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88: Standing on Opposite Sides of the Gym

 

00:00:00   (laughing)

00:00:02   - Is this a show?

00:00:03   Is this what people tune in for?

00:00:05   - Well, it doesn't matter 'cause they're here anyway.

00:00:06   So this is what they're getting

00:00:08   regardless of whether this was what they tuned in for.

00:00:12   - Oh goodness.

00:00:13   All right, let's do some follow up.

00:00:14   (upbeat music)

00:00:16   Why don't we talk about how my life took a turn

00:00:20   for the better a day or two ago

00:00:22   and no, we did not have Sprout yet.

00:00:23   Sprout is still not born.

00:00:26   But I saw a tweet from our mutual friend Michael Jurowitz, and he said something that I did

00:00:34   not realize.

00:00:35   What he said was that for you to use—I keep calling it SMS Relay.

00:00:40   I'm not sure if that's a blessed term or not.

00:00:44   But for you to use SMS Relay on iOS 8 and Yosemite, it actually does not require Bluetooth

00:00:50   Low Energy like a lot of other new continuity things do.

00:00:54   It instead just requires both devices to be on an active network.

00:01:01   And I haven't done any testing to determine exactly what that is, but I've heard rumblings

00:01:07   that basically as long as your phone is logged into your iCloud account and connected to

00:01:12   the internet some way, somehow, and the computer that you're using is connected to that same

00:01:18   iCloud account and on the internet some way, somehow, then apparently you can send text

00:01:24   messages by way of your phone, which is amazing because I didn't think that that was a possibility

00:01:31   without Bluetooth Low Energy. Yeah, this tweet was a nice summary to try to fit into a single tweet,

00:01:37   all the different requirements for the different continuity related features. We'll put a link to

00:01:40   the tweet in the show notes, but the summary is handoff tethering and airdrop needs Bluetooth

00:01:45   Low Energy. SMS, they just both need network connections and the phone calling stuff,

00:01:50   They may need network connections and I need to be on the same network

00:01:52   Now this is compressed into a tweet

00:01:55   So if there are technical nuances that didn't fit in the tweet don't blame jury blame us

00:01:59   We're just relaying it but it's it's a reasonable summary this this type of information is difficult to

00:02:04   Convey to people because even if you tell them for example that handoff uses Bluetooth low energy to discover things

00:02:10   Nobody knows if their Mac has Bluetooth low energy. Nobody knows what Bluetooth low energy is

00:02:13   So they see these features or even you know

00:02:16   read about them in my review and then are disappointed that they can't do it and you know,

00:02:20   they don't know if they have something called BTLE. So it's

00:02:22   it's just a shame really because I don't think Apple needs to communicate these technical

00:02:28   nuances but the bottom line is that if your machine doesn't have Bluetooth low energy,

00:02:31   you're not going to be scanning with regular Bluetooth at full energy all the time on the

00:02:35   phone and the Mac to be able to do handoff. You know, the feature for the feature to be feasible

00:02:40   relies on low energy so and you know the SMS thing that makes sense that they can coordinate

00:02:46   through all through the server.

00:02:47   The phone, I still don't quite understand

00:02:49   the technical details of why they need to be

00:02:50   on the same network, why, you know,

00:02:53   they don't apparently need to be in Bluetooth range.

00:02:55   I know you don't need to pair them.

00:02:58   But anyway, it's a magical, mystical voodoo,

00:03:00   and all these weird technical details will be moot

00:03:03   in five years when everybody's computers has all this stuff.

00:03:06   But for now, it's a little bit weird.

00:03:07   If you've got an older Mac,

00:03:08   you may not get all these things.

00:03:10   - Right, and that's why I was so excited,

00:03:11   because with the exception of Aaron's MacBook Air,

00:03:14   which is what I used to record,

00:03:16   The newest Mac in the house is a late 2011

00:03:19   high-res Andy Glare MacBook Pro,

00:03:20   which I've talked about numerous times on the show,

00:03:22   and that is pre-Bluetooth Low Energy.

00:03:24   And so, like I'd said before, I was devastated,

00:03:27   well, that's a strong word, but I was really sad

00:03:28   that I wasn't gonna be able to use

00:03:30   a lot of this continuity stuff.

00:03:32   And as it turns out, I haven't tried the phone thing,

00:03:35   although that should work, but I have absolutely tried

00:03:37   the SMS relay, and it's really awesome.

00:03:40   I'm really sad to miss AirDrop.

00:03:44   I am most upset about of the things I'm missing

00:03:47   because I can't tether with my phone

00:03:49   and because I'm on an unlimited plan from AT&T still

00:03:52   and handoff, eh, I don't use Apple Mail, I use Airmail,

00:03:56   so eh, but I was really, really excited to try

00:04:01   or to see that SMS relay works.

00:04:03   - Can we break apart that tethering thing for a second?

00:04:06   How much data per month do you typically use?

00:04:08   - Oh, this is where you basically back me into realizing

00:04:12   that there is no need for me to hold on

00:04:13   the unlimited plan. That is a known issue and I don't really know why I haven't

00:04:22   gotten rid of it yet, but I haven't. And there is no reasonable reason for me to still

00:04:28   have it. And to answer your question, I haven't looked in a while, but I guess I use between

00:04:32   2 and 3 gigs a month. Erin is still on a 200 megabyte a month plan and I keep begging her

00:04:38   to let me get her more. And she doesn't really use it, and especially now that she's

00:04:44   at home almost all the time, doesn't really need more than that. And so there's almost

00:04:51   no need for us to upgrade. Now I haven't crunched the numbers, but my limited understanding

00:04:56   is it would probably actually be cheaper for us to ditch the unlimited plan and just get

00:05:00   on a share plan, but whatever.

00:05:02   Yeah, Tiff and I did that recently. She was still on unlimited just because she never

00:05:07   had any reason to change it. I had given it up for tethering long ago, but yeah, we found

00:05:12   I think combined we use something like two gigs a month on average and it doesn't really

00:05:17   change that much month to month. So I would venture a guess that if you had tethering,

00:05:24   not only would you probably be paying less per month with a combined plan, but I would

00:05:28   guess that whatever benefit to your life, the unlimited data sounds like it might eventually

00:05:33   possibly someday maybe provide, and that is if AT&T doesn't throttle you too much in the

00:05:37   meantime, which they do because it's not really unlimited anymore. Whatever benefit that's

00:05:42   providing to you, I bet the benefit of going to a tethering plan would be greater.

00:05:46   I think you're right. And as you just pointed out and P-tier in the chat also pointed out,

00:05:53   one time I got to either three or four gigs, I think it was three, and AT&T definitely

00:05:59   sent me a nasty gram saying, "Yeah, we're going to slow everything down until the end

00:06:03   of the month. Have fun with that."

00:06:04   Yeah, so you're basically not getting unlimited data anyway.

00:06:08   Agreed.

00:06:09   So you might as well get the benefits of getting rid of that plan and getting the new features.

00:06:13   Yeah, I know you're right. It's one of those things that momentum is keeping me going in

00:06:17   this probably silly, wasteful direction. So, meh, whatever.

00:06:21   So John, you were saying about Bluetooth Low Energy? Is he doing that?

00:06:24   Let's talk about a airdrop right the lack of airdrop is

00:06:28   somewhat made less painful between iOS and

00:06:31   Mac devices is made less painful if you have an older Mac doesn't support it by iOS 8 extensions now

00:06:37   There are so many more ways from any app with a reasonable

00:06:40   iOS 8

00:06:42   extension support to you know to use a share extension to press push your files from one place to the other whether you I

00:06:48   Mean I guess you could always do it into a lot of apps supported Dropbox

00:06:50   You go continue to do that

00:06:51   but also things like I mean

00:06:53   I heard people even using like transmit for iOS to transfer files back and forth like

00:06:57   You're not as trapped in individual iOS apps now as you used to be like you're not reliant on

00:07:01   Apple's built-in airdrop to be the way that you quickly transfer any content from

00:07:07   From your iOS device to your Mac. So that's nice

00:07:10   Yeah, I think also

00:07:13   iCloud Drive I think is gonna be a bigger deal than we all think it it is like I think we're probably

00:07:20   estimating it because bringing a Dropbox-like storage model

00:07:24   to any iOS app that wants it is really nice.

