:33   and is there some preference of hover in Procreate

00:55:35   but why doesn't it work on the home screen?

00:55:37   This is why I was like, I think I got the wrong iPad.

00:55:39   It doesn't hover, it can't possibly be an M2.

00:55:41   Did I get the wrong pencil?

00:55:42   I googled for like, is there a second,

00:55:45   second generation Apple pencil that does the hover?

00:55:47   I'm like, no, it's all the ones with the flat side.

00:55:50   he's got the one with the flat side,

00:55:51   it magnetically connects, this should be doing hover.

00:55:53   The answer to that was, you gotta update to 16.2.

00:55:56   - Oh, gosh.

00:55:57   - It should, oh, it shipped with the wrong OS.

00:55:59   So it was a confusing morning where I was like,

00:56:01   what the hell did I buy, and don't put it past me,

00:56:04   I've bought the wrong thing before.

00:56:06   When I ordered his MacBook Air, I ordered the wrong color

00:56:08   and I had to cancel it and did a big thing,

00:56:09   or at least I caught that before it shipped,

00:56:11   but lots of confusion on Christmas morning,

00:56:13   but he does indeed have an M2 iPad Air,

00:56:16   which he very richly deserves, with an Apple pencil on.

00:56:18   Once updated to 16.2, Hover started working.

00:56:21   - All right, so that brings up something

00:56:22   I've been wondering about for a long time,

00:56:24   and I keep forgetting to bring it up.

00:56:26   So I got my first and only set of AirPods Pro

00:56:28   a year ago for Christmas.

00:56:29   I love them, I do want the new ones,

00:56:31   but I'm too cheap because the ones I've got

00:56:32   work really well, the battery's fine,

00:56:34   no rattling, et cetera, et cetera.

00:56:35   The thing that's driving me batty

00:56:37   is if you go into Find My, and you go into the Devices tab,

00:56:40   it shows my AirPods Pro, and it shows them

00:56:44   as outside of the case, which I'm looking at them.

00:56:46   I'm holding them in my hand right now.

00:56:48   I can assure you they are not outside the case.

00:56:49   And it shows them last having been seen

00:56:52   on September 27th, 2022.

00:56:55   And I vaguely remember, because again,

00:56:58   my memory is garbage, that when I think it was 16,

00:57:01   I was 16 first came out, or I don't,

00:57:03   or maybe it was a late beta, I forget exactly what it was.

00:57:05   But my AirPods Pro could do the homing beacon,

00:57:10   W1 or whatever it is where you wave your phone around

00:57:14   and it shows you where the AirPods are, et cetera, et cetera.

00:57:16   And I think that that only worked for a minute,

00:57:19   and then they pulled that for the original AirPods Pro,

00:57:22   and now it only works on the AirPods Pro 2.

00:57:24   But the stupid Find My app is stuck on September 27th,

00:57:28   and it's like it never got a clue that this feature,

00:57:31   the homing beacon feature, whatever it's called,

00:57:33   doesn't work.

00:57:34   And so according to this, my left AirPod,

00:57:37   or my left AirPod, that's a great movie,

00:57:39   my left AirPod Pro was last seen September 27th, 2022,

00:57:43   at 2.38 p.m.

00:57:45   And it is now, well, according to Marco, it's December 24th,

00:57:47   but in most of the world, it's December 26th now.

00:57:50   What do I do to fix this?

00:57:51   Like, I don't wanna unpair the things,

00:57:52   which I guess I could.

00:57:54   I really do not wanna sign out of iCloud,

00:57:56   'cause that's a nightmare.

00:57:57   - No.

00:57:58   - Is there a thing I can do to fix this?

00:57:59   I'm asking you two, and I'm asking the audience.

00:58:01   Like, what do I do about that?

00:58:04   - Hmm, I don't know any answer to that.

00:58:06   - Right? (laughs)

00:58:07   - I would unpair, like, 'cause unpairing

00:58:08   is not that big a deal,

00:58:09   and it's definitely the first thing you try.

00:58:11   Like, restart it, do it over, unpair.

00:58:13   Yeah, that's the right move.

00:58:15   I'll take that as a homework assignment for myself.

00:58:18   People in the chat are saying, oh, I'm

00:58:19   seeing some of this as well.

00:58:20   So I'm sorry if I've just made you aware of this.

00:58:22   But I don't know.

00:58:23   It was really cool for the 10 minutes

00:58:25   that it worked with the little homing beacon thing.

00:58:27   And I really liked that.

00:58:28   But then Apple took it away because they're meanies.

00:58:30   And then people are saying, when you unpair it,

00:58:32   then remove it from Find My when it's unpaired.

00:58:35   And then start fresh.

00:58:37   Fair enough.

00:58:38   I'll take that as homework assignment.

00:58:39   And do what Margo said.

00:58:40   Then you have to reset all your preferences on all

00:58:42   your devices to--

00:58:43   Well, if you want auto pairing,

00:58:44   you have to do the defaults are in your favor there.

00:58:46   - Yeah, yeah.

00:58:47   All right, iOS 16.2 came out a little while ago,

00:58:49   but it has a feature that we wanted to call

00:58:51   to everyone's attention.

00:58:52   And it was called to our attention by Brandon Butch,

00:58:54   who writes, "You can now stop your wallpaper

00:58:56   and/or notifications from appearing on the iPhones

00:58:58   always on display."

00:59:00   This was as of Beta 3, which obviously now it's true

00:59:03   for the shipping version.

00:59:05   But yeah, there's a switch in all,

00:59:06   or there's several switches and always on display.

00:59:07   There's just on/off.

00:59:09   Then there's show wallpaper and show notifications.

00:59:12   So you can turn the wallpaper on or off

00:59:15   and the notifications on or off individually.

00:59:17   - Yeah, so remember when the 14,

00:59:20   first of all, right before the 14 Pro came out

00:59:23   and we were speculating about the rumors

00:59:24   about the always-on display,

00:59:26   I had said, wouldn't it be cool if they basically

00:59:29   had this whole new aesthetic on the display

00:59:32   where most of the screen is black

00:59:34   and you have maybe just monochrome icons or widgets

00:59:39   and the clock and have those things glow

00:59:41   and have the rest of the screen be black,

00:59:42   which people quickly pointed out that that's basically

00:59:44   how Android phones with always on displays have always been.

00:59:47   And that this was not a new idea in the Android world.

00:59:50   So thank you for that.

00:59:52   They all probably used Opera as well.

00:59:53   So when the 14 came out though,

00:59:57   the only option you really had through iOS was

01:00:01   just take whatever your home screen is,

01:00:03   just make a dim version.

01:00:04   That's it, like that's what it did.

01:00:05   And there was no customization.

01:00:07   And this led to I think a couple of shortcomings.

01:00:11   one of the biggest ones being obviously

01:00:12   it wasn't very power conservative.

01:00:14   It wasn't as power conservative as it could be

01:00:17   if most of the screen was black

01:00:18   and only some pixels were being lit

01:00:20   if you had any kind of colored wallpaper.

01:00:22   But also it became harder to tell

01:00:25   whether your phone was awake or asleep.

01:00:28   And that was a huge, I think stumbling point

01:00:31   for people when they first got the 14 Pro

01:00:34   'cause iPhone users were never accustomed to having

01:00:37   always on anything.

01:00:38   And so you'd see your phone kind of like out of the corner

01:00:41   of your eye and you kind of freak out, oh, it's awake.

01:00:43   Like you'd think there was notification on it or something

01:00:44   or you think it was ringing or whatever

01:00:46   because you were conditioned to believe that a phone

01:00:49   with the screen on is awake and trying to tell you something.

01:00:52   And so what they added with 16.2 is an option

01:00:56   to turn off the wallpaper when it's in, you know,

01:01:00   sleeping always on mode.

01:01:02   And you could also optionally turn off notifications

01:01:05   which I believe Do Not Disturb always did

01:01:08   on its lock screen, but it was kind of custom on other ones.

01:01:11   Anyway, the big thing for me was the wallpaper toggle.

01:01:14   So if you turn off Show Wallpaper

01:01:17   under the Always On Display settings,

01:01:18   you now have in sleep mode a black background

01:01:22   that then only shows the clock and your widgets

01:01:26   and whatever notifications you might have there.

01:01:29   And you can turn off the notifications

01:01:30   if you want there as well.

01:01:31   So I've been using this since the 16.2 betas,

01:01:34   which were, it's been a couple of months now, I think,

01:01:38   and it has radically improved my interaction

01:01:41   with the 14 Pro's always on screen.

01:01:43   I can strongly recommend if you are a little bit put off

01:01:47   by like, you know, it not looking too different

01:01:49   or if you keep still thinking that your phone's awake

01:01:51   when it's not, try this option.

01:01:54   Turn off show wallpaper.

01:01:55   And it is, I think it's massively better.

01:01:59   I think it looks cooler and it functions better

01:02:01   in the sense that it allows me to know

01:02:04   my phone is not awake right now.

01:02:06   - I definitely believe you,

01:02:07   but I did turn off the always-on display ages ago,

01:02:10   mostly because, for what you said,

01:02:12   it seems like my phone was always on.

01:02:14   But now that I've gone back to the old way,

01:02:17   I'm not anxious to sacrifice battery life.

01:02:21   Because what I did learn after using it for a while

01:02:24   with the always-on display on

01:02:25   is that I didn't derive a lot of utility from it.

01:02:28   There was the downside, which is like,

01:02:29   "Oh, I think my phone is on."

01:02:30   But setting that aside, setting aside the downside,

01:02:32   Did I find occasions where it was useful for me to have the screen always on?

01:02:36   And I think the answer to that is no.

01:02:38   So even though this is, I agree, a much better way of doing it, at least for my purposes,

01:02:42   so I'd be able to tell that that's the always on display because the background is black,

01:02:47   I don't think I get any value from it the way I use my phone, so I'm not going to sacrifice

01:02:53   the battery life for this.

01:02:55   But I agree this is a great feature and it might even be useful to be the default, but

01:02:59   that could just be old habits, right?

01:03:02   Maybe new users who their first iPhone has

01:03:04   the always on screen will just be used to it

01:03:05   and not develop the habits that we all have

01:03:07   to expect a phone with our wallpaper being displayed

01:03:10   is on or trying to tell us something.

01:03:12   And I think related to wallpapers,

01:03:13   didn't 16.2 also add the thing where they separated

01:03:17   the screen that appears under your icons on springboard

01:03:21   from the lock screen?

01:03:23   Like it used to be whenever you made a custom one,

01:03:24   it made you make both of them as a match set, as a pair.

01:03:29   and I think they split that out, is that correct?

01:03:31   - I thought that was the case.

01:03:33   I haven't tried it either, but I thought that was the case,

01:03:35   and it drove me nuts.

01:03:36   It drove me nuts in the original version 16.

01:03:39   - And they should be split out,

01:03:40   because I, especially when I was first messing with it,

01:03:43   I wanted to make lots of different fun lock screens.

01:03:46   I did not want to make lots of different thing

01:03:48   that goes behind my icons,

01:03:50   'cause the thing behind my icons is 100% black

01:03:52   and always has been, and that doesn't change for me,

01:03:55   and so every time I had to,

01:03:57   wanted to make a new lock screen, it's like,

01:03:58   "Oh, and don't forget, you also need to make a..."

01:04:00   And I go, "Ugh, just separate these,

01:04:01   "it's two different things."

01:04:03   So if you wanna make a million different,

01:04:05   I guess they would call, what would you call it?

01:04:06   You would call it the, well, they call wallpaper

01:04:09   the image that's behind stuff,

01:04:10   but I think there should be a different name

01:04:12   for the image that appears behind your icons on springboard,

01:04:15   and then the image that appears on the lock screen.

01:04:17   And they call that image wallpaper in this setting,

01:04:22   because the option is, on the always on display,

01:04:25   do you want to show your wallpaper?

01:04:27   they mean do you want to show the image that shows behind the icons on your, on Springboard.

01:04:32   Anyway, confusing nomenclature but I'm glad they're working this feature out to be more

01:04:36   flexible.

