ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Okay, let's do this thing. Nothing like fixing a critical bug. Not 60 seconds before we go in the air.

00:00:07 ◼   ► I saw that five seconds ago. I just saw that. That was great diagnostics from the both of you. I'm very impressed.

00:00:13 ◼   ► Actually, I'm very annoyed right now because the headphones I'm using, the left driver started rattling today.

00:00:20 ◼   ► It's only resonating with certain low frequencies. So like when Casey talks, I hear a little rattle in my left ear.

00:00:26 ◼   ► But when I talk or when John talks, I usually don't. But when Casey gets nice and deep really close up then, I'm like, "Oh God!"

00:00:33 ◼   ► Hey Marco, how's it going?

00:00:35 ◼   ► So try to avoid your sexy radio voice next week.

00:00:38 ◼   ► I'll just be sure to do it like this for the whole show. How's that sound?

00:00:42 ◼   ► What could possibly go wrong? That'd be perfect.

00:00:44 ◼   ► What could go wrong?

00:00:46 ◼   ► I am incredibly pleasantly surprised with... maybe it's the quality of our audience.

00:00:56 ◼   ► So last week, we began the show with a pretty big segment about Black Lives Matter and racism and police and privilege and all the issues that are going on right now.

00:01:09 ◼   ► And have been going on for a while.

00:01:11 ◼   ► I thought we were taking a risk.

00:01:14 ◼   ► And we got hundreds of responses.

00:01:18 ◼   ► I mean, we must have heard from 500 people.

00:01:20 ◼   ► And of that number, I think three were even slightly argumentative.

00:01:26 ◼   ► Like, I wouldn't even necessarily classify them as negative.

00:01:29 ◼   ► Like, they were just slightly argumentative.

00:01:31 ◼   ► And all the rest were universally positive.

00:01:34 ◼   ► And so I think this both shows that our audience is awesome.

00:01:38 ◼   ► But also this gives me hope for just the public in general.

00:01:42 ◼   ► That I think it shouldn't be risky to say Black Lives Matter and to say that we have a racism problem in this country and to say that we have a police brutality problem.

00:01:52 ◼   ► That shouldn't be a risky thing to say.

00:01:54 ◼   ► But it is. And it has been.

00:01:56 ◼   ► But I think now it's not.

00:01:58 ◼   ► Now I think it has reached a critical mass of public realization and public acceptance.

00:02:05 ◼   ► That like, "Oh yeah, this is actually a really big problem."

00:02:08 ◼   ► And it's not risky to talk about it. It's not risky to say, "Oh yeah, we really have this problem."

00:02:14 ◼   ► Like, no. It's a real thing.

00:02:16 ◼   ► And that, in a weird way, gives me hope that we're making some progress on these issues.

00:02:22 ◼   ► And I know we have a long way to go.

00:02:24 ◼   ► And it's not going to be fast progress.

00:02:26 ◼   ► But it's not risky to talk about this anymore.

00:02:30 ◼   ► And that's a really good first step.

00:02:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

00:02:34 ◼   ► I was braced for impact because whenever you put anything on the internet and you have more than ten people that look at it, you're going to get obnoxious feedback.

00:02:44 ◼   ► It's part of the social contract of the internet.

00:02:48 ◼   ► I mean, to give you some idea, saying Black Lives Matter so emphatically around all that discussion and privilege and everything last week,

00:02:55 ◼   ► I thought, again, I thought this was going to generate some controversy among the audience.

00:03:00 ◼   ► Things that have generated more controversy than this would be things like if we said, "The sky is blue."

00:03:06 ◼   ► Or if we said, "Apple's doing pretty well these days."

00:03:09 ◼   ► Anything we could possibly say generates way more argument and way more negativity than that did.

00:03:17 ◼   ► And so, again, I think that's amazing.

00:03:20 ◼   ► And I'm really pleased with that ratio of positivity that we got.

00:03:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm very excited about it.

00:03:26 ◼   ► And I wanted to just one quick moment thank the both of you guys, especially for speaking so eloquently about it,

00:03:33 ◼   ► and for our listeners for taking the time to listen to it as well.

00:03:36 ◼   ► And actually, our first bit of follow-up relates to that.

00:03:39 ◼   ► John, can you tell me why we need to recount this other than that it's a good idea to revisit this periodically?

00:03:45 ◼   ► I'm inlining for performance purposes.

00:03:47 ◼   ► We had a whole bunch of links in the last episode about the resources so you could go to learn more and do more and stuff like that.

00:03:55 ◼   ► And people were very nice in recommending things to add to the list.

00:04:00 ◼   ► In particular, a lot of people were recommending books.

00:04:02 ◼   ► What we had linked was a page that itself linked like 16 different books.

00:04:06 ◼   ► So most of the recommendations for books that we got were actually books that were already on that page.

00:04:10 ◼   ► So I just wanted to surface them.

00:04:12 ◼   ► And so we're not going to have a million notes this week.

00:04:14 ◼   ► I just wanted to pick out the three or four handful of books that were most recommended.

00:04:19 ◼   ► They will be in line in the show notes this week and not buried one link away under a page.

00:04:23 ◼   ► So check it out if reading is your thing and you want to learn more about these issues.

00:04:27 ◼   ► I plan on reading at least one, maybe two of these.

00:04:31 ◼   ► There's another book I'm going to read this summer.

00:04:33 ◼   ► But I have a couple of these on my reading list now.

00:04:36 ◼   ► If I have time, I hopefully will be able to add many, many more.

00:04:38 ◼   ► And I'm really looking forward to that.

00:04:40 ◼   ► John, you were making fun of me last week about doing some edits inside of a web form.

00:04:46 ◼   ► And Martin Bre has some thoughts about that.

00:04:49 ◼   ► Martin writes, "Regarding John's last remark about never editing in a text field on a web page,

00:04:54 ◼   ► I've also been in the same camp and trying to spread the message.

00:04:56 ◼   ► I did that no later than yesterday with my brother who's currently taking his exams

00:04:59 ◼   ► which are occurring online due to the COVID-19 measures.

00:05:02 ◼   ► In this particular case, that was disastrously bad advice.

00:05:05 ◼   ► He quickly learned about the school's anti-cheat features.

00:05:08 ◼   ► For some of the questions, they simply blocked pasting text.

00:05:11 ◼   ► And on others, they apparently check the speed at which text is entered.

00:05:14 ◼   ► And if that's too fast, it gets cleared.

00:05:16 ◼   ► And I assume you also might get flagged as a potential cheater.

00:05:18 ◼   ► I should have anticipated this, but I didn't, and it made my brother lose a bunch of time."

00:05:22 ◼   ► See, I was right all along.

00:05:24 ◼   ► See, I think this is one of the ways like schools, when I went through school,

00:05:29 ◼   ► and again, disclaimer, I'm a terrible student, et cetera.

00:05:32 ◼   ► But when I went through school, when I stumbled through school,

00:05:35 ◼   ► we didn't have much technology in the school.

00:05:39 ◼   ► Like, you know, I graduated from high school in 2000, from college in 2004.

00:05:43 ◼   ► And that was like, I never even saw anybody use a laptop in a classroom.

00:05:49 ◼   ► Wait, not in college?

00:05:51 ◼   ► No.

00:05:52 ◼   ► Really?

00:05:53 ◼   ► That happened like right after I graduated.

00:05:55 ◼   ► Like, it was when that whole wave came in.

00:05:57 ◼   ► When I got to college, most people came with a desktop computer,

00:06:00 ◼   ► a cheap PC desktop computer.

00:06:02 ◼   ► Only a few, usually the rich kids, had laptops.

00:06:06 ◼   ► And you'd occasionally see them with it like in the library,

00:06:09 ◼   ► but you would never see anybody in the classroom using a laptop.

00:06:12 ◼   ► And that seemed to start literally like right after I graduated.

00:06:15 ◼   ► Like, I graduated in 2004, and it seemed like around 2005

00:06:19 ◼   ► is when everybody had laptops in classrooms.

00:06:21 ◼   ► But I never saw one.

00:06:23 ◼   ► And, you know, I never took a test on a computer.

00:06:26 ◼   ► I never, like, I wanted to.

00:06:28 ◼   ► I would have loved that at the time.

00:06:30 ◼   ► I was dying to use computers for anything.

00:06:32 ◼   ► But, you know, we only had them for like the computer science class,

00:06:35 ◼   ► and that's about it.

00:06:36 ◼   ► And so I missed this entire wave of classroom technology

00:06:41 ◼   ► that is now ubiquitous.

00:06:42 ◼   ► I've never seen a smart board.

00:06:44 ◼   ► I don't have a great idea of even what it is.

00:06:46 ◼   ► Oh, they're so nice.

00:06:47 ◼   ► You've missed out on so much.

00:06:49 ◼   ► And we're the same age.

00:06:50 ◼   ► In fact, actually that reminds me, happy birthday to you

00:06:52 ◼   ► because your birthday is tomorrow.

00:06:54 ◼   ► And so we are effectively the same age, you and I.

00:06:57 ◼   ► And I didn't get to use a smart board until my second real job,

00:07:01 ◼   ► but they were amazing at the time.

00:07:02 ◼   ► Smart boards were, imagine like one of those mobile white boards

00:07:06 ◼   ► that you would perhaps see in like school or whatever.

00:07:09 ◼   ► But instead of being a traditional white board,

00:07:11 ◼   ► if I remember right, it was a, maybe it was a white board.

00:07:14 ◼   ► I don't remember. It's been so darn long.

00:07:15 ◼   ► But anyways, it was something like a screen projected on the white board

00:07:18 ◼   ► or the white board itself was a screen or something like that.

00:07:20 ◼   ► So the point is, it was digitizing everything you were doing.

00:07:24 ◼   ► So you could draw using this like fake marker,

00:07:27 ◼   ► and then you could select what you've drawn and move it around.

00:07:30 ◼   ► And as someone who loves doing like white board diagrams

00:07:34 ◼   ► and things of that nature, it was really convenient

00:07:36 ◼   ► because not only could you move the stuff around

00:07:38 ◼   ► when you realized, oh, I gotta shimmy something

00:07:39 ◼   ► in between these two boxes, but also you could just easily

00:07:42 ◼   ► make a PDF and send it to your coworkers or whatever.

00:07:44 ◼   ► Smart boards are super cool.

00:07:45 ◼   ► I never had that opportunity in college,

00:07:47 ◼   ► but they were great in the real world.

00:07:49 ◼   ► Sorry, I totally interrupted, but happy birthday.

00:07:51 ◼   ► - No, I mean, I interrupted you.

00:07:52 ◼   ► That's my job on the show, I guess.

00:07:53 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:07:55 ◼   ► I've never even, like, I think in all of college,

00:07:58 ◼   ► and like I think I had one professor

00:08:01 ◼   ► who gave presentations as PowerPoints.

00:08:04 ◼   ► Like I never had that either.

00:08:06 ◼   ► Like it seemed like the old school way of doing school

00:08:10 ◼   ► ended right as I left.

00:08:12 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:08:13 ◼   ► And now everyone's on PowerPoints using smart boards

00:08:16 ◼   ► or things like that, using digital test taking on computers.

00:08:19 ◼   ► That's all new to me.

00:08:20 ◼   ► And so, you know, if you look at the quality

00:08:23 ◼   ► of software on average, you know, up like kind of

00:08:26 ◼   ► near the top you have like most consumer level stuff

00:08:29 ◼   ► made by good companies like Apple who are pretty decent at it.

00:08:32 ◼   ► That's like, you know, nice usable thoughtful software.

00:08:34 ◼   ► And jeez, I mean, even Apple has their problems

00:08:36 ◼   ► in that area a lot recently, but believe me,

00:08:38 ◼   ► it's way better than a lot of things.

00:08:40 ◼   ► Then, you know, a little step down from that,

00:08:42 ◼   ► you have like the general world of PC hardware.

00:08:44 ◼   ► Like, well, you know, sometimes it's okay,

00:08:47 ◼   ► sometimes it's all right, you know,

00:08:48 ◼   ► it's not to the best standards,

00:08:49 ◼   ► but it's still like generally kind of usable.

00:08:52 ◼   ► Then kind of like down a bit you have like

00:08:55 ◼   ► specialty software for like certain industries,

00:08:58 ◼   ► like my dentist software, and that's,

00:09:01 ◼   ► it's getting a little bit hard to use,

00:09:03 ◼   ► a little bit crappy, a little bit, you know, hostile.

00:09:05 ◼   ► And then you take a huge step down

00:09:07 ◼   ► and you have enterprise software.

00:09:10 ◼   ► And that is a disaster.

00:09:12 ◼   ► It's impossible to use, it's terrible,

00:09:14 ◼   ► it's user hostile, it's terribly designed.

00:09:17 ◼   ► And then even another giant step below that,

00:09:20 ◼   ► you have what is usually education software.

00:09:22 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:09:24 ◼   ► Like the incentives and the factors and the,

00:09:28 ◼   ► you know, the costs and benefits and everything

00:09:30 ◼   ► are not set up at all for enterprise software

00:09:34 ◼   ► and especially for education software,

00:09:36 ◼   ► which is like enterprise software but with even less money.

00:09:39 ◼   ► It's not set up at all for that to be usable

00:09:41 ◼   ► or friendly or well designed or even remotely well maintained

00:09:45 ◼   ► because schools have very special needs

00:09:48 ◼   ► and usually no money.

00:09:50 ◼   ► And so it's like, and it's, you know,

00:09:53 ◼   ► similar enterprise software where like

00:09:54 ◼   ► you're making a deal with a whole district

00:09:56 ◼   ► or a whole government where you have to,

00:09:58 ◼   ► you know, you're dealing with like huge committees

00:10:00 ◼   ► and budgets and the public and politics

00:10:03 ◼   ► and all sorts of other stuff.

00:10:05 ◼   ► So I can't even imagine how hostile

00:10:09 ◼   ► a lot of the software must be in education these days.

00:10:12 ◼   ► I mean, we only see, we like scratch the surface

00:10:15 ◼   ► with just like whatever we have to use

00:10:17 ◼   ► because my kids in school as like, you know,

00:10:19 ◼   ► the parent portals of various things,

00:10:20 ◼   ► which are always terrible.

00:10:21 ◼   ► And that's like the bare minimum.

00:10:23 ◼   ► I can't even imagine what it's like

00:10:25 ◼   ► to be a student in this stuff these days.

00:10:27 ◼   ► - I remember, I've told pieces of this story

00:10:30 ◼   ► on the show before, so forgive me,

00:10:31 ◼   ► but when I was in college, I went to school

00:10:34 ◼   ► with a home built, you know, tower monstrosity,

00:10:37 ◼   ► which at the time was not unusual.

00:10:39 ◼   ► - Me too.

00:10:40 ◼   ► A full tower too, not even a mid tower.

00:10:42 ◼   ► - Yep, yep, yep, yep.

00:10:43 ◼   ► - 'Cause the full tower had more drive bays.

00:10:44 ◼   ► - Yep, and I believe I had two CD,

00:10:47 ◼   ► like I had a CD-ROM drive that was super fast for reads.

00:10:51 ◼   ► Then I had a CD-RW drive that was not that fast for reads.

00:10:54 ◼   ► But then what you could do is you could duplicate CDs

00:10:56 ◼   ► without having to like cache it on the hard drive

00:10:59 ◼   ► for a little while.

00:11:00 ◼   ► You could do a straight rip from one to the other.