00:07:28   And I think that's gonna have wide reaching ramifications

00:07:32   if it works at all.

00:07:34   And Jon, you seem to think that,

00:07:35   I was actually paying a lot of attention

00:07:37   during that part of your review.

00:07:38   I mean, I pay attention to the whole thing, of course,

00:07:40   but in particular, the iCloud Drive part,

00:07:43   because I'm very interested in,

00:07:45   I'm really hoping that works very well,

00:07:49   because it can really help iOS so much.

00:07:53   - Yeah, the nice thing is that it's on reasonably level

00:07:57   footing with all those other services that are like that,

00:08:00   including Dropbox or Google Drive

00:08:03   or what is Microsoft's thing called, OneDrive.

00:08:07   Anybody can, once you're on that sheet that comes up

00:08:10   with your sharing things,

00:08:11   anybody can have something in there.

00:08:13   So it's good that it's like if iCloud Drive flakes out

00:08:15   or ends up being unreliable or something,

00:08:17   you have so many other options.

00:08:18   And reliability is, speaking of things in the review,

00:08:20   it's so hard to gauge because anything,

00:08:24   when I'm reviewing the OS,

00:08:25   anything that relies on a server-side component,

00:08:29   it doesn't matter what bits Apple sends me

00:08:31   in a developer build of the OS.

00:08:32   If there's a server-side component

00:08:34   that's either not yet ready or not turned on

00:08:36   or completely buggy,

00:08:37   you can't judge the feature based on that at all.

00:08:40   And even when you get what you think is the final build,

00:08:43   if Apple servers are still being wonky,

00:08:45   it doesn't mean that the bits in the final build are bad.

00:08:48   it could just mean that the servers are still wonky

00:08:50   and that the day of release,

00:08:51   they push out the last build of the server software

00:08:55   and suddenly things work nicely.

00:08:57   For iCloud Drive, in the early betas,

00:09:00   either it didn't work at all or it was totally buggy,

00:09:01   but that doesn't mean anything

00:09:02   because they're still working on it at that point.

00:09:04   And then once it did start working,

00:09:06   I had like this series of tests that I went through

00:09:09   to sort of gauge reliability of transferring large files,

00:09:12   moving files, deleting files,

00:09:13   putting folder with a bunch of little files in it

00:09:15   to try to run it through its paces.

00:09:17   And I rewrote that iCloud Drive section many times

00:09:20   because as it kept getting better,

00:09:23   like I thought, okay, this must be how it's going to work.

00:09:25   And it's not that great.

00:09:26   And, you know, it's taking X number of seconds

00:09:28   for my changes to appear on two different Macs.

00:09:30   But it just got better and better to the point

00:09:31   where by the time I wrote the final version

00:09:33   of that section, it's like,

00:09:35   it more or less works without any huge delays.

00:09:37   The UI issues, I think, are still a possible problem.

00:09:41   Especially now, did you see that Dropbox has a version out

00:09:44   uses the new file synchronization status extensions, I'm assuming, because it looks totally different.

00:09:50   How can you tell just because they're not over the actual file or folder anymore?

00:09:53   Yeah, they're not bad. I'm assuming that's using it. I just noticed it today because

00:09:57   I upgraded my work Mac to Yosemite last night. But yeah, the UI issues and reliability of the

00:10:06   server part, not the client part, or I think where the rubber really hits the road with iCloud drive.

00:10:11   because I mean there's more than one client is that there's all the the access to it from various apps on iOS and from you know,

00:10:16   the

00:10:17   Various extensions on iOS to get to this and then of course is the finder is another client and there's a web client

00:10:23   The one part that we all worry about Apple getting right is a server part

00:10:27   we need to be a reliable fast up all the time and

00:10:31   because it's kind of like Dropbox imagine if you had Dropbox and you had a bunch of little icons and

00:10:37   and they didn't have little green checks on them.

00:10:40   They just had like the little, you know,

00:10:41   spinny blue I'm trying to update thing.

00:10:44   And it never went green.

00:10:45   Like, what do you do about it?

00:10:46   You quit Dropbox and relaunch it.

00:10:48   You delete Dropbox and reinstall it.

00:10:49   It's, you know, never goes green.

00:10:51   Like that's the, that's the thing with the, you know,

00:10:53   it doesn't happen with Dropbox,

00:10:55   but if it did, what is your recourse?

00:10:56   With all these cloud services,

00:10:58   especially even Dropbox doesn't have a like

00:11:01   four synchronized disk file now, please thing.

00:11:04   It's just supposed to work, right?

00:11:05   And when it doesn't, you're like,

00:11:06   I don't know what I can do.

00:11:07   And so that's what I'm always worried about with iCloud Drive.

00:11:10   It's so young now, I don't know, like,

00:11:11   am I going to drag a file into it on my Mac at work

00:11:15   and come home and see that the file's not there?

00:11:17   And I just wait and stare at the folder

00:11:19   and wait for the file to appear?

00:11:20   Like, what do I do then?

00:11:21   I don't know.

00:11:22   There's not even anything to uninstall.

00:11:23   And I guess I could disable and re-enable iCloud Drive,

00:11:26   but so far so good.

00:11:27   But I have to admit that unless there's some compelling

00:11:30   reason for me to leave Dropbox,

00:11:31   which I've been using for a long time

00:11:33   and my habits are all built on,

00:11:34   I'm gonna keep using Dropbox.

00:11:36   Yeah, I tend to agree.

00:11:39   I don't even...

00:11:40   I enabled iCloud Drive.

00:11:42   I've not ever...

00:11:44   This is now the first time I've ever clicked on the iCloud Drive item in my Finder sidebar.

00:11:49   And turns out there's stuff in there.

00:11:51   Who knew?

00:11:53   Does Dropbox on iOS offer that file picker extension yet?

00:11:59   So it goes in the same dialog as iCloud Drive?

00:12:01   I think it does.

00:12:02   I haven't used an app with it, but I recall seeing screenshots of it.

00:12:05   it might not be released yet.

00:12:08   I haven't tried it.

00:12:10   My habits around iOS are not built around the expectation

00:12:14   that there is anything like this available anywhere.

00:12:18   It used to be that individual apps would have to build in support for Dropbox,

00:12:21   and a lot of them did.

00:12:23   But it just so happens that none of the apps that I use on a regular basis

00:12:25   had this built in support for Dropbox.

00:12:27   And all those apps that do have that built in support

00:12:29   are, I'm assuming, are slowly changing to use the system way

00:12:31   to get at that same extension.

00:12:35   - Yeah, I hope so.

00:12:36   That's actually one thing like I,

00:12:37   in apps that I'm using,

00:12:39   it's actually really annoying now,

00:12:40   the ones that still present their own share sheets,

00:12:43   like their own custom share sheet

00:12:44   without using the system one.

00:12:46   Like that's, do you guys,

00:12:47   are you guys unreasonably annoyed with that

00:12:49   or is it just a me thing?

00:12:50   - I was kind of annoyed by the apps that I have

00:12:52   that used to do a custom way

00:12:54   and now bring that giant sheet up.

00:12:57   Because a lot of time I know

00:12:58   I just want to go to Instapaper

00:12:59   and that used to be one tap.

00:13:00   - So it's the opposite of my complaint.

00:13:02   - Now it's two taps, yeah.

00:13:03   I mean, I'll get over it,

00:13:04   but like now it's two taps.

00:13:05   Especially because of the stupid bug where the reordering of the things doesn't stick.

00:13:08   Oh, I don't know about that.

00:13:10   I just haven't reordered anything.

00:13:11   I have reordered it and it has not stuck and other people have complained about it as well.

00:13:15   But anyway, it used to be one tap on a button to send Instapaper, now it's one tap to bring

00:13:20   up the giant sheet.

00:13:21   Luckily Instapaper is usually within one scrolling section, but it's not like the upper left

00:13:25   one or wherever I want it to be, and then I tap the Instapaper thing and then the thing

00:13:28   comes up.

