00:00:05 ◼ ► I am officially vaccinated because two weeks ago at about 6-6 30 was when I got my second shot of Moderna. And so I am
00:00:13 ◼ ► ready to party, except not really. I haven't changed anything and don't really plan on changing much,
00:00:18 ◼ ► but nevertheless at least I can walk around without fear of catching something that will make me dead. So I'm very excited about that. Yeah, congratulations.
00:00:25 ◼ ► It'll be interesting to see like how we all like slowly warm back up to things. Like I think I think you know
00:00:33 ◼ ► some people are you know, some people never stop doing anything. Some people are gonna, you know, jump right into it the second
00:00:39 ◼ ► they're allowed to. I think a lot of people are gonna have a much slower ramp back to like, you know, quote normal or at least like, you know, quote
00:00:51 ◼ ► I was waiting outside my school to pick up my kid and I heard from one of the residents that the town
00:01:00 ◼ ► And I mean first of all, I you know, don't know if I should verify that I probably should.
00:01:18 ◼ ► Like am I gonna appear like a jerk if I and even though you know, there's I mean the president
00:01:27 ◼ ► said, you know, basically as you know that we don't need to really be wearing masks outside as much anymore.
00:01:32 ◼ ► You know except in certain circumstances, but for the most part like in most circumstances
00:01:36 ◼ ► we don't really need to be doing that but like it still seems like I don't know if I I don't know if I'm comfortable
00:01:45 ◼ ► even though I'm not I still have one more week before my two-week notice after my vaccine is up
00:01:50 ◼ ► but I'm also confident that you know the risk of outdoor transmission that we now know especially in a
00:02:03 ◼ ► feeling okay being seen not wearing a mask by other people right that that's gonna be that's a tricky thing and like
00:02:11 ◼ ► and I wouldn't judge anyone else for their choice now because you know now now now that it's like pretty much truly optional for most for
00:02:33 ◼ ► by not putting a mask on depending on where you are and what you're doing and who you're around
00:02:46 ◼ ► you don't want to imply. A degree of redness, would you say? A degree of redness. Mm-hmm. So yeah, so I totally understand
00:02:52 ◼ ► I don't know for me, you know as I think I might have said on the show and certainly I said on analog
00:03:06 ◼ ► There was actually rumblings that I saw in the last 24 hours that Pfizer may ask for two through twelve years old in
00:03:13 ◼ ► September or something like that. I think that's right. Oh, wow. Which would be great for my family
00:03:18 ◼ ► but because we have such small kids and because I haven't seen enough evidence that you know, once you're vaccinated you really don't like
00:03:27 ◼ ► enough to worry about it. I think that is what people are guessing but no I haven't seen like, you know
00:03:38 ◼ ► I perhaps won't be allergic to the indoors as I like to joke anymore, but I certainly don't plan on loitering indoors.
00:03:46 ◼ ► I used to love going to the library to do work and I don't plan on picking that up again anytime soon. Like I might go
00:03:55 ◼ ► but I don't plan on going indoors to just sit for hours and do work like I used to in the before times.
00:04:11 ◼ ► we are very very close to being at the point that we get to make these decisions again rather than
00:04:21 ◼ ► And Marco you said you got yours what a week ago Tuesday. Is that right? Your second shot?
00:04:35 ◼ ► In the grand tradition of all ATP hosts apparently deciding to get vaccinated on the night we record, here I am.
00:04:46 ◼ ► muscles in the back of my neck are a little stiff. I have a mild headache, but you know, like I
00:04:52 ◼ ► can't complain. It's like nothing right? I mean, maybe you'll get worse tonight or something, but so far it's fine.
00:05:00 ◼ ► like, you know, I mean the hive issue predated the shot. By the way, I fixed the hives.
00:05:06 ◼ ► But yeah, my you know, we had Pfizer here and I basically had, Tiff and I both had the day after we were just very tired.
00:05:16 ◼ ► Yeah, and the hives turned out. So I'll never actually know because it could have been my illegal cold that I mentioned last time
00:05:46 ◼ ► Adam's birthday balloons in the house. Now normally I don't have issues with like latex or anything like that.
00:05:55 ◼ ► these balloons, there were two things about them. Number one, I blew up like half of them. Like Tiff and I set up one night,
00:06:02 ◼ ► 50 or 100 balloons in here. There were a lot. And they were really cheap Amazon balloons and they kind of smelled a little funny.
00:06:08 ◼ ► So I'm wondering if there might have been like some weird chemical in or on them that I was reacting to.
00:06:22 ◼ ► So it's very like... As I said when you discussed this earlier that I really like I know I know you don't want to do this
00:06:36 ◼ ► because now you're just like maybe it was the balloons. Maybe it wasn't. Oh, they smelled funny.
00:06:44 ◼ ► You can't catch the cold again, but you can get the balloons again and then we can know for sure.
00:06:57 ◼ ► But just think just think of how the frontiers of science that your personal science that you would be probing you realize please for now
00:07:12 ◼ ► We have balloons in the house very frequently and often in large numbers like any birthday any occasion
00:07:23 ◼ ► It's probably like something that was specific to these balloons that that was a problem or maybe just how much you know that I was blowing them up.
00:07:33 ◼ ► Can I? I mean who knows like on Amazon stuff you never know. Can you get the same thing twice? Sometimes.
00:07:40 ◼ ► Yeah, that's that's that's the whole mystery of Amazon when you order ostensibly the same product.
00:07:47 ◼ ► But if they if you if they look the same and they have that same funny smell then you would know.
00:07:54 ◼ ► The other half is getting to the emergency room fast enough if it turns out you're allergic.
00:08:03 ◼ ► It's like it you should know what you're allergic to but you can say you go to the doctor and they give the little pinprick with
00:08:07 ◼ ► like, you know, three molecules of shrimp or something to find out if you're allergic, you know.
00:08:13 ◼ ► I know but you can bring the balloons to the doctor and say hey doc am I allergic to these?
00:08:30 ◼ ► It'll be here through the weekend after this episode comes out and up until the following weekend. So until May
00:08:41 ◼ ► To recap we have all sorts of fun stuff for you this year. We don't have a flamethrower yet.
00:08:47 ◼ ► We're working on it, but we do have the new M1 shirt in both colorful and monochrome editions.
00:08:59 ◼ ► we're making like no money on it because it's just expensive to print on both sides in a million colors.
00:09:10 ◼ ► exercise kind of shirt. The ATP pint glass, which we're going to talk about a little more in a second,
00:09:14 ◼ ► and of course the classic ATP logo shirt and pin. All of these are available at a store near your
00:09:21 ◼ ► nearest web browser. Anyway, the ATP pint glass is dishwasher safe because it is engraved or etched.
00:09:32 ◼ ► So unlike the mugs where it was, you know, paint on the outside of the mugs, this is etched so it shouldn't be a problem.
00:09:38 ◼ ► And also we need to talk a little bit about a little wonkiness that happened, especially in the first day or so of the store.
00:09:52 ◼ ► fulfillment and all that and they print the shirts for us and they do fulfillment for the glasses and the pins and everything.
00:10:00 ◼ ► The shipping costs, however, might be a little wonky. So COVID has made international shipping in particular a mess.
00:10:08 ◼ ► Now, those of you who have ordered from us in the past internationally, I say without hyperbole and without sarcasm, like I know it's been
00:10:20 ◼ ► Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do about it. We've used other printers in the past that have had
00:10:25 ◼ ► like offices or manufacturing plants in Europe and it's been a real mess, like a real mess.
00:10:34 ◼ ► I totally get that and if it's too much money for you or you just don't think it's worth it,
00:10:39 ◼ ► totally understand. You can still throw us money by going to ATP.FM/join, but you don't have to do that either.
00:11:11 ◼ ► The entire world of global shipping and customs and VAT and everything else is all Casey's fault.
00:11:16 ◼ ► And he exclusively is very sorry for it. Yep. That's, you got it. That's exactly right.
00:11:21 ◼ ► Additionally, there was some wonkiness early on, particularly with the performance tea.
00:11:27 ◼ ► The shipping, I guess some metadata was a little askew within Cotton Bureau's own systems and so the shipping was way more expensive,
00:11:33 ◼ ► particularly with the performance tea than it was intended to be. If you ordered the performance tea already and you feel like, yeah,
00:11:40 ◼ ► my shipping was too much money. Well, either that's how much it costs or if you were afflicted by this particular
00:11:46 ◼ ► wonkiness, when the sale actually goes through, because remember that that's Kickstarter style,
00:11:52 ◼ ► when the sale actually goes through, you will get the correct pricing when your credit card is charged.
00:12:03 ◼ ► so there's a couple of things that could be going on here. First of all, the pint glasses ship priority mail,
00:12:07 ◼ ► so you might want to think about putting the pint glasses in a separate order or at least
00:12:11 ◼ ► trying and seeing if that makes a difference. And then if you're seeing something wherein the shipping is still bananas,
00:12:19 ◼ ► go ahead and give Cotton Bureau a holler. They're really responsive on Twitter or even better, support@cottonbureau.com.
00:12:25 ◼ ► We'll have a link to that in the show notes. They're really, really great. We love Cotton Bureau, despite what it may sound,
00:12:31 ◼ ► we love Cotton Bureau. They've been great to us over the years, so much better than other people we've used.
00:12:38 ◼ ► I apologize for my role in blocking the Suez Canal and for escalating the cost of international shipping everywhere,
00:12:44 ◼ ► but we are all very sorry. The other thing I'll add is sometimes people try to order and like the website tells them,
00:12:55 ◼ ► Sometimes that's because Cotton Bureau doesn't ship to your country, which is a bummer, but oh well.
00:12:59 ◼ ► But sometimes it's because it does ship, like you live in like Canada or something, and it's like, "Oh, we can't ship to you."
00:13:22 ◼ ► Casey ran through all the products, and he mentioned the last one, the pins, which are basically, I guess, our version of the HomePod,
00:13:32 ◼ ► We manufactured the pins once and we sold out of all of them, because the pins are different.
00:13:39 ◼ ► It's not like the print-on-demand shirts. The pins are, some things in Cotton Bureau are stock and some of them are print-on-demand,
00:13:44 ◼ ► but the pins were like, "Hey, tell us how much you want to order, pay for them all up front," and then we sell them.
00:13:49 ◼ ► So we did that, we bought a bunch of pins, we sold them, and we're like, "Great, let's do that again."
00:13:53 ◼ ► We bought a bunch of pins, and we've been selling that same batch of pins for what, two and a half years?
00:13:58 ◼ ► It's just, we cannot get rid of these pins, and it's fine, like it's not a big deal. They're tiny,
00:14:17 ◼ ► but not that much," if you want one, you should buy one now, because the odds of us ordering more of these pins is very low.
00:14:28 ◼ ► emailed Cotton Bureau and said, "How many pins do we have?" Because I thought, like when the numbers ticked over,
00:14:36 ◼ ► I'm like, "It's just like a bottomless pit of pins? How many pins are actually left?" And they told me,
00:14:44 ◼ ► I forget how many it was, because they're like, "Here's," because they reserve extras too, for like, you know,
00:14:48 ◼ ► if your pin gets damaged, they want to replace it or whatever. So there is a tiny amount of extras
00:14:52 ◼ ► they reserve, but I think it is conceivable that we could run out of pins. If we don't run out of pins in the sale,
00:14:58 ◼ ► next sale, the first three people to buy pins are gonna sell it out. So, if you want a pin, buy a pin. If not,
00:15:07 ◼ ► Wow. I like the pins. I think it's a cool pin. I don't understand why we're doing something like that.
00:15:11 ◼ ► But you know, anyway, this is probably the last you're gonna be seeing of pins for a while. At least for a while, that's right.
00:15:16 ◼ ► Alright, so again, ATP.fm/store. Don't be that person tweeting me on the day after the sale ends.
00:15:24 ◼ ► Sometimes literally minutes after the sale ends. Of course, a lot of people queue it up now because I make such a big deal out of it.
00:15:29 ◼ ► But then there's that person that you can tell they ain't messing around. They genuinely missed it.
00:15:33 ◼ ► So, if you're driving, pull over. If you're walking, pull to the side. Do what you need to do.
00:15:37 ◼ ► ATP.fm/store or alternatively ATP.fm/join or just tell someone you love about how much you love the show. That works, too.
00:15:44 ◼ ► Moving right along, my fans. I had talked, this is not, you know, the people. This is the spinning kind of fan.
00:15:55 ◼ ► these RF controlled fans that I have and I didn't know how to make them work with HomeKit.
00:16:01 ◼ ► Now, I don't recall where I was in the journey specifically with hacks for ways to fix this.
00:16:21 ◼ ► interface with either RF or IR. So you could say control a TV or something like that and you can get a Homebridge
00:16:37 ◼ ► And so we had to take the fans down that were in the screened-in porch for reasons that are mostly uninteresting.
00:16:49 ◼ ► controller that's in the wall, you know, where any standard light switch or fan switch would be. And then there's an RF like receiver
00:17:00 ◼ ► basically the wires go from the wall unit to the receiver and then from the receiver to the fan.
00:17:05 ◼ ► Well, as it turns out, I'm almost positive that the wires within the wall, which I haven't opened up yet, or you know,
00:17:12 ◼ ► behind the plate, I mean, those wires, I believe, match the wires going into the fan. So
00:17:23 ◼ ► that's by design, like it's not permanently attached or anything like that. It's, in fact,
00:17:27 ◼ ► it comes detached. If I take away that RF box and then put in my Lutron Caseta fan switches, I
00:17:33 ◼ ► think, I think that might work. So that's what I'm going to try. I probably won't be able to for another week,
00:17:40 ◼ ► maybe two, for again, uninteresting reasons. But that's the theory. And if that doesn't work, I'm gonna try this Bond, Bond, Bond,
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00:19:47 ◼ ► Speaking of spending money, ATP purchases. So we talked about AirTags and we're gonna talk a little more about that later.
00:20:01 ◼ ► I got the 64 gig and mostly because people said, "Well, what about those screensavers?" And I'm a sucker for the screensavers.
00:20:24 ◼ ► You sucker. You're as bad as I am. And I even bought the big one for the exact same damn reason.
00:20:30 ◼ ► I infected both of you with this virus. When else can you double the storage of an Apple product for $20?
00:20:58 ◼ ► I will demote the previous Apple TV 4k to the other TV that had the HD model previously.
00:21:11 ◼ ► because the stupid screensavers are actually like one of my favorite things about the Apple TV.
00:21:15 ◼ ► They really are. And if that increases the space to cache screensavers and therefore, you know,
00:21:21 ◼ ► maybe includes more of them in my regular rotation than otherwise would have, that alone is worth it to me?