00:11:01 ◼   ► - Well you could, but like, you know,

00:11:03 ◼   ► that was a risk, 'cause you, like,

00:11:05 ◼   ► the buffer under-arm protection on the writers

00:11:07 ◼   ► was never that great.

00:11:08 ◼   ► - No, that's true.

00:11:09 ◼   ► - I mean, you gotta whip out your Nero burning ROM game

00:11:11 ◼   ► and like, you know, rip it to an ISO first,

00:11:13 ◼   ► and then use Nero, you know, to burn with like

00:11:16 ◼   ► all the protection, try to copy all the games

00:11:18 ◼   ► with all their stupid protection disks and everything.

00:11:20 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:11:22 ◼   ► - God, this is a walk right down memory lane.

00:11:24 ◼   ► But anyways, but I think I had, what was,

00:11:26 ◼   ► it wasn't a zip, was it a jazz drive that was like

00:11:29 ◼   ► a zip drive, but higher capacity,

00:11:31 ◼   ► is that what I'm thinking of?

00:11:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was one gig instead of 100 megs.

00:11:34 ◼   ► - Yep, I had one of those, which I loved at the time,

00:11:36 ◼   ► even though I barely ever used it.

00:11:38 ◼   ► But after a couple of years, like,

00:11:40 ◼   ► I think it was my junior, maybe senior years,

00:11:44 ◼   ► I got myself a ThinkPad, which was in no small part

00:11:48 ◼   ► because Dad worked for IBM at the time.

00:11:49 ◼   ► And I remember I thought I was hot stuff,

00:11:52 ◼   ► and this is the part I've told on the show before,

00:11:53 ◼   ► because this ThinkPad was one of the first

00:11:56 ◼   ► that you could add a daughter card internal to the ThinkPad.

00:12:00 ◼   ► It had like a little door that you could unscrew and open,

00:12:04 ◼   ► and you could put a Cisco 802.11b wireless card

00:12:07 ◼   ► within the computer.

00:12:09 ◼   ► And so I had a wireless connection in the like

00:12:12 ◼   ► 10 buildings on campus that were set up for wireless.

00:12:15 ◼   ► But I had a wireless connection without one of those

00:12:18 ◼   ► PCMCIA dongles hanging out the outside,

00:12:20 ◼   ► you remember that?

00:12:21 ◼   ► Where you had that like antenna hanging out

00:12:23 ◼   ► the outside of the machine.

00:12:25 ◼   ► This is around the same era as if you were really cool,

00:12:28 ◼   ► you would have one of those, not like slot loaded,

00:12:31 ◼   ► but like one of those spring ejected ethernet or modem jacks,

00:12:35 ◼   ► you know what I'm talking about?

00:12:36 ◼   ► - Those things, I'm shocked those didn't immediately

00:12:39 ◼   ► break on every use.

00:12:40 ◼   ► - Agreed, completely agreed.

00:12:41 ◼   ► - I believe it's called an X jack, if I remember correctly.

00:12:44 ◼   ► - You might be right, I don't even remember.

00:12:46 ◼   ► But anyways, I bring all this up because one of my,

00:12:49 ◼   ► oh you are right, look at that,

00:12:50 ◼   ► very deep good pull there, Marco, I'm impressed.

00:12:53 ◼   ► - I read a lot of computer magazines,

00:12:54 ◼   ► had a lot of ads for these things.

00:12:55 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:12:57 ◼   ► I never actually owned one.

00:12:59 ◼   ► - One of my favorite memories of school,

00:13:02 ◼   ► which is probably indicative of how poorly I did in school,

00:13:04 ◼   ► was when we were in a class, it was myself

00:13:07 ◼   ► and a couple of friends, and we all had laptops,

00:13:09 ◼   ► and we were using waste.

00:13:11 ◼   ► And nobody remembers this, but this is Justin Frankel,

00:13:15 ◼   ► who did Winamp.

00:13:16 ◼   ► When he was at AOL, he put together a peer-to-peer

00:13:19 ◼   ► chat app that was all super encrypted at the time.

00:13:22 ◼   ► Maybe it was easy to break, who knows.

00:13:23 ◼   ► But at the time, it was super encrypted,

00:13:25 ◼   ► and you could make a chat room,

00:13:26 ◼   ► and then have person-to-person chats.

00:13:28 ◼   ► And this is when AOL Instant Messenger was very much a thing,

00:13:31 ◼   ► but we were like, no way, man, the school might find out

00:13:34 ◼   ► that we're chatting during class if we use AOL,

00:13:37 ◼   ► so we gotta use this super encrypted waste thing.

00:13:39 ◼   ► And it was so stupid, but now it was a stupid kid,

00:13:42 ◼   ► so what are you gonna do?

00:13:43 ◼   ► But I remember doing that with a couple of friends

00:13:44 ◼   ► during class, and it was extremely enjoyable

00:13:47 ◼   ► having a back channel as we were supposed to be listening,

00:13:51 ◼   ► even though we really weren't.

00:13:53 ◼   ► - I love Justin Frankel, 'cause he was like,

00:13:55 ◼   ► I made Winamp, AOL bought Winamp in the late '90s,

00:13:59 ◼   ► early 2000s, because they wanted relevance,

00:14:02 ◼   ► and they didn't know what to do,

00:14:03 ◼   ► and they were old people, and they had more money than sense,

00:14:06 ◼   ► and had no idea what they were doing,

00:14:07 ◼   ► and MP3s seemed like a new thing that they could take hold of

00:14:10 ◼   ► and maybe do something with, so they bought Winamp.

00:14:12 ◼   ► And meanwhile, Justin Frankel, the developer,

00:14:14 ◼   ► or at least one of the developers,

00:14:15 ◼   ► was one of the most radical activist,

00:14:19 ◼   ► anti-establishment developers of the era,

00:14:22 ◼   ► and he just kept making and releasing things

00:14:24 ◼   ► that just totally undermined AOL.

00:14:26 ◼   ► I don't know what his deal was,

00:14:28 ◼   ► how he didn't just get fired,

00:14:30 ◼   ► I don't know, whatever the contract he had with them was,

00:14:33 ◼   ► was amazing, because he was able to just release stuff

00:14:36 ◼   ► that just constantly poked them so hard,

00:14:40 ◼   ► and somehow got away with it.

00:14:42 ◼   ► And he seemed to not care at all,

00:14:44 ◼   ► which I just, I love so much.

00:14:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, I completely agree.

00:14:47 ◼   ► Whatever happened to him, like recently,

00:14:49 ◼   ► what is he even up to?

00:14:50 ◼   ► - I don't know, I hope you're not some horrible person.

00:14:52 ◼   ► - Oh, who knows.

00:14:53 ◼   ► Doesn't ATP's livestream eventually boil down to Shoutcast,

00:14:58 ◼   ► or is that not correct at all?

00:14:59 ◼   ► - Oh, yes, sort of, yeah.

00:15:00 ◼   ► So we host this livestream on an open source app

00:15:04 ◼   ► called Icecast, which is basically

00:15:06 ◼   ► the successor to Shoutcast.

00:15:08 ◼   ► Shoutcast was the streaming server protocol

00:15:11 ◼   ► for MP3s, basically, that I'm pretty sure Justin Frankel,

00:15:16 ◼   ► or at least the Winamp team initially developed, I think.

00:15:20 ◼   ► And Icecast kind of evolved out of that,

00:15:23 ◼   ► and I think it has replaced it,

00:15:24 ◼   ► and it's better in a few ways,

00:15:25 ◼   ► but the basic idea is the same.

00:15:27 ◼   ► It's one of the many things that I love about MP3s,

00:15:29 ◼   ► is that the broadcast protocol is amazingly low-tech.

00:15:33 ◼   ► You just, I run an app on my computer, Audio Hijack,

00:15:36 ◼   ► that streams the MP3 bytes that we're recording here

00:15:40 ◼   ► to the server, and the server just repeats it back

00:15:42 ◼   ► to anybody who listens.

00:15:44 ◼   ► And the protocol is super simple.

00:15:45 ◼   ► It's basic text to connect, and then it shoves binary at you.

00:15:50 ◼   ► That's just the MP3, and MP3 decoders are super simple.

00:15:52 ◼   ► They just look ahead until the C11 ones in a row

00:15:54 ◼   ► and start decoding there, and it just works.

00:15:57 ◼   ► It's amazing.

00:15:58 ◼   ► It really, it's so, this is one of the reasons

00:16:00 ◼   ► I love working with MP3s so much.

00:16:02 ◼   ► In many ways, it's so low-tech that it makes it

00:16:05 ◼   ► very easy and powerful to work with.

00:16:08 ◼   ► - Oh, that's right.

00:16:09 ◼   ► Somebody in the chat put a link to Kakos.

00:16:12 ◼   ► I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but--

00:16:14 ◼   ► - God, I hope not.

00:16:15 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:16:16 ◼   ► - Well, yeah.

00:16:17 ◼   ► It's his current company, and I'd forgotten

00:16:19 ◼   ► that my favorite software to make animated GIFs

00:16:22 ◼   ► of screen recordings, what is it called now?

00:16:24 ◼   ► I can't remember.

00:16:25 ◼   ► Shoot.

00:16:26 ◼   ► Oh, gosh, it's gonna drive me nuts.

00:16:28 ◼   ► - Kleket, that's what I use.

00:16:29 ◼   ► - Lycecap, there you go.

00:16:31 ◼   ► It's like the simplest, ugliest, like clearly cross-platform

00:16:34 ◼   ► but does the job well screen recording software.

00:16:37 ◼   ► Well, anyways, that was done by Justin Frankel

00:16:40 ◼   ► in Kakos, I don't know how you pronounce it,

00:16:44 ◼   ► but anyways, it was done in some time after he left AOL.

00:16:48 ◼   ► - This is what I was forgetting.

00:16:49 ◼   ► I knew he made something that really put AOL on the side.

00:16:52 ◼   ► He made the Nutella file sharing network.

00:16:54 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:16:55 ◼   ► That's what he, as he was working for AOL, I'm pretty sure,

00:16:58 ◼   ► which was a major media conglomerate that owned

00:17:01 ◼   ► a lot of like, you know, music and stuff.

00:17:03 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:17:04 ◼   ► - Oh, man.

00:17:05 ◼   ► Yeah, so, oh man, he's the best.

00:17:08 ◼   ► - Anyway, what were we talking about?

00:17:10 ◼   ► I don't even know.

00:17:11 ◼   ► Oh, writing into web forms.

00:17:12 ◼   ► - The moral of the story is, yeah,

00:17:14 ◼   ► don't write on web forms, kids, unless you're in school,

00:17:16 ◼   ► in which case your software probably sucks.

00:17:18 ◼   ► - Don't try to paste into web forms

00:17:20 ◼   ► 'cause they'll think you're cheating.

00:17:21 ◼   ► Yeah, my son had to take an online, an AP test online

00:17:24 ◼   ► and it had similar measures.

00:17:26 ◼   ► That was the same test where there was that story

00:17:27 ◼   ► where people were, at some point in the test,

00:17:29 ◼   ► apparently students are instructed to do something

00:17:31 ◼   ► on a piece of paper and then take a picture of it

00:17:33 ◼   ► with their phone or something or upload a picture of it.

00:17:34 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:17:35 ◼   ► Anyway, that's what they were doing

00:17:36 ◼   ► and a bunch of kids took pictures with their iPhone

00:17:38 ◼   ► and then tried to upload it, but the iPhone was taking

00:17:41 ◼   ► Heek pictures instead of JPEGs, so they tried to upload

00:17:44 ◼   ► the Heek to the website.

00:17:45 ◼   ► It crashed because it couldn't process them

00:17:47 ◼   ► and then everyone was flipping out

00:17:49 ◼   ► and it's under a time limit or whatever.

00:17:50 ◼   ► My son avoided that by dumb luck

00:17:54 ◼   ► because the way I had him doing the pictures

00:17:57 ◼   ► 'cause he doesn't know how to use computers,

00:17:58 ◼   ► so I said, look, just take the picture on your phone

00:18:00 ◼   ► and then just keep photos open in the background

00:18:02 ◼   ► and just wait a couple seconds

00:18:03 ◼   ► and you should see the photo you just took on your phone

00:18:06 ◼   ► appear in your Photos app

00:18:07 ◼   ► 'cause he's got the PhotoStream thing going

00:18:09 ◼   ► and then drag it out of the Photos app onto the desktop,

00:18:12 ◼   ► which is the only place that he knows exists

00:18:14 ◼   ► like most people, and when you drag it out of Photos

00:18:16 ◼   ► onto the desktop, it turns it into a JPEG

00:18:18 ◼   ► and so he was uploading JPEGs and not Heeks

00:18:20 ◼   ► even though his phone was taking Heek pictures.

00:18:22 ◼   ► Anyway, hopefully with all of the COVID stuff,

00:18:25 ◼   ► everybody's online test stuff will get better

00:18:28 ◼   ► and the thing trying to prevent you

00:18:30 ◼   ► from pasting into the form,

00:18:31 ◼   ► like some password fields do that too,

00:18:32 ◼   ► which is horrendous

00:18:33 ◼   ► because it defeats password managers many times,

00:18:36 ◼   ► but I know what they're trying to do,

00:18:38 ◼   ► but it's punishing people for essentially bad,

00:18:41 ◼   ► for good habits because if you are under time pressure

00:18:44 ◼   ► to write something substantial into a text field

00:18:47 ◼   ► as part of a test, it does make sense

00:18:50 ◼   ► to do it someplace else where you know it's secure

00:18:53 ◼   ► and then only put it into the webpage when you're ready,

00:18:56 ◼   ► but of course the software interprets that as,

00:18:58 ◼   ► oh, you must be cheating

00:18:59 ◼   ► because you're copying and pasting it,

00:19:00 ◼   ► and I suppose if you just edit the node in the DOM

00:19:02 ◼   ► and stick the text in, it probably won't know,

00:19:04 ◼   ► but again, they might accuse you of cheating

00:19:07 ◼   ► and it's all just very fraught,

00:19:08 ◼   ► so I feel like this is a cultural issue,

00:19:11 ◼   ► more than a technological one

00:19:12 ◼   ► that eventually once kids become accustomed

00:19:14 ◼   ► to taking these kinds of tests online,

00:19:16 ◼   ► they'll learn all the things that you're supposed to do

00:19:18 ◼   ► and not supposed to do,

00:19:19 ◼   ► and I guess the backup mechanism is every once in a while

00:19:23 ◼   ► copy and paste it out of the web text field

00:19:25 ◼   ► into a text file so that if the web page does crash,

00:19:28 ◼   ► you'll still have the text.

00:19:29 ◼   ► Anyway, online tests stink.

00:19:31 ◼   ► Boom.

00:19:33 ◼   ► - So when I got angry last week about my Samba SMB woes,

00:19:39 ◼   ► I was expecting to be the only one,

00:19:42 ◼   ► and if you recall, this is when

00:19:43 ◼   ► I haven't used my computer in a little while.

00:19:45 ◼   ► I go to Reach, like my Synology, for example,

00:19:47 ◼   ► and I see a message in Finder,

00:19:49 ◼   ► "The operation can't be completed

00:19:50 ◼   ► because the original item for," whatever,

00:19:52 ◼   ► "can't be found,"

00:19:53 ◼   ► and the only way I knew how to fix it

00:19:55 ◼   ► was to do a kill-all Finder

00:19:58 ◼   ► and then try the same thing again,

00:20:00 ◼   ► and it would always work pretty much immediately.