00:13:29   So anyway, I would much prefer it this way.

00:13:31   much better to have an extensible system.

00:13:33   It's just we need the kinks to be worked out of at first.

00:13:36   The people in the chat are saying that Dropbox doesn't yet

00:13:38   have the document picker thing on iOS.

00:13:41   That's a shame if true.

00:13:42   I mean, they showed that in the keynotes,

00:13:44   but maybe it was speculative, like,

00:13:45   and that Dropbox could make something like this,

00:13:47   and they just haven't yet.

00:13:49   Yeah, I thought they kind of danced--

00:13:51   like, I don't think they actually

00:13:52   mentioned Dropbox by name, but I'm pretty sure, like,

00:13:54   that was the very strong implication.

00:13:55   We are basically building this for Dropbox

00:13:58   and a couple other things.

00:13:59   Like, you know, same thing with the badging

00:14:01   that's entered on Yosemite.

00:14:02   It's like, we are basically building this entire capability

00:14:05   for like Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive, or SkyDrive,

00:14:08   or whatever Microsoft's thing is.

00:14:10   Our first sponsor this week is Backblaze.

00:14:13   Go to backblaze.com/atp.

00:14:16   Backblaze is unlimited and unthrottled online backup

00:14:20   for just five bucks a month.

00:14:22   This is really, I mean, we've talked about Backblaze before,

00:14:25   so, you know, I don't need to tell you guys

00:14:28   why you need cloud backup.

00:14:29   But I will anyway, because the fact is,

00:14:31   you know, a backup, somebody wise recently said,

00:14:34   and I'm pretty sure this is a very old thing,

00:14:36   somebody wise recently said that a backup is not a backup

00:14:40   if it isn't automatic.

00:14:41   And yes, I know, probably everyone has said that before.

00:14:44   Anyway, moving on.

00:14:45   If you have some kind of backup system

00:14:48   where you're only backing things up in your house,

00:14:51   then you could lose data if something happens to your house

00:14:54   that would affect all the things in it

00:14:56   or all the things plugged in.

00:14:57   So for example, if you only have a computer

00:14:59   with a time machine drive.

00:15:00   If you get a big power surge or a fire or a flood

00:15:03   or a theft, that will wipe out both of those things

00:15:06   in all likelihood.

00:15:07   And so you don't want every copy of your data

00:15:09   to be in your house or plugged into your computer

00:15:12   all the time.

00:15:13   So most people have figured out along the way,

00:15:16   oh, an offsite backup would be nice,

00:15:18   offsite backup of some sort.

00:15:20   And the problem with that is that usually

00:15:21   it's really, really hard to ever remember to actually do it.

00:15:24   So most of the time you might have a hard drive

00:15:27   at your parents' house or at work with some of your files

00:15:30   on it that you've last updated six months ago,

00:15:32   maybe at most, and then forgotten about.

00:15:35   With online backup, it's so much better

00:15:37   because it's just continuously happening in the background.

00:15:39   You are always backed up offsite.

00:15:41   And the class of problem this protects you from is so big,

00:15:46   and it's so easy, 'cause you just don't think about it.

00:15:49   You're just always being backed up online.

00:15:52   And among the cloud backup providers,

00:15:55   I've tried a number of them,

00:15:57   And I personally stuck with Backblaze

00:15:59   even before they were a sponsor.

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00:16:02   And I think they'll be the best for you too.

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00:16:06   So big things first, unlimited disk space,

00:16:08   five bucks a month, that's it.

00:16:10   Also the unthrottled point is very important.

00:16:12   Many cloud providers can't accept the files quickly enough.

00:16:15   So even though you can upload them fast,

00:16:17   they couldn't accept them.

00:16:18   And so it was gonna take months to upload my first backup.

00:16:22   And with Backblaze, that was never a problem.

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00:16:26   They can basically accept them as quickly as you're willing

00:16:28   to send them and their client does a nice job

00:16:29   of throttling automatically to make sure

00:16:31   it doesn't miss anything up for you.

00:16:33   Their app is native.

00:16:35   It is a preference pane with a menu item.

00:16:38   They're always up to date with Mac releases.

00:16:41   It runs on Yosemite.

00:16:42   They also have an iPhone, iPad, and Android app.

00:16:45   You can access your backed up files from Backblaze

00:16:48   on the go from your apps.

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00:17:02   Things like that, it's a really helpful system,

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00:17:06   to use the words of John Gruber,

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00:17:11   And so anyway, thanks a lot to Backblaze.

00:17:13   Go to backblaze.com/atp, highly recommend it.

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00:17:20   a cloud backup service, and if you're gonna have one,

00:17:23   I'd say this is the best one.

00:17:24   Anyway, thanks a lot to Backblaze

00:17:26   for sponsoring the show once again.

00:17:28   - John, you have some real time follow up for us.

00:17:31   - Chat room, and a couple other places I've pointed,

00:17:35   screenshots of the Dropbox document picker.

00:17:37   - Okay then.

00:17:38   - This is from Vitechy's review of iOS 8.

00:17:40   So it's a thing, there you go.

00:17:42   We'll put the link to Vitechy's iOS 8 document

00:17:46   provider's story, and everyone else take a look at it.

00:17:50   I'm sure everyone else already knew that.

00:17:52   When I think about it, like what kind of apps do I have

00:17:54   on iOS that would use a document picker.

00:17:57   It's kind of chicken egg, because before you

00:17:59   have a generic document picker, if you keep all your stuff

00:18:01   on Dropbox, then you're not going to have one or whatever.

00:18:03   But what apps do you guys use that you would find yourself

00:18:08   using Dropbox document picker with?

00:18:10   Well, I think what's interesting here is before--

00:18:17   one of the big problems of doing any kind of productivity

00:18:20   task on an iOS device, if you're working with documents

00:18:23   One of the big problems is always just getting the files on and off of it.

00:18:27   And some apps would support the iCloud documents and data thing.

00:18:30   It was always limited and I personally was a little bit afraid to use it because I never

00:18:35   really knew where those files were and it was kind of weird.

00:18:38   For me, iCloud Drive not only replaces that but I think just having this as a thing.

00:18:46   Right now, it's going to take us a while to realize that we can do this.

00:18:48   It's going to take developers a while to realize that they can do something with this.

00:18:52   So I think this is the kind of thing that in six months

00:18:55   or a year or two years, we might look back on this

00:18:57   and say, oh my God, this made such a big difference.

00:19:00   But right now, it's hard to see it

00:19:02   because nothing's really using it yet.

00:19:04   - Yeah, I can think of one place I would have liked

00:19:05   to use it when, it's too late now,

00:19:07   but when doing ebook previews,

00:19:09   I would have loved to not have to use iTunes.

00:19:12   And in the past, what I could do is take the versions

00:19:15   of the eBooks and throw them in my Dropbox.

00:19:17   And then I would go to the Dropbox client,

00:19:19   the dedicated Dropbox app in the days before iOS 8,

00:19:22   and find the, you know, whatever file that I wanted to open.

00:19:25   And I would tap on it, and it would download

00:19:28   in the Dropbox app, and then it would show me a little thing

00:19:30   that says, "Sorry, the Dropbox app doesn't know

00:19:32   "how to display this thing."

00:19:33   But then there was a little button that said,

00:19:34   "Open in these applications which understand it."

00:19:37   And the most recent version of the Dropbox app

00:19:41   did not understand how to do that

00:19:42   with all the formats that I was using,

00:19:44   and it would just not offer to open it in the Kindle app

00:19:46   or to open it in the iBooks app.

00:19:49   So if I had a Dropbox document picker,

00:19:52   I could have gone to the iBooks app,

00:19:54   used the Dropbox document picker,

00:19:55   assuming the document pickers are supported all day,

00:19:57   I don't even know if they are,

00:19:58   and just pull it that way,

00:19:59   and same thing from the Kindle app.

00:20:00   So too late for me,

00:20:02   but that's one scenario I can think of.

00:20:04   Anything so I don't have to use iTunes to transfer files.

00:20:08   - All right.