00:21:30 ◼ ► Like we all have gigabit connections to our house. Like the extra storage space is not, I'm gonna say right now,
00:21:36 ◼ ► is not going to let you access more screensavers. It's not going to increase things in the rotation.
00:21:41 ◼ ► They just, they can just stream. You have a gigabit connection, but you do have more space. So there's that.
00:21:59 ◼ ► So even though I'm not giving it the new model, I'm gonna have that good remote on both TVs, allegedly.
00:22:07 ◼ ► I mean, that's one thing. Like none of us have actually tried it yet. Like no one's reviewed the remote yet.
00:22:11 ◼ ► We don't actually know if it actually is good. Can it be worse though, really? Like it's hard, really, really hard to make it worse.
00:22:17 ◼ ► That's fair. Like if there are certain aspects of it that we know immediately are better. Hey, it's not symmetrical.
00:22:34 ◼ ► Now above and beyond that, maybe it also has its own problems or whatever. You're right that we don't know.
00:22:39 ◼ ► But I think it's a pretty safe bet that if you really, really hate the current remote, this one
00:22:59 ◼ ► As I bought them and you know, I had this four-pack. Great. Let me open this up. Activate the tag and
00:23:07 ◼ ► you know, I thought okay, I'll put one in my backpack. Maybe that sounds good. But the main thing I wanted to put it on
00:23:13 ◼ ► were our primary bikes in the family and the wagon that we bring to and from the boat for like freight hauling.
00:23:20 ◼ ► Because these are things that we will often leave unattended in town for a while and unlocked two things.
00:23:40 ◼ ► That way I can locate my kid if he doesn't have his Apple Watch on. So I figured, you know,
00:23:45 ◼ ► we should all have them on our bikes and that's three bikes and one wagon. Perfect. Okay.
00:24:27 ◼ ► and this might be intentional, you need to attach this to something in almost every case.
00:24:34 ◼ ► Like I could tuck one into a pocket in my backpack without modifying anything. Okay, great.
00:24:40 ◼ ► But literally anything else I would use it for, I need to attach it somehow. Now, you know, I could just use a
00:24:50 ◼ ► That doesn't work for certain things like, you know, we had friends ask like, you know,
00:25:06 ◼ ► So if you'll notice, if you go to Apple's site or, you know, we'll stick with Apple for now.
00:25:13 ◼ ► We'll cover Amazon in a second. But like you go to Apple's site, great. You can buy the AirTag for $25 to $30.
00:25:39 ◼ ► So it seems like Apple designed these in order to sell more accessories besides just them.
00:26:00 ◼ ► Then many of us could just stick a cheap hardware store, you know, key ring thing through it
00:26:17 ◼ ► prioritizing like basically visual purity and possibly in an effort to increase accessory sales,
00:26:49 ◼ ► Our friends over at, I think it was Elevation Lab announced a very similar kind of thing.
00:27:03 ◼ ► that are eight to $12, most of which appear that no one has actually gotten them and used them yet,
00:27:08 ◼ ► because they don't seem to have legitimate reviews because it just hasn't been enough time.
00:27:15 ◼ ► So, I don't know, I'm kind of like, I'm kind of lukewarm on this like, okay, this is great.
00:27:30 ◼ ► you just can't attach to anything like it's like a, you know, a UFO shaped disc with curved edges.
00:27:42 ◼ ► mount it into or onto anything very securely because it'll just slip out because of its shape.
00:27:47 ◼ ► And so like, they literally did nothing to accommodate the idea to actually attach this
00:27:58 ◼ ► And the only case that you could get for it was like Apple's awful, that big, like black rubbery
00:28:03 ◼ ► one that kind of just clamped around it on all sides. Cause the original iPad made no accommodation
00:28:08 ◼ ► for cases. And that's one of the things they changed with the iPad too. They added the magnetic
00:28:13 ◼ ► mounts on the side so you could have the smart case. Well, this has like no affordances for
00:28:19 ◼ ► attachment whatsoever. So you just, you're going to end up having all these like big, expensive,
00:28:26 ◼ ► you know, little custom mount things and, and you know, key ring straps and all these little things
00:28:32 ◼ ► and Apple sells a bunch of them and I'm sure, I'm sure they will. But like, then the result is
00:28:37 ◼ ► you put this thing, if you want to like put this on a key chain or on a dog collar or whatever it is,
00:28:41 ◼ ► it's just going to be, not only is it going to be bulkier and more expensive, but it's, it's going
00:28:46 ◼ ► to, it's just like, it's less elegant, you know, so you have this larger object than it could have
00:28:50 ◼ ► been if it was just a key ring. You're, the real price of it is going to be more like $50 each,
00:28:55 ◼ ► depending on what you, how you mount it and what products are actually available and good.
00:28:59 ◼ ► And it just, I just, it kind of leaves a sour taste in my mouth that this is kind of, you know,
00:29:04 ◼ ► for, it's one of those things that like, it looks good in pictures, but it's actually, I think,
00:29:09 ◼ ► a bad design. I think people will yell at us if we don't bring this up, because we haven't mentioned
00:29:15 ◼ ► the umpteen other times that it'll come up, but people keep thinking that the AirPods are an
00:29:19 ◼ ► example of my naked robotic core concept that we talked about with the iPhone and to review the
00:29:24 ◼ ► idea behind that with the iPhone is make the iPhone as small as possible so that you have the most,
00:29:29 ◼ ► give the consumer the most options in terms of how they want to deal with it. If they want the
00:29:33 ◼ ► smallest phone possible, then they've got it. But if they want to put a case on it, you've made the
00:29:37 ◼ ► inside part as small as possible so that when you do put a case on it, it doesn't get that much
00:29:41 ◼ ► bigger. And so you might think that given what you just said about the AirTags, oh, they're the same
00:29:46 ◼ ► thing. We don't even give you any case. We give you the naked robotic core and you have to dress
00:29:50 ◼ ► it up in these accessories. Like we don't do it. You know, it's not, there's no holes in it. It's
00:29:54 ◼ ► not supposed to be attached. It is literally the naked robotic core and you have to wrap it in
00:29:58 ◼ ► something, or you could just have it be the way it is and loosen your bag. The problem with that,
00:30:02 ◼ ► and the reason I think the AirTags are not a good example of naked robotic core is that as far as I
00:30:06 ◼ ► can tell from seeing the teardowns, I don't have these in person because I didn't buy any AirTags,
00:30:10 ◼ ► but as far as I've seen from like the iFixit teardowns and stuff, AirTags are not as small
00:30:16 ◼ ► as they can possibly be. They're much more like sort of before the iPhone, when naked robotic
00:30:21 ◼ ► core, like the iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS, any, they're both the same shape, where there's a
00:30:28 ◼ ► curve to the plastic so that there's basically air space inside it so that it can look like,
00:30:33 ◼ ► you know, like, I don't know what it's looking at, what candy looks like. It's like a lozenge,
00:30:36 ◼ ► kind of like it has a curve to it. Like a spree, a very big spree. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know
00:30:41 ◼ ► that candy, but I'll take your word for it. But, but like, if this was going to be a naked robotic
00:30:45 ◼ ► core, it would, not that it would look more like tile, but tile and my impression is they tend to
00:30:51 ◼ ► pull in the edges as tight as they can. So there's no unnecessary curves or bulges for the
00:31:01 ◼ ► it's much more like the iPhone 4, let's say, where the outsides are sucked, or the, the,
00:31:07 ◼ ► the last good looking Mazda RX7, where the outsides are sucked in as tightly as they can possibly be
00:31:13 ◼ ► to the insides to give you maximum space to adorn it, if that's what you want to do. If you want it
00:31:19 ◼ ► to be as small as possible, hey, we've sucked it all in for you as your naked robotic core,
00:31:22 ◼ ► but if you want to put something in it, we've really compacted the core as much as we can so
00:31:26 ◼ ► that when you do put a case on it, it doesn't get too bulky. And I don't think that's what they've
00:31:30 ◼ ► done with this as far as I can tell. I may be wrong. Maybe there's not as much airspace in there
00:31:33 ◼ ► as I think, but every time I see the curves and the things you were talking about that make it
00:31:37 ◼ ► essentially hard to even, let's say, electrical tape something because there's no flat side,
00:31:52 ◼ ► I think this is not, this is not a, uh, a, uh, an ideal implementation of the naked robotic core.
00:31:58 ◼ ► It has some aspects of it in that it's clear that they want you to put accessories on it or
00:32:02 ◼ ► whatever, but yeah. And so people are drilling holes in them, which is a thing that you can do,
00:32:17 ◼ ► you know, ruptured the structural integrity of the AirPod and now you're going to have like stress
00:32:21 ◼ ► cracks and everything. So I don't recommend that. Um, it makes me think though, of all the things
00:32:26 ◼ ► that, uh, that Apple made that don't actually have any kind of convenient attach point. I was
00:32:32 ◼ ► thinking of when they made a series of iPod touches that had the little pop-out, uh, anchor
00:32:37 ◼ ► point for a strap. Do you, maybe you don't remember that cause you weren't big into iPod touch, but I
00:32:41 ◼ ► was getting iPod touches and they, they had, it was like a, it was flush, but if you pressed it in,
00:32:46 ◼ ► it would go in a little bit and then pop out and it was like a, like a grommet. Like it was basically
00:32:51 ◼ ► just like a, I don't know how to describe it, like a cylinder with, with a, with a big disc on top
00:32:56 ◼ ► of it. And it would pop up and you would loop a strap around that. Right. Even something like
00:33:00 ◼ ► that as sort of an anchor point, not necessarily just, Oh, tile has a hole in there is therefore
00:33:04 ◼ ► Apple should have a hole in theirs. Apple could have done something more aptly to give an
00:33:08 ◼ ► attachment point that is more minimal than what they have. So I feel your pain in attaching things.
00:33:13 ◼ ► Lots of people are posting Twitter threads of like, uh, if you buy the expensive Apple case,
00:33:18 ◼ ► here's where it falls down because the key ring it comes with is one of those flat key rings,
00:33:23 ◼ ► you know, like the, there's lots of different ways you can do key rings, but one way you can do it is
00:33:27 ◼ ► to have kind of like a, a flattened snake that goes around in a ring and it makes it wide and
00:33:32 ◼ ► wider in one dimension than it is in the other and lots of keys and other things don't fit around
00:33:36 ◼ ► that or only fit around it one way, but then can't rotate. You know what I mean? Right. And so it
00:33:42 ◼ ► makes for absurd scenarios. And also if you look at the Apple cases, if you're looking at the air
00:33:47 ◼ ► tag head on, uh, the ring, you'd be looking at the ring like head on as well. So you'd see the
00:33:54 ◼ ► air tag and Apple logo and you'd see the key ring. So you could look straight through the hole,
00:33:57 ◼ ► but keys, a lot of keys go onto key rings the other way where the key is rotated sideways.
00:34:03 ◼ ► So you're looking at the side of the key and then looking through the key ring hole. I'm not
00:34:06 ◼ ► describing as well, but like, look at your ring of keys. If you just hold your finger with the ring
00:34:10 ◼ ► and let the keys dangle, usually the keys aren't facing you. They are side sideways to you, but the
00:34:16 ◼ ► air tag is exactly the opposite. So it doesn't even like sort of lay flat next to your other
00:34:20 ◼ ► keys because it insists on being, uh, you know, in the same plane as the key ring and it's the way it
00:34:26 ◼ ► attaches with that big strap. It doesn't let it twist at all. It's just really not particularly
00:34:31 ◼ ► well thought out or particularly compact. And it's also not a very good naked robotic core.
00:34:36 ◼ ► So maybe they'll revise it. Maybe the next one will be smaller. Uh, you know, they have,
00:34:41 ◼ ► they have some time to iterate on this. It definitely looks very much like the ideal use
00:34:49 ◼ ► You don't care that it's a little bit bulky and it works fine. Um, and you mentioned people putting
00:34:54 ◼ ► it on their pets. I would encourage people to consider a different option if they really want
00:34:58 ◼ ► something they can find their pets because in my experience, when pets run away, they don't run
00:35:02 ◼ ► away to an area where people have iPhones, they run into the woods and there's no one with iPhones
00:35:07 ◼ ► in there and it's way out of you on range. So if you're trying to, Oh, my dog is lost. Hey,
00:35:11 ◼ ► I'll find it with the fine. My network. No, you won't. Unless it ran into a mall. Like it's like,
00:35:15 ◼ ► where is your dog running? Does your dog just run into crowds full of people with phones? No,
00:35:20 ◼ ► they always run off into the woods. They're chasing a bird. They're like, you have no idea
00:35:24 ◼ ► where they are. It's not, it's not the ideal thing. Even Apple says AirTag is meant to track
00:35:28 ◼ ► things, not people or pets. Um, if you want to track your pet, I've, because I have a pet that
00:35:34 ◼ ► is a, uh, a flight risk, let's say, cause, uh, she really loves, uh, birds and squirrels and other
00:35:40 ◼ ► things and has no idea that, uh, anything else exists when she sees them. A strong prey drive,
00:35:45 ◼ ► they call it. Uh, anyway, uh, there's the company I use is a whistle.com. They're not a sponsor. Um,
00:35:52 ◼ ► but I've used their dog GPS products for a long time. Um, the first revision was a little bit,
00:35:57 ◼ ► uh, the battery life wasn't that great, but the second one, the battery life is amazing.