00:20:03 ◼   ► And I got a lot of varied feedback about this,

00:20:06 ◼   ► including from John, actually, after the show,

00:20:09 ◼   ► and one of the most, or the two most important things

00:20:12 ◼   ► I think I can share confidently right now

00:20:14 ◼   ► is that first of all, you can go to the Go menu in Finder

00:20:19 ◼   ► and then connect to Server,

00:20:20 ◼   ► which is also done by Command-K.

00:20:23 ◼   ► Should I mess with John and say "K Command"

00:20:25 ◼   ► just to really tick John off?

00:20:26 ◼   ► Anyway, you can use Command-K to go to this menu,

00:20:29 ◼   ► and then you can reconnect that way,

00:20:30 ◼   ► and supposedly, I haven't actually had to try this,

00:20:32 ◼   ► and I'll explain why in a moment,

00:20:33 ◼   ► but supposedly that'll let you reconnect

00:20:35 ◼   ► without having to kill Finder, which is excellent.

00:20:37 ◼   ► And then John, amongst others, had suggested,

00:20:39 ◼   ► "Well, how are you getting to the Synology?"

00:20:42 ◼   ► And to answer that question, what I was doing

00:20:44 ◼   ► is I was looking at locations in the sidebar of Finder,

00:20:47 ◼   ► and I see DiskStation, which is the thing

00:20:50 ◼   ► that Synology calls itself.

00:20:52 ◼   ► I see that in the sidebar, and I would just click that

00:20:54 ◼   ► and drill into the particular folder I wanted,

00:20:55 ◼   ► and that was that.

00:20:57 ◼   ► But, John, you had recommended

00:20:59 ◼   ► one of several different ways to get there.

00:21:02 ◼   ► The Synology has its own dynamic DNS system

00:21:05 ◼   ► where you can get yourself an Internet-visible hostname,

00:21:08 ◼   ► even if you're, you know, NAT-ed and so on and so forth,

00:21:10 ◼   ► and I could choose that.

00:21:12 ◼   ► But it also occurred to me that since I'm running the Piehole,

00:21:14 ◼   ► I have set up -- and it's very easy.

00:21:16 ◼   ► -It's still funny. -It's the best, isn't it?

00:21:19 ◼   ► Since I have set up Piehole version 5,

00:21:22 ◼   ► then one of the things that it allows you to do

00:21:24 ◼   ► is very easily, using the web interface,

00:21:27 ◼   ► set up DNS responses for your local network,

00:21:30 ◼   ► really, but just basically custom DNS responses.

00:21:33 ◼   ► So, for example, iMac Pro,

00:21:35 ◼   ► I have effectively hardwired, if you will,

00:21:38 ◼   ► to refer to my 192.168 address for my iMac Pro,

00:21:44 ◼   ► which is statically assigned via the Eero.

00:21:46 ◼   ► And so what I've done is,

00:21:48 ◼   ► instead of connecting using the sidebar in the Finder,

00:21:51 ◼   ► I've connected to SYN, S-Y-N, which is what I have.

00:21:54 ◼   ► It's like a shortcut to the Synology's static IP address

00:21:57 ◼   ► within my network.

00:21:59 ◼   ► And so far, after nearly a week,

00:22:01 ◼   ► I have not had a problem with doing that.

00:22:03 ◼   ► So it appears that something, I guess, with Bonjour

00:22:06 ◼   ► or something about using the locations thing in the sidebar

00:22:10 ◼   ► is what's hosing this all up.

00:22:12 ◼   ► And so if you have any other mechanism

00:22:14 ◼   ► by getting to your device, you know, do it by IP address,

00:22:17 ◼   ► do it by a fully qualified domain name,

00:22:19 ◼   ► whatever the case may be, you might find

00:22:21 ◼   ► that that will fix your problem like it did for me.

00:22:23 ◼   ► Also, there's a very interesting Hacker News post,

00:22:26 ◼   ► which is not something I say often about all this,

00:22:28 ◼   ► which I'll link in the show notes,

00:22:30 ◼   ► even though that didn't actually get me to my solution.

00:22:32 ◼   ► It was more what Jon said to me, amongst others.

00:22:35 ◼   ► But you might want to check it out,

00:22:37 ◼   ► because apparently this is a long-standing bug

00:22:39 ◼   ► and not actually a Catalina thing after all.

00:22:41 ◼   ► -Yeah, the suggestion that a couple of people had

00:22:43 ◼   ► was to do something related to IPv6.

00:22:45 ◼   ► Now, I forget what it was.

00:22:47 ◼   ► It was just telling you to, like, disable IPv6.

00:22:49 ◼   ► -I don't remember.

00:22:50 ◼   ► I didn't have to fiddle with it, though.

00:22:52 ◼   ► -Yeah, the Hacker News thing

00:22:54 ◼   ► that talks about DNS lookup and, like, the mDNS stuff,

00:22:57 ◼   ► it's not like regular DNS

00:22:59 ◼   ► in that it gets broadcast periodically,

00:23:01 ◼   ► and there's a TTL on the value.

00:23:03 ◼   ► But if the TTL expires, say,

00:23:05 ◼   ► because your computer was asleep,

00:23:07 ◼   ► apparently you can't go request it again.

00:23:09 ◼   ► You just have to wait for the next broadcast,

00:23:11 ◼   ► and during that time, your computer has no idea

00:23:13 ◼   ► how to connect to it at all.

00:23:15 ◼   ► So you have to do what I did

00:23:17 ◼   ► and cut all of that zero-conf,

00:23:19 ◼   ► Bonjour, Rendezvous stuff out of the loop

00:23:21 ◼   ► and just use IP addresses

00:23:23 ◼   ► or names that you statically map to IP addresses.

00:23:25 ◼   ► So there you go. Problem solved.

00:23:27 ◼   ► -I think so, actually.

00:23:29 ◼   ► I was really surprised, because I didn't think

00:23:31 ◼   ► I was going to get any useful feedback,

00:23:33 ◼   ► not because our listeners aren't awesome,

00:23:35 ◼   ► just because I thought it was some really weird, esoteric thing.

00:23:37 ◼   ► Turns out, not so much.

00:23:39 ◼   ► Speaking of feedback from me to me,

00:23:41 ◼   ► or to me from me -- I don't know, anyway --

00:23:43 ◼   ► I had also kind of off-the-cuff lamented

00:23:45 ◼   ► about my TV turning itself off,

00:23:47 ◼   ► and I wasn't 100% accurate

00:23:49 ◼   ► on what I had said the problem was.

00:23:51 ◼   ► And Hugo Jobling had pointed out to me via Twitter,

00:23:53 ◼   ► and I'm glad that you did,

00:23:55 ◼   ► that the issue isn't --

00:23:57 ◼   ► I think I had said it was automations,

00:23:59 ◼   ► and that wasn't strictly true.

00:24:01 ◼   ► The issue is that it -- I think the TV was added

00:24:03 ◼   ► to my goodnight scene.

00:24:05 ◼   ► I believe I had called it an automation last week.

00:24:07 ◼   ► But Hugo had pointed out that when he was talking

00:24:09 ◼   ► about the goodnight scene,

00:24:11 ◼   ► but Hugo had pointed out that when he was adding

00:24:13 ◼   ► his OLED TV to his home,

00:24:17 ◼   ► one of the screens that I guess I just plowed right through

00:24:19 ◼   ► and didn't look at --

00:24:21 ◼   ► and if so, that's on me --

00:24:23 ◼   ► one of the screens he has is "Suggested Scenes,"

00:24:27 ◼   ► and it says, "Select scenes to include this accessory in.

00:24:29 ◼   ► You can customize these scenes later in the Home app."

00:24:31 ◼   ► And sure enough, there's "Goodnight,"

00:24:33 ◼   ► where it says "Turn Off."

00:24:35 ◼   ► And I don't recall having seen this,

00:24:37 ◼   ► but I bet you anything that I just plowed right through it,

00:24:39 ◼   ► "Next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next,

00:24:41 ◼   ► whatever, whatever, whatever,"

00:24:43 ◼   ► and wasn't paying close attention, so it's all my fault.

00:24:45 ◼   ► We'll put a link to a picture that Hugo had provided

00:24:47 ◼   ► to give you a better view of what I'm talking about.

00:24:49 ◼   ► But I thought that was useful feedback

00:24:51 ◼   ► to clarify what I was talking about earlier.

00:24:53 ◼   ► And actually, a couple of people reached out via Twitter

00:24:55 ◼   ► and said, "Oh, yeah, that happened to me,

00:24:57 ◼   ► and I never understood why, and now I do."

00:24:59 ◼   ► So I'm glad I brought it up.

00:25:01 ◼   ► Let's see, Daniel Jalkut is telling us about PowerBox.

00:25:03 ◼   ► John, what's going on there?

00:25:05 ◼   ► -My corrections from last week.

00:25:07 ◼   ► PowerBox is the thing that, for security reasons,

00:25:09 ◼   ► presents the Open and Save panel

00:25:11 ◼   ► rather than your application doing it.

00:25:13 ◼   ► A couple notes from Daniel.

00:25:16 ◼   ► One is that PowerBox is now always used for Open and Save panels.

00:25:20 ◼   ► Gus Mueller says it used to be

00:25:22 ◼   ► that it was only used for Sandbox apps,

00:25:24 ◼   ► but in Catalina or maybe Mojave,

00:25:26 ◼   ► it was changed to be used for all apps.

00:25:28 ◼   ► So that could actually explain some of the slowness

00:25:30 ◼   ► because before, maybe, an app wasn't using PowerBox,

00:25:32 ◼   ► but now it was.

00:25:34 ◼   ► And the second is Daniel says that he thinks

00:25:36 ◼   ► the app actually owns the window but not the content.

00:25:39 ◼   ► So your app may actually control that window,

00:25:42 ◼   ► but you only get a small region

00:25:44 ◼   ► where you're allowed to draw into it,

00:25:46 ◼   ► and through XPC, the PowerBox draws into the main content of it.

00:25:49 ◼   ► And apps are allowed to add their own sort of accessory views.

00:25:52 ◼   ► So it's like you own the window,

00:25:54 ◼   ► and your app gets to draw in some small portion,

00:25:56 ◼   ► but PowerBox draws in the other portion,

00:25:58 ◼   ► and PowerBox is the thing that actually gives you access to the file

00:26:01 ◼   ► and tells you what the result of the thing was.

00:26:03 ◼   ► So it's very complicated, and it's not surprising

00:26:05 ◼   ► that something like that could potentially go wrong

00:26:07 ◼   ► or have some performance difficulties,

00:26:10 ◼   ► again, related to security checks and other things

00:26:12 ◼   ► that may be slow, especially the first time you try them.

00:26:15 ◼   ► So security's complicated.

00:26:17 ◼   ► It's a lot easier back in the day

00:26:19 ◼   ► when everything was all in one giant memory space

00:26:21 ◼   ► and you just put up an open, say, dialog box,

00:26:23 ◼   ► and you could literally not do anything else on the computer

00:26:25 ◼   ► until you just dismissed it.

00:26:27 ◼   ► - All right, and then finally for follow-up,

00:26:29 ◼   ► David Darcy writes and shows us some videos

00:26:32 ◼   ► about something absolutely fascinating

00:26:35 ◼   ► that I had no idea was a thing.

00:26:37 ◼   ► If I understand this right, on an Android phone,

00:26:40 ◼   ► there's an accessibility mode called live caption,

00:26:43 ◼   ► and so David sent us a video of the Android phone

00:26:48 ◼   ► playing our show and doing speech-to-text captioning

00:26:53 ◼   ► live as he's playing it in his podcast app.

00:26:55 ◼   ► At least that's how I understood it,

00:26:57 ◼   ► and this looks really freaking cool.

00:26:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, I thought it was cool.

00:27:01 ◼   ► It's another type of Android thing.

00:27:03 ◼   ► You see much more of this in Android.

00:27:05 ◼   ► There's no reason that iOS can't do it,

00:27:07 ◼   ► but in general, Apple has shied away

00:27:09 ◼   ► from allowing parts of the UI,

00:27:11 ◼   ► parts of the system that are not the app you're currently in

00:27:14 ◼   ► from overlaying the app that you're in.

00:27:16 ◼   ► Obviously, notifications can come down from the top,

00:27:18 ◼   ► and there's other things that can appear,

00:27:20 ◼   ► and the status bar can change color.

00:27:22 ◼   ► There are obviously ways that the operating system

00:27:24 ◼   ► can intrude into the space of an app,

00:27:26 ◼   ► but not really to this degree.

00:27:28 ◼   ► So this was, presumably, the operating system, Android,

00:27:30 ◼   ► on top of the podcast player, showing the captions, right?

00:27:33 ◼   ► And you might be mistaken for thinking like,

00:27:35 ◼   ► "Oh, that's a feature of the podcast app,"

00:27:37 ◼   ► but my understanding of watching this video is that it's not.

00:27:39 ◼   ► It is a feature of the operating system,

00:27:41 ◼   ► and any time audio is playing,

00:27:43 ◼   ► you can have this translucent overlay

00:27:45 ◼   ► with the things being transcribed in it,

00:27:47 ◼   ► which is pretty cool if you've got

00:27:49 ◼   ► a very fast on-device speech-to-text engine.

00:27:51 ◼   ► That's a great use of it.

00:27:53 ◼   ► Was this person-- did they also give the video

00:27:55 ◼   ► showing the voice control of Android,

00:27:57 ◼   ► or was that somebody else?

00:27:59 ◼   ► I don't know about that tweet.

00:28:01 ◼   ► It was like showing how to speak to your Android phone

00:28:04 ◼   ► to make it do stuff, not like you speak to Siri,

00:28:08 ◼   ► like, you know, "Hey, dingus," you know,

00:28:11 ◼   ► "Open thing," and whatever,

00:28:13 ◼   ► or "Remind me to do this with that," or whatever,

00:28:15 ◼   ► but, like, using it as kind of a verbal pointer, right?

00:28:20 ◼   ► So you could tell it to go to the home screen

00:28:22 ◼   ► to open an application, and when it opened that app,

00:28:25 ◼   ► like, all the controls on the screen

00:28:27 ◼   ► have tiny little numbers in circles next to them,

00:28:29 ◼   ► so you would tell it to, you know,

00:28:32 ◼   ► hit button number one, number five,

00:28:34 ◼   ► confirm, okay, like, it was kind of like speaking,

00:28:38 ◼   ► you know, very much like the interface

00:28:40 ◼   ► that the Mac has, right?

00:28:41 ◼   ► Do you remember that demo where they showed, like,

00:28:43 ◼   ► the screen was cut into regions

00:28:44 ◼   ► and controls had numbers on them,

00:28:45 ◼   ► and you could essentially navigate the screen with speech,

00:28:48 ◼   ► only this was on a phone.

00:28:50 ◼   ► I'm not sure what Apple's interface to that

00:28:52 ◼   ► looks like these days, because this interface

00:28:55 ◼   ► does require you to see the screen,

00:28:56 ◼   ► so it's not for people who can't see the screen well.

00:28:59 ◼   ► I mean, these numbers are very small,

00:29:01 ◼   ► so you have to have good vision,

00:29:02 ◼   ► but just not the ability to --

00:29:04 ◼   ► or the motor control to use the touch interface.

00:29:07 ◼   ► So, anyway, I think all this stuff

00:29:09 ◼   ► is especially interesting,

00:29:11 ◼   ► including in the context of RSI.

00:29:13 ◼   ► I don't know if anyone is getting RSI from their phones,

00:29:15 ◼   ► but I can assure you that that is actually a thing.