00:20:09   So to continue with some follow-up,

00:20:11   do you wanna tell us, John,

00:20:12   about some person-to-person Bluetooth-based mesh networks

00:20:17   that are particularly popular,

00:20:18   perhaps were particularly popular in Hong Kong.

00:20:21   - A couple shows ago, we were talking about Twitter

00:20:24   and decentralized messaging services,

00:20:27   not controlled by any one company like Twitter or whatever,

00:20:31   protocols instead of,

00:20:34   protocols like IMAP, POP and SMTP

00:20:36   instead of proprietary services like Twitter with APIs

00:20:40   and OAuth tokens and all that stuff.

00:20:41   And I don't remember if we brought this up on the show,

00:20:45   but so I threw it into the followup.

00:20:46   Sorry if this is a repeat, but what I was thinking of when we were having a discussion and I might not have

00:20:51   Remembered to interject was when they're having those protests in Hong Kong the people in the crowd were using an application

00:20:59   For messaging that used Bluetooth person to person so there was no connection to a centralized server over the internet

00:21:07   I think they might have actually not even had internet access

00:21:09   But since each individual phone had Bluetooth the message could be passed from phone to phone to phone to phone

00:21:14   to spread to all the people in the crowd and this application is an application that was used for

00:21:19   like if you go somewhere where there's no Wi-Fi signal like you go camping or something and

00:21:24   So you and your friends can all you know send messages to each other on your information phones

00:21:28   Even though none of you have access or cell access and you're all near each other

00:21:32   Yeah, well, you know, you're in your you know, a bunch of tents all set up somewhere, you know what I mean?

00:21:36   I think that's what it's for. But anyway

00:21:38   Regardless they were using this technology to basically communicate with each other despite the you know

00:21:43   the government or whatever, the centralized authorities making other forms of communication impossible.

00:21:48   So I think in this scenario, it's kind of weird because this was like a protest or whatever, but the dystopian future,

00:21:55   dystopian sci-fi future is everybody uses Twitter and Twitter is controlled by one company and the utopian future is

00:22:02   everybody uses peer-to-peer mesh networks that can't be controlled by any single government or entity and like there's nothing you can do to break

00:22:11   communication in the entire

00:22:12   world because we all are just connected to each other by

00:22:15   Proximity and mesh networks and you could you could black out little portions here and there

00:22:20   But eventually the mesh will cover everything so I think we are not in either one of those scenarios

00:22:24   We're between the dystopia and the utopia, but uh hopefully we'll push things the right direction

00:22:29   Somehow all right and a couple shows ago

00:22:32   We were also talking about bent iPhones, which by the way did that just magically go away

00:22:36   I think it's still there, but I don't think there's any new news. You know yeah well anyway

00:22:42   Jared Villemaire, I'm probably butchering that.

00:22:45   Sorry, Jared.

00:22:46   Anyway, he said that with regard to Apple taking bent iPhones, we were talking about

00:22:52   how we thought it was interesting that, or somebody had written in that it was

00:22:55   interesting that a genius or whoever it was took notes on the fact of what that

00:23:00   person was doing when their iPhone bent or something on those lines.

00:23:02   Well, anyways, Jared says Apple taking bent iPhones, Apple always does quote

00:23:06   engineering captures quote for specific issues on new products for a short time.

00:23:11   So that is just a little bit of follow up there.

00:23:15   And also it occurred to me,

00:23:17   what happened at that Twitter thing today?

00:23:19   Was that a thing, wasn't there a thing today?

00:23:21   - There, yeah, they had a developer conference today.

00:23:25   And honestly, I have not been paying attention

00:23:27   to what they announced,

00:23:28   except they announced something called, is it Digits?

00:23:30   It's like basically like SMS two-factor as a service

00:23:34   that anybody can use, something like that.

00:23:37   But honestly, I don't know the details.

00:23:39   Yeah, all right, so more of the same.

00:23:42   I don't know.

00:23:43   I keep meaning to blog about this.

00:23:44   So I wrote an article the other day

00:23:47   in anticipation of this conference

00:23:48   because WSJ had posted some kind of crazy thing saying

00:23:51   Twitter is going to start over again with developers

00:23:53   and start fresh and reset their image.

00:23:55   And I basically said, no, they're not.

00:23:57   And the gist of my post was that they're not

00:24:00   trustworthy to developers.

00:24:02   And there's been a number of responses.

00:24:04   Dave Weiner notably responded pretty publicly,

00:24:08   basically saying in short,

00:24:11   and I hope I'm not butchering his argument here,

00:24:13   but in short that we can pick and choose our gatekeepers

00:24:17   and that it's hard for me to say this kind of stuff

00:24:20   without pointing out that I accept

00:24:22   the Apple App Store gatekeeper

00:24:24   and Apple has done crappy stuff to developers in the past.

00:24:27   And that's all true.

00:24:29   I think the main difference is alignment of interests though.

00:24:33   Twitter, there's a great quote,

00:24:35   let me see, I have it open here.

00:24:38   It's on the verge today.

00:24:39   There's a comment from somebody at Twitter that said,

00:24:42   referring to their old API before they put it

00:24:44   in the restrictions with the token limits

00:24:46   and everything for clients.

00:24:47   They said, "Our API was so open

00:24:49   "that we allowed people to compete with us."

00:24:51   And this was like their justification

00:24:55   for locking it down two years ago

00:24:57   with the token limits and everything.

00:24:59   I think that, you know, our API was so open

00:25:01   that we allowed people to compete with us.

00:25:03   That right there says a lot more

00:25:06   than that person probably planned to say,

00:25:08   that explains a lot.

00:25:10   So what this means is Twitter's API made it possible

00:25:15   for people to compete with Twitter

00:25:18   and they shut it down because they had to.

00:25:22   Their API has the potential

00:25:24   to make people compete with them.

00:25:25   It gives people the ability to compete with them.

00:25:27   It gives people the ability to do things

00:25:28   like build a whole following graph.

00:25:31   Like when Instagram launched,

00:25:32   Instagram became a social network,

00:25:34   primarily by importing people's Twitter friends

00:25:37   and then building its own side network.

00:25:40   And then you didn't need Twitter anymore after that.

00:25:42   And then Twitter, of course, realized this

00:25:44   and cut off access to the Friend Finder thing for them.

00:25:46   And these situations will keep coming up.

00:25:49   Twitter also had a problem where there were some clients,

00:25:51   I forget the name of it,

00:25:52   but there was some company buying up

00:25:54   a whole bunch of Twitter clients

00:25:55   and they were gonna start their own shadow network

00:25:58   next to Twitter.

00:25:59   (laughs)

00:26:00   And you'd be able to post to both of them

00:26:03   and integrate the timelines and everything.

00:26:05   And that I think was the bigger freak out that Twitter had.

00:26:08   And that was a couple of years earlier than Instagram,

00:26:09   I think.

00:26:10   So Twitter got freaked out that you could use their API

00:26:14   to steal value from them and devalue them

00:26:17   and compete with them.

00:26:19   If you look at the situation Apple's in with app developers,

00:26:21   it's a very different situation.

00:26:23   I mean, yes, it's possible that you can make an app

00:26:26   that competes with one of Apple's apps,

00:26:28   but Apple's primary interests are selling the hardware.

00:26:30   And so if you're a developer making apps,

00:26:33   the chances that your interests are going to conflict

00:26:36   with Apple's interests are extremely low.

00:26:38   There's almost no chance for that to realistically happen

00:26:41   in any plausible future scenario,

00:26:43   at least during, at least enough of a future,

00:26:46   maybe on a Syracuse timescale maybe,

00:26:48   but in the next like 10 years,

00:26:51   how long is your software likely to last?

00:26:54   Five, 10 years if you're lucky.

00:26:56   So in that time, are Apple's interests

00:26:59   really gonna change dramatically to the point

00:27:01   where they're gonna be at odds

00:27:02   with what app developers do on their platform.

00:27:05   And the answer is probably not.

00:27:06   So I think it's a very different argument to say that,

00:27:10   oh, well, Apple has complete control over their platform

00:27:12   and you buy into that and you're investing in that

00:27:15   and therefore your argument is invalid.