01:04:37   Yeah, because one issue I still have with the Always On Display is that when it's in

01:04:42   sleep mode, whatever is on screen is not tappable.

01:04:46   It looks like it's tappable, but it's not.

01:04:48   The first tap that you do will put it into awake screen mode and then you have to tap

01:04:52   again or swipe or whatever you're doing to interact with something on that screen.

01:04:57   And so having, like part of the reason why I like this option of turning off show wallpaper

01:05:02   is that it makes it more clear to me, not only is the phone not awake, but it is not

01:05:05   interactive right now.

01:05:07   Like if I want this thing to be interactive, I have to tap it so that it is no longer mostly

01:05:11   black.

01:05:12   And then I know, oh it's lighting up with my, I still like the weather background, it's

01:05:16   lighting up with the rain that's outside, great, now I can interact with the notification

01:05:20   or whatever.

01:05:21   And that's, I hope, I really, really hope,

01:05:25   in future hardware iterations,

01:05:26   I hope they are at some point able

01:05:28   to make the sleep state more interactive.

01:05:31   I know there's a lot of challenges with that

01:05:33   and a lot of kind of practical concerns of like,

01:05:36   well, what if it's in your pocket

01:05:37   or what if you're handling it, you know, whatever it is.

01:05:39   And I think there are certain risks

01:05:41   and maybe it's not possible to do that well,

01:05:44   but I would love for them to at least try to do that well

01:05:46   because, or at least make it more obvious

01:05:49   that something's not interactive in the design.

01:05:52   And then ideally also, hopefully, make it wake up faster.

01:05:56   That would also help a lot.

01:05:58   Like if it can go from sleep state to awake state

01:06:01   in half the time it does now,

01:06:04   I'm sure some of that is a choice

01:06:06   in terms of animation speed,

01:06:07   but also I think some of that is giving the OS time

01:06:10   to wake up and using the animation

01:06:12   as kind of cover for that time.

01:06:14   So whatever they can do to make it more interactive

01:06:17   when you want to interact with it,

01:06:18   that would feel very good.

01:06:20   And right now, it still feels a little bit clunky

01:06:22   in that way.

01:06:23   - They could do kind of,

01:06:24   the only safe way I think they should try doing this

01:06:26   is kind of like they do for continuity camera,

01:06:28   which is the thing where you can take your phone

01:06:30   and use it as like the quote unquote webcam for your laptop.

01:06:34   And continuity camera works by detecting

01:06:36   that you have taken your camera

01:06:38   and put it in a particular orientation

01:06:40   that is more or less stationary

01:06:41   when you put it on those little clips or stands

01:06:43   to be behind your display, right?

01:06:45   So the feature you want,

01:06:47   It would be extremely, it would have lots of accidental input if it was just like that

01:06:51   all the time.

01:06:52   Oh, the lock screen, but it's interactive because people, like I said, people would

01:06:54   put it in their pocket, it would activate.

01:06:56   My parents are constantly accidentally calling me because, just because the delay between

01:07:00   when they lock their phone and when they put it into their pocket is too long and they

01:07:06   end up like touching something on their phone when they put it into their pocket and they

01:07:08   butt dial me, right?

01:07:10   But it could detect, for example, when it is laying on its back on a table for a certain

01:07:15   period of time and say, now I've detected that I'm on a table,

01:07:19   and I am going to actually register your taps, whatever

01:07:23   you tap on.

01:07:23   But as soon as you pick it up and start moving,

01:07:25   it's like, nope, nope, I'm locked.

01:07:26   No input means anything to me, right?

01:07:28   So that you-- it's tricky to do, right?

01:07:30   But I think if you just make it active all the time,

01:07:32   people are going to dial things like crazy.

01:07:34   Like it's just-- it's impossible to have.

01:07:37   Because again, when you lock your phone

01:07:39   and you put it into any of your pockets,

01:07:42   the expectation is there's nothing

01:07:43   can happen in that pocket that's going to do stuff on my phone, right? Even if I accidentally

01:07:48   hit the power button, which is a physical button for now anyway, it's still not going to unlock

01:07:53   my phone because Face ID will fail, Touch ID will fail, it's inside my pocket, right? Whereas if that

01:07:57   tap would actually activate the notification, as we know from stupid iOS, once you look at

01:08:01   a notification it's gone forever and you can never see it again and I hate that so much. I wish there

01:08:06   was like, here are the last 100 notifications that you dismissed, just show me them, keep them around.

01:08:11   So anyway, tricky to add feature, but I get where you're coming from, and I do think the

01:08:16   16.2 things are all improvements.

01:08:19   I actually left my Always On Display in all the default settings.

01:08:23   I like it.

01:08:25   I wouldn't say it's been an earth-shattering change for me.

01:08:28   I will say, kind of tangentially related, that battery life, when I first got the new

01:08:32   phone and it was chugging on photos and all that and all the machine learning stuff, like

01:08:36   the battery life was garbage as expected.

01:08:38   Then it got really really good for a while and then I don't know if it was 16.2 or something

01:08:43   But sometime in last month or two both errands and my phones

01:08:46   Our battery life has gone through the crapper recently and I haven't dug much to figure out what's going on there

01:08:52   There was nothing obvious when I went, you know spelunking in the battery like history and all that in settings

01:08:58   But it's it struck me as a little odd that both of us were having similar problems

01:09:02   So, I don't know if that's just a list family thing or if that's broader or whatever

01:09:06   But it's been a little bit of a bit of a bummer and so I might be turning off the always-on display if it continues

01:09:12   To be a problem, but all told I do like it

01:09:14   I have it rotating between pictures of the kids and pictures of Erin

01:09:17   And I like that every time I pick up my phone or well every time it gets locked

01:09:22   There's a new picture there and then the next time I lock the phone

01:09:25   There's a different picture and I can see it dimly on the display while it while it's just sitting and I dig that I think

01:09:30   That's fun cute

01:09:31   But I totally understand if it's not for everyone and by the way even without the always-on display like part of my problem of being

01:09:37   Distracted by it is that I would think like someone is calling because there I see their face on my phone

01:09:43   But I also have a rotation of my family right so every time I pick up my phone

01:09:46   It's the picture of someone in my family, but if my phone starts ringing

01:09:50   And it's like a spam call from just you know random spam number telling you my car warranty repair or whatever

01:09:56   But my phone screen will light up and I'll see a picture of my son's face on it

01:10:01   I'm like, oh I'm getting a call from my son. But yeah, I mean like that was the problem with the always on display

01:10:06   I always thought that was being contacted by somebody even without the always on display

01:10:09   that's still that's just a side effect of putting people's face as the you know, as your

01:10:14   Wallpaper or lock screen or whatever because you have to actually then say ignore the face

01:10:18   Look up at that

01:10:20   You know at the little caller ID thing that shows when you're getting a call to see what number it's coming from

01:10:24   from.

01:10:25   And if my son does call, I think it still shows his face, but it's a different picture,

01:10:29   but it's still him.

01:10:30   So anyway, possible confusion.

01:10:32   I mean, I guess I could just do landscapes or, you know, this is the first, whatever

01:10:35   it is, the iPhone 14 Pro is the first phone and iOS 16 that I did not have a picture of

01:10:42   one of my past dogs as my lock screen.

01:10:44   That has been my lock screen since the iPod touch in 2007, right?

01:10:48   I remember this.

01:10:49   It was Huckleberry or whatever, right?

01:10:51   Yep.

01:10:52   I decided, because I wanted to try the feature, I decided to try the rotating thing.

01:10:55   I had a bunch of nice pictures of my family that I made very tall and put room above their

01:11:00   heads for the clock so the clock wasn't over their face.

01:11:02   And I do like that.

01:11:03   I do like seeing those pictures rotate, but it continues to be a little bit confusing

01:11:06   when I get a call.

01:11:08   So a week or two ago, I think something like that, it was sometime in December, we got

01:11:13   word through Bloomberg, and I presume it was Germin, that the Apple Car project has "scaled

01:11:18   back" and is delayed. And it won't feature full self-driving capabilities. Imagine that.

01:11:23   But yeah, this was a news report and some highlights that were reported, re-reported on

01:11:29   MacRumors. Apple Inc. has scaled back ambitious self-driving plans for its future electric vehicle

01:11:33   and postponed the car's target launch date about a year to 2026. The car project has been in limbo

01:11:39   for the past several months as Apple executives grappled with the reality that its vision for a

01:11:42   fully autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals isn't feasible with current technology.

01:11:47   You don't say.

01:11:48   Imagine that.

01:11:49   The car will have an Apple-designed custom processor

01:11:51   to power AI functionality.

01:11:52   The chip is equivalent to four of the highest-end Mac chips

01:11:55   and is nearly production-ready.

01:11:57   That actually kind of brings us back to our discussion

01:11:59   about the Mac Pro last week,

01:12:00   but that's neither here nor there.

01:12:01   - That's a nip, though.

01:12:02   - Well, I mean, I would think.

01:12:04   Apple will use the cloud for some AI processing,

01:12:06   and the company is considering a remote command center

01:12:09   that could assist drivers and control the cars

01:12:10   from afar during emergencies.

01:12:12   That sounds safe.

01:12:14   I don't know if we really need to go

01:12:16   go into the ins and outs of the particulars of this,

01:12:18   but it is interesting that this poop show

01:12:21   is still a poop show from what it sounds.

01:12:25   - Why are they still doing any of this?

01:12:27   That's my, you know, this project has gone through

01:12:30   so many phases and ideas and certainly people

01:12:35   and certainly money, oh my God.

01:12:38   Like how long do they have to keep fumbling around

01:12:42   with this massive money waster before they're like,

01:12:45   you know what, this isn't for us.

01:12:46   Let's just crap can it and move on.

01:12:49   I still don't see why they even want to be in this business,

01:12:54   let alone why they keep plowing forward

01:12:58   without seemingly able to go near any kind of outcome.

01:13:01   - The story's interesting because it's kind of like,

01:13:06   the best line of the story is where it says that,

01:13:10   grappling with their vision, that blah, blah, blah,

01:13:12   isn't feasible with current technologies.

01:13:14   What it's saying is they don't have it.

01:13:16   They would like to have a product that does X,

01:13:18   but they don't.

01:13:19   It's like, I would like something,

01:13:20   I would like something that lets me levitate.

01:13:23   That would be a cool product, but we don't have that.

01:13:27   So how much money are you gonna spend on a project?

01:13:29   So is this R&D?

01:13:31   Like that's kind of the problem with self-driving.

01:13:33   It's difficult to do the R&D to figure out

01:13:36   if you can make a product without spending a lot of money.

01:13:39   And I get that.

01:13:40   It's not as simple as like,

01:13:40   oh, we'll have these people tooling around

01:13:43   with a multi-touch, right?

01:13:44   And that'll be a small team of a handful of people

01:13:49   and they'll tool away at it for years.

01:13:50   And eventually, if we get to the point where,

01:13:52   no, we could probably make a product out of this.

01:13:53   Maybe we'll make a tablet, maybe we'll make a phone.

01:13:55   Then you form the iPhone team and then the iPad team, right?

01:13:59   And that's when you staff up

01:14:00   and that's when you spend the money.

01:14:01   Although the amount of money that was used

01:14:03   to develop the original iPhone is comically low

01:14:05   and every company should feel bad

01:14:07   when they read those histories of like,

01:14:08   so how much money did Apple spend?

01:14:10   Even if we count like everything we can think of,

01:14:11   How much do they spend to make the iPhone?

01:14:14   The small number I think is they spend $150 million,

01:14:16   which is like, we spent $150 million

01:14:18   to change the color of the logo, right?

01:14:20   That's what big companies normally do.

01:14:22   So they spent $150 million to make the iPhone,

01:14:24   how much money is it made?

01:14:26   Anyway, there's more to it if you add to that, right?

01:14:28   But for self-driving cars, it's like, okay,

01:14:31   I can understand why they're saying,

01:14:32   it would be cool if we had a self-driving car.

01:14:34   I agree, that would be cool, right?

01:14:37   Can we make one?