00:29:18 ◼   ► Somewhere out there is somebody

00:29:19 ◼   ► who's been swiping too much with their thumb,

00:29:21 ◼   ► and it feels a little stiff,

00:29:22 ◼   ► and they're trying not to think about it,

00:29:23 ◼   ► and they should.

00:29:25 ◼   ► We did want to take a moment to call out

00:29:29 ◼   ► three different organizations that we think

00:29:31 ◼   ► are probably worth your investment, interest, time, et cetera.

00:29:35 ◼   ► And just if you happen to have any money

00:29:39 ◼   ► that you can throw their way,

00:29:40 ◼   ► I think the three of us all believe

00:29:42 ◼   ► that these are worthwhile causes,

00:29:44 ◼   ► and they're worth checking out.

00:29:46 ◼   ► So we wanted to take just a brief moment

00:29:48 ◼   ► and highlight three of them.

00:29:49 ◼   ► First of all, the Equal Justice Initiative,

00:29:51 ◼   ► which is committed to ending --

00:29:52 ◼   ► and I'm pulling these mostly from their websites,

00:29:54 ◼   ► but I've heard from various people

00:29:56 ◼   ► that these are all pretty great.

00:29:57 ◼   ► The Equal Justice Initiative is committed

00:29:59 ◼   ► to ending mass incarceration

00:30:00 ◼   ► and excessive punishment in the United States

00:30:02 ◼   ► to challenging racial and economic injustice

00:30:04 ◼   ► and to protecting basic human rights

00:30:06 ◼   ► for the most vulnerable people in American society.

00:30:09 ◼   ► Secondly, the Black Lives Matter organization

00:30:11 ◼   ► is a global organization in the U.S., U.K., and Canada

00:30:14 ◼   ► whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy

00:30:16 ◼   ► and build local power to intervene in violence

00:30:18 ◼   ► inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes.

00:30:21 ◼   ► By combating and counteracting acts of violence,

00:30:23 ◼   ► creating space for black imagination and innovation,

00:30:25 ◼   ► and centering black joy, we are winning --

00:30:27 ◼   ► well, not "we," but they are winning

00:30:29 ◼   ► immediate improvements in our lives.

00:30:31 ◼   ► But it'll be "we" if you donate, which is excellent.

00:30:33 ◼   ► And then finally, Black Lives Code

00:30:35 ◼   ► is one of the organizations that the, I believe,

00:30:38 ◼   ► now-defunct AppCamp for Girls

00:30:40 ◼   ► has decided to sponsor or at least elevate,

00:30:44 ◼   ► and I know the AppCamp people, and they're all really great.

00:30:47 ◼   ► So Black Girls Code is devoted to showing the world

00:30:50 ◼   ► that black girls can code and do so much more.

00:30:52 ◼   ► By reaching out to the community through workshops

00:30:54 ◼   ► and after-school programs, Black Girls Code

00:30:56 ◼   ► introduces computer coding lessons to young girls

00:30:58 ◼   ► from underrepresented communities in programming languages

00:31:00 ◼   ► such as Scratch or Ruby on Rails.

00:31:02 ◼   ► If you happen to have a few extra bucks

00:31:04 ◼   ► to throw any of the three organizations

00:31:07 ◼   ► that we've just called out,

00:31:09 ◼   ► I think that would be really excellent,

00:31:11 ◼   ► and certainly the three of us would appreciate it.

00:31:13 ◼   ► But we just wanted to call that out.

00:31:15 ◼   ► And, yeah, I don't know what our agenda is

00:31:17 ◼   ► for talking about these sort of social issues

00:31:19 ◼   ► and stuff in the future,

00:31:21 ◼   ► but expect that, as with last week,

00:31:24 ◼   ► we'll talk about it here and there,

00:31:26 ◼   ► and then we won't, and then we will, and then we won't,

00:31:28 ◼   ► and we'll just do what we think is best.

00:31:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, we had some sponsorship openings this week,

00:31:32 ◼   ► and we figured, you know, what better thing to do with them

00:31:34 ◼   ► than try to promote some of these great causes.

00:31:36 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:31:37 ◼   ► (jazzy music)

00:31:40 ◼   ► Marco, it's your birthday tomorrow.

00:31:42 ◼   ► Are there any birthday presents you would like by chance?

00:31:45 ◼   ► - Oh, I don't know.

00:31:47 ◼   ► My wife's making me some delicious fruit tarts,

00:31:49 ◼   ► and I'm gonna have some beer that I like,

00:31:50 ◼   ► and I think that'll be a good day.

00:31:52 ◼   ► - That sounds like a good day.

00:31:53 ◼   ► - Additionally, if you wanna get me an extra birthday present

00:31:55 ◼   ► after you've already given to the good causes

00:31:57 ◼   ► that are way better than this,

00:31:58 ◼   ► 'cause they need it way more than we do,

00:32:01 ◼   ► we are going to launch a membership program,

00:32:04 ◼   ► as of right now.

00:32:05 ◼   ► So if you go to ATP.fm/join,

00:32:07 ◼   ► you can join as a member right now.

00:32:10 ◼   ► We've been doing this show for seven years so far,

00:32:13 ◼   ► something like that, a little over seven years.

00:32:16 ◼   ► And we are not gonna stop anytime soon.

00:32:18 ◼   ► We all love doing this show,

00:32:20 ◼   ► and as long as all of you out there keep listening,

00:32:23 ◼   ► we wanna keep making this show.

00:32:25 ◼   ► And the format and style of this show

00:32:28 ◼   ► were established really fast.

00:32:30 ◼   ► Within the first few episodes,

00:32:31 ◼   ► we pretty much established the format

00:32:32 ◼   ► that we've really used, almost unchanged, for seven years.

00:32:37 ◼   ► We have the cold open pre-show,

00:32:39 ◼   ► we have the dial-up sound, follow-up, main topics,

00:32:42 ◼   ► ask ATP if we have it that week,

00:32:43 ◼   ► ending theme, and the after show.

00:32:45 ◼   ► It's a very simple formula.

00:32:46 ◼   ► We've been doing it for a very long time.

00:32:48 ◼   ► - And yet you too still can't follow it, can you?

00:32:50 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:32:52 ◼   ► - Part of the formula is not following the formula.

00:32:56 ◼   ► - It's okay, great.

00:32:58 ◼   ► - And we also very early on established

00:33:00 ◼   ► the business model of the show,

00:33:01 ◼   ► and it hasn't changed really in the entire seven years.

00:33:03 ◼   ► The show is free, it's available everywhere,

00:33:05 ◼   ► it's not exclusive to anybody,

00:33:07 ◼   ► and it's funded, as so many podcasts are, by sponsorships.

00:33:10 ◼   ► We read and ad read three times per episode roughly.

00:33:14 ◼   ► Each read is about two minutes long,

00:33:15 ◼   ► so you get about six minutes of ads in our show

00:33:17 ◼   ► that is usually almost two hours long.

00:33:19 ◼   ► And I think that's one of the best content to ads ratios

00:33:22 ◼   ► of anything I listen to that has ads.

00:33:24 ◼   ► And this all has worked very well,

00:33:27 ◼   ► and continues to work very well for seven years,

00:33:30 ◼   ► and will continue well into the future, we hope.

00:33:32 ◼   ► And unless the sponsorship changes a lot,

00:33:35 ◼   ► and if people stop buying podcast ads,

00:33:38 ◼   ► other than something dramatic like that,

00:33:41 ◼   ► we have no intention of changing any of these basics

00:33:43 ◼   ► for the foreseeable future.

00:33:45 ◼   ► And if you all will forgive me for a moment

00:33:48 ◼   ► of a total lack of modesty, I think we make a great show.

00:33:53 ◼   ► We might make the best tech podcast in the world.

00:33:57 ◼   ► You will never hear me say this any other time,

00:34:00 ◼   ► 'cause it's really hard for me to say this

00:34:02 ◼   ► without freaking out about the lack of modesty here.

00:34:04 ◼   ► But we take a lot of pride in what we do here.

00:34:06 ◼   ► We put a lot of work into it,

00:34:08 ◼   ► and I think we're good at it, and I'm damn proud of it.

00:34:11 ◼   ► So let's get back to the money part for a minute.

00:34:14 ◼   ► We already make good money from this show.

00:34:17 ◼   ► None of us are hurting financially.

00:34:20 ◼   ► The vast majority of that money, though,

00:34:22 ◼   ► only comes from one source.

00:34:24 ◼   ► It comes from those ads.

00:34:26 ◼   ► And we did just finish a merchandise sale,

00:34:28 ◼   ► which we do a couple times a year.

00:34:29 ◼   ► Merchandise is kind of a fun side project.

00:34:31 ◼   ► It doesn't make that much money to us,

00:34:33 ◼   ► because it's so expensive to produce physical items

00:34:35 ◼   ► and ship them around the world and everything.

00:34:37 ◼   ► We make a few bucks off of each thing,

00:34:39 ◼   ► but it's more for kind of fun stuff

00:34:41 ◼   ► to give our fans something cool to wear if they want to,

00:34:43 ◼   ► and make some side income from this show.

00:34:45 ◼   ► But the vast majority of the money

00:34:47 ◼   ► comes from those six minutes of ads

00:34:49 ◼   ► that you hear in each episode.

00:34:51 ◼   ► Our ads usually sell well,

00:34:54 ◼   ► because we have a really good audience for selling ads.

00:34:57 ◼   ► You all out there, we have a pretty good idea

00:34:59 ◼   ► that you're probably mostly a bunch of nerds like us,

00:35:02 ◼   ► and we can sell you things like hosting companies

00:35:06 ◼   ► and domain recognition, and we can sell you

00:35:08 ◼   ► companies and domain registration and things like that,

00:35:10 ◼   ► and it's not that hard to sell ads to our audience, right?

00:35:13 ◼   ► And that's why you hear so many of the same companies

00:35:15 ◼   ► advertising over and over again,

00:35:16 ◼   ► because our ads work well for them.

00:35:18 ◼   ► And it's great for us.

00:35:19 ◼   ► We like them too, because they're good companies

00:35:21 ◼   ► selling good stuff, and we can get paid good money,

00:35:25 ◼   ► but also sleep at night, knowing that we're not

00:35:27 ◼   ► annoying people or ripping you off or making a bad show.

00:35:31 ◼   ► But podcast ads are a bit tricky as a business model.

00:35:36 ◼   ► They are mostly good, but over time,

00:35:39 ◼   ► they do take an increasingly higher amount of work to sell

00:35:43 ◼   ► and to get paid for.

00:35:45 ◼   ► As a lot of that ad buying has shifted,

00:35:47 ◼   ► it used to be that the companies who bought the ads

00:35:50 ◼   ► would come directly to us and deal with us,

00:35:52 ◼   ► and we would send them an invoice

00:35:53 ◼   ► and they would pay it and whatever.

00:35:55 ◼   ► Increasingly, many of the podcast advertisers

00:35:57 ◼   ► that you hear on most shows are buying through ad agencies,

00:36:01 ◼   ► and the ad agencies are also consolidating

00:36:03 ◼   ► and getting bigger and getting acquired and everything.

00:36:05 ◼   ► And so when you're dealing with ad agencies,

00:36:07 ◼   ► it just adds more work to the process.

00:36:09 ◼   ► It adds more cost all around.

00:36:11 ◼   ► We can't always sell every slot.

00:36:13 ◼   ► We can't always sell the ads at the prices that we want.

00:36:17 ◼   ► We often don't get paid for months,

00:36:20 ◼   ► and sometimes we don't get paid for a sponsor at all.

00:36:23 ◼   ► Like if they go out of business, if they go bankrupt,

00:36:25 ◼   ► or they just don't want to pay anybody any forever again.

00:36:27 ◼   ► We do get stiffed on an occasional basis.

00:36:31 ◼   ► And the ad market is also volatile.

00:36:34 ◼   ► It's kind of like the real estate market.

00:36:36 ◼   ► Real estate are like, oh, it's always going to go up.

00:36:38 ◼   ► People always assume the ad market will do well

00:36:40 ◼   ► because it usually does until it doesn't.

00:36:44 ◼   ► And whenever there's a big economic disturbance

00:36:47 ◼   ► like there was with the quarantine,

00:36:49 ◼   ► everybody cuts back on their ad spending immediately,

00:36:52 ◼   ► and it's really hard to sell additional ads.

00:36:55 ◼   ► It's also really hard every January or February or August

00:36:58 ◼   ► or the fifth week in a five-week month.

00:37:00 ◼   ► Like that's just how podcast ads have ups and downs,

00:37:03 ◼   ► and you're very much tied to the economy

00:37:05 ◼   ► or like these random calendar things about budgeting.

00:37:09 ◼   ► So in this quarantine period,

00:37:11 ◼   ► we've had, this was terrible for podcast ad sales.

00:37:14 ◼   ► Some shows were hit worse than others.

00:37:16 ◼   ► We were hit pretty bad.

00:37:17 ◼   ► That's why you've heard so many episodes recently

00:37:19 ◼   ► that have had only like one or two sponsors,

00:37:21 ◼   ► including this one,

00:37:22 ◼   ► instead of the usual three sponsors that we have.

00:37:24 ◼   ► Now, I don't want to paint a picture

00:37:26 ◼   ► that we're like dying here.

00:37:27 ◼   ► The rest of the summer is looking a lot better

00:37:29 ◼   ► for the ad sales, and again, we make good money,

00:37:31 ◼   ► and we'll be fine no matter what you do.

00:37:33 ◼   ► But this was a wake-up call to us

00:37:36 ◼   ► that we wanted some diversification.

00:37:38 ◼   ► You know, we don't want this entire show

00:37:41 ◼   ► that we love so much

00:37:42 ◼   ► to be dependent on the whims of the ad market

00:37:44 ◼   ► when we have this perfectly good audience,

00:37:46 ◼   ► you all sitting out there right now,

00:37:48 ◼   ► many of whom have told us

00:37:50 ◼   ► that you'd be happy to support us directly

00:37:52 ◼   ► if Flexion option became available.

00:37:53 ◼   ► So we are now launching a membership program.

00:37:57 ◼   ► We don't expect this to replace the ads anytime soon

00:38:00 ◼   ► or probably ever.

00:38:02 ◼   ► Honestly, I think we'd be shocked

00:38:03 ◼   ► if we got more than a few percent of the audience

00:38:05 ◼   ► to sign up for it.

00:38:06 ◼   ► And we also don't want to take anything away

00:38:10 ◼   ► from what this show has always been for everyone.

00:38:12 ◼   ► So we don't want to take any existing part of the show

00:38:15 ◼   ► and put it behind a paywall or anything like that.

00:38:17 ◼   ► You know, and maybe in the future,

00:38:19 ◼   ► if ad sales totally tank

00:38:20 ◼   ► and we have to make a bigger push for membership,

00:38:23 ◼   ► maybe we'll have to do stuff like that,

00:38:24 ◼   ► but that probably won't happen.

00:38:26 ◼   ► If you want to support us by becoming a member,

00:38:28 ◼   ► we have one plan, which we'll talk to in a minute.

00:38:30 ◼   ► It's eight bucks a month.

00:38:32 ◼   ► For that, you get your own private RSS feed

00:38:35 ◼   ► and you get a sponsor-free version of the show.

00:38:38 ◼   ► And you can put that feed in whatever podcast app you want.

00:38:40 ◼   ► We made a nice, slick integration,

00:38:42 ◼   ► heavily inspired by Stretecorion Dithering.