00:27:17   I don't think that's a fair counterargument.

00:27:20   Twitter on the other hand,

00:27:21   there are so many ways you can use a Twitter API

00:27:24   in ways that if you say, well, if this gets big enough,

00:27:27   this could be a real problem for Twitter,

00:27:28   or we've just stolen a whole bunch of value from Twitter.

00:27:31   Like, that is so much more likely given what Twitter is

00:27:35   and what their API allows access to.

00:27:38   That's what makes it so untrustworthy,

00:27:39   is that the chance that your interests

00:27:41   will conflict with Twitter's if you are successful

00:27:44   are very, very high.

00:27:45   - I don't think it's a structural difference though.

00:27:47   I think it is the actions of the companies involved.

00:27:51   Because, I mean, when I heard that quote about, you know,

00:27:55   Twitter saying we actually have people compete with us,

00:27:57   I just shook my head thinking they don't,

00:28:00   their view of API usage is different.

00:28:05   And it has caused them to act in ways that makes them untrustworthy because they've proven they don't understand what the heck is going on there.

00:28:11   The aspects of competition you just talked about are real and they're there,

00:28:16   but even before Instagram was able to steal value from Twitter by exploiting its relationship graph to bootstrap its own photo social network thing,

00:28:27   Twitter only became Twitter, or so the story we tell ourselves go in our little circle.

00:28:32   Well, not only, but at least partially because people, third parties, made clients that made

00:28:38   the service more palatable for people who didn't want to go to their ugly ass webpage.

00:28:43   Like they were not, those people who were using Twitter's API to make client software

00:28:47   for all these sorts of platforms and to refine it and everything like that, for Twitter to

00:28:52   view them as people, we even let people compete with, they weren't competing with you, they

00:28:55   were helping you become the Twitter you are today.

00:28:58   Without them, who knows if you would have become the Twitter?

00:29:00   You could have still been, you know, like a tent, right?

00:29:04   Like a service that nobody wants to use

00:29:07   because they don't like using your webpage

00:29:08   and your client software is crappy.

00:29:09   Like who cares?

00:29:11   Like you wouldn't be worried about protecting your value.

00:29:13   Like, so to view those people as competition is just weird.

00:29:16   Like that was the whole sort of what we all felt betrayed

00:29:19   or the Twitter client developers is like,

00:29:21   they felt like they helped build this service

00:29:23   into what it is today.

00:29:24   and then Twitter was like,

00:29:25   "Okay, don't need you anymore, thanks, bye."

00:29:27   Whereas Apple, for all its weird foibles and everything,

00:29:30   still seems to be able to keep the eye on the ball and say,

00:29:33   "Developers are actually an important part of, you know,

00:29:36   "they add value to our devices.

00:29:38   "We can sell our hardware because these people,

00:29:40   "app developers make apps from that."

00:29:42   Apple's constantly saying, "Hey, look at all these apps."

00:29:44   And not being like,

00:29:45   "We even let people make apps to compete with ours."

00:29:47   Apple would never say that, 'cause it's like,

00:29:49   you know, all they do is brag about

00:29:50   how many people make apps,

00:29:51   how many apps are on the app store,

00:29:53   how much money they give to developers.

00:29:54   Like they know that the apps make,

00:29:57   without apps their hardware is way less valuable.

00:29:59   So Apple pushes that like crazy.

00:30:01   And you know, it's the hierarchy of Apple needs

00:30:03   of Apple first, customers first,

00:30:06   Apple second and developers third,

00:30:07   and that still annoys developers.

00:30:08   And Apple still does have a tremendous amount of control

00:30:10   over its platform, but it's,

00:30:12   that's why I said it's not structural.

00:30:13   Twitter and Apple have similar amounts of control

00:30:15   at this point over their platforms.

00:30:17   But based on past actions,

00:30:18   we believe Apple understands to some degree

00:30:21   that everyone who makes an app for the App Store

00:30:24   is increasing the value of Apple's products.

00:30:27   Whereas Twitter seems hell-bent on not understanding

00:30:31   that people writing applications against the Twitter API

00:30:33   in all sorts of ways makes Twitter more valuable.

00:30:36   And you're right, there still is possibility,

00:30:38   you know, exploiting it to bootstrap some other network

00:30:40   or stuff like that.

00:30:41   But things like Twitter clients, like the reason,

00:30:43   you know, oh, doesn't that add value to your network?

00:30:45   It's like, no, because we have a monetization strategy

00:30:47   that relies on you not being able to get tweets

00:30:49   and we would need to be able to insert tweets

00:30:50   your timeline and blah blah blah like that tension is kind of of Twitter's own invention

00:30:55   over their inability to figure out a business plan that that that benefits everybody so

00:31:02   I don't trust Twitter particularly but it's not because they have a lot of control because

00:31:06   Apple has a lot of control too it's because it just doesn't seem like Twitter understands

00:31:10   you know their view of the relationship between third parties and their service is just different

00:31:14   than than my view from the outside.

00:31:16   Well, but I think Twitter's view is very valid.

00:31:19   Twitter's view, you know, I totally see why they want to own the client experience.

00:31:24   You know, the changes they made were not only to squash competition from, you know, stealing

00:31:30   from Twitter and like taking over their network or replacing their network, but was also to

00:31:35   take back control of the client experience for most people and to never let a third party

00:31:40   client get as big as their client again.

00:31:43   What that allowed them to do then is have the power over their own experience.

00:31:46   their product is not an API.

00:31:50   It originally kind of was, but now, you know,

00:31:53   for a long time their product has not been the API,

00:31:55   it has been the Twitter app.

00:31:58   - But that's their view of the service.

00:32:00   Our view of the service was you're like email, but smaller.

00:32:03   Like you are a protocol, you are a message format.

00:32:08   That's not what they actually were,

00:32:09   but like that's how we viewed it on the outside.

00:32:11   In the same way we would make awesome email clients

00:32:13   back in the day to work with email,

00:32:15   and you know, Claris email,

00:32:16   this is before your time,

00:32:16   but Claris email will come out and people love you,

00:32:18   Dora and blah, blah, blah.

00:32:19   And those were all email clients and we liked the client

00:32:22   and but email was email.

00:32:23   Well, Twitter was Twitter,

00:32:24   but like Twitter's view of itself was not that

00:32:26   and you don't make money being a company

00:32:28   that invents a pop or SMTP or whatever.

00:32:31   So that was the tension,

00:32:32   but like I still get back to Twitter,

00:32:35   the service would be nothing,

00:32:36   would be a footnote in history

00:32:37   if it wasn't for all of those clients that added value

00:32:40   and Twitter didn't make those clients,

00:32:41   Twitter couldn't make those clients.

00:32:43   Twitter could only have made one of those clients at most

00:32:45   if it had tried to take control earlier.

00:32:47   But there was tons of clients,

00:32:48   and that's why Twitter is what it is today.

00:32:50   - Yeah, sure, but that doesn't matter anymore.

00:32:52   That's ancient history.

00:32:53   I mean, anybody at Twitter who possibly cared about that

00:32:56   has probably left by now.

00:32:57   - But that's the betrayal,

00:32:58   and that's why we don't trust them anymore.

00:33:00   That's why, again, it's not structural.

00:33:02   It's not because of the control they have.

00:33:03   It's because of what they have done

00:33:04   with that control in the past.

00:33:06   And it's a bit of divorce between the way we saw Twitter

00:33:10   and the way Twitter sees itself.

00:33:11   And so no change of heart on their part unless they prove that they see their service differently and that we're on the same page

00:33:16   Again, and we don't see their you know, they're not on the same page. They're still saying

00:33:21   Oh, we let people compete with us. It shows that there's still a disconnect

00:33:24   We want to think of Twitter as a protocol a service a message format or whatever

00:33:28   We want to think of Twitter like blogging. No one owns blogging right just conceptually

00:33:33   It's we know what blogging is conceptually, but there's no owner of a technology wise but

00:33:37   We want to think of Twitter that way too. It's not that way

00:33:40   So I think we'll always be sort of, you know, standing as opposite sides of the gym during

00:33:46   the dance, not ever going into the middle. And, you know, I don't see a way out of this. I don't

00:33:52   see any overture unless Twitter changes its mind and decides to become like an infrastructure

00:33:57   company. But—

00:33:59   That's not gonna happen.