00:36:06 ◼ ► and it is literal GPS. So no matter where your dog goes, uh, you know, you can, it sends a signal
00:36:14 ◼ ► up to wherever, like, you know, you, you can find your dog basically anywhere. It's not super duper
00:36:18 ◼ ► great real time tracking, but you don't have to rely on your dog running near people with iPhones,
00:36:22 ◼ ► which is a big plus to come back around. John, I don't think you told us if you bought any
00:36:28 ◼ ► Apple TVs or remotes, I got a new Apple TV. Yes, of course the big one, um, for, to replace my,
00:36:36 ◼ ► my existing Apple TV or 4k downstairs and the, the existing Apple TV 4k will bump up to the bedroom,
00:36:42 ◼ ► kicking out our old Apple TV HD. And then I got a spare remote. So I don't have to use that stupid
00:36:47 ◼ ► serial remote ever again. So I got exactly the same stuff as Marco and I'm basically following
00:36:50 ◼ ► the same plan. Good deal. All right. We need to talk about FileVault performance. And, uh,
00:36:57 ◼ ► some people had pointed out that the SSD in computers that have the Apple T2 security chip
00:37:03 ◼ ► is encrypted. Uh, so you can turn on FileVault, uh, so that your Mac requires a password to
00:37:09 ◼ ► decrypt your data, but it's going to be encrypted no matter what. Yeah. We mentioned on the last
00:37:12 ◼ ► show, but it's just good. We'll link to the tech support article, you know, rather than just going
00:37:16 ◼ ► by what, what you've heard in our reckons last time. Oh, I think there's things with T2 or the
00:37:20 ◼ ► M1 do this or whatever. Here's an Apple support document that spells it out. Um, you know,
00:37:24 ◼ ► iPhones and iOS devices have been encrypted maybe since the beginning, but certainly for many, many,
00:37:31 ◼ ► many years. Right. Um, and so the M1 Macs and the Macs based on the ARM chips and the, you know,
00:37:37 ◼ ► iPhone-ish architecture of course do the same thing. But even before that, once the, uh, uh,
00:37:48 ◼ ► it being encrypted on the SSD is one thing. And you maybe think, well, then what is turning FileVault
00:37:54 ◼ ► on and off do? And as this article says, what it does is it means that to decrypt it. Now you have
00:37:59 ◼ ► to enter a password for one of your user accounts to decrypt it. Whereas before the decryption keys,
00:38:06 ◼ ► presumably are in the secure enclave and it didn't demand anything of you, right? You could just,
00:38:15 ◼ ► please enter your password. It would just pull its own password out of the secure enclave and,
00:38:19 ◼ ► and go to town. So, uh, this was with respect to, you know, worrying about performance.
00:38:24 ◼ ► You have no choice. If you have a T2 or an M1 Mac, whatever the performance hit is or isn't. And I
00:38:29 ◼ ► think there is basically none because it's all just done transparently and hardware at, uh,
00:38:32 ◼ ► at full speed. Uh, you're getting, you're paying that price no matter what. So your only choice is,
00:38:42 ◼ ► Indeed. Then, uh, related Michael Birtle wrote that, uh, I have two Mac minis in remote locations
00:38:49 ◼ ► running headless. I access them via VNC over an SSH tunnel. In this setup, I need to have
00:38:55 ◼ ► FileVault disabled. If I perform an OS update remotely that requires a restart and FileVault
00:38:59 ◼ ► requires the input of a password before I'm able to connect via VNC. Just something to consider if
00:39:04 ◼ ► you ever plan on servicing a Mac remotely without access to a physical keyboard. A bunch of people
00:39:13 ◼ ► but I don't actually know what it is, but it seems like a lot of people have run into this problem
00:39:18 ◼ ► that, yeah, if you do make it require your password and then your reboot and you're not there to enter
00:39:22 ◼ ► your password at the point that it demands your password, it's like, it needs it to get to the
00:39:27 ◼ ► disc so it can boot. So if you're thinking, I'm just going to VNC in and enter my password. No,
00:39:31 ◼ ► you're not because the thing isn't even booted yet. Like I said, I think there might be some
00:39:34 ◼ ► workarounds for this somehow, but just keep it in mind. If you don't know the workarounds like I
00:39:39 ◼ ► don't and you enable FileVault and you want to remotely control your computer through a reboot,
00:39:44 ◼ ► you may have a problem. So now we turn into, please Apple, please fix my particular bug corner.
00:39:51 ◼ ► And this time I'm not the winner. John, what's going on with your Mac, buddy? I don't, this is,
00:39:57 ◼ ► I don't think that I'm not really asking them to, I mean, they should fix it if it's a thing, but
00:40:01 ◼ ► this is, I just thought I'd bring this up because it's interesting. It's one of the aspects of
00:40:05 ◼ ► owning a computer that lots of people don't own that people maybe don't think about. And I've
00:40:10 ◼ ► always had these really weird computers that are, you know, expensive and obscure that most people
00:40:21 ◼ ► So recently Mac OS 11.3 came out and as soon as I did the update, I started experiencing a bug on
00:40:27 ◼ ► my Mac. Right. And the bug was that the display would not wake from sleep. Right. And it's not
00:40:33 ◼ ► that the computer wouldn't wake from sleep. The display wouldn't. So, you know, I have my things,
00:40:37 ◼ ► some energy savers set up as like screen saver goes on after five minutes and then after 15
00:40:41 ◼ ► minutes, the display goes to sleep. And so when the display goes to sleep, you are seeing your
00:40:44 ◼ ► screen server, then all of a sudden the display turns black, right? The way it's supposed to work
00:40:47 ◼ ► is you come up to your computer and you whack the space bar, click the mouse button or something.
00:40:51 ◼ ► And the display springs back to life. Right. During this time, the computer hasn't yet fallen
00:40:55 ◼ ► asleep because the computer sleep timer is different and much longer. And you can confirm
00:40:59 ◼ ► this, you know, by just going to another Mac and SSHing in and say, yep, here I am. I'm on this
00:41:04 ◼ ► Mac. The Mac is totally awake. It's running. I'm SSHed into it. I can do stuff. But no matter what
00:41:09 ◼ ► I do, the display won't wake. I can type as much as I want on the keyboard. I can click the mouse
00:41:14 ◼ ► button. I can tap the power button on the computer. The display just stays asleep. And so on.
00:41:19 ◼ ► Something like this happens and it started happening immediately after 11.3 and has happened
00:41:23 ◼ ► multiple times since. I'm pretty sure it's the 11.3 update. You think, oh, this is a bug. And
00:41:29 ◼ ► you might be thinking, well, this happened so immediately and so many people's Macs go to sleep.
00:41:34 ◼ ► Surely this has been reported a thousand times already and this will be fixed quickly. But then
00:41:37 ◼ ► you remember nobody to a first approximation has my computer set up. Who has a Mac Pro with the
00:41:43 ◼ ► Pro Display XDR? Probably nobody is reporting this. In fact, for all I know, the other eight
00:41:48 ◼ ► people in the world who have a Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR have their display set to never sleep
00:41:56 ◼ ► or something. Or who knows, right? But I did my duty as a good Apple reporter and I filed the
00:42:02 ◼ ► feedback. And what I did was like one of the times that it happened, I SSHed into the computer from
00:42:06 ◼ ► elsewhere and I ran a sysdiagnose and I ran a spin dump and I saved the files and then I made a
00:42:12 ◼ ► feedback. Number will be in the show notes, FB9095615. And I said, here's what's happening. I
00:42:18 ◼ ► have no idea how to reproduce it. It doesn't happen every single time, but it's happened a bunch of
00:42:22 ◼ ► times. I'm pretty sure it's 11.3. Here's a spin dump. Here's a sysdiagnose. Fingers crossed. But
00:42:34 ◼ ► computer, be aware that when you have problems, A, nobody cares and B, you and only like five
00:42:40 ◼ ► other people in the world have even a chance of having that problem. So if you buy one of the new
00:42:44 ◼ ► iMacs and something like this comes out, thousands of other people are going to report it and it will
00:42:48 ◼ ► probably get fixed. But all I can do is just hope that it somehow magically goes away in a future
00:42:53 ◼ ► update. I have updated to 11.3.1 and haven't seen it happen since, but I updated like two hours ago.
00:42:59 ◼ ► So I don't know. Anyway, that's it. Fun times. All right. There's been an update with regard to the
00:43:07 ◼ ► new 13 inch iPad and the old Magic Keyboard. Jason Snell had speculated on upgrade this week or last
00:43:15 ◼ ► that the new iPad Pro would probably fit in the old Magic Keyboard case. It might just be a bit
00:43:21 ◼ ► too snug by Apple standards and turns out that he was right. And yes, you can use the new 12.9 inch
00:43:27 ◼ ► iPad Pro in the old Magic Keyboard. It's just that the tolerances are a little tight and it's
00:43:33 ◼ ► not going to be flawless and Apple isn't keen on that, but it will work. It's like when you try to
00:43:37 ◼ ► put on your skinny jeans after a long winter of fattening up, you can pretty much get them on and
00:43:41 ◼ ► snap them, but you can kind of tell it's not fitting the way it's supposed to. You know about this,
00:43:45 ◼ ► John? Is this something you have experience with? I do. Oh my God. How skinny are your jeans?
00:43:49 ◼ ► Yeah, just wait. What is it? After a certain age, you say you gain a pound a year for the
00:44:10 ◼ ► I'll tell you what, that's not a sponsor, but like the banner public traveler line. Oh my God. So
00:44:17 ◼ ► good. Oh my word. The middle-aged men podcast, get some stretch jeans. I'm telling you, it's,
00:44:22 ◼ ► you feel like you're getting away with something because like they look normal. They look totally
00:44:25 ◼ ► normal. And you're like, I can't believe how incredibly comfortable this is. And like, cause
00:44:31 ◼ ► they feel almost like sweatpants, but with much more functional pockets because you don't have
00:44:35 ◼ ► like the phone sliding out problem that you do with sweatpants. And you can go outside and like,
00:44:39 ◼ ► go out places and stuff and you look normal. Speaking of Jason Snell, and speaking of being,
00:44:45 ◼ ► speaking of being a middle-aged man, if you're interested in the Tesla model three, then Snell
00:44:51 ◼ ► borrowed one. And I thought it was worth, if you're willing and interested listening to this
00:44:56 ◼ ► review that Jason did on upgrade plus, which is there for pay only after shows. So you will have
00:45:02 ◼ ► to be a member to hear it, but on episode three 51, Jason had recounted a trip from San Francisco
00:45:08 ◼ ► to Arizona, I think in a model three. And yeah, it was really, really interesting to hear someone
00:45:14 ◼ ► who is not that into cars, but very into technology talk about it. One of the most striking things that
00:45:20 ◼ ► he said was that he felt like he was more aware of his speed in terms of like miles per hour
00:45:27 ◼ ► in the Tesla, that's the model three with only the center mounted display, no, no gauge cluster of
00:45:33 ◼ ► any sort than he is in his old traditional minivan. And I thought that was fascinating. He was saying
00:45:38 ◼ ► that, you know, because on the minivan, you have to look at where the needle is and find what the
00:45:43 ◼ ► nearest number is, and then figure out exactly where in between the two nearest numbers are,
00:45:47 ◼ ► you know, to get your exact miles per hour, that it was more effort and for him to figure out his
00:45:52 ◼ ► speed in the minivan than just looking at this screen that's a little bit out of your direct
00:45:56 ◼ ► line of sight and looking in the corner to see the numeral. I've driven a model three and I did not
00:46:01 ◼ ► personally get this experience, but I also only have driven model threes for like 10, 15 miles at
00:46:06 ◼ ► a time, not 2000 or whatever it was that he did. So if you're a member of upgrade plus or whatever
00:46:12 ◼ ► they call their membership, I definitely suggest you try out or take a listen to episode 351 and
00:46:17 ◼ ► the after show from that. Sounds like it just wants a digital speedo. I mean, I remember those
00:46:23 ◼ ► coming out when I was a kid on like Cadillacs and stuff like, yeah, if you want to read a digital
00:46:26 ◼ ► watch instead of an analog one, we can put that number in front of you and it'll be much bigger
00:46:29 ◼ ► than it is on a corner of the model three screen. But it took me a second to realize what a digital
00:46:34 ◼ ► speedo meant. I got it. I also thought it was fascinating. He was saying that his wife, Lauren,
00:46:40 ◼ ► wears reading glasses and apparently there is no record. As far as he knew, there was no
00:46:46 ◼ ► affordance for increasing the size of the font and any of the display stuff on the Tesla, which was
00:46:52 ◼ ► not that surprising, but also deeply disappointing. Yeah, they actually, they did a software update
00:46:57 ◼ ► last fall. I think it was where they made the font size way too small. Like, and it was just like one
00:47:03 ◼ ► day I went to my car and like the PRND indicator, like a bunch of other stuff was just really tiny.
00:47:10 ◼ ► And it seemed like they had designed the UI for the model three and just kind of shoved it into
00:47:15 ◼ ► the S screen, but it was really bad. And they had to revert that. I mean, a couple of weeks later,
00:47:22 ◼ ► maybe, but it was, it kind of gave me a bad taste in my mouth. Like, wow, Tesla can at any time
00:47:42 ◼ ► It's probably not as incognito as you think. And why would it be incognito mode like the
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00:49:09 ◼ ► our show. Okay, so I think it was right before we released or really recorded last episode,
00:49:21 ◼ ► there was quite the brouhaha about Basecamp. And oh man, there's so much here and I'm going to try
00:49:30 ◼ ► to figure out a way to summarize it very quickly. But to establish a little bit of like basic
00:49:37 ◼ ► foundation, first of all, Basecamp has sponsored in the past. They haven't sponsored terribly
00:49:43 ◼ ► recently and they are not currently booked to sponsor in the future. And they definitely
00:49:48 ◼ ► have sponsored in the past. But Basecamp is the company behind Basecamp software, as well as Hey,
00:49:55 ◼ ► the new new-ish email service. And about a week ago, or maybe a little more, I think it was Jason
00:50:04 ◼ ► Fried wrote a post on their kind of blogging platform that's powered off of Hey, saying that
00:50:10 ◼ ► there's going to be a new company's policy, Jason Fried being their CEO, there's new company's
00:50:15 ◼ ► policy saying that it will be no more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp
00:50:19 ◼ ► account. It's probably worth noting here that that is not the original verbiage, but that's where it
00:50:23 ◼ ► got changed to. And a lot of people got really up in arms about this, which is somewhat interesting
00:50:30 ◼ ► because Basecamp is not a big company. It was only about 60 people, but, you know, the internet
00:50:35 ◼ ► needed a main character and Basecamp and Jason Fried and David Hanamatter-Hanson, they became
00:50:40 ◼ ► the main characters for last week. And a lot of people got really upset. And it seemed like there
00:50:46 ◼ ► was more to this than meets the eye. And there is so much more to this than, than I think we can
00:50:52 ◼ ► reasonably cover or even really reasonably summarize during the course of the show. But
00:50:57 ◼ ► it made all of us kind of wonder what are the bigger implications about what went on and to
00:51:06 ◼ ► build a little more about what went on, you know, a lot of people got really upset about this, oh,
00:51:10 ◼ ► no more politics at work. And I think a lot of the employees at Basecamp said, well, hold on,
00:51:14 ◼ ► that's not really fair. And then it came to light that a lot of the genesis of this was from a list
00:51:22 ◼ ► that had been started many, many years back about funny sounding names of clients of theirs. And
00:51:29 ◼ ► it's not terribly clear how much of that was something like Seymour Butts or how much of that
00:51:34 ◼ ► was something that was kind of racially motivated. But a lot of people at Basecamp got really
00:51:38 ◼ ► uncomfortable about it. This at the same time as while they're doing a what is it diversity
00:51:43 ◼ ► equality? What's DEI? I'm drawing a blank now. diversity, equity inclusion. I'm going to go.