00:38:44 ◼   ► Thanks, guys.

00:38:45 ◼   ► We made a nice, slick thing that you can just do it

00:38:49 ◼   ► with a couple of clicks on most apps.

00:38:51 ◼   ► I went back, the last four episodes

00:38:53 ◼   ► have sponsor-free versions in those feeds,

00:38:55 ◼   ► and then all future episodes ongoing

00:38:57 ◼   ► will have sponsor-free versions.

00:38:59 ◼   ► And for now, that's it.

00:39:01 ◼   ► You have the ad-free version of the show,

00:39:02 ◼   ► eight bucks a month.

00:39:04 ◼   ► And I gotta say, I subscribe to a few Patreons

00:39:07 ◼   ► for ad-free podcasts, and I love it.

00:39:10 ◼   ► It's a completely unnecessary luxury.

00:39:13 ◼   ► As I said, we have six minutes of ads a week,

00:39:15 ◼   ► but it's a luxury.

00:39:17 ◼   ► Like most luxuries, it's kind of nice

00:39:19 ◼   ► if you can afford it and if you care about that kind of thing.

00:39:22 ◼   ► We hope to add more stuff later,

00:39:24 ◼   ► maybe some occasional member-exclusive bonus content

00:39:28 ◼   ► that wouldn't fit or make sense

00:39:30 ◼   ► to be a part of this regular show.

00:39:32 ◼   ► And we'd also love to hear your ideas

00:39:34 ◼   ► on what else you would like to see as member benefits.

00:39:36 ◼   ► But for the most part, what we're selling is

00:39:38 ◼   ► supporting us, and you get a sponsor-free feed of the show.

00:39:41 ◼   ► Same show, just without sponsors.

00:39:43 ◼   ► So if you wanna spend eight bucks a month for that,

00:39:46 ◼   ► that's great.

00:39:47 ◼   ► If you don't wanna spend eight bucks a month for that,

00:39:49 ◼   ► that's totally fine, too.

00:39:51 ◼   ► Simply by listening to our show

00:39:53 ◼   ► and hearing the ads in the regular version,

00:39:55 ◼   ► that supports us perfectly well.

00:39:57 ◼   ► So we thank you for that, that's enough.

00:39:59 ◼   ► If you wanna support us differently

00:40:01 ◼   ► by becoming a member for eight bucks a month,

00:40:03 ◼   ► we'd be very thankful for that.

00:40:05 ◼   ► So there it is, thank you for that.

00:40:07 ◼   ► We have a lot more we can talk about, actually,

00:40:09 ◼   ► but the implementation of this,

00:40:11 ◼   ► some of the decision-making and why,

00:40:13 ◼   ► the stack and everything.

00:40:14 ◼   ► - I think we should dig into that.

00:40:16 ◼   ► - We can start by saying that

00:40:18 ◼   ► I've already seen suggestions go by in the chat.

00:40:21 ◼   ► As you might imagine,

00:40:23 ◼   ► when we discussed this amongst the three of us,

00:40:25 ◼   ► we had all sorts of ideas.

00:40:27 ◼   ► We entertained almost everything.

00:40:28 ◼   ► I'm not sure which ones we want to discuss

00:40:30 ◼   ► that we entertain, there's a couple of them

00:40:32 ◼   ► that you might be amused by,

00:40:34 ◼   ► but we're starting intentionally very simple.

00:40:37 ◼   ► And we don't know how this is gonna go.

00:40:39 ◼   ► There's one price, there's one offering,

00:40:41 ◼   ► it's an ad-free show, it's straightforward,

00:40:43 ◼   ► it's easy to understand,

00:40:44 ◼   ► we're not taking anything away from anybody,

00:40:46 ◼   ► nothing is moving behind a paywall.

00:40:48 ◼   ► If you don't pay, you get exactly the same show

00:40:50 ◼   ► you've always gotten.

00:40:51 ◼   ► But we've entertained all possibilities.

00:40:53 ◼   ► And so I think it's important to recognize

00:40:55 ◼   ► that we are intentionally starting simple,

00:40:57 ◼   ► and we're just gonna learn from how it goes.

00:40:59 ◼   ► If nobody signs up,

00:41:00 ◼   ► then maybe we've made the wrong offering, right?

00:41:02 ◼   ► And so we'll figure it out from here.

00:41:05 ◼   ► But hopefully what we're providing

00:41:08 ◼   ► is easy to understand, straightforward,

00:41:10 ◼   ► and something that at least a few people

00:41:12 ◼   ► will be interested in doing.

00:41:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think we should also talk about

00:41:16 ◼   ► a little bit of the machinations with regard to cost,

00:41:19 ◼   ► because I think that even though I am very comfortable

00:41:24 ◼   ► and proud even of where we've landed,

00:41:26 ◼   ► a little sliver of me is disappointed

00:41:28 ◼   ► that we didn't decide to go with

00:41:30 ◼   ► what we were originally thinking.

00:41:32 ◼   ► - It was really funny.

00:41:33 ◼   ► - It was really funny,

00:41:34 ◼   ► but I think it would have come across obnoxious,

00:41:36 ◼   ► which is why we shelved it.

00:41:37 ◼   ► But I think it's one of those things where

00:41:39 ◼   ► it's a bad joke, but I can't help but telling it anyway.

00:41:42 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:41:43 ◼   ► - You're totally that dad who tells the bad joke anyway.

00:41:46 ◼   ► - I am, I am.

00:41:47 ◼   ► - I don't think it's a bad joke.

00:41:48 ◼   ► I was heavily in favor of this plan.

00:41:50 ◼   ► Go ahead, Casey, it was your idea.

00:41:51 ◼   ► - No, I thought it was Marco's idea.

00:41:53 ◼   ► - It might have actually been Tiff's idea.

00:41:56 ◼   ► Tiff and I derived it one night.

00:41:58 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, that's right, it was Tiff.

00:41:59 ◼   ► Marco came and told us that Tiff suggested it.

00:42:01 ◼   ► - That's right, yes, he does.

00:42:02 ◼   ► But anyways, Marco and Tiff had come up with the idea

00:42:06 ◼   ► of doing RAM plans.

00:42:08 ◼   ► So you could do eight bucks a month,

00:42:10 ◼   ► 16 bucks a month, 32 bucks a month, or 64 bucks a month.

00:42:14 ◼   ► Now, of course, what would you be getting

00:42:16 ◼   ► for all of those higher tiered plans?

00:42:17 ◼   ► The same exact crap you're getting for the eight month plan.

00:42:20 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:42:21 ◼   ► You get nothing.

00:42:22 ◼   ► - And we like it 'cause it's a computery,

00:42:24 ◼   ► like the pricing at powers of two and stuff like that.

00:42:27 ◼   ► But practically speaking, a lot of things

00:42:29 ◼   ► that are like Patreons work like that,

00:42:32 ◼   ► where there are tiers and you get,

00:42:34 ◼   ► if you pay more, you get some separate thing or whatever.

00:42:37 ◼   ► And especially for an initial offering,

00:42:39 ◼   ► even though the joke about the RAM things was good,

00:42:42 ◼   ► it just seemed like maybe too confusing

00:42:45 ◼   ► and just let's just start off simple

00:42:46 ◼   ► and see how it goes.

00:42:47 ◼   ► If there are people out there who are super angry

00:42:50 ◼   ► that they're not able to give us more money per month,

00:42:52 ◼   ► let us know and we'll consider higher tiers.

00:42:54 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:42:55 ◼   ► - I don't expect a lot of email on that.

00:42:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, right.

00:42:58 ◼   ► And my thing is like, you should have an other field

00:43:01 ◼   ► where people can just type in the amount they wanna pay.

00:43:04 ◼   ► 'Cause who knows?

00:43:05 ◼   ► I've always been waiting for that one reclusive billionaire

00:43:08 ◼   ► who listens to the show, it's like, all right,

00:43:10 ◼   ► 10 grand a month, here you go.

00:43:11 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:43:12 ◼   ► - I love, K Ham in the chat says,

00:43:14 ◼   ► come on, this is an Apple podcast, we know it's 8/32/64.

00:43:18 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:43:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's probably true.

00:43:21 ◼   ► We're gonna skip over the size

00:43:22 ◼   ► that everyone else would wanna do, yeah.

00:43:23 ◼   ► And we have all sorts of ideas

00:43:24 ◼   ► of other things that we could give,

00:43:25 ◼   ► but in the beginning, we don't, you know,

00:43:28 ◼   ► we don't wanna overwhelm, all right?

00:43:30 ◼   ► So Marco mentioned member specific content.

00:43:33 ◼   ► I always said like, eventually,

00:43:34 ◼   ► some day, years down the line,

00:43:36 ◼   ► we should eventually get me to play Destiny with those two,

00:43:39 ◼   ► but I don't know if they're actually gonna wanna do that.

00:43:41 ◼   ► And that's not a podcast either,

00:43:42 ◼   ► so I don't even know how that would work.

00:43:43 ◼   ► But that's like stretch goal, five years in the future,

00:43:46 ◼   ► potentially, if this is still a thing that we're doing.

00:43:50 ◼   ► But in the short term, most of the obvious ideas

00:43:54 ◼   ► you can think of, we've also been entertaining

00:43:55 ◼   ► and may actually arrive,

00:43:57 ◼   ► but we don't know what those are going to be now,

00:43:59 ◼   ► so this is what we've got to start with.

00:44:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, and ultimately, like, you know,

00:44:04 ◼   ► we know, if you go, you know,

00:44:07 ◼   ► apples to apples comparison,

00:44:08 ◼   ► and like, well, for eight bucks a month,

00:44:10 ◼   ► I could get Disney+ or something,

00:44:11 ◼   ► like, yeah, we know.

00:44:13 ◼   ► But it's closer to like, if you look at, you know,

00:44:16 ◼   ► like, Patreons, basically, are the real good comparison here.

00:44:20 ◼   ► Like, many podcasts and stuff that we like have Patreons.

00:44:23 ◼   ► They usually have tiers at five or $10 a month,

00:44:27 ◼   ► and that's like what I usually pay.

00:44:29 ◼   ► Like, the average of what I pay for the ones I support

00:44:31 ◼   ► is usually $10 a month.

00:44:33 ◼   ► And really, like, you know,

00:44:35 ◼   ► when we were talking about the multiple tiers,

00:44:36 ◼   ► we didn't really want to have some kind of like,

00:44:40 ◼   ► doodads that we give you, or kind of vague promises,

00:44:44 ◼   ► or like, DVD extras, you know, it's like,

00:44:47 ◼   ► a lot of Patreons and Kickstarters and everything,

00:44:50 ◼   ► they think they have to offer stuff to people

00:44:52 ◼   ► to get them to pay for the higher tiers.

00:44:54 ◼   ► But as a supporter, you often just,

00:44:56 ◼   ► you just want to support them.

00:44:57 ◼   ► You don't want their stuff, or you don't want,

00:44:59 ◼   ► you're not ever gonna like, you know,

00:45:00 ◼   ► get their like, free email greeting,

00:45:03 ◼   ► or you know, whatever the thing is.

00:45:05 ◼   ► And then, meanwhile, for the creators,

00:45:06 ◼   ► those things are massively time consuming

00:45:08 ◼   ► and burdensome and often costly to make.

00:45:11 ◼   ► And so, I, as a frequent supporter of this kind of stuff,

00:45:15 ◼   ► I don't want any of that stuff.

00:45:17 ◼   ► Let me pay you the five or 10 bucks a month for your show

00:45:20 ◼   ► and get the ad free feed if you have one.

00:45:21 ◼   ► And that's great, that's all I want.

00:45:23 ◼   ► Like, 'cause the whole point is,

00:45:24 ◼   ► you're paying to support something,

00:45:26 ◼   ► not to buy a low priced product, right?

00:45:29 ◼   ► And so we wanted to avoid anything like that,

00:45:32 ◼   ► because not only is it generally not worth it for creators

00:45:35 ◼   ► and it wouldn't be worth it for us,

00:45:36 ◼   ► but that's not why we want your money.

00:45:39 ◼   ► Like, we don't want you to buy something expecting like,

00:45:43 ◼   ► you know, massive bonus stuff or special access to us,

00:45:47 ◼   ► or you know, stuff like that,

00:45:48 ◼   ► that's kinda hard for creators to actually really give.

00:45:51 ◼   ► We just, if you wanna pay us for an ad free feed

00:45:54 ◼   ► and for extra support if you want to, that's great.

00:45:57 ◼   ► If you don't want to, that's totally cool.

00:45:59 ◼   ► Again, we understand, if you just listen to our show

00:46:01 ◼   ► and hear the ads, you are already supporting us.

00:46:04 ◼   ► You can even skip them sometimes,

00:46:05 ◼   ► just don't tell anybody, it's fine.

00:46:07 ◼   ► Everyone does it, I do it, it's fine.

00:46:09 ◼   ► Like, you are already supporting us by doing that.

00:46:11 ◼   ► So if you wanna support us more,

00:46:12 ◼   ► come be a member, ATP.fm/join.

00:46:16 ◼   ► - There's some interesting tech details of this.

00:46:18 ◼   ► My favorite one, before we start talking about

00:46:20 ◼   ► like the website and everything,

00:46:22 ◼   ► hopefully everyone in the chat has already signed up

00:46:23 ◼   ► so you already know what the website's like, but.

00:46:26 ◼   ► - We already have 71 members.

00:46:27 ◼   ► - Hooray!

00:46:28 ◼   ► - The interesting, the most interesting tech bit here

00:46:32 ◼   ► is to streamline the production of the ad free feed,

00:46:37 ◼   ► Marco, lover of dynamic ad insertion,

00:46:40 ◼   ► has made the reverse of that, which is static ad removal.

00:46:45 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:46:46 ◼   ► The forecast tool that he uses to chapterize the shows

00:46:49 ◼   ► now has a feature where it can export the ad free version.

00:46:52 ◼   ► I don't know exactly how this works, Marco,

00:46:53 ◼   ► you wanna explain it?

00:46:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, sure.

00:46:55 ◼   ► So basically, this is one of the areas,

00:46:59 ◼   ► sorry, this is gonna be a Marco heavy episode.

00:47:01 ◼   ► If the haters out there, I'm sorry,

00:47:02 ◼   ► you might as well stop now.

00:47:04 ◼   ► This is one of the areas where like owning the entire stack

00:47:07 ◼   ► of production tools and like,

00:47:09 ◼   ► this is strategically very good for me.

00:47:11 ◼   ► Back when I made forecast, I believe I said on the show,

00:47:16 ◼   ► like one of the reasons why I wanted to just get it out there

00:47:21 ◼   ► for free and not try to charge like, you know,

00:47:23 ◼   ► 30 or 50 bucks for it and make nobody buy it

00:47:25 ◼   ► is because it had value to me as somebody

00:47:29 ◼   ► in the podcasting space, as both a podcaster

00:47:32 ◼   ► and the owner of Overcast, it had value to me

00:47:35 ◼   ► to have some kind of control over a podcast production tool.

00:47:39 ◼   ► 'Cause then if I wanted to add features to podcast

00:47:42 ◼   ► at the production side, I had a place to do that.

00:47:45 ◼   ► And then I can do things like add corresponding features

00:47:47 ◼   ► to Overcast, you know, give MP3s a certain ability,

00:47:50 ◼   ► like the idea of, I have my floating chapters

00:47:52 ◼   ► where the chapter spec has a provision

00:47:55 ◼   ► where you can have a chapter that does not get listed

00:47:58 ◼   ► in the list of chapters, but just appears

00:48:00 ◼   ► at a certain time range.