01:14:38   Let's do some R&D to find out.

01:14:40   But it has always seemed to me

01:14:41   that this project at Apple was created

01:14:43   as if they had already done that.

01:14:44   It's like, oh, we know how to make a self-driving car,

01:14:46   let's just make a project to make one.

01:14:47   Like that it's already in the phase of like,

01:14:49   we're designing a product and we're staffing a team

01:14:51   to build that product and we're gonna contract manufacturers

01:14:54   to manufacture that product.

01:14:55   It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa,

01:14:56   what product are you making?

01:14:57   Our self-driving car.

01:14:59   Do you have a self-driving car?

01:15:00   He's like, no, but we'll probably be able

01:15:02   to figure it out, right?

01:15:03   Nope. (laughs)

01:15:05   Like you gotta be able to make the thing first

01:15:08   before you make a product team.

01:15:10   So again, no one knows the details of this,

01:15:12   but to the extent that anything with product Titan

01:15:15   has been in like let's make a product mode,

01:15:18   that has been a bad idea if the premise of the product

01:15:21   is a car without a steering wheel or pedals.

01:15:23   You cannot make a car, let's go with that saying,

01:15:25   you cannot make a car with a steering wheel or pedals

01:15:27   until it can drive itself.

01:15:29   And if it can't drive itself,

01:15:30   maybe get out of the product phase

01:15:32   and back into the R&D phase.

01:15:34   Don't go to the product phase until you think

01:15:36   you have something that works like the multi-touch.

01:15:38   We've got a multi-touch screen that we think works.

01:15:41   Maybe it's too big, maybe it's too clunky,

01:15:43   maybe it takes a lot of power,

01:15:44   maybe it's connected to like a power Mac or something,

01:15:46   but it works.

01:15:48   And the question is, can we make it smaller, cheaper,

01:15:51   blah, blah, blah.

01:15:52   They don't have anything that works.

01:15:54   Nobody does.

01:15:55   Nobody has this, right?

01:15:57   It would be cool if you could make it, but make it first.

01:16:00   I think this is just a hilarious story that the premise is,

01:16:03   Apple has decided they can't make a product they can't make.

01:16:05   Like, yeah, you gotta be able to.

01:16:07   And the other thing they can decide is,

01:16:08   we're not gonna make a car without pedals or steering wheel.

01:16:10   Make one with pedals and a steering wheel

01:16:12   that humans can drive.

01:16:13   Lots of people do that.

01:16:14   You can have lots of self-driving assistive functions

01:16:16   that I think are probably a bad idea in many cases,

01:16:18   but that's a thing that you can make.

01:16:20   But the idea that they keep trying to make a car

01:16:22   without a steering wheel, you can't do that.

01:16:25   And so I'm sad for them and I'm sad for the story.

01:16:28   I do like the idea that their AI powered chip

01:16:30   or whatever is, that sounds so much like the Mac chip

01:16:33   that they canceled, equivalent to four

01:16:34   of their high-end processors.

01:16:36   You know, I mean, you can't afford to put it in a $10,000,

01:16:40   you know, Mac Pro, because $10,000 is too much for a Mac Pro.

01:16:42   How much would this car cost?

01:16:44   Again, if it actually existed and worked.

01:16:46   My advice to Apple is if you wanna make a car,

01:16:48   add a steering wheel and pedals.

01:16:50   - Yeah, I just, I still go back and like,

01:16:53   you know, to me, like the question you asked,

01:16:54   like all right, can we make this thing work,

01:16:56   and then, you know, then move on from there.

01:16:58   I would step back again and say,

01:17:00   is this even a business that we need to be in

01:17:02   or want to be in?

01:17:04   And what would it mean if we entered this business

01:17:08   and actually stayed in it and maybe even succeeded in it?

01:17:11   What would that actually mean for the rest of our business?

01:17:15   Can you imagine Apple selling cars?

01:17:18   How would that even physically work?

01:17:20   Can you imagine Apple servicing cars?

01:17:22   Can you imagine Apple going through all the regulations?

01:17:25   Like, I can see that it's possible for them to do all that,

01:17:30   But why would they want to?

01:17:32   And what they would achieve in that

01:17:35   would be they'd be a car manufacturer.

01:17:39   Look at all the car manufacturers.

01:17:40   How happy are they?

01:17:41   How good of a business does that seem to be?

01:17:44   It doesn't seem like it's worth them entering this business

01:17:48   even if it was fairly easy to get into, and it's super not.

01:17:53   And so I just don't see why they would even want

01:17:58   to be in this business.

01:17:59   That even sets aside the question of,

01:18:02   could Apple be good at designing cars,

01:18:06   which I think is a huge question mark, honestly.

01:18:10   Apple's very good at designing a lot of things.

01:18:13   I don't know that I would want an Apple-designed car,

01:18:17   but again, I think that's even,

01:18:20   that's too far down the line of thinking of like,

01:18:22   why are they even doing this?

01:18:23   Why do they wanna be in this business?

01:18:25   That, to me, makes no sense.

01:18:27   I mean, it is different in many ways that we've discussed, but I think it is actually

01:18:31   a better fit with their traditional strengths than some other things.

01:18:37   Because it is manufacturing a product that they sell for a profit.

01:18:42   It is, you know, regulation stuff.

01:18:44   Again, Apple's not used to automotive regulation, but they are used to dealing with the FCC

01:18:48   and the various radio regulations and heat and thermal.

01:18:51   Like there are different laws in different countries and being in compliance with them

01:18:54   with electronic devices is a thing, right?

01:18:56   It is a scaled up version of what they do.

01:18:59   They're good at manufacturing, they don't have their own manufacturing plans, they outsource

01:19:02   that, and they're good at helping those manufacturers do a better job of manufacturing.

01:19:06   Apple is good at actually "making things" even if they're doing through third parties.

01:19:09   Like, I can squint and say, this looks like, again, a question of whether they'd be able

01:19:14   to make a good car, but they make hardware products that are software powered and they

01:19:18   manufacture them and comply with a bunch of laws.

01:19:20   So it is conceivable that they could get good at this after many years because it is like

01:19:25   what they do.

01:19:26   to me of this great quote that Gruber had back on December 21st, I put this in contrast

01:19:31   to something that Apple already does that I think is not a good fit for their traditional

01:19:36   strengths and model.

01:19:37   This is a quote from talking about, what was it, Gruber's not guested on a podcast and

01:19:43   they talked about various Apple related things.

01:19:46   And he put this little summary at the end of his link to the podcast he was a guest

01:19:51   on.

01:19:52   This is quoting Gruber.

01:19:53   The App Store's financial success is the worst thing that's happened to Apple this century.

01:19:57   It's a distraction at best and a profound corruption at worst.

01:20:01   Services revenue and the App Store do not fit with Apple's traditional strengths of

01:20:06   making a really good product and selling it to people for a profit because it's really

01:20:09   good and they like it.

01:20:10   It is a much more complicated model where you're selling access to them, you're rent-seeking,

01:20:16   you're controlling a platform and then charging other people money to get access to the people,

01:20:19   potentially collecting information about them and advertising to them.

01:20:23   That model does not fit with the Apple that we love in a way that the car does.

01:20:27   Because if Apple made a good car product, I believe that they could figure out how to

01:20:32   sell it, how to service it.

01:20:33   In the same way they figure out how to sell their hardware products, their phones and

01:20:37   everything, they figure out how to service them, they figure out how to comply with laws,

01:20:40   they figure out how to get them manufactured, they figure out how to sell them all over

01:20:43   the world with different regulations.

01:20:45   Obviously a car is way different than a phone.

01:20:47   is a much bigger scale thing. There are so many other complications they're working with,

01:20:51   a bunch of other players, but that fits better. The incentives are aligned better for the

01:20:56   Apple that I like, the Apple that makes its money by making a good product. Not the Apple

01:21:01   that is a distraction at best or a corruption at worst, paraphrasing Gruber, that is distracted

01:21:07   by the idea of like, "Yeah, but have we considered rent-seeking? Because that's where the real

01:21:11   money is." That does not align with the incentive. I want them to be incentivized to make good

01:21:17   The incentives that I like is, hey, if we make a bad keyboard,

01:21:19   we have to pay people a class action lawsuit.

01:21:21   And if we make good keyboard, people buy our stuff.

01:21:23   If we put ports back on our laptops,

01:21:24   people buy more of them.

01:21:25   If we make a really fast, low-power computer,

01:21:27   people buy it, right?

01:21:28   If we make an amazing touchscreen phone,

01:21:29   people buy it because it's a cool phone.

01:21:31   That model aligns better with my interest as a customer.

01:21:34   Make cool technology.

01:21:36   Make a profit when I buy it, because it costs you

01:21:39   less to manufacture it than it does for me to buy it from you.

01:21:42   That's your profit.

01:21:43   That's a really good business.

01:21:44   It's a model I understand that I'm more comfortable with.

01:21:47   than the App Store model, which is sell tons of devices that

01:21:51   are awesome and then charge people 30% of all the money

01:21:54   they make on them because you deserve it

01:21:56   because you made the platform.

01:21:58   The thing that-- just to go back a little bit to what Marco's

01:22:00   saying, I think the thing that makes me very worried--

01:22:04   maybe a little dramatic-- but worried about an Apple

01:22:06   car is that I feel like the same problems that everyone

01:22:10   snarks on Tesla about, like, oh, the windshield wipers don't

01:22:13   work because it never rains in the Bay Area, which I know

01:22:15   is not really true.

01:22:16   but just go with it here.

01:22:18   - They don't work that well.

01:22:19   - Well, fair.

01:22:20   And then the door handles would freeze constantly

01:22:23   because it legitimately really rarely does freeze

01:22:25   in the Bay Area.

01:22:26   This very myopic view of the world,

01:22:28   which I feel like is a very common problem

01:22:32   for engineers in the Bay Area,

01:22:34   I wonder if that's going to be an affliction

01:22:37   for an Apple car as well.

01:22:38   And where that would manifest itself is,

01:22:40   oh, surely $150,000 car is something anyone would want,

01:22:43   right?

01:22:44   We charge like 200% of what an average, you know, run-of-the-mill Android phone is for a new iPhone.

01:22:51   People pay 2x for a new iPhone. Surely they'll pay 2 to 3x for an entire car, right?

01:22:57   And no, people will not. Like maybe it's just me,

01:23:01   but I don't have $150,000 just laying around to buy an Apple car, to lease an Apple car at $4,000 or whatever.

01:23:07   I don't know. I don't lease cars, but whatever that lease payment would be.

01:23:09   I don't have that just laying around.

01:23:11   Like, it's wonderful if they think that them

01:23:13   and their cushy worlds with their $3 million,

01:23:15   2,000 or 200 square foot houses and their, you know,

01:23:19   R8s and their Lamborghini Uruses and all that,

01:23:23   like yeah, $150,000 car may be great in the Bay Area,

01:23:27   but that ain't gonna work in the real world, my friends.

01:23:28   - Doesn't it fit with Apple's model?

01:23:30   Their hardware is always more expensive

01:23:32   than everybody else's.

01:23:32   And I know it's a different matter of scale.

01:23:34   It's like, oh, 20% higher is an extra 200 bucks

01:23:36   versus 20% higher is an extra 20,000 bucks.

01:23:40   But still, I think that it is not impossible

01:23:43   to be the car manufacturer that sells mostly cars

01:23:45   that are too expensive.

01:23:46   Look at Porsche.

01:23:47   - Oh, I agree, I agree.

01:23:48   But I just, I don't know.

01:23:49   I think the thing, and maybe it was Gruber,

01:23:51   maybe it was you, John.

01:23:52   Somebody had once said, like,

01:23:54   the great thing about Apple and about Coke is that if,

01:23:57   okay, so if you want the best Coke in the world,

01:23:59   the best Coca-Cola in the world.

01:24:01   - And he was paraphrasing somebody else.

01:24:03   - Yeah, wasn't this like Andy Warhol or somebody?

01:24:04   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:24:05   - Who knows? - I think it was Andy Warhol.