00:33:59   Yeah. I mean, once the VCs come in and everything, it's like, well, you know,

00:34:03   they can want their money back somehow.

00:34:05   - Well, the VCs were there.

00:34:06   (laughs)

00:34:07   I think we all thought, you know,

00:34:09   when Twitter came to its initial rise,

00:34:13   when we were writing all these clients,

00:34:14   that was during the era of web development,

00:34:16   where every web app was expected to have an API,

00:34:19   often from the start.

00:34:20   It was often best wisdom to have an API first

00:34:23   and then build your actual app on top of it.

00:34:25   - Right, like the web app was like,

00:34:27   who cares about the web app?

00:34:28   It's all about the API, right?

00:34:29   - This was kind of like this weird time

00:34:31   in web development history,

00:34:32   where everyone just kind of temporarily forgot

00:34:35   about making money, and granted this happens a lot,

00:34:37   but this was an especially bad time

00:34:39   that everyone was like, you know, let's make an API

00:34:41   and see what people mash up with it.

00:34:42   And the reality is that there's a reason

00:34:46   why so many new services these days don't have full APIs

00:34:51   and almost always don't at least launch with them

00:34:53   because that's just a really hard thing

00:34:56   as a business case to justify.

00:34:58   And it opens you up to a lot of risks of things like,

00:35:01   You know, like, what if Instagram had a full API

00:35:03   from the beginning, where you could read and write

00:35:05   and you could make your Instagram client?

00:35:07   Then what happens when they wanna change

00:35:08   the way the client works?

00:35:09   You know, there was that time in the mid 2000s

00:35:12   where APIs were expected and were the cool thing,

00:35:14   but that time is over and it's been over for a while

00:35:16   and that's never coming back because it's just,

00:35:19   it's so difficult from a business perspective

00:35:21   and from a control perspective,

00:35:22   it's so difficult to actually maintain that.

00:35:25   So, you know, we might expect Twitter

00:35:26   to someday go back to that or we might be mad

00:35:29   that they're not doing that now,

00:35:30   but the reality is it would be a very bad idea

00:35:33   for Twitter to ever do that again.

00:35:34   - That was a good move back,

00:35:36   the reason everyone was doing it back then

00:35:37   is because it's kind of like a wolf in sheep's clothing

00:35:40   where if you make something look like a protocol

00:35:45   or a piece of plumbing or part of the internet,

00:35:47   you can get traction among a certain set of people

00:35:51   that like, you know, we like,

00:35:53   the utopia we were thinking of is there, you know,

00:35:55   okay, we have some existing protocols

00:35:56   and we have some old protocols.

00:35:57   We have SSH, HTTP, FTP, NNTP, all these protocols, old and new,

00:36:03   all kind of mixing together in this too.

00:36:05   But now if we make these APIs with this REST format,

00:36:08   we can turn the web into a giant API machine,

00:36:11   and it'll just be like the internet.

00:36:13   But now people can innovate, and like you said,

00:36:15   the mashups and all that other stuff.

00:36:16   If you make it look like infrastructure,

00:36:18   people are attracted to it, especially technical people.

00:36:20   Because immediately your mind goes, what can I do with this?

00:36:22   If I had this API and that API, I could pull this and that,

00:36:24   and I could synthesize these things, and this is great.

00:36:26   And what you don't realize is that all those companies

00:36:29   with APIs are like lying in wait

00:36:31   and just hoping they become massively popular.

00:36:33   And then they can be like, aha, we've got you

00:36:34   because this wasn't really a piece of infrastructure.

00:36:36   Really, this is a wholly owned proprietary thing.

00:36:39   We are the only source of it.

00:36:40   No one else can copy it.

00:36:41   We have all the data.

00:36:42   We can, you know, you know what I mean?

00:36:43   And then Twitter basically, you know,

00:36:46   one succeeded in that strategy of looking like infrastructure

00:36:49   to people who weren't thinking about it too hard.

00:36:52   And then when everyone realized they're not,

00:36:54   it's too late, they've spread.

00:36:54   Like it's an, it's a good way to spread things

00:36:56   where if you had just made a website,

00:36:58   people would know like, you know, I mean,

00:37:00   just ask Myspace how that worked out.

00:37:02   If Myspace had tried to be a protocol first

00:37:04   and then turn the screws and turn it into a site,

00:37:05   I mean, then it really probably wouldn't have worked

00:37:07   for Myspace, but anyway,

00:37:08   it's much harder to get people to come to your site

00:37:11   and make that like as big as Facebook, right?

00:37:13   But everyone had APIs,

00:37:16   people were mixing them all together

00:37:18   and if any of them caught on,

00:37:20   you could lie and wait and say like,

00:37:21   I'm part of the internet.

00:37:23   This is not, I'm not a single private company

00:37:26   a single website, I'm invisible, I'm a protocol, I'm like app.net, and then grow to tremendous

00:37:31   size like that and then change your mind.

00:37:33   That's what everybody did, and I still think that strategy could work.

00:37:35   Like if you made something that looked like a protocol, everyone would forget the fact

00:37:39   that you're a private company and completely control it, and you could do exactly what

00:37:41   Twitter did again.

00:37:42   I think that strategy is not entirely dead because we'll all be fooled again by it.

00:37:47   I mean, we'd be the same with app.net, right?

00:37:50   Like this is slightly better, they're charging up front, but it was the same situation.

00:37:53   We would have all done it.

00:37:54   If app.net had become tremendously successful,

00:37:56   it would have been a small step up from Twitter,

00:37:58   but they would have ended up doing the same thing.

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00:39:47   That's a big sentence.

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00:39:48   The breath is not in the sentence.

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00:40:18   Once again, they're long-term friends

00:40:20   and sponsors of our show.

00:40:21   - Excellent.

00:40:23   So, Jon, I wanted to quickly ask you

00:40:25   what's going on with the review?

00:40:27   How's the initial feedback?

00:40:29   Did you have to make any big updates

00:40:31   or is it basically the status quo as usual?

00:40:34   - That's so last week, Casey.

00:40:35   We're still talking about that thing?

00:40:36   - Hey, you never know.

00:40:37   A week has passed.

00:40:38   It was like 24 hours or something like that

00:40:40   when we got to speak about it last.

00:40:42   - No, yeah, most of the updates come in the first 24.

00:40:45   I think I did one ebook update every couple of hours every time for a while, but it's

00:40:51   been quiet since then.

00:40:52   I only put in a couple of, one more update about core storage application, which, I mean,

00:41:00   we talked about this last week, the type of things that you can't test when the final

00:41:04   bits aren't out until after you publish your review, and also the type of thing that I

00:41:09   personally can't test because I don't have a lab full of computers.

00:41:11   It's just me here and I had loaner hardware from Apple which was useful, but it's still like a total of like five computers

00:41:17   You know many of which are the same vintage or similar

00:41:20   So I can't do the type of like we installed this OS and you know five different computers with you know

00:41:26   Ten different partition configurations each and both internal and external drives and determined, you know

00:41:31   So I still don't know under what circumstances does it decide to turn your volume into a core storage volume?

00:41:36   Does it sometimes doesn't do it other times I put a correction the most recent correction I put in was

00:41:41   This doesn't happen all the time

00:41:44   It happens under these scenarios

00:41:46   Didn't happen under this scenario and other people on Twitter like installing it to their machines with different partition

00:41:51   Arrangements and stuff and seeing when it doesn't doesn't happen

00:41:53   So I don't know if I had known that it was that weird like it basically happened on every and every

00:41:58   Installation scenario that I did in my test hardware

00:42:01   So that's why I thought it was done all the time and I asked Apple about it

00:42:04   and they were giving explanations of why they were doing it.

00:42:07   They didn't ever offer the information like,

00:42:08   "Oh, by the way, we don't actually do that all the time

00:42:10   "and these scenarios we won't."

00:42:11   So missing information to be clarified.