00:48:02 ◼   ► Nothing actually reads or writes those,

00:48:04 ◼   ► but the provision was there in the spec,

00:48:06 ◼   ► so I said, hey, I'll implement that.

00:48:08 ◼   ► So I implemented it in forecast and in Overcast.

00:48:10 ◼   ► So now if you have a chapter podcast

00:48:13 ◼   ► and you want to display a chapter that merely shows up

00:48:16 ◼   ► at a certain time range but is not listed

00:48:18 ◼   ► in the table of contents, you can do that and it works.

00:48:21 ◼   ► So you know, there is value to kind of owning

00:48:23 ◼   ► the whole stack here.

00:48:24 ◼   ► In this case, first we built a CMS.

00:48:28 ◼   ► This is one of the big reasons why I built the CMS

00:48:30 ◼   ► when we did it.

00:48:31 ◼   ► - Oh, stop, stop right there.

00:48:32 ◼   ► We did not build a CMS.

00:48:34 ◼   ► I would love to take credit for this,

00:48:36 ◼   ► but two of us complained and moaned about a handful

00:48:38 ◼   ► of design decisions and one of us actually did all the work.

00:48:41 ◼   ► - Complained?

00:48:42 ◼   ► That's important user feedback.

00:48:44 ◼   ► - Yes, I would say two of you were design consultants.

00:48:48 ◼   ► - Fair enough, fair enough.

00:48:49 ◼   ► - Anyway, so first I built a CMS.

00:48:53 ◼   ► We were wanting to do it for a while.

00:48:55 ◼   ► As we said, things like controlling the RSS feed

00:48:57 ◼   ► and how everything works and everything,

00:48:59 ◼   ► we wanted to build it exactly for our needs

00:49:02 ◼   ► in part to support a membership program.

00:49:05 ◼   ► The way I build things is for the long term

00:49:09 ◼   ► and with as much under my control as possible.

00:49:12 ◼   ► So this is things like minimizing external services

00:49:16 ◼   ► is a big part of this.

00:49:18 ◼   ► When a service is done,

00:49:20 ◼   ► when a service is necessary,

00:49:23 ◼   ► I like to choose conservative, stable, long term services,

00:49:28 ◼   ► companies that have been there a long time,

00:49:30 ◼   ► and I like to choose low level building blocks

00:49:34 ◼   ► instead of high level all in one solutions.

00:49:38 ◼   ► What I want to do is own as much of the customer interaction

00:49:42 ◼   ► and the customer billing relationship as possible.

00:49:45 ◼   ► For example, rather than going to Patreon or Memberful,

00:49:49 ◼   ► we built a site on Linode and we host our files on Libsyn

00:49:54 ◼   ► and I built the whole membership payment program on Stripe.

00:49:59 ◼   ► Building a hosting platform or a podcast CDN

00:50:03 ◼   ► and stats service or a payment processor,

00:50:06 ◼   ► which is what those three companies are respectively,

00:50:08 ◼   ► that's no small feat.

00:50:10 ◼   ► It's not worth doing for almost anybody ever.

00:50:12 ◼   ► So that made sense to Outsource.

00:50:14 ◼   ► Those are major problems that are really hard to do.

00:50:18 ◼   ► I'm not going to become my own credit card processor.

00:50:21 ◼   ► But I also don't want to go to somebody like Patreon

00:50:26 ◼   ► where they have this whole big platform

00:50:28 ◼   ► and I would simply be like,

00:50:30 ◼   ► we'd be like one tiny member of it

00:50:33 ◼   ► and we would be at the whims of whatever they decide to do.

00:50:36 ◼   ► Every company seems good for a while if they're good,

00:50:40 ◼   ► but then you don't know what's going to happen

00:50:42 ◼   ► in the future down the road.

00:50:43 ◼   ► Why have a dependency if you don't need it?

00:50:46 ◼   ► So we built the CMS as these low-level building blocks

00:50:50 ◼   ► that you, the customer, either will never see

00:50:53 ◼   ► or might only notice, you'll see a Stripe logo

00:50:56 ◼   ► in the footer of the payment page or something,

00:50:59 ◼   ► but that's it.

00:51:00 ◼   ► These aren't hitting you over the head.

00:51:02 ◼   ► You're not going to Patreon to sign up for us.

00:51:04 ◼   ► You're going to our site

00:51:05 ◼   ► and you're signing up directly on our site.

00:51:06 ◼   ► And we control all that.

00:51:08 ◼   ► We don't have to worry.

00:51:09 ◼   ► If we're going to go to some new podcast subscription

00:51:12 ◼   ► membership management service,

00:51:13 ◼   ► what if they go out of business next year?

00:51:15 ◼   ► We don't have to worry about that kind of stuff.

00:51:17 ◼   ► Stripe is not going anywhere.

00:51:18 ◼   ► Libsyn has been around for like 15, 20 years.

00:51:21 ◼   ► They're not going anywhere either.

00:51:22 ◼   ► Linode is not going anywhere.

00:51:23 ◼   ► These are solid, long-term, low-level building blocks

00:51:26 ◼   ► and that's the way I like to build things.

00:51:28 ◼   ► So that's the CMS part.

00:51:30 ◼   ► And there's lots of interesting stuff about the CMS,

00:51:32 ◼   ► but we'll get to that some other time maybe.

00:51:34 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:51:35 ◼   ► So as John mentioned, here I'm signing myself up

00:51:40 ◼   ► for every week producing two copies of the show,

00:51:43 ◼   ► one with the ads and one without.

00:51:45 ◼   ► What the entire rest of the podcast industry does now

00:51:48 ◼   ► is called dynamic ad insertion.

00:51:50 ◼   ► We've talked about it here and there before.

00:51:51 ◼   ► This is one of the reasons why you can occasionally,

00:51:53 ◼   ► if you're listening to one of the major shows

00:51:55 ◼   ► from a major producer,

00:51:56 ◼   ► you will often hear a recent ad in an old show

00:52:00 ◼   ► or you will hear a local ad for some local car dealership

00:52:04 ◼   ► or some event that's happening in your town,

00:52:06 ◼   ► which sounds kind of creepy the first time you hear it.

00:52:09 ◼   ► And the reason why is they're doing dynamic ad insertion

00:52:11 ◼   ► where they have their MP3 files of the show

00:52:13 ◼   ► and they mark certain timestamps to insert ads at.

00:52:16 ◼   ► And on download, they look at your IP address,

00:52:19 ◼   ► they either do a direct geolocation lookup

00:52:22 ◼   ► and figure out roughly where you are

00:52:24 ◼   ► or they do something even creepier

00:52:26 ◼   ► where they look it up with one of those data broker services

00:52:28 ◼   ► and find out exactly who you are

00:52:30 ◼   ► and then they inject ads that are relevant to you

00:52:33 ◼   ► directly into the show at your download.

00:52:36 ◼   ► As I mentioned earlier,

00:52:37 ◼   ► the MP3 file format is really like hackable.

00:52:40 ◼   ► You can basically splice MP3s freely

00:52:43 ◼   ► and as long as you do it remotely competently,

00:52:46 ◼   ► you can be really sloppy, you can make a lot of mistakes,

00:52:49 ◼   ► as long as you do it remotely competently,

00:52:51 ◼   ► it'll work, it'll play.

00:52:52 ◼   ► And so that's what a lot of big publishers do now.

00:52:55 ◼   ► They dynamically insert ads and anyway,

00:52:59 ◼   ► I actually do kind of the opposite now.

00:53:03 ◼   ► As John said, I am statically deleting ads automatically

00:53:06 ◼   ► where forecast, the tool that I use to encode

00:53:10 ◼   ► the chapter markers and the MP3, which I write,

00:53:13 ◼   ► already had the concept of sponsor chapters.

00:53:17 ◼   ► I like recognizing sponsored chapters by the prefix

00:53:19 ◼   ► and you can edit what the prefix is.

00:53:21 ◼   ► By default, it's what we use on this show, sponsor colon.

00:53:24 ◼   ► And so it recognizes those and it highlights them

00:53:26 ◼   ► in the table view so you can easily see them

00:53:28 ◼   ► and that way, I always check to make sure,

00:53:30 ◼   ► like, are they actually, you know,

00:53:32 ◼   ► do they have the right durations roughly

00:53:33 ◼   ► and then I can make sure they all have links

00:53:35 ◼   ► and everything.

00:53:36 ◼   ► And so it already had this mechanism of recognizing sponsors.

00:53:38 ◼   ► It also had a feature called export air checks

00:53:40 ◼   ► where people who buy ads, a lot of times,

00:53:43 ◼   ► they will want to hear a copy of whatever ad you read

00:53:47 ◼   ► before they pay you.

00:53:49 ◼   ► They're like, give us an air check,

00:53:50 ◼   ► which is just a fancy industry term for the copy of the ad

00:53:53 ◼   ► as you read it from the show.

00:53:54 ◼   ► And so I have a feature in forecast.

00:53:56 ◼   ► I never wanted to do this.

00:53:58 ◼   ► So I have a feature in forecast that says

00:53:59 ◼   ► export sponsor air checks.

00:54:01 ◼   ► And any chapter that has the sponsor prefix that you've set,

00:54:06 ◼   ► it will just export those as separate files

00:54:08 ◼   ► that include only that plus or minus,

00:54:09 ◼   ► or plus, like, you know, a couple seconds on either side,

00:54:11 ◼   ► et cetera.

00:54:13 ◼   ► So I already had MP3 splicing, sponsor recognition,

00:54:17 ◼   ► chapter markers, and I'm already making the show with chapters.

00:54:21 ◼   ► So I built in a feature into forecast

00:54:25 ◼   ► to automate the creation of the sponsor-free versions

00:54:28 ◼   ► by simply having a menu item that will export

00:54:31 ◼   ► a copy of the same file without the sponsor chapters in it.

00:54:35 ◼   ► And as you hear the show,

00:54:36 ◼   ► the way the sponsor-free version sounds,

00:54:38 ◼   ► it's exactly the same show.

00:54:39 ◼   ► The way it sounds is when you hear...

00:54:42 ◼   ► [ Music plays ]

00:54:43 ◼   ► ...and then you hear the sponsor here,

00:54:45 ◼   ► and then you hear the sponsor close music.

00:54:47 ◼   ► [ Music plays ]

00:54:50 ◼   ► Basically, the way the ad-free version works

00:54:52 ◼   ► is you only hear the ad close music,

00:54:55 ◼   ► and then it goes to the next topic.

00:54:56 ◼   ► So you don't hear the ad open or the ad.

00:54:58 ◼   ► You hear just, you know, previous topic...

00:55:00 ◼   ► [ Music plays ]

00:55:04 ◼   ► ...and then the next topic.

00:55:05 ◼   ► To do this in forecast,

00:55:07 ◼   ► I had to first figure out Mac OS app notarization

00:55:11 ◼   ► because the last forecast update predates Catalina.

00:55:14 ◼   ► I also then had to add support for dark mode

00:55:17 ◼   ► because the last update also predated Mojave.

00:55:19 ◼   ► It was in 2018.

00:55:20 ◼   ► -Oh, wow. That's great.

00:55:21 ◼   ► -But the main reason I had to update the forecast app

00:55:23 ◼   ► besides adding this feature was I had to improve the precision

00:55:27 ◼   ► of the chapter markers because it turned out that the way I was...

00:55:30 ◼   ► What Forecast does to achieve its amazing speed

00:55:32 ◼   ► and make your fans spin so fast

00:55:34 ◼   ► is it splits up the file into however many cores you have.

00:55:39 ◼   ► So on my iMac, I have 10 cores.

00:55:41 ◼   ► It's 20 virtual hyper-threading cores.

00:55:42 ◼   ► So it splits the files with 20 parts,

00:55:44 ◼   ► encodes each of those parts separately in parallel,

00:55:47 ◼   ► and then glues them all together at the end.

00:55:49 ◼   ► It turned out the way I was gluing things together

00:55:51 ◼   ► was actually adding one silent frame of audio,

00:55:55 ◼   ► which is something like 11 milliseconds.

00:55:58 ◼   ► It was adding a little bit of audio

00:56:00 ◼   ► at every joint that was silent.

00:56:02 ◼   ► And it split them on silences, so you wouldn't ever notice.

00:56:06 ◼   ► It wouldn't split it in the middle of a word,

00:56:08 ◼   ► so it wouldn't be inserting silence anywhere you would notice.

00:56:11 ◼   ► But it was enough that the chapter markers

00:56:14 ◼   ► would be very slightly off as they were layered in an episode

00:56:18 ◼   ► if you were encoding with a high core count machine,

00:56:21 ◼   ► because you would have all these segments that were joined,

00:56:23 ◼   ► and so a chapter marker might be off by a half a second.

00:56:27 ◼   ► And the problem is, when I'm placing these so precisely

00:56:30 ◼   ► to make sure that the audio flows correctly

00:56:34 ◼   ► when it performs the sponsor removal splice,

00:56:37 ◼   ► and it doesn't have a weirdly long gap

00:56:39 ◼   ► or it doesn't cut off half a word somewhere,

00:56:42 ◼   ► a half a second of imprecision is too much.

00:56:45 ◼   ► So first, and this is all to save me

00:56:48 ◼   ► a small amount of work every week.

00:56:50 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:56:52 ◼   ► First, I had to improve the MP3 joining algorithm in forecast.

00:56:58 ◼   ► When I first wrote it, like four or five years ago,

00:57:02 ◼   ► I had less knowledge of the MP3 file format than I have now.

00:57:05 ◼   ► So I was able to do that just by knowing,

00:57:07 ◼   ► like, oh, that's right, it's this padding frame

00:57:09 ◼   ► that the lame lib is adding, you know, whatever.

00:57:11 ◼   ► So I knew enough to do it correctly this time.

00:57:14 ◼   ► So first I had to, like, figure out the notarization,

00:57:17 ◼   ► add dark mode, update lame, then improve

00:57:20 ◼   ► the precision of chapter markers

00:57:22 ◼   ► by rewriting the way I joined things.

00:57:24 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:57:25 ◼   ► - My goodness.

00:57:26 ◼   ► - But all that, I was able to do it

00:57:28 ◼   ► because I control my production tool.

00:57:31 ◼   ► You know, like, it's a very powerful thing,

00:57:34 ◼   ► like, to have that, and you know, it's like a slow build.

00:57:38 ◼   ► Like, this is how I like to do things

00:57:39 ◼   ► in my entire career, if possible.

00:57:41 ◼   ► You put in a lot of work up front

00:57:43 ◼   ► to do ridiculous things that save time over time.

00:57:46 ◼   ► This is one of the great things about being a programmer.

00:57:48 ◼   ► Like, you can, if you have some annoying task

00:57:52 ◼   ► that you have to do every day or every week

00:57:54 ◼   ► or even once a year, you can write a script

00:57:57 ◼   ► and you can spend three hours writing a script

00:57:59 ◼   ► that's gonna save you one minute a day,

00:58:01 ◼   ► but that's satisfying, and eventually

00:58:03 ◼   ► that might be worth it.

00:58:04 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:58:05 ◼   ► But now I have ad-free versions.

00:58:08 ◼   ► As I said, I only did the last four episodes ad-free.

00:58:11 ◼   ► I didn't go back, like, any further than that.

00:58:13 ◼   ► Then there's also issues with overcast

00:58:15 ◼   ► that were kind of led to this.