00:51:49 ◼ ► There you go. Thank you. That's close. I think that's right. It's something like that. Something
00:51:52 ◼ ► like that. There was like a third of the company was in a DEI like committee trying to make things
00:51:57 ◼ ► better as this is all going on. And I think that might have been the genesis of discovering this
00:52:02 ◼ ► particular list. And the list was brought to the attention of Jason and David. And, you know, it's
00:52:09 ◼ ► hard to say what exactly happened, but basically they kind of shrugged it off at first. And that
00:52:13 ◼ ► just escalated things even more. And I don't know, I really, really strongly encourage you if you
00:52:20 ◼ ► have the time and the willingness to read a little bit to read the two pieces by Casey Newton. I
00:52:24 ◼ ► believe both of them are at the verge. We'll put them in the show notes. It's also worth reading
00:52:28 ◼ ► the actual stuff that David and Jason said on their various, I guess, kind of sort of blogs.
00:52:34 ◼ ► There's so much here. And I'm going to give you two a chance to add any other relevant summary if
00:52:40 ◼ ► you'd like. But truly, you're hearing me, the chief summarizer in chief, doing at best a passable
00:52:47 ◼ ► job of summarizing this. And I am deliberately leaving out a lot because we would be here for
00:52:51 ◼ ► an hour if I don't. So that's kind of where things started. And again, please read Casey's,
00:52:58 ◼ ► the other Casey's articles, and feel free to pause the show now to do so. But like I was saying
00:53:04 ◼ ► earlier, it really makes people wonder, like, what is the role of politics in the workforce? What is
00:53:08 ◼ ► the role of executives with regard to setting rules and culture? Was this right? Was this wrong?
00:53:17 ◼ ► Was it that their edict of no politics in the workplace was right, but the way they handled
00:53:22 ◼ ► it was wrong? Who really knows? And we're certainly going to talk about it here in a second. But what
00:53:27 ◼ ► we do know is by the end of last week, or perhaps the beginning of this week, Basecamp had said in a
00:53:33 ◼ ► very Basecamp-y way, "Look, if you want to leave Basecamp, if you're an employee and you would like
00:53:40 ◼ ► to leave, we'll give you something to the order of six months severance and no questions asked,
00:53:44 ◼ ► you can walk. We'll give you six months pay and we'll do what we can to help you land another job."
00:53:48 ◼ ► And supposedly about a third of the company did that. They walked away, including, from what I
00:53:55 ◼ ► understand, the entire iOS team, for example. So there's a lot here. I don't know which of you
00:54:03 ◼ ► would like to start. Maybe Marco, are there any other points that I'm skipping that are salient
00:54:08 ◼ ► with regard to the summary? And then feel free to dig in if not. Honestly, I have not followed the
00:54:15 ◼ ► story that closely. I had a bunch of stuff happening in real life, nothing bad, just a very
00:54:20 ◼ ► busy couple of weeks. And so I missed most of this. I have read some of the summary articles.
00:54:25 ◼ ► It's hard for me to speak about this because not only is it a little uncomfortable, because I don't
00:54:32 ◼ ► want to offend people or say the wrong thing or say something that I don't mean, just out of my
00:54:38 ◼ ► clumsiness with using the language and speaking that I'm not particularly solid at. So there's
00:54:44 ◼ ► all that factoring in here. But on the basic question of whether political speech at work
00:54:55 ◼ ► should be allowed, and again, with the massive disclaimer that I've never managed people,
00:55:08 ◼ ► But with that all said, I think the idea that you shouldn't allow "political speech" in a workplace,
00:55:16 ◼ ► however you define that, which is its own massive can of worms, but the idea that you shouldn't allow
00:55:23 ◼ ► that only makes sense in a perfect world that is not our world that we live in. The idea that you
00:55:30 ◼ ► would not allow "political speech" presumes a lot about the equality of the world you're in,
00:55:39 ◼ ► whether anybody is oppressed. There's so many presumptions of privilege and of equality in that
00:55:50 ◼ ► kind of point of view. In reality, the world is messier than that. And in reality, you have to
00:55:55 ◼ ► talk politics sometimes because the world is not right. Not talking about it really just enables
00:56:02 ◼ ► the status quo to continue. And so the status quo has to be really damn good for everybody for that
00:56:07 ◼ ► to make sense, and that's never really the case anywhere in the world ever. So I think it's one
00:56:11 ◼ ► of those ideas that a lot of tech people have really simplistic, systematic views of the world,
00:56:18 ◼ ► of like, "Here's how things should work, because this is how they work logically in my head and in
00:56:22 ◼ ► my computer programs." And the world is messier than that. The world is way messier than that.
00:56:26 ◼ ► And I don't think we're ever going to be at a point where equality is so great and widespread
00:56:32 ◼ ► and universal that we will be able to have the privilege to say we don't need to talk about
00:56:37 ◼ ► politics in the workplace. That's not reality. That will never happen. And as long as the world
00:56:43 ◼ ► has any inequality whatsoever, the idea of trying to limit speech in a workplace to not include
00:56:51 ◼ ► politics, again, whatever that means, I think it's a fantasy. And the real world is not like that.
00:56:56 ◼ ► And by forcing silence on certain topics as a policy, what you really do is enable the current
00:57:07 ◼ ► ruling class, whatever that is, and you significantly disadvantage any kind of marginalized
00:57:14 ◼ ► group or any kind of marginalized cause. And that's, again, that's just, it's never going to
00:57:20 ◼ ► work. That's never going to be a right and just and justified outcome. I don't think, I mean,
00:57:27 ◼ ► I don't know the people who run this company. I have no idea what their motivations are or aren't.
00:57:34 ◼ ► But I don't believe that these are fundamentally evil people. I don't, maybe I haven't read up on
00:57:42 ◼ ► it. I don't know. I don't think they are. I think this was just a really badly made decision and a
00:57:49 ◼ ► series of very badly handled problems from what I've read. But again, that's very little. So I'll
00:57:53 ◼ ► let Jon talk about the details much better than I could and the issue much better than I could. But
00:57:59 ◼ ► yeah, my point of view on this basically is, again, from my very limited reading of it, that the whole
00:58:05 ◼ ► idea of politics at work, of trying to pretend like you can just not talk about that and everything
00:58:11 ◼ ► will be fine, that's a fantasy. So when these things blow up on Twitter, like, I mean, we're
00:58:18 ◼ ► all kind of probably have some form of trauma from the past four years, at least in the US anyway.
00:58:25 ◼ ► But, you know, for these, for the Twitter dramas that are essentially lower stakes, like,
00:58:31 ◼ ► this is one small tech company, it looms large in our particular nerd world, but I bet most people
00:58:36 ◼ ► have never heard of it. When there's lower stakes like that, and you're more distant from it, maybe
00:58:41 ◼ ► your inclination is like, oh, then I don't have to pay attention to it. It's not a big deal, like,
00:58:44 ◼ ► or whatever. But I think it's useful when something blows up like this, that you do have distance from,
00:58:51 ◼ ► that it's not really about you, it's not really about anyone you know, and it's not really about
00:58:55 ◼ ► anything of consequence, it's just, you know, one little company. There's always something in every
00:59:00 ◼ ► one of these controversies, there's always something to be learned. And the more you're able to,
00:59:04 ◼ ► to look at it from a distance, the more you're able to incorporate that new knowledge into yourself
00:59:13 ◼ ► without any kind of like personal thread or identity thread or whatever, right? Because
00:59:17 ◼ ► I bet most people listening to this don't have any particular stake in base camp. And it's,
00:59:23 ◼ ► it's a 60 person company, or was a 60 person company, right? And so that's the first thing
00:59:29 ◼ ► I'll say about this is, take the opportunity, if you are a person who follows Twitter or follows
00:59:35 ◼ ► any kind of tech news, that when some one of these things happen, and when it seems like
00:59:39 ◼ ► there's a lot of like, strife and drama about some decision, take that opportunity to see,
00:59:46 ◼ ► is there anything I as a basically detached observer can learn from what has happened here?
00:59:52 ◼ ► And there almost always is, sometimes it's multiple things learn from different angles,
00:59:56 ◼ ► like, you know, it depends on the controversy, but sometimes in a controversy, especially when
01:00:01 ◼ ► it's like super low stakes, where people like arguing about superheroes or something, it's like,
01:00:04 ◼ ► who cares? You can put yourself in the position of all sides of the debate and say, okay, well,
01:00:09 ◼ ► if I was in this position, here's what I would have learned from this thing. And if I was in this
01:00:13 ◼ ► position, here's what I would have learned if I was in this position, here's what you know, what
01:00:15 ◼ ► can be learned, right? And this is a great example of that. In all measures, it's not as low stakes
01:00:21 ◼ ► as superheroes, but in the grand scheme of things, most of us, you know, we're not base camp employees.
01:00:32 ◼ ► the company in our, you know, sort of not Mac nerd circles, but sort of tech enthusiasts with
01:00:38 ◼ ► tastes kind of circles. They're known for making products, making sort of products that appeal
01:00:47 ◼ ► to the nerds. They have nice user interface, they look nice. And they're also known for
01:00:59 ◼ ► that runs counter to a lot of the conventional wisdom about how companies should be run
01:01:02 ◼ ► in a way that is appealing to, that would be appealing to the founders. Like they made a
01:01:08 ◼ ► company, it's the type of place that they would want to work. They wrote a lot of books about it.
01:01:13 ◼ ► I think at least one was like a New York Times bestseller that says, look, you can run a company
01:01:18 ◼ ► like this and it's better. Things like, hey, you don't have to grow at the maximum possible rate.
01:01:24 ◼ ► It's okay to get a company that is merely sustainably profitable. You don't have to run
01:01:29 ◼ ► your employees ragged. You don't have to accept VC money. And, you know, people would run at them
01:01:33 ◼ ► and say like, look, what you have, you've left millions of dollars of value on the table by not
01:01:39 ◼ ► pursuing growth at all costs. And they would say, that's just not what we want to do. And this is a
01:01:42 ◼ ► perfectly valid choice. You can have a company that, you know, treats its employees with more
01:01:48 ◼ ► respect than your typical company. You can give them perks that most companies wouldn't give them,
01:01:52 ◼ ► even though you lose money on them. And like, you know, you don't have to require your employees to
01:01:57 ◼ ► answer your emails on weekends and just all sort of stuff that feels good to you. If, again, if
01:02:02 ◼ ► you look at the founders and where they're coming from, they say, it seems to me that they tried to
01:02:06 ◼ ► make a company that is a place that they would want to work. And that's one of the things that
01:02:11 ◼ ► they're famous for in addition to their products, which are, you know, well, well made and appealing.
01:02:15 ◼ ► And of course, David Hennemeyer Hanson created Ruby on Rails. So this is a whole other technical
01:02:20 ◼ ► side of things where the technology stack they work on is itself famous and also famous for
01:02:24 ◼ ► reasons that are related to the stuff that I just said. Ruby on Rails is convention over configuration
01:02:28 ◼ ► and it's aesthetically nice and it's simple and it's user friendly and it has lots of affordances
01:02:33 ◼ ► for getting set up and running. You know, it all kind of fits together in that, you know,
01:02:38 ◼ ► like if you look at their products, their books, the technology, it makes sense together, right?
01:02:44 ◼ ► And everything about it sounds good. And, you know, a lot of people are having a lot of
01:02:50 ◼ ► making fun of this, like, oh, these are, these are the people who are writing books about how to,
01:02:54 ◼ ► telling us how we're supposed to run a company for the past 17 years. And they just lost a third
01:02:57 ◼ ► of their employees. So, ha ha, I guess you, all those ideas you had must've been terrible
01:03:02 ◼ ► because you obviously have no idea what you're doing. And I don't think that's necessarily the
01:03:07 ◼ ► case, but I think this particular controversy goes to show that like, like what they've been able to
01:03:15 ◼ ► do with their products, with their books, even with their technology stack, they've been able
01:03:19 ◼ ► to do because of their decisions to not accept VC, to maintain control over the company, to not have
01:03:26 ◼ ► a big hierarchy, to keep the company small. And that means that the two people, the co-founders
01:03:31 ◼ ► are able to essentially do whatever they want. Like it's their company, they control it. They don't
01:03:36 ◼ ► have to answer to a board of directors. They don't have to run their decisions by a committee.
01:03:40 ◼ ► If they think something is a good idea, they can just do it. That kind of individual control
01:03:45 ◼ ► produces many great things. Lots of great works of art, great video games, small companies,
01:03:56 ◼ ► And that allows them to do things that the big companies can't do or won't do or are against
01:04:13 ◼ ► those also get a chance to be executed immediately, unequivocally. And if it turned out to be the
01:04:20 ◼ ► wrong decision, that's the downside of having the control embodied in a very small number of people
01:04:26 ◼ ► who answer to nobody. And it seems kind of amazing to me that 37Signal/BaseCamp has gone on this long
01:04:40 ◼ ► So that I think is an important lesson of like, "Oh, if only it was just me in charge of everything
01:04:46 ◼ ► and I didn't have to run everything through this organization, everything would be great and I would
01:04:49 ◼ ► make all the right decisions." There is a buffering effect of having more opinions and not having
01:04:56 ◼ ► absolute control. I wouldn't promote the idea of giving VCs control, but that's one lesson that I
01:05:04 ◼ ► take away from this. The next thing is, so what was their problem? What's their blind spot?
01:05:10 ◼ ► Like, what did they do wrong? One of the things you can learn from this controversy is,
01:05:22 ◼ ► Here's our new policy." It had a bunch of other stuff in the policy, which is other new policies
01:05:31 ◼ ► Instead of giving you benefits, they were just going to give you the cash for those benefits so
01:05:35 ◼ ► you can decide what you want. But it was like, "Well, but maybe what if they get a group deal?"
01:05:39 ◼ ► Will they always give us the cash? Is the cash really equivalent to what they're taking away?
01:05:47 ◼ ► I mean committees. Who likes committees?" But on the other hand, does that mean it's just
01:05:51 ◼ ► the committees we were doing useful things? One of the committees they were getting rid of was
01:05:56 ◼ ► the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. That seems maybe not great, but the one that
01:06:02 ◼ ► everyone focused on was the one we just read, "No more societal and political discussions on
01:06:06 ◼ ► our company base camp account," which I think said, "No more societal or political discussions
01:06:10 ◼ ► at work originally," or something like that. That particular point is when it landed on Twitter,
01:06:17 ◼ ► one particular group of people saw that and immediately said, "Warning! Warning! Danger!