01:24:06   want if you want the best coca-cola in the world I don't care if you make a

01:24:09   thousand dollars a year or a hundred million dollars a year you're still

01:24:12   getting the same coca-cola if you want the best iPhone in the world you know

01:24:15   you're still if you're a rich and famous or if you're just somebody of a regular

01:24:19   schmo you're getting the same iPhone and I don't know I feel like Apple wants to

01:24:23   be in that space where they are a premium product full stop but they're

01:24:27   not a 10x premium product I mean look at how well that worked out for the Apple

01:24:31   Watch Edition like yeah some were sold some to some of the hosts on this

01:24:35   episode but nevertheless... Not the gold one! Fair, fair. But you get what I'm

01:24:41   driving at. That they want to be a premium product but I don't think that a

01:24:46   10x premium product has ever really fit that well for them. See also Mac Pro and

01:24:51   beyond that we're talking, this is what you just said Jon, we're talking about

01:24:54   10x, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10x of what's an average car these days?

01:24:59   Anywhere between $20,000 and $40,000 for like an okay car? Like how much does a

01:25:03   a Civic cost, John. Like that's a decent, very run-of-the-mill car. And a Civic is like

01:25:08   fifteen, twenty thousand dollars, isn't it? Easily.

01:25:11   What planet are you on? You cannot buy a Civic for fifteen thousand dollars. You haven't

01:25:15   been able to do that for decades. Okay, fine. So it's been a while since I've

01:25:18   bought a car. Maybe the average selling price of car is

01:25:20   like forty grand or something. Oh, there you go. So you think that they're

01:25:23   just going to slide in here and charge 3x, 4x, 5x? Like, yeah, again, maybe that works

01:25:29   in the Bay Area, where you folks are all getting paid absurd amounts of money and spending

01:25:33   it all on housing. But that doesn't work in the real world. And I'm very concerned that

01:25:38   they're going to strut in thinking, "Oh, we can totally charge 3X for our car because

01:25:43   it's awesome and it's Apple."

01:25:44   Well, that was one of the rumors of what one of the revisions of Project Titan, Apple's

01:25:49   car project was scrapped because they did a product design and they said, "Here's

01:25:53   the car we want to make," and then they priced it out and said, "No, it's too much."

01:25:57   So they've already stopped one of their iterations due to cost because they realize—I mean,

01:26:02   Again, I think it is perfectly valid to be a car manufacturer that makes expensive cars.

01:26:05   You're just going to sell fewer of them.

01:26:06   The question is, where do you want to be?

01:26:08   Do you want to sell as many cars as Ferrari?

01:26:10   They actually sell a lot of cars for a car company that sells cars that start at like

01:26:14   200 grand or whatever, but they don't sell as many as Porsche, and then Porsche does

01:26:18   not sell as many as Volkswagen and on down the line.

01:26:21   So you have to kind of decide how many you want to sell.

01:26:23   iPhones, they sell a heck of a lot of those.

01:26:25   They sell them to not half the world, but a pretty stable portion of the potential smartphone

01:26:30   selling market is iPhones.

01:26:31   I don't know what it is worldwide, is it like 30% or something?

01:26:35   If you wanted to sell 30% of the cars in the world, you can't price it at 100 grand.

01:26:39   But there is a question of, is our first one really expensive and then the price comes

01:26:44   down, especially with electric cars, which is what everyone assumes they're building.

01:26:48   A lot of the price has to do with battery, that is the cost driver for your car is the

01:26:53   battery.

01:26:54   Those electric motors don't actually cost that much and building a car costs as much

01:26:57   as it's ever cost in terms of making a frame and suspension and tires and brakes or whatever,

01:27:01   but the battery is the big cost thing. If the batteries cost nothing, electric cars

01:27:05   would be incredibly cheap, but if the batteries were expensive as they were two decades ago,

01:27:09   they're less feasible. And again, battery technology is something Apple is familiar

01:27:14   with and has relationships with and stuff like that, so I think it is plausible that

01:27:18   Apple could sell a car at a reasonable price range, but I also think if they ever come

01:27:24   out with a car, it's definitely going to be the Apple of cars, which is going to be too

01:27:27   expensive most people, especially the first one. Think of the shock of the iPhone. Remember

01:27:31   when the iPhone came out and everyone was like, "I've never been making fun of it because

01:27:33   it cost so much money?" Because it wasn't like carrier-subsidized or whatever. And today,

01:27:38   the iPhones we all have are very expensive devices. If you had told us back when we were

01:27:42   using flip phones that someday you're going to every year, or in my case every other year,

01:27:47   buy a phone for $1200, you'd be like, "$1200 from a phone? I'm not going to carry that

01:27:51   around and drop it on the pavement?" That's ridiculous. But people derive enough value

01:27:55   from their smartphones that they're willing to pay hundreds, sometimes up into a thousand

01:27:58   dollars for their phone sometimes every year.

01:28:01   So that, of all things, I get where you're coming from, that it just doesn't seem like

01:28:07   something that they're going to be able to sell a lot of, and it also doesn't seem like

01:28:10   they want to be the Ferrari or the Porsche of phones, but they don't have a product to

01:28:15   sell at all right now, so it's not really an issue.

01:28:16   And then as for the Andy Warhol thing of like, no matter who you are, a Coke is a Coke, when

01:28:21   Gruber uses that analogy and said no matter who you are, a phone is a phone, I think it's

01:28:24   a little bit too different things. The idea of Coke is like Coke is not an expensive product

01:28:30   to make. Anyone can buy it because it's very inexpensive and it's also not expensive to

01:28:34   manufacture. The things that are in it are not rare, right? Whatever the secret formula

01:28:38   is, it's not made with platinum flakes or something, right? So everyone can get it because

01:28:45   it is accessible to everyone and it is the same. And the whole point is, because it's

01:28:48   basically the cultural hegemony of Coca-Cola, because you're all raised drinking Coke and

01:28:53   you want something that tastes like what you were raised on, you have brand loyalty to

01:28:56   Coke because if you try RC Cola it doesn't taste like what you think a Coke could taste

01:28:59   like.

01:29:00   Not because Coke is fancier and more expensive than RC, but just because it's what you're

01:29:03   used to due to the dominance of the Coca Cola brand.

01:29:06   Whereas the iPhone, no one can get a better iPhone, no matter how rich you are, because

01:29:11   making a phone is really, really hard.

01:29:14   Unlike Coca Cola, which is protected by whatever the circular form of it is, the iPhone is

01:29:18   protected by the fact that making a smartphone with a complete ecosystem around it has a

01:29:22   There's a huge barrier to entry.

01:29:24   And so yeah, no matter how rich you are,

01:29:26   you can't get another iPhone.

01:29:27   Because even if given, you know, $3 trillion,

01:29:31   try making a better iPhone than an iPhone

01:29:34   with $3 trillion.

01:29:36   It's a harder thing to make.

01:29:37   Whereas if I gave you $3 trillion

01:29:39   and said try making your own Coke,

01:29:40   you'd just buy Coca-Cola.

01:29:42   And you got your own Coke now, right?

01:29:44   Like it's different in that like,

01:29:45   one is like everyone gets the same Coke,

01:29:48   which seems weird because it's so easy to make.

01:29:49   And the other one, everyone gets the same,

01:29:51   no one can make a better iPhone,

01:29:52   how rich they are, because it's so tremendously hard to make a smartphone.

01:29:56   So I'm not sure that analogy works out.

01:29:58   What it is trying to say is that it's nice that, to your point, Casey, that the very

01:30:04   best X in the world is accessible to a large number of people.

01:30:08   And although the iPhone is very expensive, it is accessible to a lot of people, especially

01:30:13   if you're buying a used iPhone.

01:30:14   I think that's what Gruber was celebrating, the idea that iPhones are so important to

01:30:18   our life and if you want the very best one you don't have to be a millionaire to get

01:30:22   it. You just have to shop for refurbs on Amazon or whatever. Whereas the very best car in

01:30:28   the world is not accessible to most people because even if you're shopping for a refurb

01:30:33   whatever you consider the best car it's going to cost a lot more than a Civic.

01:30:37   It certainly will. Do you think that they would do something, I forget the term for

01:30:41   it but like Volvo and I'm sure other manufacturers are doing this, have like a subscription service

01:30:45   And the way this worked when it first came out, you had to go there.

01:30:49   I'm asking because they love their services revenue.

01:30:52   I agree with you.

01:30:53   I think the Apple car would have a service or a new component.

01:30:56   That's what the thing with like the data center where they can assist drivers.

01:30:58   I bet you pay for that service.

01:30:59   Oh my gosh, I hope that's not true.

01:31:02   But I hear you and you're probably right.

01:31:03   Grubber's saying that it's a distraction at best and a profound corruption.

01:31:07   Whereas it is a profound corruption to every time they make a cool tech product to figure

01:31:10   out and now how can we make a service out of this?

01:31:14   How can we make it a recurring payment?

01:31:15   How can we make it so that you don't just buy the Apple car, you buy a subscription

01:31:19   to the Apple car and if you want your heated seats to get, like again, the auto industry

01:31:22   is way out ahead of Apple here, but I have to imagine that in Project Titan, this is

01:31:27   disgust because the old Apple that would create a technology product without service revenue

01:31:33   attached to it seems dead.

01:31:34   Like the headset.

01:31:35   Headset's going to be cool tech if and when they ship it.

01:31:38   And you're like, well, that's not going to have a service associated with it.

01:31:40   Of course, it will have an app store.

01:31:41   That is the easy go-to of like if we sell anything that is a platform, it has an associated

01:31:45   app store where we try to make service revenue, which may or may not work, but that's the

01:31:48   play.

01:31:49   So if Apple comes out with a car, there will be service revenue associated with it because

01:31:54   that's what modern Apple does.

01:31:55   Yeah, I just don't know if they're going to do like a Care by Volvo, as I was just looking

01:31:59   it up, is what I believe I'm thinking of where you get to get a car and I believe insurance

01:32:04   as well and maintenance and all that.

01:32:06   You just pay a monthly fee and I think you might even be able to switch which Volvo you

01:32:10   have from time to time and so on and so forth. I don't know, I feel like it wouldn't surprise

01:32:15   me if that's how they get in the door is that you're not buying a $300,000 Apple car. You're

01:32:20   instead paying a hilariously expensive lease or subscription or what have you to have access

01:32:25   to Apple's Apple car that they own.

01:32:27   Well, that's the Apple car upgrade program.

01:32:29   Right, exactly.

01:32:30   You get a new Apple car every year. And again, I don't, I don't, that is more of a, that's

01:32:34   less than the server I've been complaining about. I'm just like, Hey, it's kind of like

01:32:37   a rolling lease where you get a new car at a certain interval, but you can also buy it

01:32:41   outright.

01:32:42   It's the service revenue I'm talking about.

01:32:43   Your car is useless to you unless you pay X dollars a month for the service that, I

01:32:46   don't know, whatever they would charge for.

01:32:48   We're not going to go to the heated seats or whatever, a BMW, but this is obviously

01:32:53   not just like, "Oh, Apple's being mean.

01:32:54   They shouldn't do this."

01:32:55   This is the way the whole industry and the whole world is going.

01:32:57   And to some extent it makes sense, but it feels worse when the people who are charging

01:33:04   are not charging because the service is useful, but charging because they've got you on a

01:33:10   vice that's like they can't.

01:33:12   You have no other choice, right?

01:33:14   It doesn't seem like you would pay for this otherwise, but because Apple has complete

01:33:18   control over the platform, they get to extract 30% of all the transactions.

01:33:21   That feels worse than "let me pay."

01:33:24   Even just something as simple as "let me pay for Sirius XM Radio" or whatever.

01:33:26   I want to pay for ongoing access to this thing.

01:33:28   If you think it's worthwhile, pay for it.

01:33:30   If you don't, don't.

01:33:31   but it's not like all of its competitors

01:33:34   are forced to also pay serious

01:33:35   to be able to put audio into your car.

01:33:37   Like that's what starts feeling bad.