00:58:17 ◼   ► I developed a ping API to kind of make

00:58:21 ◼   ► the private feed update speed be as fast

00:58:25 ◼   ► as the public feed, 'cause you know,

00:58:26 ◼   ► what you wouldn't want is if you have a premium feed,

00:58:29 ◼   ► where everybody has their own little feeds,

00:58:31 ◼   ► you know, like a premium offering,

00:58:33 ◼   ► you don't want the public show to go out

00:58:35 ◼   ► and then, and have that be picked up

00:58:37 ◼   ► by all the apps really fast, 'cause it's a popular feed,

00:58:40 ◼   ► and then have to wait like two or three hours

00:58:42 ◼   ► for all the member feeds to pick up the same episode.

00:58:44 ◼   ► Like, that would be not good.

00:58:46 ◼   ► You know, you don't want your members

00:58:47 ◼   ► to have a worse experience than your non-members, right?

00:58:49 ◼   ► You want it to be equal or better.

00:58:51 ◼   ► So I developed an API in overcast,

00:58:53 ◼   ► where every time we publish a new episode,

00:58:56 ◼   ► and this is a public API, it's on the podcaster info page,

00:58:59 ◼   ► the ping API, overcast now has an API

00:59:01 ◼   ► where you can say, all right, the feeds

00:59:03 ◼   ► that begin with this prefix just got updated,

00:59:05 ◼   ► so go crawl them now, instead of waiting, you know,

00:59:07 ◼   ► possibly up to an hour or whatever

00:59:09 ◼   ► that you might otherwise crawl them.

00:59:11 ◼   ► So again, like, we produce a show here,

00:59:14 ◼   ► I control the production tool, I control our biggest client.

00:59:17 ◼   ► It's a good place to be.

00:59:18 ◼   ► I know not everybody can do this,

00:59:20 ◼   ► but when you do this, when you have this kind of stuff,

00:59:22 ◼   ► it's amazingly strategically valuable,

00:59:25 ◼   ► and you can push things forward, you know,

00:59:27 ◼   ► you can make new features or make things better for everybody

00:59:30 ◼   ► just based on your own needs, 'cause you know

00:59:32 ◼   ► what your needs are, 'cause you're also a podcaster.

00:59:34 ◼   ► - It's important to remember, and Mark was talking about

00:59:36 ◼   ► all these things about how he has his production tools

00:59:38 ◼   ► and the app and the CMS and blah, blah, blah.

00:59:40 ◼   ► This is still using all just open standards.

00:59:43 ◼   ► MP3 is an open standard that Marco did not invent.

00:59:45 ◼   ► Chapters are part of the standard that Marco did not invent.

00:59:48 ◼   ► Anybody can make tools that understand these.

00:59:50 ◼   ► Our private and public feeds are just plain old RSS feeds

00:59:53 ◼   ► that any podcast client can play.

00:59:55 ◼   ► Like, we're all within this open ecosystem.

00:59:57 ◼   ► It's just that because it's open,

00:59:59 ◼   ► anybody can make apps that deal with them,

01:00:01 ◼   ► which means that Marco can make apps that deal with them,

01:00:03 ◼   ► and so he has, and same thing with our website.

01:00:05 ◼   ► It's, you know, using PHP. It's on the web.

01:00:07 ◼   ► It's on the website using open standards.

01:00:09 ◼   ► It's just nice to be able to control

01:00:12 ◼   ► as much of that as possible and as feasible.

01:00:15 ◼   ► Related to that, since we control it,

01:00:18 ◼   ► we wanted to make it a good, simple experience.

01:00:20 ◼   ► Hopefully the people in the chat room who are our superfans

01:00:22 ◼   ► have figured out the website

01:00:24 ◼   ► and have not stumbled over anything,

01:00:26 ◼   ► but we spent a surprising amount of time trying to figure out

01:00:28 ◼   ► how to make it, make the experience obvious

01:00:30 ◼   ► and simple enough.

01:00:32 ◼   ► It's just like one or two screens.

01:00:34 ◼   ► Like, it's not complicated. You just go there,

01:00:36 ◼   ► and it's very simple, and that's what we wanted it to be.

01:00:38 ◼   ► But one of the simplifications that I had my heart set

01:00:40 ◼   ► on the beginning that it turns out we couldn't do

01:00:42 ◼   ► was sign in with Apple.

01:00:44 ◼   ► The thing that we talked about on the show,

01:00:46 ◼   ► I'm a big fan of this service.

01:00:48 ◼   ► It's like, oh, if you already trust Apple

01:00:50 ◼   ► and if you're listening to this podcast,

01:00:52 ◼   ► maybe you do already, you can, instead of signing in

01:00:54 ◼   ► with an e-mail address or something,

01:00:56 ◼   ► you can do sign in with Apple, and we wouldn't even know

01:00:58 ◼   ► what your e-mail address was if you didn't want us to.

01:01:00 ◼   ► You'd just be completely anonymous

01:01:02 ◼   ► as far as we're concerned. You wouldn't have to maintain

01:01:04 ◼   ► separate login credentials. It would just be like

01:01:06 ◼   ► your Apple ID that you already have, and that would be

01:01:08 ◼   ► an option for people who wanted to use

01:01:10 ◼   ► sign in with Apple. Unfortunately,

01:01:12 ◼   ► sign in with Apple

01:01:14 ◼   ► strongly suggests that you have

01:01:16 ◼   ► an application associated with

01:01:18 ◼   ► like an iOS application or whatever,

01:01:20 ◼   ► and you can kind of make like a dummy

01:01:22 ◼   ► application just to satisfy

01:01:24 ◼   ► its desires, but

01:01:26 ◼   ► we don't have an app. We have a website.

01:01:28 ◼   ► There is no like ATP app, right?

01:01:30 ◼   ► We didn't want to make one,

01:01:32 ◼   ► so unfortunately, the reason we don't have

01:01:34 ◼   ► sign in with Apple is right now, it's not really

01:01:36 ◼   ► designed to be just a way

01:01:38 ◼   ► for people to log into a website that has no

01:01:40 ◼   ► associated app whatsoever.

01:01:42 ◼   ► We do support Apple Pay through Stripe,

01:01:44 ◼   ► so the payment process is really

01:01:46 ◼   ► easy if you have Apple Pay and you want to use that

01:01:48 ◼   ► and you don't want to have to enter credit card number. You can

01:01:50 ◼   ► be done in like less than 30 seconds,

01:01:52 ◼   ► but for now, no sign in with

01:01:54 ◼   ► Apple. I mean, yeah, like as John said, if we could

01:01:56 ◼   ► just get away with not having your e-mail address

01:01:58 ◼   ► at all, that would be wonderful. You know

01:02:00 ◼   ► I would jump at that. You know, I mean, and believe me,

01:02:02 ◼   ► I thought of various ways I could try to get

01:02:04 ◼   ► away with not having an e-mail address

01:02:06 ◼   ► for anybody, but the problem is

01:02:08 ◼   ► like when you're taking people's money

01:02:10 ◼   ► directly, you need to have

01:02:12 ◼   ► some way of accounting for them so that like

01:02:14 ◼   ► you can, so if they have a problem,

01:02:16 ◼   ► they can e-mail you

01:02:18 ◼   ► and say, "Hey, I have a problem. Here's my e-mail

01:02:20 ◼   ► address. Can you look up my account?" You know, otherwise

01:02:22 ◼   ► it just makes stuff a lot harder if

01:02:24 ◼   ► you don't have that, and our payment processor,

01:02:26 ◼   ► Stripe, collects the e-mail address

01:02:28 ◼   ► anyway, so like we already

01:02:30 ◼   ► are in possession of it anyway

01:02:32 ◼   ► through, you know, indirectly. Like we have access

01:02:34 ◼   ► to it. It's in our data from Stripe,

01:02:36 ◼   ► so at that point, it's like, "Well,

01:02:38 ◼   ► we already, we're already exposed

01:02:40 ◼   ► to it." You know, and like, if

01:02:42 ◼   ► you think about it, like personal information

01:02:44 ◼   ► as like almost like a virus,

01:02:46 ◼   ► like, you know, it's like, well, if it passes

01:02:48 ◼   ► near your hands, like it's on

01:02:50 ◼   ► you, so you have to take the precautions

01:02:52 ◼   ► to protect it, and you know, you have to have

01:02:54 ◼   ► a privacy policy about it and everything. It's like

01:02:56 ◼   ► once you have to do all that stuff anyway,

01:02:58 ◼   ► you might as well also provide a decent login experience

01:03:00 ◼   ► and be able to fix people's

01:03:02 ◼   ► issues when they e-mail you. One

01:03:04 ◼   ► of the problems that we had when

01:03:06 ◼   ► we were thinking about, "Should we add

01:03:08 ◼   ► Sign-In with Apple?" before we realized that, you know, you kind of, that you

01:03:10 ◼   ► really are encouraged, that it really

01:03:12 ◼   ► needs an app, and you know,

01:03:14 ◼   ► when Apple strongly encourages something, it basically

01:03:16 ◼   ► is a rule, not a suggestion.

01:03:18 ◼   ► But,

01:03:20 ◼   ► but, you know, and if it isn't a rule now,

01:03:22 ◼   ► it will become one later, so you might as well treat it like a rule

01:03:24 ◼   ► now. But, one of the

01:03:26 ◼   ► problems with Sign-In with Apple is like,

01:03:28 ◼   ► if you have Sign-In with Apple,

01:03:30 ◼   ► many people will use it

01:03:32 ◼   ► the first time they sign up, or they will not use it

01:03:34 ◼   ► the first time they sign up, and then when they

01:03:36 ◼   ► come back to your site a few months later and want to log in,

01:03:38 ◼   ► they will try

01:03:40 ◼   ► the other thing. If they, you know, they used it the first time,

01:03:42 ◼   ► they will try not using it the second time, because they'll forget

01:03:44 ◼   ► whether they used it the first time or not,

01:03:46 ◼   ► and then they will either

01:03:48 ◼   ► not have, not see their account, and

01:03:50 ◼   ► e-mail you saying, "My account's missing,"

01:03:52 ◼   ► or they will miss, they will

01:03:54 ◼   ► inadvertently create a new

01:03:56 ◼   ► blank account, and then they'll write to you saying,

01:03:58 ◼   ► "All my stuff's gone in my account."

01:04:00 ◼   ► So, you create all sorts of, like, customer

01:04:02 ◼   ► friction and customer support problems

01:04:04 ◼   ► whenever you have multiple ways to log in

01:04:06 ◼   ► to your service or app. So, ideally,

01:04:08 ◼   ► if you could make it just one way,

01:04:10 ◼   ► you totally eliminate,

01:04:12 ◼   ► "How did I sign up for this?" You know,

01:04:14 ◼   ► and you still have issues of people with multiple e-mail

01:04:16 ◼   ► addresses deciding which one they want to use,

01:04:18 ◼   ► but at least you reduce the,

01:04:20 ◼   ► you know, you reduce the number of problems and problem sources

01:04:22 ◼   ► you have by one big one, by just

01:04:24 ◼   ► saying, like, "Okay, you don't have to worry about

01:04:26 ◼   ► whether you log into our site with Twitter

01:04:28 ◼   ► or Facebook or Apple ID or anything. You just

01:04:30 ◼   ► log into our site with an e-mail address,

01:04:32 ◼   ► period." So, there it is.

01:04:34 ◼   ► I don't even have a password. I use one of my

01:04:36 ◼   ► passwordless login systems.

01:04:38 ◼   ► And, well, so

01:04:40 ◼   ► we put a lot of work into the subscribe

01:04:42 ◼   ► flow. Again, special thanks to the

01:04:44 ◼   ► Chatecury and Dithering

01:04:46 ◼   ► podcasts, Ben Thompson and John Gruber.

01:04:48 ◼   ► The system that Ben Thompson has devised

01:04:50 ◼   ► over there for quick

01:04:52 ◼   ► subscribing with, like, the cool QR code and everything,

01:04:54 ◼   ► we ripped it off completely 100%,

01:04:56 ◼   ► with permission, but totally ripped it

01:04:58 ◼   ► off, totally shamelessly, so

01:05:00 ◼   ► thanks to them for

01:05:02 ◼   ► innovating

01:05:04 ◼   ► so that the rest of us can

01:05:06 ◼   ► reap the benefits.

01:05:08 ◼   ► One final nicety that Marco added,

01:05:10 ◼   ► and you can correct me if I'm wrong about

01:05:12 ◼   ► understanding this, but if you sign up as a member

01:05:14 ◼   ► and you get your special member feed and you add it

01:05:16 ◼   ► to your podcast player of choice using our

01:05:18 ◼   ► cool little page that lets you do

01:05:20 ◼   ► that, and then

01:05:22 ◼   ► you unsubscribe, you stop being a

01:05:24 ◼   ► member, you don't

01:05:26 ◼   ► have to change your feed. Is that

01:05:28 ◼   ► correct, Marco? That feed will continue to work

01:05:30 ◼   ► for you, and then if you sign,

01:05:32 ◼   ► it will just become the non-member feed,

01:05:34 ◼   ► right? So, suddenly, you know, you won't have to, like,

01:05:36 ◼   ► delete the feed from your podcast player, then resubscribe

01:05:38 ◼   ► to the public feed, and then delete the public feed.

01:05:40 ◼   ► You can just keep that feed there forever,

01:05:42 ◼   ► and the content of it will change

01:05:44 ◼   ► based on whether you are currently an active member

01:05:46 ◼   ► or not. Yeah, and it'll tell you, like, it'll

01:05:48 ◼   ► prefix the title with "Subscription Expired,"

01:05:50 ◼   ► so, like, it'll be very clear that it

01:05:52 ◼   ► is an expired member subscription, but the content

01:05:54 ◼   ► will still be coming in, and there will be a link in each

01:05:56 ◼   ► post for you to renew if you want to.

01:05:58 ◼   ► Your member feed, as long as you don't delete your

01:06:00 ◼   ► account, your member feed will continue

01:06:02 ◼   ► to work just fine

01:06:04 ◼   ► as a copy of the public feed.

01:06:06 ◼   ► And then as soon as you want to resubscribe in the future,

01:06:08 ◼   ► member stuff all shows up again. Yeah, and

01:06:10 ◼   ► you can, of course, delete the feed and resubscribe to the public one, too,

01:06:12 ◼   ► just saying this is a nice city, so you don't

01:06:14 ◼   ► end up with this weird dead feed that doesn't

01:06:16 ◼   ► work anymore. One thing that may

01:06:18 ◼   ► not be clear, or at least wasn't clear to me about

01:06:20 ◼   ► your membership that you're paying for,

01:06:22 ◼   ► it's not calendar month, so if you

01:06:24 ◼   ► become a member now, you're not, like, missing out

01:06:26 ◼   ► on, like, the first couple of shows in June.

01:06:28 ◼   ► It's based on your

01:06:30 ◼   ► sign-up date, right? Yeah, it's

01:06:32 ◼   ► simply, you know, time range from now.

01:06:34 ◼   ► You're buying, you know, a month from

01:06:36 ◼   ► now, and so, and it renews

01:06:38 ◼   ► next month. And you can see it's, like,

01:06:40 ◼   ► man, Stripe is so good

01:06:42 ◼   ► these days. I mean, so I've built,

01:06:44 ◼   ► I've used Stripe a couple times over the years.

01:06:46 ◼   ► It's always been great.

01:06:48 ◼   ► It's always been, like, great company,

01:06:50 ◼   ► super amazing API,

01:06:52 ◼   ► extremely easy to use, like,

01:06:54 ◼   ► breath of fresh air compared to the old days of PayPal.