01:06:24 ◼ ► This is not good. This is not a good decision." A much larger group of people said, "What's the
01:06:31 ◼ ► big deal? It sounds fine to me. You don't want people arguing about politics all day at your
01:06:39 ◼ ► controversy is why did those two groups of people have such different reactions to this rule? One
01:06:45 ◼ ► group thought, "Well, whatever. I can understand where they're coming from. Seems kind of weird,
01:06:49 ◼ ► but who cares?" The other group was like, "This is the wrongest thing you could possibly say.
01:06:53 ◼ ► You have totally lost track of what you're doing. Do not do this." Understanding both of those
01:07:02 ◼ ► positions is important to understanding what they did wrong. I was in the camp when I saw this,
01:07:08 ◼ ► and I said, "Oh, no. No, no. You've done something very bad here." What I meant was they've done
01:07:17 ◼ ► something so bad that they're going to have to walk this back. They're just going to have to.
01:07:33 ◼ ► "You think? Do you think you made a mistake?" They didn't spell out the mistake they made,
01:07:38 ◼ ► so it's not entirely clear they understand it fully yet, but I think all observers would agree,
01:07:45 ◼ ► unless that third of the employees that left your company were employees that you wanted to leave
01:07:49 ◼ ► your company, which it doesn't seem like it was because it was super senior people and a lot of
01:07:53 ◼ ► them had been there for a long time. I have a feeling that Basecamp did not hire a lot of
01:07:57 ◼ ► people who were terrible employees and didn't retain people who were terrible employees.
01:08:01 ◼ ► Probably you didn't want those people to leave, so you can't even say, "Oh, well, people left,
01:08:06 ◼ ► but only the bad ones." You can say, "Whatever you did, it didn't work the way you thought it
01:08:12 ◼ ► was going to work, and it's bad." Then you've got to figure out what it was. Again, all the
01:08:16 ◼ ► people who said, "This is a bad idea and this is terrible," understood something that the founders
01:08:23 ◼ ► didn't. Without digging into it too much, Marco more or less landed on it. As the details came out,
01:08:33 ◼ ► we could—I don't want to dig more into the deals. We'll put tons and tons of links so you can read
01:08:36 ◼ ► about what it is. The founders who have complete control of policy don't set a policy like this
01:08:42 ◼ ► unless something has happened and they're like, "Okay, well, I don't know how to deal with this,
01:08:48 ◼ ► so I'm just going to make a blanket rule so that we never have to deal with this again. Let's just
01:08:52 ◼ ► not bring it up again. Let's just not talk about it," which anyone who's ever been in a relationship
01:08:55 ◼ ► knows is not the solution to any kind of serious problem that you're having. These problems are
01:08:59 ◼ ► hard, but it's essentially a failure of leadership, of saying, "We don't know what to do. It seems
01:09:04 ◼ ► like whatever we do, nobody is happy, so we're just not going to talk about it anymore." As Marco
01:09:09 ◼ ► points out, you've essentially made a decision and picked a side at that point, whether you know it
01:09:13 ◼ ► or not, because not talking about it is a tacit endorsement of the status quo and yada, yada.
01:09:19 ◼ ► Then people will be asking themselves, "So what the hell is wrong with the status quo and why
01:09:22 ◼ ► should people be arguing about stuff at work?" I still don't understand. That brings me to another
01:09:26 ◼ ► thing that you can learn by blocking a lot of these controversies. Inevitably, someone will
01:09:30 ◼ ► bring up the word "woke," which gets thrown around as an insult these days. It's, I think,
01:09:38 ◼ ► one of the more recent, in the past decade or so, vocabulary words that has come into use that is
01:09:44 ◼ ► actually extremely appropriate. The reason people have such differing views of this rule has to do
01:09:54 ◼ ► with how awakened certain people are to things that other people are not yet awakened to. That
01:10:01 ◼ ► sounds profound. It's like, "Oh, we know the truth and you don't," and blah, blah, blah. It's not
01:10:04 ◼ ► that at all. It's just that, I'm sure as you live longer, you will experience this eventually,
01:10:15 ◼ ► This is something that I can personally, I think all three of us, can personally speak to as an
01:10:21 ◼ ► experience of awakening to issues that previously were not on your radar at all. If I think back to
01:10:28 ◼ ► my teenage self and how aware I was of many, many of the issues that fall under the umbrella of
01:10:35 ◼ ► current modern-day wokeness, I had no awareness of them whatsoever, or the awareness I had was so
01:10:41 ◼ ► surface level and I was on the complete opposite side of it that I might as well not have understood
01:10:47 ◼ ► its existence. Think of something simple like, "Does sexism exist? How are girls treated differently
01:10:58 ◼ ► intellectually, I could have given lip service or something or other, but I had no idea. I had not
01:11:02 ◼ ► yet awakened to that profound reality. It took years, embarrassingly long, and years and years
01:11:07 ◼ ► and years of my age to eventually mean to awaken the fact that, "Oh, life is actually different if
01:11:12 ◼ ► you're a woman in America than if you're a man." And not just different in a way that we fixed in
01:11:18 ◼ ► the 60s and we never have to worry about again, but profoundly different. I don't know what it's
01:11:25 ◼ ► like to experience that, but I do know what it's like to be awakened to the idea that there is
01:11:30 ◼ ► something that you didn't understand before that you do now. Multiply that by a million different
01:11:35 ◼ ► issues that we all potentially are unaware of now, but could, through experience or hearing other
01:11:41 ◼ ► people talk about it or just the passage of time and through our thick skulls, become awakened to
01:11:47 ◼ ► things. And it's a difficult thing to express because if I could go back in time and talk to
01:11:53 ◼ ► my teenage self and try to explain it, my teenage self would dismiss me and say, "You're an idiot.
01:12:05 ◼ ► Right. But that's a difficulty we face here, right? So anytime there's anything like this
01:12:12 ◼ ► where the "woke people" see this and understand the underlying issues of marginalization and
01:12:20 ◼ ► oppression in the workplace, in the subtle modern incarnation where there is no one trying to do
01:12:27 ◼ ► anything particularly evil and everyone is trying to do the right thing, but because, let's say,
01:12:32 ◼ ► I mean, this is the hypothetical. I don't know. The founders, whatever. But let's say the founders
01:12:35 ◼ ► of this company tried to make a company that they would want to work out. Maybe they did. Maybe they
01:12:39 ◼ ► successfully made a company that they would want to work at, but they are two rich white dudes.
01:12:46 ◼ ► And making a company that they want to work at isn't necessarily the same company that someone
01:12:50 ◼ ► who doesn't share their life experiences would also want to work at, right? And I don't want to
01:12:55 ◼ ► dig too far. I don't know the details of the Basecamp thing or immaterial, but it's clear
01:13:00 ◼ ► that the founders, I'm not going to say they didn't fully understand the perspective of the employees
01:13:22 ◼ ► The founders all agreed that the list was bad. Everyone agreed the list was bad. We're going to
01:13:26 ◼ ► get rid of it. It's bad that we have this list. It's not like they were saying the list is fine.
01:13:30 ◼ ► I don't know what you're worried about. They weren't saying that at all. They were like,
01:13:32 ◼ ► yes, we should never have done this. The founders didn't make the list. They became aware of it and
01:13:37 ◼ ► they said, this is not how we do things here at Basecamp. We're not going to have a list of making
01:13:43 ◼ ► fun of our customers' names. It's bad for multiple reasons. We're getting rid of it. It's not like
01:13:47 ◼ ► there was a debate about that, right? But they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
01:13:53 ◼ ► by when Preston's saying, okay, not only is this list bad, but also, hey, if you're, you know,
01:14:00 ◼ ► I don't know the details here, but let's say they had an employee who was an Asian American and
01:14:06 ◼ ► said, there's no Asian American probably alive today who's an adult who did not have their
01:14:11 ◼ ► name made fun of or their imagined name made fun of when they were a kid, right? And maybe that's
01:14:17 ◼ ► a thing you know intellectually, but if you haven't grown up having sort of people make fun
01:14:24 ◼ ► of your name in that way that they can make fun of Asian names or calling you things that aren't
01:14:29 ◼ ► your actual name, but it's fun to call you when you're in elementary school, having a list of
01:14:34 ◼ ► names at work that people are making fun of has a different effect on you as making the workplace
01:14:41 ◼ ► feel like a safe place where you belong and where, you know, you don't have to worry about
01:14:46 ◼ ► things like that coming up. And you might say, well, that's not a big deal. Who cares? Your name's
01:14:50 ◼ ► not on the list. What are you even worried about? Right. Not understanding the sort of continuum of
01:14:55 ◼ ► like, okay, well, making fun of my name. That's not a big deal all the way up to like, you know,
01:15:00 ◼ ► people attacking Asian Americans with cinder blocks in San Francisco, the latest story I read
01:15:04 ◼ ► or whatever, right? Those two things aren't connected at all, which is something that some
01:15:08 ◼ ► of the founders actually said. It's like, I can see where you come from. This is bad. We should
01:15:11 ◼ ► get rid of the list, but come on. Like, it's not the same thing as like attacking Asian Americans
01:15:16 ◼ ► on the street. Like, this is not, that's, there's no connection between those two things. And the
01:15:21 ◼ ► thing is, there is a connection. It is a long circuitous connection, but you can travel it and
01:15:27 ◼ ► you can find it and they do eventually connect. And like the founders push back on trying to sort
01:15:34 ◼ ► of draw the bigger picture. Someone who is aware of the bigger picture because they live it, trying
01:15:39 ◼ ► to show that bigger picture to the founders, cause the founders to push back against that. Again,
01:15:44 ◼ ► even though everyone agrees list is bad, we're getting a little bit, there's not a thing that
01:15:48 ◼ ► we do with this company. They disagreed about particularly why we don't do it and what it means
01:15:55 ◼ ► in the bigger picture. And so their reaction was, you know what? We tried this and no one's happy.
01:16:00 ◼ ► We told you we're getting rid of the list. Some people think that getting a list is bad. And we
01:16:03 ◼ ► said, we're getting rid of the list. And the people who agree with us said, well, but you don't
01:16:06 ◼ ► understand why you don't know. You're not getting rid of the list for the reasons that are the exact
01:16:10 ◼ ► same reasons that we think you should. And you don't understand the bigger pictures. And now
01:16:12 ◼ ► we're angry at you. So you know what? No politics at work. Problem solved. And that was not the
01:16:18 ◼ ► right decision to make, but it stems from the collective blind spot that the founders had to,
01:16:24 ◼ ► like they didn't really know what they were dealing with. And I'm not saying these issues
01:16:27 ◼ ► are easy to deal with. Like I, you know, few people are equipped to deal with this on their own,
01:16:33 ◼ ► which is part of why you get a DEI committee, which is part of why you diversify your workforce.
01:16:37 ◼ ► In fact, I feel like, again, I'm speculating here, but it feels like Basecamp has made an effort over
01:16:42 ◼ ► the past few years to try to diversify its workforce. And that's kind of like, you know,
01:16:46 ◼ ► the pipeline problem with like women in tech or whatever. Oh, the solution is let's just hire more
01:16:50 ◼ ► women. That's not the solution if you're hiring women into an environment that is hostile to
01:16:54 ◼ ► women. All you're doing is like throwing them into a threshing machine and saying, we hired you,
01:16:57 ◼ ► the problem is solved. And they're like, well, but here we are. And there's some things we should
01:17:01 ◼ ► change about your company because now that we're here, we see it's not particularly great to be a
01:17:05 ◼ ► woman here. So let's change some stuff, right? So it is plausible. I don't know if this to be true,
01:17:10 ◼ ► but it is plausible that Basecamp made an effort to diversify its hiring because its founders are
01:17:14 ◼ ► good people and want to do that. And they successfully diversify their hiring. And those
01:17:19 ◼ ► diverse employees said, we think we should make some changes around here and let's form a committee
01:17:24 ◼ ► to, you know, like once you get employees with different perspectives and different points of
01:17:28 ◼ ► view, they necessarily will have things that they want to improve to make the working environment
01:17:35 ◼ ► better for everybody, not just for the people who are already there. And when that happens,
01:17:40 ◼ ► there is going to be, I'm not going to say a power struggle, but like the phrase they use these days
01:17:44 ◼ ► is renegotiating the social contract. And that happens on levels very small and very large.
01:17:49 ◼ ► And even just at the level in an individual company, if you hire a bunch of employees from
01:17:54 ◼ ► diverse backgrounds, they're the ones who are going to find that list and say, you know what,
01:17:58 ◼ ► it's not great that this list exists, making fun of people's names. Whereas it had existed for years
01:18:02 ◼ ► and apparently it wasn't a big deal, but now you hire some new employees and say, hey, we probably
01:18:07 ◼ ► shouldn't do this. And to the founders credit, they say, you know what, now that you've shown us
01:18:11 ◼ ► this list, we agree, this is crappy, we shouldn't do this. But then the debate that ensues about
01:18:15 ◼ ► why it's crappy reveals that the founders don't really have the bigger picture that these other
01:18:19 ◼ ► employees do because they don't have the life experiences. And they're also not experienced
01:18:23 ◼ ► enough to know how to navigate this very difficult issue. And they don't have a bunch of committees
01:18:29 ◼ ► or a board helping sort of buffer their decisions to try to figure out how we can navigate this.
01:18:33 ◼ ► They just try to do the best they can as two individuals. They are not equipped to deal with
01:18:40 ◼ ► this. They make the wrong decision. And a third of the company leaves. And you look at the third
01:18:43 ◼ ► of the company leaving, you're like, all these people all overreacting. What were they, you know,
01:18:47 ◼ ► what are they so mad about? What actually happened isn't that big of a deal. And the founders agreed
01:18:52 ◼ ► the list was bad. And they're just, oh, because they're not, because they're not woke enough,
01:18:55 ◼ ► you have to leave the company. And one, maybe final thing, one final thing you can learn here is,
01:19:01 ◼ ► ask the people, ask someone who left, why did you leave? Why was it important enough for you to
01:19:07 ◼ ► leave the company? Like, look at what they have to say on Twitter, read their blog posts, see where
01:19:10 ◼ ► they're coming from, try to understand their perspective, right? And that can help you maybe
01:19:17 ◼ ► sort of not file people away as these are the villains, and these are the heroes, and these are
01:19:22 ◼ ► the overreactors, and these are the people who are doing the, you know, the right thing or the smart
01:19:27 ◼ ► thing or whatever. From all sides of this, there is something to learn about, you know, how people
01:19:34 ◼ ► can make mistakes, how people can be blind to their mistakes, how something that's small to
01:19:39 ◼ ► one person can be big to another, and how doing anything to upset the status quo, whether it is
01:19:46 ◼ ► diversifying hiring practices, or forming a DEI committee, or, you know, changing something about
01:19:53 ◼ ► a workplace as simple as a list of customer names that we all agree is bad, that we shouldn't be
01:19:59 ◼ ► laughing at at work, that we all agree we should get rid of, how that can turn into something that
01:20:04 ◼ ► destroys a third of the company, right? Lots, lots and lots to learn here. And none of it has to,
01:20:11 ◼ ► you know, none of it is about like demonizing people or taking revenge against people or
01:20:17 ◼ ► being thrilled that the people who wrote a bunch of management books about how to run a company
01:20:20 ◼ ► have gotten their comeuppance because now it shows how they didn't know how to run a company after
01:20:24 ◼ ► all. I think they know a lot about running a great company. But we found a blind spot, and they made
01:20:30 ◼ ► the wrong call, and they are suffering the consequences from it. And I think and hope that
01:20:35 ◼ ► they will learn something from this. I think, you know, everyone involved is learning a hard lesson.