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01:35:25   (upbeat music)

01:35:28   - All right, let's do a little bit of Ask ATP,

01:35:30   and let's start with Peter Petrovic, who writes,

01:35:32   "In this day and age of social media all around us,

01:35:35   "and with the Fediverse gaining traction,

01:35:37   "is it still worth one's time to have a personal website

01:35:39   "or a blog residing on one's personal domain?"

01:35:42   Yeah, I think so, because I'm a nerd,

01:35:43   and I want that control.

01:35:45   I mean, nobody can ever take away

01:35:49   casylist.com from me.

01:35:51   It's mine.

01:35:52   Well, that's not a challenge.

01:35:52   Please don't take that as a challenge.

01:35:53   But you know what I'm saying.

01:35:54   it's mine, that's where I live, that's my space.

01:35:58   My space, space, you know what I'm saying.

01:36:00   And so anyway, I control that,

01:36:03   and my email address is at caselist.com.

01:36:06   So when I moved from Gmail to Fastmail,

01:36:09   then nobody knew it.

01:36:12   Well, I mean, people knew it

01:36:12   because I talked about it on the show,

01:36:13   but like any of the people I knew--

01:36:14   - I was gonna say, everyone knew it.

01:36:16   (laughing)

01:36:17   - Hush you, nobody asks.

01:36:19   It's caselist.com/fastmail.

01:36:20   Anyway, but again, you take the point,

01:36:24   you get the point I'm trying to make here is that because it was under my control, everyone

01:36:28   else that I was emailing with was completely ignorant to the fact that these emails were

01:36:32   actually getting routed to passmail instead of Gmail. And similarly, you know, my website

01:36:36   will live there and maybe it will continue to run on my broken blog engine, maybe it'll

01:36:40   run on something else, but it will always be there. And even though my hot takes and

01:36:45   quips and whatnot I used to put on Twitter and now I'm putting on Mastodon, it's still

01:36:50   to me important to have a like canonical place to live, if you will, a place that is mine

01:36:57   and that is kind of my home base on the internet. And I think it is absolutely worth it. Even

01:37:02   if all you have is like a single serving site, you know, an about page that says, "Hey, I'm

01:37:07   Casey. I do these, you know, I have these projects. You can find me at these places."

01:37:10   I still think that's important. And let's not lose sight of the fact that, you know,

01:37:15   we were all on Mastodon servers years ago, most of which have crumbled, except John who

01:37:19   apparently was on every Mastodon server, but for like Marco and me, you know, or at least

01:37:23   certainly me, and I thought Marco, you were in the same boat. We signed up on servers

01:37:26   that have since disappeared and that could happen. Now granted, you know, the three of

01:37:30   us seem to be using Mastodon.social now, which seems to be the most stable, but you never

01:37:35   know, you never know what'll happen. And so I absolutely stand by and think it is important

01:37:40   and it's not that expensive. You know, you can use pass sponsor hover to get a domain.

01:37:45   You can use past sponsor Squarespace

01:37:48   in order to put a website there.

01:37:49   In fact, I think you can even get your domain

01:37:51   through Squarespace if you so choose.

01:37:52   - Linode.

01:37:53   - Linode, yep, that's another past sponsor as well.

01:37:56   - Pretty sure those two are also current sponsors,

01:37:58   by the way, just not this episode.

01:38:00   - I'm sorry, that's what I meant.

01:38:01   Sorry, just not this episode is what I meant,

01:38:03   but thank you for the correction.

01:38:04   But yeah, I mean, we bring these services up

01:38:06   in part because genuinely we either use

01:38:09   or genuinely recommend them because they really are great.

01:38:12   And so this is something that I absolutely think

01:38:14   you should have a little corner of the internet

01:38:17   that is under your control.

01:38:19   And I stand by that 100%.

01:38:21   Let's start with Marco, where do you land on this?

01:38:23   And I think I have a pretty strong feeling about it.

01:38:26   - So I think we have to separate out like,

01:38:28   is it worth having your own domain from,

01:38:31   what Peter was asking here was,

01:38:33   is it worth having a personal website or blog

01:38:35   on a personal domain?

01:38:36   - That's fair, that's fair.

01:38:37   - So whether you want to have a website or a blog,

01:38:40   that's up to you.

01:38:41   I do think it's worth having a domain

01:38:44   because as Casey was saying, on the long term,

01:38:49   on an infinite time scale, services come and go.

01:38:52   And servers come and go, and companies come and go,

01:38:55   and what you want to do on the website,

01:38:57   what your identity is, what services and functions

01:39:01   it needs to offer or provide, all of that changes over time.

01:39:06   And so it is nice to have something

01:39:08   that is your own domain, so that way,

01:39:10   when you have your email address at your own domain,

01:39:13   instead of at a certain email provider.

01:39:15   That pretty much guarantees that as long as no one

01:39:20   big email provider that does not support custom domains

01:39:23   ever takes over and makes it impossible

01:39:26   to use a custom domain, which seems unlikely with email,

01:39:28   that pretty much guarantees that you can be

01:39:30   service provider portable or agnostic.

01:39:33   And so, for instance, if you use Gmail with your own domain,

01:39:37   and then Gmail starts to suck,

01:39:38   or they start charging money for that

01:39:40   and you don't wanna pay or whatever happens there,

01:39:42   If you don't wanna be on Gmail anymore,

01:39:44   you can just move what is hosting your email,

01:39:47   but it's, to the world, it's still your domain.

01:39:51   You change over the MX records and that's it.

01:39:53   So you can change your hosting provider

01:39:55   and not affect your ability to be reached or found

01:39:58   or whatever popularity you've built up or whatever.

01:40:01   If Mastodon continues to be a thing, and I hope it does,

01:40:06   then certainly there might become some value

01:40:08   in having your own domain for that,

01:40:09   in the sense that, again, that's a username

01:40:11   that you can easily port between different backend options.

01:40:16   That being said, it's a little bit less important there

01:40:17   'cause they have this whole redirect mechanism in place.

01:40:20   But basically for many services,

01:40:23   the redirect procedure isn't so simple or effective

01:40:26   or permanent, and so it is nice to be able

01:40:30   to have your own domain that things are pointed to

01:40:32   and that you can host whatever you want there over time.

01:40:35   Now whether you should have a blog,

01:40:38   that's a different question, and that's up to you.

01:40:41   You know, personally, I have had a blog for a long time.

01:40:45   I don't really use it much anymore,

01:40:47   but I like the idea that I can always go back to it.

01:40:49   Many people, in the collapse of Twitter,

01:40:53   many people are going back to their own personal blogs

01:40:55   and reviving them and writing again,

01:40:57   and I think that's great.

01:40:58   And so, you know, whether you're gonna like, you know,

01:41:03   become the next Engadget, posting, you know,

01:41:05   30 posts a day or whatever, that's, you know,

01:41:08   you don't have to do that to make it worth

01:41:09   having a personal blog.

01:41:11   It could be like John's where you post once a year,

01:41:13   or it could be like mine,

01:41:14   and when you post whenever you wanna promote something

01:41:16   or call out a particularly bad bug to Apple

01:41:18   and hope they fix it.

01:41:18   Like, whatever it is, you can post once every five years

01:41:21   and through the magic of RSS readers,

01:41:23   it doesn't really matter.

01:41:24   You're not gonna lose your audience.

01:41:25   They'll just see a post once every five years

01:41:27   and that'll be it.

01:41:28   So whether you have a blog, that's up to you,

01:41:30   but I think that can be very flexible.

01:41:31   But I do think whether you should have your own domain

01:41:35   and some way to put stuff on that domain,

01:41:37   whether that's your, you know,

01:41:38   whether you're just pointing it to even like

01:41:40   static page on GitHub that will host it for free,

01:41:42   or whether you're putting it to like an S3 bucket,

01:41:44   or having a full-blown host like Squarespace,

01:41:46   or running a full-blown server like Linode,

01:41:48   whatever it is, having a domain,

01:41:51   if you are nerdy enough to even know

01:41:52   what any of the stuff I'm talking about means,

01:41:54   is probably valuable to you, and you should probably do it.

01:41:57   - Yeah, this is kind of, this topic comes up a lot,

01:42:00   and I think it's kind of a, not a happy accident,

01:42:03   but we were lucky enough that the standards of the internet

01:42:07   that were made by people who wanted to do something good for the world, or do it in

01:42:16   a kind of open way.

01:42:18   The attitudes of the people who made the internet were such that the things we got out of it

01:42:24   — DNS, TCP/IP, the fact that it was part of a government program that became open,

01:42:29   all those different systems — that they sort of snowballed and gained critical mass

01:42:35   before private or public corporations could come in and extract all the value means that

01:42:41   we actually have a competitive market for the things we're talking about.

01:42:46   The reason we say it's so important is not because, to Marco's point, not because we

01:42:50   think you should have a blog or be a blogger, but because DNS and owning your own domain

01:42:55   name is a way for you to control your identity and your data on the internet.

01:43:01   The internet is really important and having control of your identity is important.

01:43:04   The reason you can control it is because DNS is not owned and controlled by Google or Microsoft

01:43:09   or Apple, right?

01:43:10   TCP/IP is not owned and controlled by any corporation.

01:43:13   It wasn't embraced and extended by Microsoft, so they own all the networking.

01:43:16   We're not doing all this on MSN or whatever.

01:43:18   Those open standards that sort of got their foot in the door before corporations would

01:43:22   come and ruin everything exist and you should take advantage of them.

01:43:26   And all the technical ins and outs of why it's portable and everything are important,

01:43:30   but the underlying technology is what makes that possible.

01:43:33   That's why there is a competitive market for where you register your domain name.

01:43:37   You can use it at one of our sponsors, you can use it at different companies.

01:43:39   There's companies that compete to try to be the place where you register your domain.

01:43:43   No one controls all domain names.

01:43:45   You can register at different places.

01:43:47   What about hosting?

01:43:48   Where do I host my website?

01:43:49   There is a competitive market for hosting your website.

01:43:52   Once you control the domain, the hosting companies know you can put that domain anywhere.

01:43:56   You can run a server out of your closet, you can put it on Squarespace, you can put it

01:43:59   on Linode, you can put it on like there's a million companies that do that because nobody

01:44:02   owns and controls, oh this is the one company that controls, like, AWS does not control

01:44:06   web hosting, although sometimes it seems that way. They don't. You can host anything anywhere.

01:44:11   Same thing with email. It happens to be an open protocol that, yes, there are dominant

01:44:14   players in the market, but you can host your email at different places. It's not as easy

01:44:18   to be receiving email, which is what we talked about in past shows, because of all the spam

01:44:21   rules and all the crap like that. Some of that early sort of open stuff didn't go quite

01:44:25   so well. Maybe email didn't work out that well for the world. But that's why we're always

01:44:30   pressing on that you should have your thing, not because we think you should be a blogger

01:44:34   or not because we think you should use one of our sponsors and have a website, but because

01:44:37   we want individuals to own and control their identity on the web.

01:44:41   That's why we push for the idea of some username at twitter.com.

01:44:45   You don't own and control that.

01:44:46   Twitter does, right?

01:44:48   Same thing with Mastodon, although Mastodon does let you use the web finger protocol and

01:44:51   various other things to basically be your username at domain that you control on Mastodon,

01:44:57   but I haven't gone into the web finger thing to try it.

01:44:59   It seems like it might not be as well supported in various clients and places as I expect,

01:45:05   but that is the ideal.

01:45:06   That's what we're shooting for.

01:45:08   Open protocols, open standards, a competitive market to provide the services, and that's

01:45:13   where this falls down.

01:45:14   It's like we're a nerd show and we know that if you're listening to this, maybe you know

01:45:17   how to make your own website.

01:45:18   We all wish it was easier, and that's why in a competitive market, you have companies

01:45:22   like Squarespace that are saying, "We're going to try to make it as easy as possible for

01:45:25   you to do this."

01:45:26   more complicated than you would like and the competition is,

01:45:29   "Oh, look how easy it is to sign up for Twitter.

01:45:31   You don't have to pick a server, you just go to twitter.com

01:45:33   and you create an account and it's so easy."