01:06:56 ◼   ► But, now,

01:06:58 ◼   ► it's even better. Like, if you can

01:07:00 ◼   ► believe, like, if you are building anything with

01:07:02 ◼   ► payments, I strongly encourage

01:07:04 ◼   ► you to use Stripe,

01:07:06 ◼   ► because it's so good.

01:07:08 ◼   ► Stripe, not a sponsor of this episode. Yeah.

01:07:10 ◼   ► You'd be amazed how

01:07:12 ◼   ► much functionality we

01:07:14 ◼   ► got from them for

01:07:16 ◼   ► almost no effort at all. Like,

01:07:18 ◼   ► the Stripe integration took me two days

01:07:20 ◼   ► for the entire payment

01:07:22 ◼   ► system. That is,

01:07:24 ◼   ► subscribing, including Apple Pay,

01:07:26 ◼   ► including support for

01:07:28 ◼   ► the cards that use 3D Secure that need, like,

01:07:30 ◼   ► you know, send you a text message to verify the

01:07:32 ◼   ► charge before it actually goes through. Like, all that stuff

01:07:34 ◼   ► is supported. And a whole billing portal, where

01:07:36 ◼   ► you can go in and, like, change your credit card number

01:07:38 ◼   ► if it's about to expire. It'll email you a week

01:07:40 ◼   ► ahead of time of expiration and stuff like that.

01:07:42 ◼   ► You can see your billing history.

01:07:44 ◼   ► All that, and it

01:07:46 ◼   ► took me two days to build the entire

01:07:48 ◼   ► integration. Again, Stripe has always been good,

01:07:50 ◼   ► but it's even better now.

01:07:52 ◼   ► So, if you're building something that

01:07:54 ◼   ► requires credit cards, if you're thinking about it,

01:07:56 ◼   ► you'd be shocked how easy it is. So, yeah.

01:07:58 ◼   ► Thank you to Stripe for being awesome.

01:08:00 ◼   ► There were a lot of design decisions and things

01:08:02 ◼   ► that went into this, and I don't think we need to belabor it anymore

01:08:04 ◼   ► right now, but we might visit it in the future,

01:08:06 ◼   ► or as we make other choices, we might

01:08:08 ◼   ► revisit those in the future. But, I

01:08:10 ◼   ► do want to thank Marco one more time for putting

01:08:12 ◼   ► in the overwhelming amount of work on doing this.

01:08:14 ◼   ► And if you want to get Marco a birthday present,

01:08:16 ◼   ► you can donate to the three

01:08:18 ◼   ► organizations we've already talked about,

01:08:20 ◼   ► and/or you can join the

01:08:22 ◼   ► ATP membership program.

01:08:24 ◼   ► And. And would be better.

01:08:26 ◼   ► Let's do "and." I'd rather, if you're gonna only give

01:08:28 ◼   ► $8 a month to somebody, don't give it to me. Give it to

01:08:30 ◼   ► one of them.

01:08:32 ◼   ► We are sponsored this week by Notion.

01:08:34 ◼   ► The all-in-one tool for taking

01:08:36 ◼   ► notes, managing projects,

01:08:38 ◼   ► sharing documents, and collaborating with your

01:08:40 ◼   ► team seamlessly.

01:08:42 ◼   ► When your work is scattered across different tools,

01:08:44 ◼   ► different browser tabs, your brain feels

01:08:46 ◼   ► scattered, too. You need to simplify.

01:08:48 ◼   ► Notion can do all those

01:08:50 ◼   ► jobs, letting you consolidate

01:08:52 ◼   ► your tools. All the work tools

01:08:54 ◼   ► you use every day with Notion

01:08:56 ◼   ► in one place. And Notion

01:08:58 ◼   ► is quick to set up and fun to use.

01:09:00 ◼   ► They make it easy to work on your own

01:09:02 ◼   ► or with your teammates in real time

01:09:04 ◼   ► or around the clock, no matter where you

01:09:06 ◼   ► are in the world. Notion keeps

01:09:08 ◼   ► information centralized so you can find

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01:10:06 ◼   ► [Music]

01:10:08 ◼   ► [Music]

01:10:10 ◼   ► All right, we have one big topic we need to talk

01:10:12 ◼   ► about, which is going to make me friggin' miserable.

01:10:14 ◼   ► Bloomberg says that the ARM

01:10:16 ◼   ► transition is happening in, what,

01:10:18 ◼   ► a week and a half, two weeks, something like that?

01:10:20 ◼   ► It's happening at WWDC, or at least it will be announced

01:10:22 ◼   ► anyway at WWDC.

01:10:24 ◼   ► And this would only be

01:10:26 ◼   ► depressing if you had a brand new laptop

01:10:28 ◼   ► arriving tomorrow, which I definitely

01:10:30 ◼   ► don't. Definitely not.

01:10:32 ◼   ► I'm kind of amazed at how much mileage

01:10:34 ◼   ► that Bloomberg has gotten,

01:10:36 ◼   ► slash, Germin have gotten out of essentially the same

01:10:38 ◼   ► story. Like, I think we've had

01:10:40 ◼   ► basically the same story as a topic

01:10:42 ◼   ► on this podcast. Not just

01:10:44 ◼   ► ARM MAX, but I'm saying this

01:10:46 ◼   ► specific story with these facts

01:10:48 ◼   ► in this publication

01:10:50 ◼   ► on this show, like, three times, right?

01:10:52 ◼   ► So kudos for, you know, getting the page

01:10:54 ◼   ► views. I don't think there's much new information, except

01:10:56 ◼   ► they're becoming more and more insistent that no,

01:10:58 ◼   ► really, WWDC,

01:11:00 ◼   ► which is in a couple of weeks as we record this,

01:11:02 ◼   ► this is going to be the coming out

01:11:04 ◼   ► party for ARM on

01:11:06 ◼   ► the Mac. They don't,

01:11:08 ◼   ► you know, with the typical hedging, they always say, "As

01:11:10 ◼   ► early as," yeah, well, it could happen as early

01:11:12 ◼   ► as any point in the future. That's kind of,

01:11:14 ◼   ► you know, anyway. So

01:11:16 ◼   ► they're hedging, and they're like, "Oh, there's not going to be

01:11:18 ◼   ► hardware available," but of course you have to announce

01:11:20 ◼   ► the transition before you have the hardware for most cases,

01:11:22 ◼   ► because if you just released ARM MAX, nothing

01:11:24 ◼   ► would run on them, and, you know,

01:11:26 ◼   ► all this leads us to discuss

01:11:28 ◼   ► all the same questions. Now, the fact that they, why

01:11:30 ◼   ► are we talking about it for a third time, then? If it's like

01:11:32 ◼   ► there's not really any new facts, and it's just, you know,

01:11:34 ◼   ► being more insistent on the dates that they've said many

01:11:36 ◼   ► months ago, I think as they

01:11:38 ◼   ► become more insistent, and as the date comes closer,

01:11:40 ◼   ► I start to believe more,

01:11:42 ◼   ► because it's like, well, they're still insisting,

01:11:44 ◼   ► and it's getting closer to the day. We all know, kind of, like,

01:11:46 ◼   ► you know, the leaks get more

01:11:48 ◼   ► solid the closer you get to the date of when they're

01:11:50 ◼   ► supposed to happen, and

01:11:52 ◼   ► practically speaking, if

01:11:54 ◼   ► the long-term rumors of, like, ARM MAX in

01:11:56 ◼   ► 2021 are true,

01:11:58 ◼   ► you kind of have to tell people about it

01:12:00 ◼   ► before you try to sell them a bunch of

01:12:02 ◼   ► hardware that doesn't run any apps, right? So

01:12:04 ◼   ► WWDC is the time

01:12:06 ◼   ► you would tell them, and you

01:12:08 ◼   ► probably don't want to wait until WWDC

01:12:10 ◼   ► 2021 if you're planning on having any

01:12:12 ◼   ► selling consumers max in 2021.

01:12:14 ◼   ► That's too late, so

01:12:16 ◼   ► unless, like so many other things

01:12:18 ◼   ► in this world that have been, you know, delayed

01:12:20 ◼   ► by coronavirus, if that, if coronavirus

01:12:22 ◼   ► hasn't thrown a giant monkey wrench into their

01:12:24 ◼   ► plans, I'm starting to

01:12:26 ◼   ► believe that this upcoming WWDC

01:12:28 ◼   ► is going to be the,

01:12:30 ◼   ► you know, the move away from

01:12:32 ◼   ► x86, move away from Intel. I don't even know

01:12:34 ◼   ► how to phrase it. We keep saying ARM MAX, but

01:12:36 ◼   ► as we've discussed in many past shows, oh, could be anything,

01:12:38 ◼   ► could be any kind of Apple processor, could be RISC-V,

01:12:40 ◼   ► could be AMD, could be,

01:12:42 ◼   ► anyway, ARM MAX, we're pretty sure

01:12:44 ◼   ► that's what's coming, that's what Bloomberg says.

01:12:46 ◼   ► And WWDC could be the date.

01:12:48 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm

01:12:50 ◼   ► very much looking forward to this. I mean, we've been talking

01:12:52 ◼   ► about it for years now as the thing that

01:12:54 ◼   ► we assumed was probably going to happen

01:12:56 ◼   ► someday, and it has

01:12:58 ◼   ► kind of felt over the last year or so

01:13:00 ◼   ► like, it seems like it's getting close.

01:13:02 ◼   ► If it finally is happening,

01:13:04 ◼   ► I'm so excited. And even though,

01:13:06 ◼   ► you know, again, we've talked about this

01:13:08 ◼   ► so many times, there will

01:13:10 ◼   ► be losses along the way, but I think

01:13:12 ◼   ► we've already hit most of them.

01:13:14 ◼   ► It's not a coincidence

01:13:16 ◼   ► that Mac OS in the last couple of years

01:13:18 ◼   ► has dropped support outright

01:13:20 ◼   ► or deprecated major

01:13:22 ◼   ► functionality that is

01:13:24 ◼   ► considered like old or legacy that you

01:13:26 ◼   ► think might be hard to support in an ARM transition.

01:13:28 ◼   ► So things like 32-bit support,

01:13:30 ◼   ► OpenGL, you know, like

01:13:32 ◼   ► major things that have

01:13:34 ◼   ► cost us a lot of apps, especially 32-bit has

01:13:36 ◼   ► caused a lot of apps to be killed, basically.

01:13:38 ◼   ► You know, a lot of the old

01:13:40 ◼   ► APIs that were 32-bit only, you know,

01:13:42 ◼   ► those aren't coming over. Why do

01:13:44 ◼   ► you think Apple's been doing all this house cleaning on Mac OS?

01:13:46 ◼   ► It's not just

01:13:48 ◼   ► for fun. It's

01:13:50 ◼   ► clearly in preparation for this transition.

01:13:52 ◼   ► So it does seem,

01:13:54 ◼   ► it seemed for a while that it's imminent. That seems

01:13:56 ◼   ► more likely than ever now, and especially

01:13:58 ◼   ► when backed up with this pretty firm

01:14:00 ◼   ► report. I'm very excited

01:14:02 ◼   ► to see this. I cannot wait.

01:14:04 ◼   ► I do think we are probably going to lose

01:14:06 ◼   ► Bootcamp,

01:14:08 ◼   ► any kind of x86 emulation

01:14:10 ◼   ► I think is out the window,

01:14:12 ◼   ► and a lot of PC hardware

01:14:14 ◼   ► compatibility is probably going to be lost as well.

01:14:16 ◼   ► But I think that

01:14:18 ◼   ► will be worth it in the end.

01:14:20 ◼   ► I'm trying to remember what was the presentation

01:14:22 ◼   ► where

01:14:24 ◼   ► was it the most recent

01:14:26 ◼   ► WWDC? There was some recent Apple presentation.

01:14:28 ◼   ► I remember talking on

01:14:30 ◼   ► the show about how

01:14:32 ◼   ► the whole presentation was like

01:14:34 ◼   ► a giant sub-tweet.

01:14:36 ◼   ► I remember saying that the presentation

01:14:38 ◼   ► was basically screaming, "We are making our

01:14:40 ◼   ► Macs!"

01:14:42 ◼   ► That's exactly what I said in the

01:14:44 ◼   ► past episode of ATB. I can't remember the episode number.

01:14:46 ◼   ► But the presentation was,

01:14:48 ◼   ► "Here at Apple, we have a bunch of new

01:14:50 ◼   ► products, and this one has an

01:14:52 ◼   ► A-whatever processor in it.

01:14:54 ◼   ► And let me tell you how great those A-whatever processors

01:14:56 ◼   ► are. And it's got this, and it's got that." And they just

01:14:58 ◼   ► went into how great they are at making these system-mounted

01:15:00 ◼   ► chips. It was obviously an iOS device or whatever.

01:15:02 ◼   ► They were so into it, and they were

01:15:04 ◼   ► just telling you about all this cool stuff.

01:15:06 ◼   ► And either just before or just

01:15:08 ◼   ► after that, they had talked about a Mac product,

01:15:10 ◼   ► and it said almost nothing about the CPUs.

01:15:12 ◼   ► Because A) we knew that

01:15:14 ◼   ► they were not remarkable, and B)

01:15:16 ◼   ► everything that they were saying

01:15:18 ◼   ► about the A-series, you knew if you knew the

01:15:20 ◼   ► tech stuff, it was like, "Not true

01:15:22 ◼   ► of the Intel CPU and the other

01:15:24 ◼   ► thing." It's not super power efficient.

01:15:26 ◼   ► It's not made on a new process size.

01:15:28 ◼   ► It doesn't have a neural engine. It's GPU isn't

01:15:30 ◼   ► way better. It doesn't have more cores.

01:15:32 ◼   ► It has none of that stuff.

01:15:34 ◼   ► And of course, Apple's not going to say this in the presentation. It costs

01:15:36 ◼   ► Apple hundreds of dollars to Intel,

01:15:38 ◼   ► whereas this one costs them less

01:15:40 ◼   ► than $100 or whatever.

01:15:42 ◼   ► The whole presentation,

01:15:44 ◼   ► the subtext was

01:15:46 ◼   ► "Apple makes great CPUs.

01:15:48 ◼   ► Our CPUs are great in ways that

01:15:50 ◼   ► Intel CPUs are not." But they didn't say that.

01:15:52 ◼   ► That wasn't the time for that presentation.

01:15:54 ◼   ► When I saw that presentation, I'm like, "Oh, it's

01:15:56 ◼   ► on now. It's clear that they are

01:15:58 ◼   ► just... There's no turning

01:16:00 ◼   ► back now. This is the tech

01:16:02 ◼   ► strategy. Everybody knows it, and their

01:16:04 ◼   ► presentations have been leading

01:16:06 ◼   ► up to it." So when they do come on stage and

01:16:08 ◼   ► present this, this is

01:16:10 ◼   ► the thing I'm thinking about as we come closer to

01:16:12 ◼   ► WWC. How do they position this?

01:16:14 ◼   ► We talked about this when we were talking about it years ago. It's like, "Oh, do they

01:16:16 ◼   ► just use ARM for the low-end laptops?

01:16:18 ◼   ► Do they keep the big ones

01:16:20 ◼   ► x86? Do they try to make a 64-core

01:16:22 ◼   ► processor for a new ARM-based

01:16:24 ◼   ► Mac Pro?" This is back when we didn't even know

01:16:26 ◼   ► they were going to make a Mac Pro.