01:20:40 ◼ ► And I hope observers will learn something from this. That, you know, though this may be your
01:20:46 ◼ ► first instinct, and though it may be your instinct to stick to your guns, this is not actually the
01:20:50 ◼ ► solution to the problems that were identified. And, you know, the details are going to be different
01:20:54 ◼ ► in every single situation. But the idea that we are going to, you know, change the status quo in
01:21:01 ◼ ► any way to make marginalized people ever so slightly less marginalized and ever so narrowly
01:21:07 ◼ ► defined situations, that will necessarily have ramifications for everybody, not just for the
01:21:16 ◼ ► you just can't continue to sit exactly where you are and do the same thing all the time. Making
01:21:20 ◼ ► room means making room. And that's always difficult. Yeah, I think the thing that really
01:21:26 ◼ ► bothered me about it is, or not the thing, but one of the things that bothered me about it was that,
01:21:33 ◼ ► you know, this whole no politics in the workplace thing was obviously not a great idea. And people
01:21:38 ◼ ► very quickly jumped on it and tried to say, "Hey, you know, this is not a great idea, and it's not
01:21:42 ◼ ► quite that cut and dry." And if you look at, and we have all these links in the show notes,
01:21:47 ◼ ► that was announced in a post that Jason Fried wrote called "Changes at Basecamp." And everyone
01:21:53 ◼ ► pretty quickly was like, "Whoa, whoa, that's not so great. Not loving that." There were one, two,
01:21:59 ◼ ► three, four, five posts that followed. The fifth was a kind of mealy-mouthed half apology-ish,
01:22:08 ◼ ► maybe? It was more of a— I mean, you know what? It wasn't an apology. It was an acknowledgement
01:22:13 ◼ ► that they had made a mistake. They didn't go into explaining, "Here's the mistake that we made,"
01:22:18 ◼ ► so it's not clear whether they fully understand it yet. But, you know, part of their MO,
01:22:26 ◼ ► always worked is they do things boldly and in public and whenever they come to mind. So
01:22:32 ◼ ► their last post of saying, you know, "We made a mistake, and we've got a lot of learning to do,"
01:22:38 ◼ ► didn't go into more detail. But I'm sure this won't be the last post on this topic, right? So
01:22:44 ◼ ► I do hope that they are talking to people and soul-searching and figuring out exactly what
01:22:49 ◼ ► happened, but to expect them to suddenly figure it all out immediately is asking a lot.
01:22:57 ◼ ► And I think, you know, I think they have a road to continue to travel to truly, truly understand
01:23:02 ◼ ► exactly what just happened. Right, exactly. And I think the thing that I find so gross,
01:23:06 ◼ ► one of the things I find so gross about it is, you know, from all the reporting, particularly
01:23:11 ◼ ► that Casey Newton has done, when they were called out internally, like, "Hey, you know, this ain't
01:23:16 ◼ ► right. The list ain't right. This ain't right," you know, there were times they agreed. But then
01:23:22 ◼ ► when they were still challenged, they didn't seem to have any particular appetite to understand why.
01:23:27 ◼ ► And it was like you said, Jon, they said, "Oh, well, you know, nobody seems to be happy. Well,
01:23:34 ◼ ► They understood what they understood some things that were wrong with it, things that were within
01:23:40 ◼ ► the realm of their understanding were, "Hey, it's not good to make fun of your customers,
01:23:44 ◼ ► because that's rude. And it's private customer information that we shouldn't be passing around
01:23:49 ◼ ► anyway. So it's an invasion of privacy." Right? Those two reasons they got, which are both true,
01:23:54 ◼ ► right? But I think it was particular Hennemeyer Hanson, like when when pressed on like, "Oh,
01:23:59 ◼ ► and by the way, there's also a racial oppression aspect of this," said, "Get out of here."
01:24:05 ◼ ► That's not that's not a bit. That's not a big deal. That's not a big, you know, because that
01:24:10 ◼ ► was outside their experience and understanding that they didn't, they hadn't yet awoken to that,
01:24:15 ◼ ► what that reality is like for some people who are not them, and hadn't internalized it. Again,
01:24:20 ◼ ► it seemed the way that I had not internalized sexism when I was a teenager, even though
01:24:23 ◼ ► intellectually I could say something about it. But if pressed on a specific issue, "Oh,
01:24:27 ◼ ► that's not sexist. And that's just that's something else. There's no connection." You know,
01:24:30 ◼ ► right? I've been there. We've all been there before we have understood whatever the issue may be.
01:24:45 ◼ ► ask the people who left why they left and they'll explain it to you in their own words.
01:24:48 ◼ ► They're in a much better position than I do. But that's why this looks so weird from the outside.
01:24:52 ◼ ► But it's like, maybe that was just the straw that broke the camel's back. Maybe that was just
01:25:00 ◼ ► we give up. We can't seem to make these founders understand what we're trying to tell them. And
01:25:04 ◼ ► they disbanded the DEI committee. And they say we can't talk about politics at work. So
01:25:08 ◼ ► whatever hope we had for them figuring out is lost. And it's not so much about this one
01:25:12 ◼ ► particular incident in exchange. It's just the accumulation of offense." Because, you know,
01:25:17 ◼ ► in the end, something more profound has to happen than this one incident for a third of your company
01:25:22 ◼ ► to leave, right? Especially people who've been there for years and years, senior people,
01:25:26 ◼ ► entire teams. Like, this is obviously a bigger issue than the details that we have, you know,
01:25:32 ◼ ► access to now. But it only takes, you know, everyone has their sort of breaking point or
01:25:37 ◼ ► their giving up point of saying, "Well, I don't see this going any better." And as someone pointed
01:25:42 ◼ ► out in the chat, in the update post, it doesn't say yet, as far as I can tell, that they're changing
01:25:47 ◼ ► the policy. They just are recognizing that they made a mistake. And it's not clear to me that they
01:25:53 ◼ ► understand what that mistake was yet, or how it connects to the rule they made or anything like
01:25:57 ◼ ► that. But I'm hoping they will come around to it eventually. No, but it's worth reading this first
01:26:03 ◼ ► paragraph in an update, which as we record was posted yesterday. This is from Jason Fried. And
01:26:08 ◼ ► again, I will read this verbatim in the first paragraph. "Last week was terrible. We started
01:26:12 ◼ ► with policy changes that felt simple, reasonable, and principled, and it blew things up internally
01:26:16 ◼ ► in ways we never anticipated. David and I completely own the consequences and we're sorry.
01:26:21 ◼ ► We have a lot to learn and reflect on, and we will. The new policies stand, but we have some
01:26:25 ◼ ► refining and clarifying to do." That is the entirety of the first paragraph. Yeah, so like,
01:26:30 ◼ ► they're saying the policies stand, but they're refining and clarifying. Hopefully their learning
01:26:36 ◼ ► and reflecting will lead them to understand that refining and clarifying is not going to solve this
01:26:39 ◼ ► problem. But you know, put it another way, this is not the ideal learning environment for you as
01:26:47 ◼ ► a company founder and CEO. This is not the way you want to learn these lessons in public in
01:26:52 ◼ ► incredibly dramatic fashion in a way that is very bad for your established self-image as people who
01:26:57 ◼ ► tell other people how to run a company, right? It's not the ideal scenario for you to learn. And so
01:27:02 ◼ ► it's probably harder for them to be receptive to these broader ideas. And from my personal
01:27:08 ◼ ► experience, I've had to be exposed to, you know, information experiences, the experiences of
01:27:16 ◼ ► others, personal stories, reading on it for years and years for it to finally sink through my thick
01:27:21 ◼ ► skull about insert whatever issue you want to put here, whether it's sexism, racism, you know,
01:27:25 ◼ ► any kind of thing that I've felt like I've become awoken to in the latter part of my adult life,
01:27:38 ◼ ► okay, how would you cause that to happen in someone else? Like, "Oh, geez, I don't know.
01:27:41 ◼ ► Can you give me 10 years?" Like, it's not a type of thing that you can like argue at Twitter and
01:27:47 ◼ ► like, "Oh, I'm convinced. Now I understand racism is real. Yay." It doesn't work that way. I don't
01:27:52 ◼ ► know what the solution is. And to be clear, the lesson here is not like, "Oh, company must be a
01:27:58 ◼ ► battleground for changing each other's minds." That's not what it is at all. Like, I think one
01:28:02 ◼ ► of the things that they should be thinking about is what kind of environment were we trying to make
01:28:06 ◼ ► it work and what kind of environment actually existed at work for all the different people who
01:28:11 ◼ ► came to work for us? What is the experience? What has the experience of working at Basecamp been like
01:28:16 ◼ ► for people who are not me and who are not exactly like me? And what is the ideal working environment
01:28:22 ◼ ► that we want to create? There's always going to be conflict at work. There's always going to be
01:28:25 ◼ ► multiple views. It's not the job of the CEO to change the mind of all the employees. It's not
01:28:29 ◼ ► the employees to change the mind of the CEO. People can leave and get a different job if they want.
01:28:33 ◼ ► Like, that's not what we're talking about here. All we're talking about is if you are a leader and
01:28:36 ◼ ► you're trying to make a place where people can work, you have to decide as a leader, "What kind
01:28:41 ◼ ► of place do I want to make? And am I succeeding in making it be like that for everybody who works for
01:28:46 ◼ ► me?" And that's a super hard job. And it's much harder now than it was if we could just say, "Well,
01:28:51 ◼ ► everyone stays at home except for the white men. And they're all going to be like me. And we're
01:28:54 ◼ ► all going to have the same thoughts and ideas and the same religion and come from the same place and
01:28:57 ◼ ► speak the same language. And we're going to make an environment that we like." That's way easier,
01:29:02 ◼ ► if you're one of those people in charge, than trying to make a good place to work for everyone.
01:29:09 ◼ ► And to the credit of the founders, it seems to me that they were trying to make Basecamp more
01:29:14 ◼ ► inclusive than it had been. It's just that they were not prepared to understand what it takes to
01:29:21 ◼ ► do that. It's not as simple as, "We'll just hire more different kinds of people." And problem solved.
01:29:25 ◼ ► And that's step zero. All you're going to do now is reveal all the problems you didn't know you had.
01:29:31 ◼ ► One more thing I'll throw in here from the Creativity Inc. thing. Success hides problems.
01:29:35 ◼ ► And Basecamp has been very successful. The founders have been very successful. It's easy
01:29:40 ◼ ► to think that everything is going awesome when everyone's raking in the money and people are
01:29:44 ◼ ► buying your book about how to run companies. And every time you put an opening, tons of people
01:29:50 ◼ ► apply and you get to pick really great employees. And it seems like you have an awesome little
01:29:54 ◼ ► company. And being on that path for a long time can convince you that things really are going as
01:30:02 ◼ ► well as you think they are. Because how could you be so successful if they weren't? And having it
01:30:07 ◼ ► slowly revealed to you that actually everything isn't as rosy as you think is counter to your
01:30:12 ◼ ► notion that everything is, "What do you mean? We're doing great. Everything's awesome. I'm rich.
01:30:21 ◼ ► What's the problem?" And it's like, "That success exists. That success is helping hide problems from
01:30:27 ◼ ► you. But it's not hiding them from us who are down here working with them, but it's hiding them from
01:30:30 ◼ ► you and that itself is a problem." Yeah, I think an overwhelming impression I got for, again,
01:30:36 ◼ ► the little bit of the actual direct quotes and stuff that I did read is that these people running
01:30:43 ◼ ► this company don't seem like they're wrong a lot, or at least they don't think they're wrong a lot.
01:30:48 ◼ ► And the jump to defensiveness as a reaction is almost always a bad thing, especially when dealing
01:30:57 ◼ ► with issues like this. And it seems like that's their primary mode is like jump first to
01:31:02 ◼ ► defensiveness because they can't... I think they're not accustomed to being wrong in their own minds
01:31:07 ◼ ► or the possibility that they might be wrong in their own minds. And I think that's why you see
01:31:11 ◼ ► this huge amount of defensiveness that is quite bad. I think they're used to being wrong in ways
01:31:18 ◼ ► that they understand because that's a big part of how you run a company. You're going to do things,
01:31:22 ◼ ► you're going to do bold things, you're going to make a mistake, you're going to learn from them,
01:31:25 ◼ ► but they're used to being wrong in terms that make sense to them. That we tried to make a decision,
01:31:29 ◼ ► and now that I see that it didn't work, I now understand why it didn't work. It is all tractable.
01:31:34 ◼ ► It is within their worldview. And here is a case where they're wrong in a way that they didn't even
01:31:39 ◼ ► know what they were wrong about. That it was just so... And instead of themselves figuring out that
01:31:45 ◼ ► they were wrong based on, "I expected this to happen, but that happened, here's the explanation."
01:31:49 ◼ ► It seems like at this point they don't even yet have an explanation. They don't know what just
01:31:54 ◼ ► happened. And it's much more uncomfortable to be wrong in that situation than in all the other
01:31:58 ◼ ► situations where they were wrong because I bet half their business books are filled with like,
01:32:03 ◼ ► and this price won. It turned out people didn't want to do that, but they wanted to do this,
01:32:07 ◼ ► or this price was wrong, or we should have made this free, or we decided to charge people a lot
01:32:11 ◼ ► even though we weren't sure how it worked out." Those are decisions they're comfortably wrong
01:32:15 ◼ ► about. That's all business books are about. Here's what I learned from the things that I did.