01:45:35   Private companies can make it easier

01:45:37   because there is less competition.

01:45:38   There's one place to go.

01:45:40   Mastodon, you have to pick a server

01:45:41   and even then you're sort of under the thumb of that server

01:45:43   even with the redirect rules and everything, right?

01:45:45   Domain names and web hosting are the most open

01:45:49   and that means there is the most choice

01:45:51   and that means there is kind of a barrier to entry

01:45:53   because like, "Where do I go?

01:45:54   What if I don't want to use to where I sit?

01:45:55   what I want to use, you know, like it's a little bit trickier to use, but that is the beauty of it. Like,

01:45:59   claim a portion of the internet for yourself because as websites come and go, as MySpace, you know, rises and falls,

01:46:07   as Facebook comes in and out of favor, as Twitter comes and goes, and Mastodon comes and goes, if you own your own domain name,

01:46:13   your place on the internet will always exist at static URLs that you control.

01:46:19   That's why we always send you to ATP.fm/store because that is the URL that we control. And yes,

01:46:24   Yes, it leads you to Cotton Bureau with various URLs,

01:46:28   but at various times it has led you to other places.

01:46:30   We want to send you to the place that we control,

01:46:32   so that if you hear something that says ATP.fm store,

01:46:37   five years in the past or five years in the future,

01:46:40   that page will still exist.

01:46:41   And we know that because we control it.

01:46:43   And whether we're hosted on Squarespace or Linode

01:46:45   or Marco's water closet, wherever we're hosted,

01:46:50   we control that URL.

01:46:51   That's-- this is the ideal.

01:46:53   The web happened to get out the door before corporations could totally destroy it.

01:46:57   And yes, it is tricky or whatever, but this is why we wish everything was.

01:47:01   We wish that our names on social were our names at a domain that we control, but that

01:47:05   is unfortunately, it is not reasonable to expect as much as nerds would like every person

01:47:11   in the world to have their own domain name.

01:47:13   The namespace contention alone would be horrendous, right?

01:47:16   So we recognize this is not, you know, it's a little bit of a fantasy to say that every

01:47:21   Every person in the world is going to have their own domain name, although with IPv6

01:47:24   they can have their own IP address, but that's a different story.

01:47:27   But for the people listening to this show, you're not every person in the world, unfortunately

01:47:30   for us.

01:47:31   You are a very, very, very tiny subset.

01:47:33   And for the people listening to this show, I definitely recommend getting your own domain

01:47:37   and using it and making a bunch of static URLs that never change and putting stuff on

01:47:42   them.

01:47:43   And if you post it once every five years, that's fine.

01:47:44   If the only thing on it is a link to your resume, that's fine.

01:47:46   Whatever you want to do.

01:47:47   The point is that you control it.

01:47:48   Once you have that, no one can take it away from you except probably the government, and

01:47:52   hopefully we'll stop that from happening.

01:47:54   Alright, Jeremy Nash writes, "I've recently learned about Bitrot and I am going down a

01:47:58   rabbit hole convinced all my data will be corrupted one day.

01:48:01   Do you guys worry about this on your Synologies?

01:48:03   Is ZFS or TrueNAS the only answer?

01:48:05   And related, if your Synologies died today, would you immediately replace them or would

01:48:08   you look at a do-it-yourself solution like Unrate or TrueNAS?"

01:48:11   I'll start here.

01:48:13   I am actually looking at, I feel like we just talked about this, maybe we didn't, but I

01:48:16   I am looking to replace my sonology probably in the first half of this coming year, not

01:48:20   because there's anything wrong with it, but because it's 10 years old and I think it's

01:48:23   starting to feel its age and it's time to maybe get something new.

01:48:28   But I freaking love this thing.

01:48:29   I adore my sonology.

01:48:31   I totally understand that if you're patient enough and enjoy fiddling enough, that unraided

01:48:37   true NAS may be interesting to you, but it is not to me.

01:48:40   With regard to bit rot, it's something I try not to think about because I don't want to

01:48:45   think about it. But one of the things that I want to do on a new Synology, which I don't

01:48:48   think my current one supports, is I want to move to some file system, I believe, Butter,

01:48:54   BTR, whatever it is. I'll talk to Jon about it when the time comes. But I would like to

01:48:57   move to some file system that prevents this. Maybe it's, maybe Butter isn't the one I'm

01:49:01   thinking of, but one of the ones that at least does a passable amount of effort to try to

01:49:06   prevent bit rot. But yeah, it's a fact of life unless you're actively avoiding it. And

01:49:12   I'm not actively avoiding it yet, but I hope to be soon.

01:49:15   Let's start with Jon this time.

01:49:16   - Yeah, so congratulations for learning about bit rot.

01:49:20   Yes, all your rots, all your bits will be corrupted someday

01:49:23   on an infinite timeline.

01:49:25   And the defense against that are these systems that,

01:49:28   well, there's two defense of this.

01:49:29   One is you want to detect when this happens.

01:49:32   Because if you don't detect when this happens,

01:49:33   all you do is you'll propagate your corrupted data

01:49:35   to all your backups, right?

01:49:36   So there's lots of different file systems

01:49:37   and storage systems that do this.

01:49:40   There's two parts to that.

01:49:41   One is detecting whether it happened, in which case you have to have some kind of like checksum

01:49:45   to say, "Hey, we wrote bits like this.

01:49:47   Are they still like that?"

01:49:49   You need to be able to answer that question.

01:49:51   Second is, when you get the answer, it says, "No, actually, when we wrote these, they look

01:49:54   like this, but now they look like that."

01:49:58   They might just know, "This is not what we wrote.

01:50:00   Ten years ago, we wrote some data here, and now the checksum doesn't match.

01:50:02   This is bad."

01:50:04   What do you do about that?

01:50:05   Well, what you want is to be notified, at the very least, for your device to say, "Hey,

01:50:11   file is corrupt. That doesn't help you if you don't have a way to fix that corruption.

01:50:16   One way you can fix it, if you're lucky, is "okay, well I have a backup of that file,

01:50:21   and I got notified promptly that the file was corrupt, so that means that my backup

01:50:25   isn't corrupt, because it just turned corrupt, and I backed up, you know, I have like 30

01:50:29   days worth of backups, so I can pull that file from 30 days ago and restore it, and

01:50:34   now it's not corrupt anymore." That relies on timely notification and timely action and

01:50:38   frequent backups. The other way you can do that is the file system itself can store enough

01:50:43   redundant information such that when it finds something is corrupt, it can just fix it itself

01:50:48   if it has a good copy of that data somewhere. But of course that eats your storage space,

01:50:52   because now you're not just storing all your data once, you're storing it 1.2 times, 1.5

01:50:56   times depending on how many errors you want to be able to recover from. If you want to

01:51:00   store your data twice, three times, five times like AWS does and S3 or whatever, the more

01:51:04   copies of your data you store, the more likely you will be able to repair it when the computer

01:51:10   detects that it's bad.

01:51:12   So again, two parts.

01:51:13   Detect when it's bad, be able to fix it.

01:51:15   And those are two different things.

01:51:17   Just because you use a file system that has checksums, you're like, "I'm protected!"

01:51:20   All it's going to do is tell you when you're screwed immediately.

01:51:22   "Oh, I found your files corrupt and you don't have any other copies of it.

01:51:25   Haha, that doesn't help you."

01:51:27   You have to have a good copy of the data somewhere.

01:51:31   So ZFS and BTRFS and a bunch of other things can let you sort of choose how much storage

01:51:36   space do you want me to burn saving redundant data such that you can repair small errors,

01:51:42   bigger errors or whatever.

01:51:43   Really if you want to be the best protected you should use a file system that does that,

01:51:47   store some amount of redundant data and also have backups with not just one backup, not

01:51:52   like you overwrite the backup of the new one every time, you want to have multiple versions

01:51:56   of backups.

01:51:57   Like even Backblaze has this now where you can save different versions for 30 days or

01:52:00   or whatever, so you have seven different versions

01:52:02   of this file, not just one.

01:52:03   And then pay attention when it tells you

01:52:05   that something is corrupt, right?

01:52:07   This is a high bar, kind of like hosting,

01:52:09   oh, I don't wanna have to think about all this stuff,

01:52:11   whatever, but if you're looking into TrueNAS and stuff,

01:52:14   it seems like you're on board to dive into this,

01:52:16   so that's what you need.

01:52:17   Detect the errors and be able to fix them.

01:52:19   As for me, if my Synology died today,

01:52:21   I would immediately replace it with a Synology.

01:52:23   I love it, it's been one of the best technology products

01:52:25   I've had in my entire life.

01:52:28   I actually, I don't wanna replace it

01:52:30   'cause it just works and it's fine,

01:52:33   but I also frequently go to the Synology site,

01:52:35   but I had to replace it.

01:52:36   - Yep, yep, yep. - What kind of cool

01:52:37   Synology would I get?

01:52:38   'Cause I love it, it's like, it's my favorite thing.

01:52:40   It's in the basement, it's out of sight, it's out of mind,

01:52:42   it does everything that I want it to do.

01:52:44   It is almost 10 years old, it is old and creaky,

01:52:47   it will soon be very, exactly 10 years old

01:52:50   'cause we got them in 2013, right?

01:52:52   - Yeah, in April, I believe.

01:52:53   - Yeah, so in April, this will be the thing

01:52:54   that'll be 10 years old, I hope it doesn't take that.

01:52:56   I don't wanna replace it 'cause it would be expensive

01:52:58   to replace, but I kind of look forward to replacing it

01:53:00   'cause I wanna shop for a new Synology.

01:53:02   So that's an endorsement of that brand.

01:53:04   - All right, Edwin Guggenbichler writes,

01:53:07   "Do you use native mouse acceleration?"

01:53:10   And then somebody, I don't know if that was Edwin

01:53:12   or somebody else, put in a link to SteerMouse.

01:53:15   I don't even know what this is about, so John, fill in.

01:53:17   - All right, so Casey, you probably remember

01:53:19   when you switched from Windows to Mac,

01:53:22   the way the mouse accelerates is different

01:53:24   between those two systems.

01:53:25   - Oh God, it was so long ago.

01:53:26   I'm sure you're right, but I have zero recollection of it.

01:53:29   - Well, you've certainly noticed if you go back.

01:53:31   (laughs)

01:53:32   - That's fair, that's fair.

01:53:33   - And if you happen to use PCs and Macs to get,

01:53:37   on a regular basis, if you happen to use both,

01:53:40   you will probably notice, especially if you use mice

01:53:42   on both, it's a little bit harder to notice

01:53:43   with trackpad on the Mac or whatever,

01:53:45   but if you use mice on both, you will definitely notice,

01:53:48   oh, it doesn't move right on one or the other.

01:53:52   So basically, yeah, the mouse acceleration

01:53:54   works totally differently on Macs than it does on Windows.

01:53:58   So to answer Edwin's question,

01:53:59   do I use native Mac acceleration?

01:54:01   Yes, because I'm mostly on Mac

01:54:06   and with the exception of playing my weird Sim Tower game,

01:54:09   I'm mostly on Mac most of the time

01:54:12   and games are the only thing I use Windows for

01:54:15   and games I feel like you kind of get used to whatever,

01:54:18   however the mouse behaves in the game anyway

01:54:21   and it's always different from how it behaves on a desktop,

01:54:23   so it kind of doesn't matter.

01:54:24   So is there a setting for this?

01:54:26   I still feel ignorant.

01:54:28   - So the reason why the Steer Mouse link is here,

01:54:29   I assume John put it there,

01:54:31   is that Steer Mouse is a utility

01:54:33   that I believe allows you to change

01:54:35   the mouse acceleration curve on Macs

01:54:38   to possibly better match what Windows PCs do.

01:54:41   - That's not what it's,

01:54:43   it's not supposed to match Windows PCs.

01:54:44   So yeah, when we talk about acceleration curve,

01:54:46   it's basically saying, when you move the mouse,

01:54:48   there's multiple pieces of information coming in.

01:54:51   There's how far you moved it,

01:54:52   which direction and over what period of time, right?