00:42:14   Basically what I'm trying to do is make it

00:42:15   so that if someone stumbles across this review

00:42:18   five years from now, or if I try to look something up

00:42:19   in the review five years from now,

00:42:21   I will see these little corrections in there

00:42:23   and understand that this was the way I thought things were

00:42:28   on the day of release or before,

00:42:30   but actually things were more complicated,

00:42:32   so don't take this as the final word.

00:42:34   But other than that, it's been fine.

00:42:37   There's been a big difference in feedback

00:42:39   over the years between these things.

00:42:40   It used to be that I would do one of these reviews

00:42:41   and I would have like 20 or 30 pages

00:42:44   of comments attached to them.

00:42:45   Now, not that many comments.

00:42:47   And most of the comments are no longer

00:42:49   discussions of the article.

00:42:51   They're just people complaining about what they do

00:42:52   or don't like about Yosemite, which is fine, I guess.

00:42:54   But it's definitely a change in commenter behavior

00:42:57   at Ars Technica, you know.

00:42:59   Lower volume of comments, maybe because they feel

00:43:00   like they have other avenues to talk back to me,

00:43:03   like Twitter or whatever,

00:43:04   and comments that aren't interested

00:43:06   in discussing the article,

00:43:07   but just are interested in,

00:43:08   hey everybody, let's talk about Yosemite,

00:43:09   how's it working for you?

00:43:10   I don't like this, I do like that,

00:43:11   I had this bug, I didn't have that bug.

00:43:13   Yeah, it's mostly done,

00:43:18   it's off the front page of ours,

00:43:19   it's slowly fading away.

00:43:20   - That's so sad.

00:43:23   - With the exception of comments,

00:43:24   does it seem like, is interest,

00:43:26   if you can say, has interest remained high

00:43:30   in recent years in the reviews,

00:43:32   or is that going up or down?

00:43:33   - It's going down.

00:43:34   Like, I mean, it's been going down for a couple years.

00:43:36   It's still not awful,

00:43:37   but definitely interest is going down.

00:43:39   I mean, you know, people are just more interested

00:43:40   in iOS these days.

00:43:41   I don't blame them.

00:43:42   It's the bigger platform.

00:43:42   It's more popular.

00:43:43   More people are likely to have it.

00:43:45   And yeah, so it's still doing fine and everything,

00:43:48   but it's like if you were to graph it

00:43:50   with the past four or five reviews I've written,

00:43:52   it's a steady downward slope.

00:43:54   - Do you think it's a problem with the fact

00:43:57   that it's now released every year,

00:43:58   and so like there's more frequent,

00:43:59   There's less of a build up to new OS releases

00:44:02   'cause they're happening so much more frequently now.

00:44:05   - I don't think it's the frequency.

00:44:06   I think it's just the primacy of the Mac

00:44:09   in the Apple nerd space is just so much less

00:44:12   than it used to be.

00:44:12   They used to be all there was.

00:44:13   It was all about the Mac.

00:44:15   And then iOS has been just coming on strong.

00:44:18   And it's kind of generational.

00:44:21   Even when iOS was just insanely popular

00:44:24   and it long eclipsed the Mac

00:44:25   in terms of every possible number you can imagine,

00:44:28   early on, the people who were interested in reading about it

00:44:32   were the same people who had come up with Apple

00:44:34   as Apple's that company that makes Macs

00:44:36   and I'm super into Macs, right?

00:44:38   And then iOS is another thing that's interesting too.

00:44:40   Now there's generations of people

00:44:41   who barely even know the Mac exists.

00:44:44   They grew up thinking of Apple as the iPhone company

00:44:47   and they're super interested in reading about iOS

00:44:49   and they could care less about the Mac.

00:44:50   And I really see a big generational turnover.

00:44:52   In the people who are, you know, Apple nerds on the web,

00:44:57   There's whole generations of Apple nerds on the web now,

00:45:00   maybe, you know, I don't know if it's just one generation

00:45:02   or two or whatever, who think of Apple as the iOS company.

00:45:05   And that's what they're into.

00:45:07   In the same way that like the Mac people

00:45:09   replaced the Apple II people.

00:45:10   Like people thought like, I'm really into Apple.

00:45:12   It's all about the Apple II.

00:45:12   And this Mac thing looks like it's cool too.

00:45:14   Eventually there was sets of people like me

00:45:16   who entirely identified Apple as the company

00:45:18   that makes the Mac and could care less about the Apple II.

00:45:21   So it's a natural consequence of the different number

00:45:26   of these products as they sell.

00:45:27   - Well, the Mac is selling more than ever.

00:45:30   So do you think it's more of an issue of just like

00:45:33   the nerds not caring as much about each Mac update?

00:45:36   - Well, they sell way more iOS devices than Macs.

00:45:38   Like in terms of numbers, in terms of revenue,

00:45:40   in terms of profit, like every possible metric

00:45:43   that the iOS devices eclipse Macs easily.

00:45:46   - You know, maybe it's just me.

00:45:48   I've never once read anybody's long iOS reviews

00:45:54   because, I mean, part of it is like I'm involved

00:45:56   in the iOS beta process, so I already know

00:45:58   generally what's different, but I've never felt the need

00:46:01   because it seems like iOS changes are kind of more,

00:46:06   I don't know, they seem very relatively surface level

00:46:11   in what you could possibly really discuss about them.

00:46:14   Like, you get into a lot of the internals,

00:46:16   a lot of the reasoning, a lot of the under the hood stuff.

00:46:20   I don't see a lot of people doing that with iOS.

00:46:21   It's usually just like, here's an overview

00:46:23   of the features and visuals that have changed?

00:46:26   - Well, there's less poking you can do to iOS.

00:46:28   Like you can't get a terminal, you can,

00:46:30   but you know what I mean?

00:46:31   Like without going to more heroic lengths,

00:46:33   you can't get a terminal prompt

00:46:34   and start screwing around with things.

00:46:35   And moreover, if you do jailbreak and get a SSH in

00:46:39   and get a terminal prompt for screwing with things,

00:46:41   that has zero to do with most people's interaction

00:46:44   with the OS.

00:46:45   Whereas on the Mac, if you open a terminal,

00:46:46   a lot of people who use the Mac,

00:46:48   that is part of their experience of using the OS.

00:46:50   Like the terminal is not a jailbreak feature.

00:46:53   like you guys don't remember,

00:46:54   but back in the days before 10.0 came out,

00:46:57   like in all the developer previews, that was a hot topic.

00:47:00   Would Apple ship the terminal with, you know, OS X?

00:47:05   Would Apple ship it, but have it disabled or hidden?

00:47:09   Or, you know, like that was something we seriously

00:47:11   thought about because it's the old school Mac users saying,

00:47:13   you're not gonna sell a Mac with a command line or whatever.

00:47:15   Those of us who are Unix nerds are like,

00:47:17   please let them do this.

00:47:18   Like the whole point is it's supposed to be Unix

00:47:20   plus a Mac combined if they ship it without,

00:47:22   But we were like, but you know Apple,

00:47:23   maybe they'll just,

00:47:24   the terminal will be a developer download,

00:47:26   kind of like, you know,

00:47:28   the graph tools are,

00:47:29   graphics tools are now for Xcode or whatever.

00:47:31   Like you'll have to go to ADC to get them, whatever.

00:47:33   You'll be able to use it, but they won't advertise it.

00:47:34   But it turned out, it totally shipped with it.

00:47:36   They never got rid of it.

00:47:37   They never hid it.

00:47:38   It's in the utilities folder.

00:47:39   It's still there today.

00:47:41   All right, so,

00:47:42   but that's just not what iOS is like.

00:47:44   And the second aspect is,

00:47:46   I'm kind of cheating with these reviews.

00:47:49   I found myself doing it this year's WWDC.

00:47:51   I found myself going to the Metal sessions and taking notes and like, "What the hell

00:47:54   am I doing?

00:47:55   Metal isn't even a Mac technology."

00:47:56   But you just start thinking of, and that was a big point of this review, you start thinking

00:47:59   about all of these things as just part of Apple's platform.

00:48:03   Like I could have written that entire Swift section if this was an iOS review.