01:32:20 ◼ ► And this is a case where not only did they not realize they were wrong, they don't understand
01:32:23 ◼ ► how or what they were wrong about, and still don't. They saw the bad consequence. They know
01:32:28 ◼ ► something went wrong here, but it seems like they just don't quite get it yet. I mean, I feel like
01:32:33 ◼ ► they should really just sit through every single exit interview of every single employee leaving
01:32:38 ◼ ► the company and just let them talk to them for an hour each, and maybe that will sort of hammer home.
01:32:42 ◼ ► When these people tell you why they're leaving, believe them, right? Because they're like,
01:32:48 ◼ ► and understand how that came about based on your policies and actions of the company, right?
01:32:59 ◼ ► but I think part of it is defense out of fear of the unknown. Like, what even is going on here?
01:33:09 ◼ ► Something bad is happening and I don't quite understand it, and what people are telling me
01:33:14 ◼ ► doesn't make sense to me, so they must be the ones who are wrong, and we just stick to our guns and
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01:35:20 ◼ ► David Barber writes, "I'm curious to know what, if any, note-taking apps are used by the ATP hosts.
01:35:29 ◼ ► Obsidian, Roam, Evernote, OneNote, Just Folders. How do you track notes, plans, or ideas?"
01:35:33 ◼ ► I personally, I am not a productivity person and I don't switch note-taking apps all the time. I
01:35:42 ◼ ► use Apple Mail, which I know is extremely not trendy. I don't really care that much. I don't
01:35:48 ◼ ► really have a to-do list manager other than the app DUE, which is basically just a glorified
01:35:53 ◼ ► nagging machine. But I use Apple Notes for these sorts of things. I did use Evernote way long ago
01:35:59 ◼ ► and there are still some things in there, I suppose, but I haven't looked at it in forever.
01:36:03 ◼ ► I just use Apple Notes. It's fine for the sorts of things I want to capture and it's good enough for
01:36:07 ◼ ► me. Jon, what are you using? I'm using Apple Notes ever since they revised it so that syncing works
01:36:13 ◼ ► and everything. My needs are low. The only things I really need are a note-taking app that can do
01:36:21 ◼ ► basic lists of things, supports links, synced everywhere, and I can share notes. Those features
01:36:33 ◼ ► losing all of my data there. If there's anything serious and important, I feel more comfortable
01:36:38 ◼ ► having it in a text file that lands in my backup vortex somehow because at any second all my notes
01:36:43 ◼ ► could disappear. But most of the stuff that's in Notes is just like Notes. Shopping lists,
01:36:49 ◼ ► a bunch of snippets of text that I want to deal with. If they all went away, it wouldn't be that
01:36:53 ◼ ► bad. I think the only really important thing I have in Notes is my squirrel list. Did I talk about
01:36:59 ◼ ► that in rectives? Yes, on rectives. There's a list of where I squirrel stuff away in the house so I
01:37:04 ◼ ► don't forget where it is because I'm old now. I guess if I lost that it would be bad, but in the
01:37:09 ◼ ► end it's all in the house. I'll find it eventually or my kids will with the estate sale. Whatever.
01:37:13 ◼ ► Wow. What about you, Marco? Yeah, pretty similar. I've never been that much of a note-taker in any
01:37:21 ◼ ► form, analog or digital, but certainly in the digital world my needs are also pretty light.
01:37:28 ◼ ► Yeah, I've just been using Apple Notes for a few years now. I used to use Clear for my shopping.
01:37:37 ◼ ► in the grocery store. I don't even do that anymore. I just use Apple Notes. I have a grocery list
01:37:43 ◼ ► that's just like a checklist. Ever since they have the checklist items and some more of the
01:37:48 ◼ ► like rich formatting stuff. I love being able to just paste in images and stuff. I love how quick
01:37:53 ◼ ► and easy it is to use it and it mostly syncs okay most of the time. Although that being said,
01:38:02 ◼ ► I've had actually recent sync issues where like I'll edit on one device and I'll go to my phone
01:38:08 ◼ ► and the title will be incomplete and the content might not sync until like the next edit I make
01:38:14 ◼ ► on the source device and then it'll pop over. But that's been only a very recent thing. I assume
01:38:24 ◼ ► Yeah, my notes app is my Apple Notes app is where it's at. I share the same anxiety about it as John
01:38:32 ◼ ► about like the data format to it is completely opaque and there is there are a few different
01:38:39 ◼ ► ways to export data from notes. A few different apps try to fill that role but there's no way to
01:38:45 ◼ ► then import it back in as far as I'm concerned. So that's not particularly useful as a backup method.
01:38:52 ◼ ► I do wish that Apple would solve this and I understand why they might not want to cram that
01:38:57 ◼ ► into the iOS app but they should at least cram into the Mac app. But yeah otherwise I like Apple
01:39:02 ◼ ► Notes. It is simple. It is deceptively powerful for how simple it is and I don't like everything
01:39:09 ◼ ► about it. It's not perfect. No app ever is but it's close enough to what I need and provides
01:39:15 ◼ ► enough advantages, enough integration, enough convenience everywhere and frankly enough
01:39:26 ◼ ► about the document scanning feature in notes which I forget about for months at a time but then
01:39:30 ◼ ► remember exists. It's nice. It's this little camera icon in the app and it will basically scan a
01:39:34 ◼ ► document and like straighten it for you. You know if you're if you're scanned at a slight angle or
01:39:39 ◼ ► it's twisted or whatever. It's just a you know there are plenty of apps that do a better job of
01:39:44 ◼ ► this I'm sure but for a built-in app don't forget that hey if you have a piece of paper that you
01:39:49 ◼ ► want to save a picture of instead of just bringing up the camera app and taking a picture of it and
01:39:53 ◼ ► putting it in your camera roll you can bring up a notes document and you know attach you know
01:39:59 ◼ ► use the document scanner and attach a nice straightened cropped in one button press view
01:40:04 ◼ ► of a page and then just do that for multiple pages and they can be part of a note because
01:40:08 ◼ ► notes can support and you can export them and you know as pdfs and put them into you know put them
01:40:12 ◼ ► wherever you want but like I find it much more convenient than littering my camera roll with
01:40:17 ◼ ► a bunch of slightly off-center skewed pictures that I then have to manually crop and fix
01:40:22 ◼ ► you know and never do. Also if your desired output format is a pdf like a scanned pdf of real life
01:40:30 ◼ ► paper I don't think I mentioned this in the show but I very recently learned that you can do that
01:40:36 ◼ ► in the files app on ios and you can it can scan directly to a pdf there there is a way like you
01:40:41 ◼ ► can do it from mac you can do it with preview where it'll it'll use like the continuity camera thing to
01:40:47 ◼ ► use your phone's camera from your max preview app to capture the document but it's clunky and a
01:40:53 ◼ ► little unreliable and and just kind of it's a lot of like manual weird back and forth so if you if
01:40:58 ◼ ► you are trying to use your phone as a document scanner to scan to a pdf definitely do the the
01:41:04 ◼ ► built-in scanner thing in the files app for basic needs again as john said there are a million other
01:41:08 ◼ ► apps that do like you know better you know more professional or more option-filled versions of
01:41:13 ◼ ► document scanning but if your needs are basic like me the built-in one in the files app is fine
01:41:18 ◼ ► why would you just do the scanning in the notes app and then go to print it and then you can make
01:41:23 ◼ ► a pdf that way did you know that trick i assume you knew that trick i'm serious that's i wouldn't
01:41:27 ◼ ► even think to go to the files app yeah so if you go to print anything in ios and then it's some
01:41:32 ◼ ► completely obtuse gesture i think you need to like uh pinch out you know so i guess the opposite of
01:41:38 ◼ ► pinch you need to expand in order to get like a full screen preview and then once you're in that
01:41:44 ◼ ► from the print dialogue yes yes i really i'm not messing with you uh i i am not trolling you at all
01:41:49 ◼ ► so hold on now i got to try this live it's gonna be fun for you that it's i'm in safari i had no
01:41:53 ◼ ► idea there there was a pdf export in ios yeah so if so i'm in safari and i go and i use the share
01:41:59 ◼ ► sheet and go to print okay so then i'm looking at just so happen i had atp up so i have to do the
01:42:05 ◼ ► opposite pinch so not bring in but push out totally doing this hold on and then and then you see a pdf
01:42:15 ◼ ► okay so go to print yeah the best programming ever all right so do you see you see there's like
01:42:21 ◼ ► a print preview at the bottom right yeah i just tried to print a web page and it totally didn't
01:42:28 ◼ ► all right hold on so actually wait how do you do an action from mail uh you have to do the reply
01:42:35 ◼ ► thing don't you all right well let me follow around along in mail then just make sure we're
01:42:38 ◼ ► seeing the same so i'm zooming out okay so you do uh where is it uh print yep and then you see the
01:42:44 ◼ ► print preview and you pinch to zoom into it i'm sorry so zoom in yeah it's how do you describe
01:42:50 ◼ ► the opposite the anti-pinch you know save to files and then you can you can do all number of things
01:42:56 ◼ ► but if you look it says so you have to go to the second action sheet nested inside the first action
01:43:03 ◼ ► sheet that got you to the print dialogue you're correct this is ridiculous anti-pinch oh it's
01:43:09 ◼ ► totally ridiculous but it does work and zoom in with the page on the previewed pages that i guess
01:43:16 ◼ ► correct make them open logically open up a pdf i mean this i honestly right this kind of seems
01:43:20 ◼ ► like an accidental feature um but wow that's this is like the the epitome of the the the worst of
01:43:29 ◼ ► touch design because this is completely undiscoverable and even when you told me to do it
01:43:36 ◼ ► i still couldn't figure it out for a while yeah when you scan documents and notes they end up as
01:43:41 ◼ ► pdfs too i think i mean certainly they do they're just inside a note so like yeah but you can get
01:43:45 ◼ ► them out very easily by just holding down yeah but like if you're if you are scanning a document with
01:43:51 ◼ ► your with your phone camera for the purpose of getting a pdf you're better off doing it directly
01:43:56 ◼ ► in the files app and save you a couple steps rather than scanning it into a note for no other reason
01:44:00 ◼ ► other than that you knew notes did this and then deleting the note or whatever like that's that's
01:44:04 ◼ ► what you normally it's like attached to a note where you want to sort of add annotations like
01:44:08 ◼ ► i'm usually like say let's say i'm shopping for couches and we're seeing a bunch of different
01:44:11 ◼ ► couches and i want to like basically save like the little tag that's on it to say oh we saw this
01:44:17 ◼ ► couch and here's all the information about it the serial number the blah blah blah like in the notes
01:44:21 ◼ ► document we're keeping track of the couches we're looking at scan document yep there's the little
01:44:25 ◼ ► tag and then move on to the next one so it's a series of notes about couches pictures of the tag
01:44:30 ◼ ► and then photos of the actual couches all you know it's it's a rich text document who knew uh just a
01:44:37 ◼ ► couple of quick shout outs actually before we move on uh for grocery shopping i think reminders or
01:44:42 ◼ ► excuse me notes is perfectly fine but i really really like any list i think i brought it up
01:44:46 ◼ ► before we'll put a link in the show notes they do shared shopping lists really well including with
01:44:50 ◼ ► photo annotations and quantities and things and uh i this isn't exactly note-taking but i should
01:44:56 ◼ ► mention day one i don't recall if they've ever sponsored the show before but i really love day
01:45:01 ◼ ► one actually any list may have sponsored many many years ago but anyway both of those uh whether or
01:45:05 ◼ ► not they've ever sponsored really really love both those apps day one is a journaling app and that's
01:45:10 ◼ ► where i keep memories from like the family because i have the world's worst memory and things that i
01:45:16 ◼ ► want to remember i keep in day one so uh moving right along zarf sharf writes uh what do you
01:45:22 ◼ ► prefer developing against an agent api or technology that's basically abandoned but the bug workarounds
01:45:27 ◼ ► are well known or modern api or technology that's constantly being updated and changed this is a
01:45:32 ◼ ► really good question and i feel like i i don't have one consistent answer i mean i look at what
01:45:38 ◼ ► i'm working on right now and i'm using swift ui exclusively and combined and that has its fair
01:45:44 ◼ ► share of problems so i'm enjoying it except when i'm not uh so i don't know i think i think i am
01:45:52 ◼ ► too distractible by the by the new shiny that i probably would probably would would would prefer
01:45:58 ◼ ► something modern and new even though intellectually and the mature developer in me knows that that's
01:46:04 ◼ ► the incorrect answer uh john what do you think i mean the way this is phrased i have to go with
01:46:09 ◼ ► the modern one just because like the ancient one that's basically abandoned yeah the bug workarounds
01:46:17 ◼ ► are known but working on any tech that is sort of basically no longer supported but abandoned
01:46:22 ◼ ► gets real bad real fast right you like you don't want to be the last one using a particular
01:46:27 ◼ ► technology for any purpose right whereas working on the new thing that's constantly being updated
01:46:31 ◼ ► and changed that means it's constantly improving too and that means that's where the action is that
01:46:40 ◼ ► because so many other people are fixing and updating or whatever so in practice i think
01:46:44 ◼ ► that's what everybody does yes even marco like you don't want to be on something that nobody
01:46:49 ◼ ► is supporting anymore now php doesn't qualify for that because it's not like php is abandoned people
01:46:53 ◼ ► are working on it all the time they're making new versions they're fixing bugs like it's still used
01:46:57 ◼ ► by tons of people right an actual technology that is quote-unquote basically abandoned means like
01:47:03 ◼ ► you're out there using it and nobody else is like it won't even build on your machine eventually
01:47:07 ◼ ► like it's just you know everyone moves to arm and it's still x86 and you have to figure out how to
01:47:12 ◼ ► compile it for arm if you want to keep using it you got to go with the one that's constantly being
01:47:16 ◼ ► updated and changed because that means people are working on it and that means it's improving
01:47:19 ◼ ► what do you think marco yeah i'm kind of torn on this actually because you know john raised up a
01:47:26 ◼ ► good point like if you are the last one using something that you know it might get abandoned
01:47:31 ◼ ► or it might get discontinued or broken that being said you never want to be building on quicksand
01:47:37 ◼ ► so it's it's one of those things where the answer is it depends in an ideal world you build
01:47:45 ◼ ► something once and then you never need to revisit it unless you want to that's not always what you
01:47:50 ◼ ► get though you know and so you know it in in the real world sometimes old technologies break because
01:47:59 ◼ ► no one's minding them you know no one's maintaining them no one's minding the store no one is is uh
01:48:04 ◼ ► testing against them so you know that's that's not great to be relying on on the other side of
01:48:09 ◼ ► the coin though i when i build against an api i'm trying to build something else i'm trying to build
01:48:17 ◼ ► something on top of it i'm trying like the whole thing is i want to do this work and then never