01:54:55   And those are all factors in how the cursor moves.

01:54:58   The new position of the cursor is a factor of all of that.

01:55:00   It's not just how far you move the mouse, and it's not just how fast you move it, and

01:55:03   it's not just the direction, it's all those things combined.

01:55:06   And the equation that takes those inputs and translates them to the new position of the

01:55:12   cursor is called like, they call it the mouse acceleration curve, right?

01:55:15   And there's lots of different kind of, you know, if you could graph like, here's the

01:55:18   three inputs, here's the output, you can graph that, and it's probably more than three inputs.

01:55:22   But anyway, there's lots of different ways you can do that.

01:55:26   I'm very sensitive to mouse acceleration, especially since I was basically born on the

01:55:30   Mac and used to the Mac's mouse acceleration, which was just phenomenally better than mouse

01:55:36   acceleration on other platforms from day one.

01:55:38   If you use a mouse on the Apple IIGS and use it on the Mac, it did not feel the same.

01:55:42   Like even from the same company, it was not the same at all.

01:55:45   I was so sensitive to it, I remember when I got my SE30, there was some kind of bug.

01:55:51   I don't know if it was a bug in the OS, a bug in Mac Paint.

01:55:54   I think it was probably a bug in the OS that would cause the mouse cursor to jump in a

01:56:00   little L-shaped right angle thing, where instead of going from one point to another point that's

01:56:04   on an angle from it, it would go up and then over to the right.

01:56:08   Like up three pixels and to the right three pixels, instead of going like the hypotenuse,

01:56:13   right?

01:56:14   And that would manifest if you tried to draw with the mouse in Mac Paint.

01:56:17   You would see these little stair steps, and not just stair steps from pixels, but stair

01:56:20   intercepts like three pixels high, three pixels right.

01:56:23   And it's like, no, I wanted you to do five pixels

01:56:25   on an angle on the hypotenuse.

01:56:27   I actually brought it to the,

01:56:28   that was such a complaining kid,

01:56:30   brought it to the authorized Apple dealer.

01:56:32   - You? - Some things never change.

01:56:34   - Because I got a new computer,

01:56:35   this is my new fancy computer,

01:56:37   and the mouse doesn't work right.

01:56:38   Like I can't draw on Mac Paint.

01:56:39   I brought it to, we brought it to the authorized Apple dealer

01:56:42   'cause there was no Apple stores in those days,

01:56:43   and said, hey, we just got this new computer

01:56:45   and the mouse don't work right.

01:56:46   And then I showed them and they're like,

01:56:48   how much you talking about, kid, go away.

01:56:49   Like they just, I mean, there's nothing they could do about it.

01:56:51   I don't know if it ever got fixed or if it was just like,

01:56:53   I got a new computer after that.

01:56:54   But anyway, I'm very sensitive to the mouse curve.

01:56:57   The reason I use SteerMouse, which is what I put link in here, is--

01:57:00   and this is sometimes the case for people--

01:57:03   when you go to the system settings or whatever

01:57:07   and see the little slider for mouse acceleration--

01:57:09   what is it called now?

01:57:10   It's like--

01:57:11   Pointer speed or something?

01:57:13   Yeah, mouse.

01:57:14   Tracking speed.

01:57:16   Yeah, it's a slider.

01:57:17   And it goes from slow in the left end to fast at the right.

01:57:19   Those are literally the labels.

01:57:20   There are no labels in synthetic marks.

01:57:21   The left edge is labeled slow, and the right edge

01:57:23   is labeled fast.

01:57:24   And that's basically saying, do you

01:57:26   want the mouse cursor to move a lot when

01:57:28   you move the mouse a little?

01:57:29   Or do you want it to move a little when

01:57:31   you move the mouse a little, right?

01:57:33   And there's a setting for this under the covers.

01:57:36   I think it's just a floating point value or something.

01:57:38   Just a single floating point value, which obviously,

01:57:40   given what I said about the inputs,

01:57:42   it's more complicated than that.

01:57:43   But the OS gives you this one setting, slow and fast.

01:57:47   If, like me, you have a very large monitor,

01:57:49   even the fastest setting might feel too slow.

01:57:52   Like it might feel like it takes,

01:57:54   you have to like move the mouse, then pick it up

01:57:56   and move it back to the middle and move it again

01:57:58   just to get from one side of the other thing to the other.

01:57:59   Or you have to move the mouse unreasonably fast

01:58:01   and it doesn't feel accurate to do it or whatever.

01:58:04   So if you're on the highest setting

01:58:06   and it still doesn't feel fast enough,

01:58:08   one thing you can do is just like default to right

01:58:10   whatever that thing is,

01:58:11   and set the value of that thing to a higher value

01:58:15   than the slider lets you go.

01:58:16   I don't know what the values are,

01:58:17   but let's pretend the left side of the thing is like zero

01:58:19   and the right side is 1.0.

01:58:21   You can from the command line set it to 1.5, 2.0, 2.5,

01:58:25   like basically set values that are not

01:58:27   settable with the GUI.

01:58:28   So that's one way to influence the mouse tracking.

01:58:33   On my big monitors, I have found that no matter

01:58:35   what value I put into the one value that Apple lets you pick,

01:58:38   the mouse doesn't feel right to me.

01:58:40   It feels slow, but also inaccurate.

01:58:43   So for a while, I've used a third-party utility,

01:58:45   a steer mouse, that lets you more concisely tweak

01:58:50   the acceleration curves for individual input devices.

01:58:54   This is another factor that's not, I didn't mention.

01:58:56   The actual mouse influences this as well.

01:58:59   If I'm using my Microsoft mouse connected through USB

01:59:02   versus using an Apple mouse connected through USB,

01:59:05   they behave wildly differently.

01:59:06   This may seem strange to you, but they absolutely do.

01:59:09   different mice will behave differently

01:59:11   with the same tracking setting.

01:59:13   So to make this Microsoft mouse not drive me insane,

01:59:17   I needed to be able to tweak the acceleration curves

01:59:21   in a more accurate way.

01:59:24   And so SteerMouse gives you two numbers

01:59:26   that lets you type in the values.

01:59:28   I don't know what these numbers mean.

01:59:29   They call them acceleration and sensitivity.

01:59:31   Who knows what they're doing under the covers?

01:59:32   But the point is I can fiddle with these sliders

01:59:35   and type in exact values and save my settings

01:59:37   and associate them with this specific input device.

01:59:39   So if I plug in an Apple mouse,

01:59:41   it will feel Apple mouse normal,

01:59:43   and I can make this Microsoft mouse feel the way I want.

01:59:45   So do I use native mouse acceleration?

01:59:47   No, I don't, not with my Microsoft mouse.

01:59:50   If I had an Apple mouse,

01:59:51   I think I probably would use the native one

01:59:52   because the Apple mice,

01:59:54   when you crank up the built-in setting,

01:59:57   still feel right to me.

01:59:59   But when I went on the big mouse journey

02:00:01   buying all these different mice,

02:00:02   I was amazed at how different they feel.

02:00:04   Logitech mouse, a Logitech gaming mouse

02:00:06   feels different from a Logitech regular mouse,

02:00:07   feels different from a Microsoft mouse,

02:00:09   feels different from an Apple mouse.

02:00:10   That's why it's great to have third-party utilities

02:00:12   that let you tweak this.

02:00:13   And again, associate that tweak specifically with the device.

02:00:16   So once you get every device set up the way you want,

02:00:19   you can even have different curves

02:00:20   for Bluetooth versus USB connection of the same mouse.

02:00:22   Then it just remembers them,

02:00:23   and when you plug in the device, it feels normal.

02:00:26   One of the fun things StairMouse has

02:00:28   is like a social networking aspect

02:00:30   where you can see other people's popular saved settings

02:00:34   for your mouse.

02:00:35   - Are there achievements that like,

02:00:37   oh, you've moused 100 miles?

02:00:39   - There should be, but no, I think it's just like,

02:00:42   save settings for your mouse,

02:00:43   'cause you feel like, I don't know

02:00:44   what to set these numbers to.

02:00:45   Every time of these sliders around, it still feels weird.

02:00:47   Can I find a setting that lots of other people use

02:00:50   for this mouse, and you can just use

02:00:52   one of the save settings.

02:00:54   - Thanks to our sponsors this week,

02:00:55   Memberful, Nebula, and Blaze.

02:00:58   And thanks to our members who support us directly.

02:01:00   You can join at atp.fm/join,

02:01:03   and we will talk to you next week.

02:01:05   Happy New Year everyone.

02:01:06   (upbeat music)

02:01:09   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

02:01:12   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

02:01:14   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

02:01:16   ♪ Accidental ♪

02:01:17   ♪ Oh it was accidental ♪

02:01:19   ♪ Accidental ♪

02:01:20   ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

02:01:22   ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

02:01:25   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

02:01:26   ♪ Accidental ♪

02:01:28   ♪ It was accidental ♪

02:01:29   ♪ Accidental ♪

02:01:30   ♪ And you can find the show notes ♪

02:01:32   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

02:01:40   @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

02:01:44   So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

02:01:49   Auntie Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C

02:01:54   U-S-A, Syracuse It's accidental

02:01:58   They didn't mean to, accidental, accidental Tech podcast so long

02:02:10   Did anybody watch any Christmas movies?

02:02:12   Even Marco when he thought his Christmas was going to be a normal time?

02:02:15   Did any of you watch a movie that you always watched during Christmas?

02:02:18   Oh yes, absolutely.

02:02:19   You have to watch several movies.

02:02:21   There's a litany of movies that you are compelled to watch, Jon.

02:02:24   You have to watch...

02:02:25   Every year though?

02:02:26   - Yeah. - Like as a tradition?

02:02:27   How much room is there for multiple?

02:02:29   I feel like maybe you can have one or two movies,

02:02:31   but you can't have like 17 movies

02:02:32   you have to watch on Christmas.

02:02:33   - Oh, you absolutely can.

02:02:35   Christmas for most of us is the 25th, man.

02:02:37   You got plenty of time.

02:02:38   I think you were intending to mean on the day of,

02:02:41   and that's a different conversation, but--

02:02:42   - No, no, not on the day of.

02:02:43   Just sort of like I always have to watch these

02:02:45   in the Christmas season.

02:02:47   What is your list of terrible '90s movies

02:02:49   that you like to watch? - Well, since we haven't

02:02:50   actually gotten to like the rest of the family

02:02:52   where we would normally watch like Christmas Vacation,

02:02:56   We've only watched kind of second-tier movies. And in fact, we've actually watched no joke

02:03:02   Only bad sequels to second-tier movies so far. So the Christmas movies we've seen so far this year are

02:03:07   Diehard 2 and Home Alone 2.

02:03:10   Diehard 2 is not that bad. It's not as good as the first but it's not that bad.

02:03:14   It's not as bad as Home Alone 2. I'll give you that but but neither are good. I would say.

02:03:19   No, I mean for us that you know the Christmas season in terms of movies starts really anytime after Thanksgiving

02:03:26   at the very latest on December 1st.

02:03:28   And for us, we have to watch Elf.

02:03:32   I've always enjoyed Elf,

02:03:33   and it is becoming possibly my favorite Christmas movie

02:03:36   over time.

02:03:37   Aaron is a big fan of Love Actually.

02:03:39   I know that's very polarizing.

02:03:40   I never had seen or even heard of Love Actually

02:03:43   before we had met.

02:03:44   And I actually have come to really, really like Love Actually

02:03:46   as well.

02:03:47   This is where John rolls his eyes and tells me

02:03:48   the litany of ways in which it's wrong or bad or what have you.

02:03:51   - I was rolling my eyes at Elf, but go on.

02:03:52   - Yeah, me too. - Oh, fair enough.

02:03:54   Oh, how can you not like Elf?

02:03:55   - Oh God, you monsters.

02:03:56   - I don't dislike it, but it is not,

02:03:58   like, here's the thing with classic Christmas things,

02:04:01   it's whatever you get used to at a certain point,

02:04:03   it has really no connection to quality.

02:04:04   We all just have to admit that.