01:48:22 ◼ ► have the api cause problems for me or surprise me or require more time from me unnecessarily
01:48:30 ◼ ► so obviously it's not great if it's still very much in flux and so like if abandoned means
01:48:37 ◼ ► inactive like if it's not being actively improved upon but it's still like around and working and
01:48:45 ◼ ► that doesn't seem to be changing like that's that's fine with me and and that's that's usually
01:48:51 ◼ ► a safe bet for me but if it seems like it's not even going to be supported in the near future
01:48:57 ◼ ► that that's when i bail yeah abandoned is not the same as boring yeah the way the way this question
01:49:04 ◼ ► is phrased it's like it's not php versus swift ui it's cold fusion versus swift ui and give it a
01:49:10 ◼ ► choice between cold fusion swift ui marco chooses swift ui although i'll tell you what so one of the
01:49:16 ◼ ► way i spent yesterday uh was uh i there was this bug where forecast my app my mp3 encoder app uh
01:49:25 ◼ ► was outputting weird things or crashing with certain types of wave file inputs like the if
01:49:34 ◼ ► if there was a wave file that was above two to the 31 bytes it's like you know 2.2 gigs or whatever
01:49:41 ◼ ► that is 2.1 whatever it is if it was above that but less than four gigs so in the unsigned 32-bit
01:49:50 ◼ ► integer size range but not the signed range so if it yes so between two and four gigs if it was a
01:49:56 ◼ ► wave file exported from adobe audition uh then the system audio libraries that specifically the uh
01:50:05 ◼ ► ext audio file api but i think pretty much any of these any of apple's platform audio libraries
01:50:11 ◼ ► would misread the end of the wave file and would basically blow right past where the audio sample
01:50:18 ◼ ► data ends and read whatever metadata happened to be after it as if it were audio data and so it
01:50:27 ◼ ► would output like garbage audio and that would you know in forecast that would result in either
01:50:31 ◼ ► garbage audio at the end of a file or in some cases forecast would crash because a function
01:50:36 ◼ ► deep inside the mp3 encoder would try to read that as audio and some assumptions about the way audio
01:50:41 ◼ ► flows would not be met and it would crash um so there's it was a terrible bug and i and i spent
01:50:47 ◼ ► the whole day like looking at you know the specs of this ancient file format of the wave file which
01:50:52 ◼ ► is the the riff wave file format from forever ago um and you know looking up like okay how is this
01:50:59 ◼ ► being read how should this be being read is this is the size of the chunk supposed to be a signed
01:51:04 ◼ ► integer or an unsigned integer you know whose bug is this basically is it mine is it apple's is it
01:51:10 ◼ ► adobe auditions bug who knows and it turns out yeah it turns out it's apples so i had to like
01:51:15 ◼ ► file the bug report and everything but so i was dealing with all these old formats which
01:51:19 ◼ ► one of the things i thought about those but the reason i i brought this up now is i actually went
01:51:24 ◼ ► through and i did the stupid sysdiagnose and everything they wanted from the file to follow
01:51:29 ◼ ► the bug report and i made a sample project so i kept adjusting things between my sample project
01:51:36 ◼ ► and forecast to try to like you know isolate the bug and it turns out it's super easily isolatable
01:51:41 ◼ ► and i made the entire sample project in objective c because it was easiest and fastest to do the
01:51:46 ◼ ► thing i had to prove and forecast is still all objective c and as much as i'm enjoying using
01:51:53 ◼ ► swift for overcast oh here we go my god objective c apps build so fast it was shocking like you and
01:52:08 ◼ ► seconds it's it's like for your for your toy app though for your sample project right of course
01:52:13 ◼ ► it's building fast it has like 10 lines of code for forecast too like because forecast is forecast
01:52:19 ◼ ► is a medium-sized app it's not a large app it's but it's you know medium and it builds instantly
01:52:24 ◼ ► and and other simple stuff like like the code auto completion was so fast like all that stuff
01:52:32 ◼ ► so much it was fast debugging was amazing because it not only worked but was fast and it and there
01:52:39 ◼ ► were so many weird like debugging type system error messages and and fights that swift would
01:52:46 ◼ ► pick with me that i didn't have to deal with and like just everything about working with objective
01:52:50 ◼ ► c besides writing it everything else was so fast you get someone else to write it and you'll just
01:52:57 ◼ ► hit the compile button right like the compilation the the the you know debug and run loop actual
01:53:05 ◼ ► debugging all the build the archive everything oh my god so much faster than swift it really
01:53:12 ◼ ► spoiled me and i realized like oh man that's swift has a long long way to go before it's anywhere
01:53:21 ◼ ► near as responsive to to edit and work with as objective c it reminds me of uh rebooting back
01:53:28 ◼ ► into mac os 9 on my power mac blue and white power mac g3 after using the early versions of os 10 for
01:53:34 ◼ ► a while you reboot into mac os 9 like wow my computer's fast look how fast these menus pull
01:53:40 ◼ ► down this is amazing oh yeah technology marches on speaking of your your uh signed 32-bit apple
01:53:47 ◼ ► framework bug you when you i saw your tweet about that and then like not you know 50 tweets later
01:53:52 ◼ ► uh there was another one on a similar i don't know if this has been proved you you figure out that
01:53:56 ◼ ► that's actually the case with your thing but this was uh someone saying that uh berkshire hathaway
01:54:01 ◼ ► uh warren buffett's company uh the shares of berkshire hathaway are so expensive now that
01:54:07 ◼ ► they rolled over the apparent signed 32-bit integer uh they're like they're like 400 000
01:54:13 ◼ ► each or something but they do like you know five decimal places of uh of cents after it or something
01:54:17 ◼ ► like that so it was you know like so that what they said was that apparently it's some kind of
01:54:24 ◼ ► signed 32-bit thing and they got like delisted due to a computer error and they're gonna fix it i find
01:54:28 ◼ ► that somewhat hard to believe but it is coincidental that the number really got up to around you know
01:54:33 ◼ ► the 32-bit value before it screwed up that's pretty funny yeah i guess if they're treating it as an
01:54:38 ◼ ► integer that just is like you know multiplied by 10 000 or whatever yeah wow i mean maybe it wasn't
01:54:44 ◼ ► signed maybe it was just it was 32-bit and then we need to go to 64 it seems like not supported by
01:54:48 ◼ ► the facts because i i can't imagine that's really true but oh yeah look at that 424840 it's real
01:54:55 ◼ ► close if you if you would multiply it because it's 429496 you know that's that's the the 32-bit so
01:55:00 ◼ ► that there are 424840 like they're they're very close to that so if yeah yeah that that makes
01:55:04 ◼ ► total sense like and i mean it's like it's like a reasonable assumption when whenever this system
01:55:08 ◼ ► was designed in the 80s or something someone's saying okay and this is where we're going to
01:55:12 ◼ ► start the share price what's a big enough how many digits is enough for the share price of a company
01:55:16 ◼ ► no one thinks any company's going to have a single share that's going to be worth 400 000 or something
01:55:21 ◼ ► or whatever it just seems ridiculous in 1980 and here we are that's amazing who phd writes i've
01:55:29 ◼ ► been waiting for an apfs deduping space saver script to move from alpha quality to beta quality
01:55:34 ◼ ► or quote reliable enough for my less important data that suck up space have you heard of disk
01:55:40 ◼ ► dedupe on the app store i have not and i don't think you're asking me anyway john what do you
01:55:45 ◼ ► think so this is a an interesting technology enabled by our wonderful modern new file system
01:55:51 ◼ ► that we have here on the mac um it's been around for a long time in the enterprise the idea is that
01:55:57 ◼ ► on every one of our disks but especially on lots of enterprise disks there's some data that's
01:56:01 ◼ ► duplicated right you might think you don't have a lot of like literal duplicate documents
01:56:05 ◼ ► but it's sort of the enterprise level a lot of devices do block level deduping right so if they
01:56:13 ◼ ► can find any part of a file that's exactly the same as some part of another file there's no
01:56:17 ◼ ► reason to store that block of data twice you can just store it once and point to it from both files
01:56:22 ◼ ► and this saves you space right so like say you have a bunch of jpeg images and they have a bunch
01:56:28 ◼ ► of you know metadata inside them and the metadata for a whole bunch of them is similar or the same
01:56:35 ◼ ► like a bunch of pictures taken uh you know at your home and the gps coordinates are always the same
01:56:40 ◼ ► and you know i mean obviously it's not down to the byte level that they're deduping or whatever but
01:56:44 ◼ ► the more granular you can get with your deduping the higher chance you have to find redundancies
01:56:48 ◼ ► and the more space you can save right even just deduping at a file level though sometimes you do
01:56:54 ◼ ► have complete duplicates of files in multiple locations sometimes maybe the os has them maybe
01:56:59 ◼ ► some resources or assets are in multiple places maybe you have two of the same file somewhere like
01:57:04 ◼ ► one in your account and one elsewhere if you have if you have music libraries that are you know if
01:57:09 ◼ ► you have multiple accounts on your computer and the music library is not shared among them with
01:57:12 ◼ ► a single app id you could have the same songs in multiple places because you and your spouse both
01:57:18 ◼ ► have uh the you know complete works of taylor swift separately in your own music libraries on
01:57:24 ◼ ► your mac that's shared between the two of you now you're storing all that data twice wouldn't it be
01:57:28 ◼ ► great if you could store it once uh what apfs has for you here is that apfs can do the this this was
01:57:39 ◼ ► where you can see this in the finder if you make a copy of like a gigantic file and it looks like it
01:57:44 ◼ ► and completes instantly wait a second how did it just duplicate that 4 gig file instantly well it
01:57:49 ◼ ► didn't use the you know i forget what it's called like smart cloning or whatever apfs just says okay
01:57:54 ◼ ► i will just make a second pointer to that file now it's not the same thing as hard links in unix
01:57:58 ◼ ► because hard links in unix you can make an instant quote-unquote instant copy of a file
01:58:02 ◼ ► but they both point to the same data so if you make a 4 gig file and then you make a hard link
01:58:06 ◼ ► to it and you edit either one the original file or the hard link you will change the other right
01:58:13 ◼ ► but with apfs smart cloning instant whatever the hell it's called thing when you make a copy you
01:58:18 ◼ ► don't have to worry that now when i edit one the other one will edit they are independent as soon
01:58:22 ◼ ► as you make a change so they're copy on right right so you instantly get a copy without actually
01:58:27 ◼ ► taking up any more disk space but if you change some part of the copy they will start to diverge
01:58:32 ◼ ► from each other right so it's a safe way to make an instant copy so the way the deduping things work
01:58:37 ◼ ► is they go through in theory they go through your entire hard drive or whatever they find two files
01:58:42 ◼ ► that are the same this is like sort of like the the transporter in star trek i guess or cloning
01:58:47 ◼ ► or whatever they find two files the same they delete one and then they make a smart clone of
01:58:53 ◼ ► the original to the second location right so now i mean it's complicated by the fact that when they
01:59:00 ◼ ► deleted that one it probably didn't actually go away because it probably exists in a snapshot
01:59:04 ◼ ► right and so you didn't actually but pretend snapshots don't exist for a second so you've
01:59:08 ◼ ► got two four gig files that are identical they're taking up eight gigs of space again ignoring
01:59:12 ◼ ► snapshots right you delete one of the four gig files now you've saved four gigs of this space
01:59:17 ◼ ► not really but in theory um and then you clone the original four gig file and that takes up no
01:59:23 ◼ ► more space except for a tiny little bit for the metadata right so now you've you previously those
01:59:28 ◼ ► two four gig files were taking eight gigs and you can make it so those two four gig files are only
01:59:31 ◼ ► taking up four gigs and you don't have to worry about any weird side effects because you can edit
01:59:35 ◼ ► one or the other and there they will be completely independent files they won't be linked to each
01:59:39 ◼ ► other in any way except for the fact that they were originally cloned from each other so in
01:59:43 ◼ ► theory you could save a ton of disk space that way in practice apps like this especially when they
01:59:50 ◼ ► come from a third party and not apple scare me because what i just described uh like and the
01:59:55 ◼ ► reason i'm comparing to the starter transporter is the idea that it destroys all your molecules
01:59:58 ◼ ► in the original location and then sends the information out elsewhere and the reconstitute
02:00:02 ◼ ► them so the transporter essentially kills you there's a million youtube videos in this if you
02:00:05 ◼ ► want to watch it it kills you and then reconstructs you elsewhere aside um in this case it has to
02:00:12 ◼ ► delete one of the files and then it has to do the smart cloning thing to make and and make
02:00:17 ◼ ► reconstitute that file from a clone in exactly the way that it was before including all the dates
02:00:23 ◼ ► all the permissions all the metadata the labels all this other stuff and that scares me a little
02:00:28 ◼ ► bit because it is not a non-destructive operation you must necessarily destroy one of the files and
02:00:33 ◼ ► try to recreate it quote-unquote exactly the way it was so if apple came out with a utility to do
02:00:39 ◼ ► this i might trust it but 30 party ones and i did actually buy this one here i am very wary of i'd
02:00:47 ◼ ► be wary of trying to do it myself now maybe you can make like a command line tool that does it's
02:00:51 ◼ ► not complicated this api for the smart cloning you can just look it up and run it right maybe if
02:00:55 ◼ ► there's files that are as low these are just data files there's no metadata i don't care about them
02:01:00 ◼ ► like they're taylor swift songs right if i screwed them up worst case i can just delete them all and
02:01:04 ◼ ► redown them from itunes like it's not a big deal maybe i would trust it in that scenario but for
02:01:09 ◼ ► now i would say use caution when considering tools like this um the best thing you can say for tools
02:01:15 ◼ ► like this is if you can run them in kind of a read-only mode and say like i'm not going to do
02:01:19 ◼ ► any deduping but just please tell me how many duplicate files do i have and if they could all
02:01:25 ◼ ► be deduped how much space would i save again setting aside snapshots which are a thing thanks
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02:02:31 ◼ ► speaking of members i'm glad to see apparently customers finally taking advantage of what i
02:02:50 ◼ ► urged them to do last time i just hey sign up to become a member get the discount buy crap from the
02:02:53 ◼ ► store and then cancel to be fair we don't encourage you to cancel yeah we don't encourage you to get
02:02:58 ◼ ► but like last year like it seemed like nobody was like people were buying from the store but
02:03:02 ◼ ► there was like no increase in members it's like why are you not taking advantage of the free money
02:03:05 ◼ ► that we're offering you here become a member get the discount buy stuff with it and then cancel
02:03:10 ◼ ► or stick around if you want to because can we stop can we stop with the case we know that some