02:04:05   Like, it's like, the things, the Christmas movies

02:04:08   that we like is unrelated to the quality of those things.

02:04:12   - Well, with that in mind, for me,

02:04:14   the thing that imprinted on me when I was a wee lad,

02:04:17   you know, many, many moons ago, was Claymation Christmas.

02:04:19   - Oh yeah.

02:04:20   - Which almost nobody has heard of,

02:04:21   but Marco is the prime age,

02:04:23   it's because we're basically the same age,

02:04:25   the Prime Age to have heard of Claymation Christmas. It is not the Christmas season

02:04:29   if you have not watched Claymation Christmas at least once, preferably thrice to ten times.

02:04:34   So that is definitely on the list. I'm trying to think of what else. I just watched for

02:04:38   the very first time, I watched Christmas Vacation. I'd never seen it. Which is funny because

02:04:43   my parents' license plate growing up was Griswold. But I'd never seen it and I went into it expecting

02:04:49   it to be garbage, kind of like a Christmas story. And I actually thought it was pretty

02:04:54   good. It, you know, there are some, some jokes that didn't age well, but for the most part,

02:04:58   yeah, when you come to something that's 30 years old, 40 years old, whatever it is today,

02:05:02   usually it's bad. It's real bad. And I actually enjoyed Kristen's Vacation. It was pretty good.

02:05:09   Yeah. I'm actually kind of surprised that like, that like as a newcomer to it in 2022,

02:05:14   I'm surprised that you would have liked it honestly, because yeah, you're right. Like most

02:05:18   like 80s and 90s movies are really do not hold up well to modernize especially

02:05:25   comedies especially Chevy Chase movie like oh god there's so much like the you

02:05:31   know odds are poor that that anything you see from that time period is going

02:05:35   to hold up today and and even that you even be able to get through it let alone

02:05:39   think it's funny and not be horribly offended by it and but yeah it actually

02:05:43   as that goes, you know, again, the bar is low, but as that goes, it's good.

02:05:51   It's all relative. So, John, what are your John

02:05:55   Syracuse approved movies? And is there, are there any? Is there at least one?

02:05:59   I don't, I used to watch things like every year just because they were on,

02:06:04   like the Rudolph thing, because that's how old I am, right? Right, but that was just on TV and

02:06:07   I'd watch it every year, but as I got older, and surprise, surprise to everyone, like, the,

02:06:12   When things were of bad quality, but they were still like,

02:06:15   oh, you watch us every year,

02:06:17   the bad quality eventually went out.

02:06:19   Then I stopped watching things that I don't like.

02:06:21   It's like, yes, it is traditional, I watch us all the time,

02:06:23   but it's not like the Rudolph thing,

02:06:25   it's for kids, I'm not interested in it.

02:06:27   I don't feel compelled to watch the Rankin/Bass Rudolph thing

02:06:30   every year because it's not something that I enjoy,

02:06:33   so I haven't seen that in ages.

02:06:36   It's true of most things.

02:06:37   I remember watching "Christmas Vacation"

02:06:38   when it first came out and enjoying it when I was,

02:06:40   however old it was when that happened,

02:06:42   teenager or something but I don't think it would hold up on repeat viewing and

02:06:46   so I don't watch it even though it's like oh as traditional I've seen it all

02:06:49   the time like it's part of my Christmas memories it is but it's not a movie that

02:06:52   I enjoy so I don't watch it the one thing that I would probably be willing

02:06:56   to watch again is a Christmas story which I think is actually good but I

02:07:03   know people are bored by it may require I think it is a well-executed version of

02:07:08   what it is but it is a nostalgia trip for people of a certain age it is a

02:07:11   nostalgic for a time that is before my time, but it is my parents time so I can

02:07:16   I can relate to it and kind of the same way I can relate to Goodfellas. I wasn't

02:07:20   a mobster in the 70s, but some of my relatives probably were.

02:07:23   So when I look at Goodfellas I see people who I remember from my childhood

02:07:30   like my uncle was like that, my cousin was like that, like I can connect to it

02:07:34   in that way. So in the same way Christmas Story connects with me because

02:07:37   because it is a fantasy nostalgia version of a world I never experienced and probably never really existed

02:07:44   but that I feel like I have a connection to.

02:07:46   And I think it's actually kind of funny and a fun movie.

02:07:48   But I understand it's kind of like the same way that I'm never going to like Elf the way that 90s kids like it.

02:07:52   I thought Elf was fine, but it doesn't have that connection to me.

02:07:55   So if I had, if it was forced at gunpoint, it says, "You must watch a movie every Christmas from now on as a Christmas tradition."

02:08:02   A) I wouldn't like it because that's not how I roll.

02:08:04   B) If I had to pick out a Christmas story.

02:08:06   Oh, I mean, obviously whatever makes you happy makes you happy, but for me, I came to Christmas

02:08:10   Story just like five-ish years ago, and I did not care for it at all.

02:08:14   There's no Claymation Christmas, right, Casey?

02:08:16   No, it is not a Claymation Christmas!

02:08:18   It's so much better!

02:08:20   Frankly, that'd be my one!

02:08:21   If I had to pick one, it'd be Claymation Christmas.

02:08:23   Oh, amen, brother.

02:08:24   I am right there with you.

02:08:25   Oh my goodness, no, you are doing it through rose-colored glasses.

02:08:29   Oh, 100%!

02:08:30   Also, honorable mention for the Garfield Christmas as well.

02:08:33   I don't think I've ever seen that one.

02:08:35   - Claymation Christmas, I absolutely will concede

02:08:39   that it is probably garbage if you look at it

02:08:42   with any sort of reasonable point of view,

02:08:45   but as someone who is of the correct age, like Marco,

02:08:48   who is of the correct age for Claymation Christmas,

02:08:50   if I had to choose just one, it's that one,

02:08:52   but if I got two, I think Elf would be my second.

02:08:55   I really freaking love Elf.

02:08:56   That being said, Aaron and I watched Die Hard last night,

02:08:58   because that's what you do.

02:08:59   - Yeah, I mean, Die Hard is more of a recent

02:09:01   internet phenomenon, people like getting it,

02:09:02   what was it, like a decade ago,

02:09:03   like, oh, Die Hard's a Christmas movie, right?

02:09:05   I love Die Hard and I'll watch it anytime.

02:09:07   It's a fun movie, but it's not something

02:09:08   I ever watched at Christmas.

02:09:09   I never went in on that fad.

02:09:11   I guess the one Christmas tradition thing that I do have

02:09:13   that I actually do do every Christmas season

02:09:16   is not a movie, but music.

02:09:18   When I was a kid, we had a record, Casey,

02:09:21   the Muppets and John Denver Christmas album.

02:09:24   - What?

02:09:26   - We were a big John Denver family.

02:09:27   We had John Denver records, and I loved the Muppet Show

02:09:30   when I was a kid, watched every single night

02:09:32   or whatever time I was on, 7.30 or whatever.

02:09:34   love the Muppet show, I love the Muppets,

02:09:35   I love the Muppet movie, I'm of that age.

02:09:38   And because we had that Christmas records

02:09:40   of the Muppets singing Christmas carols with John Denver,

02:09:43   we heard it all the time during my childhood.

02:09:45   And for whatever reason, unlike, well, here,

02:09:48   unlike the movies, which are crap movies

02:09:49   and I stop watching, if this is crap music, I can't tell.

02:09:53   Because I still enjoy listening to the Muppets

02:09:56   and John Denver sing Christmas carols.

02:09:58   So when we put on Christmas music,

02:09:59   when we're decorating the tree,

02:10:00   and it's my random playlist of holiday music,

02:10:03   A huge swath of that is John Denver and the Muppets.

02:10:06   I love that album.

02:10:07   It reminds me of my childhood.

02:10:09   And I think they do a good job.

02:10:10   I mean, they're singing Christmas carols.

02:10:11   It's like, you know, it's not,

02:10:13   it's "Rear Out the Red News," "Reindeer," "Silent Night,"

02:10:15   like it's Christmas songs,

02:10:17   sung by the Muppets and John Denver.

02:10:19   And I still give that a thumbs up.

02:10:21   I think some of the songs are funny and good for kids.

02:10:23   And, you know, especially if you're a kid

02:10:24   and you like Muppets,

02:10:25   but some of them are just good renditions of a song.

02:10:27   I guess it helps if you like John Denver, which I do.

02:10:30   So yeah, that's the one thing I actually still do every year

02:10:33   not a single Christmas has gone by where I have not listened to John didn't run them

02:10:36   up at St. Christmas Carols at some point.

02:10:38   This is from a TV special apparently? I've never heard of this, I'm digging on Wikipedia

02:10:41   now, but apparently it's a soundtrack album from a special?

02:10:44   I think it was on TV, but I have the record and now I have it in MP3s.

02:10:50   Also on the list, it will surprise nobody that I'm a bit of a pack rat about certain

02:10:53   things, and I really enjoy the Pentatonix Christmas specials from the years and the

02:10:58   Disney Christmas specials through the years, and I'll put those on as like background noise

02:11:01   and whatnot. All of these of course are living in Plex as they are wont to do. But no, I

02:11:07   freaking love Claymation Christmas and Elf, again I think I'm of the right age, that Elf

02:11:11   just absolutely clicked for me. Even though it came out when Marco and I were like almost

02:11:15   graduated from college if I remember right, I think it was like 2003 or thereabouts.

02:11:18   Yeah, we were a bit old for it. I think if I liked Will Ferrell I would like it, but

02:11:22   I don't so I don't.

02:11:24   Oh, see, I love Will Ferrell so I'm all in. But no, I don't have any real problems with

02:11:31   with any of these, not that it really matters, you do you,

02:11:33   but I don't know, Christmas Story just never clicked for me.

02:11:35   I've never seen It's a Wonderful Life,

02:11:37   so I don't know if that's good or bad or whatever.

02:11:40   Obviously, The Grinch, I'm okay with the Jim Carrey version,

02:11:43   the original version I love.

02:11:45   One of you, I think John had mentioned Rudolph,

02:11:48   and all the Rankin/Bass stuff, and Frosty,

02:11:50   that always happens, but no,

02:11:52   Elf and Claymation are my two winners.

02:11:55   - Now, speaking of owning your place on the web

02:11:57   and having permanent links to live on,

02:11:58   this is a difficult problem,

02:12:00   I just put a link in the show notes.

02:12:02   I said, I want a link in the show notes to the John Dutton

02:12:04   and Ryn Muppet albums that I was thinking of.

02:12:06   Someone in the chat room put an Apple Music link,

02:12:07   but then you're like, oh, but what if people

02:12:09   don't use Apple Music?

02:12:09   Should I have a Spotify link?

02:12:11   Maybe it's on YouTube, blah, blah, blah.

02:12:12   So there's these services that have grown up

02:12:15   over the past few years that try to provide

02:12:19   a canonical link to a song and say,

02:12:21   hey, if that song is available in Apple Music,

02:12:23   here's how you get to it.

02:12:23   If it's a song on Spotify, here's how you get to it there,

02:12:25   and so on and so forth.

02:12:26   But of course, those services themselves

02:12:28   are just another thing that might disappear.

02:12:30   So album.link is the song.link.

02:12:35   - Oh, see, I use songwhip, but it's the same idea.

02:12:38   - Right, but that's the problem.

02:12:39   None of those things are any more permanent

02:12:41   than the individual services.

02:12:42   So I'm gonna put an album.link thing in the show notes,

02:12:44   but five years from now, when album.link is a spam site

02:12:47   that tries to give you a virus, I feel bad,

02:12:49   but there just isn't a canonical place for this.

02:12:52   You can't rely on the record label to have a canonical link

02:12:54   'cause they change the URLs every day

02:12:55   and they probably don't have it up anymore.

02:12:56   So we're gonna put an album.link here,

02:12:58   This just shows the problem of like if if the people who own this media really cared about it

02:13:03   They would provide canonical links for all the media in their catalog that then sublinked out to its availability on services

02:13:10   But that's a lot of work and they just seem like they're not going to ever do that. So we're stuck with these things

02:13:14   [BEEPING]