00:48:07   Metal is iOS only, but I'm writing about it as if it's an Apple technology because there's

00:48:11   nothing stopping it from appearing on the Mac, except for Apple's willingness to port

00:48:14   it to the GPUs that are available on the Mac, which granted are much more numerous and it'd

00:48:18   it would be much more difficult,

00:48:19   and there's much more reason for them to put it on iOS,

00:48:21   but like so many technologies apply to both of it,

00:48:23   a larger and larger portion of the review could have been,

00:48:27   I could change it to review iOS 8

00:48:29   and put a lot of that same stuff in there.

00:48:32   So I don't know, I don't know if that,

00:48:34   what that has to do with traffic numbers or anything.

00:48:36   I just think the Mac is less a focus,

00:48:41   even though so many things that are relevant to the Mac

00:48:43   are also relevant to iOS and vice versa,

00:48:45   it's still iOS is where everyone's eyes are.

00:48:48   Do you think it's because there's less to see on Mac

00:48:51   every year or because no one's paying attention?

00:48:54   - Well, this year there was tons to see.

00:48:55   I mean, this is the whole thing.

00:48:57   It looks totally different.

00:48:58   It's a lay person who could tell the difference, I think,

00:49:00   between Mavericks and Yosemite,

00:49:02   or at least tell that these are two different OSs

00:49:03   'cause they just plain look different.

00:49:05   But I mean, there's just as much as, I mean, iOS 8,

00:49:09   when you look at it, it's like, oh, it looks like iOS 7.

00:49:12   What's even different?

00:49:13   And unless you know all the extensions,

00:49:14   don't people update, they're absolutely better

00:49:16   in this way or whatever, but it's really,

00:49:17   Like iOS 8 was a much more subtle change from 7 than Yosemite was from Maverick.

00:49:22   So I don't think that was the problem either.

00:49:24   Like if anything, people should be super bored by iOS 8 and really excited by Yosemite if

00:49:28   just based on like the sort of in your face wow factor of the changes because iOS 8 does

00:49:35   not in your face about almost anything.

00:49:38   You know to go back Marco you had said who writes a really big iOS 8 review?

00:49:42   A friend of the show, Rene Ritchie, did a pretty solid one for iMore that we should

00:49:47   definitely mention.

00:49:48   In fact, I believe it was Crashing Safari.

00:49:50   I don't remember if that was on the Mac or iOS, but the darn thing is a single page and

00:49:55   it's so darn big that it ended up causing issues for a lot of users.

00:50:00   That's how in-depth it was.

00:50:01   I concur with what you were saying, that it's harder to poke at iOS.

00:50:04   It's harder to get the depth that Jon does with the OS X review, but nevertheless, his

00:50:09   iOS 8 review was huge.

00:50:11   - Yeah, when I look at the iOS updates,

00:50:14   I always thank my lucky stars

00:50:16   that I'm not doing an iOS review.

00:50:17   Like maybe not so much in eight,

00:50:19   but like in seven and everything,

00:50:20   because there is so many changes,

00:50:22   so many things that are different, so many screens,

00:50:25   and just-

00:50:25   - All those screenshots you have to retake

00:50:27   every time there's a new beta?

00:50:29   - Yeah, well, you know, I don't know if it's better or worse

00:50:32   that you'd be filling your camera roll with screenshots

00:50:35   or that you don't have a good way to screenshot things

00:50:37   you'd have to like crop and, you know, anyway,

00:50:39   I guess it's kind of easier in that all your screenshots are full screen, you don't have

00:50:42   to worry about windows and backgrounds, especially on your side.

00:50:44   But anyway, various iOS updates have been like, "Wow, I'm glad I'm not reviewing this,"

00:50:49   because they added a ton of new features.

00:50:50   Because it was a young OS and they just added tons of things.

00:50:54   Everything changed.

00:50:56   There's very little.

00:50:57   The built-in apps changed.

00:50:58   The way you deal with the OS itself, like when they added multitasking and stuff, those

00:51:03   were big changes.

00:51:04   You expect that in the early versions of an OS.

00:51:06   Now it seems like it's settling down a little bit.

00:51:08   So now you have features like extensions,

00:51:11   which seem to be non-features at all.

00:51:12   You're just like, oh, I don't see anything different.

00:51:14   It's like, you gotta wait for the apps to update.

00:51:15   Then it'll be totally different, but just trust me.

00:51:17   But how do you really review that in an OS review?

00:51:19   You gotta talk about it speculatively.

00:51:22   - Maybe the difference that I'm perceiving,

00:51:25   or whether it's real or not,

00:51:28   maybe the difference I'm perceiving

00:51:29   is that the iOS reviews that I've seen

00:51:31   all seem to be extremely long.

00:51:34   I don't want a comprehensive overview of everything.

00:51:37   - Oh, 'cause that's like just a slideshow.

00:51:39   Like a lot of people do that, you know,

00:51:40   a gallery or a slideshow.

00:51:41   Here's every screen that's different, right?

00:51:43   I mean, and ours did that too.

00:51:44   Ours did a slideshow.

00:51:46   Like they asked me if I was gonna have galleries

00:51:48   in my review 'cause they have a gallery feature

00:51:49   where you can just take a whole bunch of photos

00:51:50   and have like a carousel that you flip through them,

00:51:52   right, on the page.

00:51:54   And I said, "No, I'm not gonna have any galleries

00:51:55   "'cause I'm old and the way I do things is I write words,

00:51:58   "then there's a screenshot, then with a caption,

00:52:00   "then I write more words, then there's a screenshot."

00:52:02   You know, it's like, it's interleaved.

00:52:04   Like it would never be like,

00:52:05   and here's 50 photos of this new app.

00:52:07   You know, even if I could put a caption

00:52:08   on every single one, that's not,

00:52:09   that's just not how I do a review.

00:52:11   But they, so since I didn't do one,

00:52:13   they did a slide show that showed essentially,

00:52:16   here's what this screen looked like in Mavericks,

00:52:17   here's what it looked like in Yosemite,

00:52:19   and I forget if each one had a caption or not.

00:52:21   But that gallery was tremendously popular.

00:52:23   Like a lot of people do want that out of a thing.

00:52:25   And the other thing you're talking about,

00:52:27   like a reference type thing,

00:52:28   those are the old days where you'd go to the bookstore

00:52:30   back when we had bookstores,

00:52:31   and there would be like, you know,

00:52:33   ultimate guide to Mac OS 8

00:52:37   or learn Mac OS 8 in 21 days or whatever.

00:52:40   And it would just be this gigantic paperback book

00:52:42   that would just take you through laboriously

00:52:44   every single feature at a time.

00:52:45   Here's how you rename a file in the Finder.

00:52:47   Here's how you move a file.

00:52:48   Here's how you copy a file.

00:52:49   Like just every single freaking thing you need to know

00:52:51   to use like essentially a manual for the OS.

00:52:53   And that's not a review at all.

00:52:55   That is a manual, right?

00:52:57   And there's a place for that as well.

00:52:58   But like these days,

00:53:00   No one's gonna write a book like that.

00:53:01   At least not, it's not gonna be out at the time

00:53:03   Yosemite is launched.

00:53:04   I get, probably something like that in bookstores,

00:53:06   but that's not what people are looking for.

00:53:07   And back in the day when I was on top of it

00:53:10   and when the OS was small,

00:53:11   I could pretty much document every single pixel that changed

00:53:14   and every single new keyboard shortcut and behavior.

00:53:16   But it's been years since Mac OS X

00:53:20   has been small enough for me to do that.

00:53:21   Now it's just too big.

00:53:22   And once I started to have to pick and choose

00:53:24   which things were important,

00:53:26   that was a big transition in my reviewing.

00:53:28   'Cause going from 10.0 to 10.1,

00:53:30   I could try to find every single little thing,

00:53:31   'cause there was like five things that changed,

00:53:33   except for it being faster and stuff, right?

00:53:35   But going from 10.4 to 10.5, forget it.

00:53:39   There was no way that I could fit everything in.

00:53:42   - Is that thunder?

00:53:44   - That is thunder.

00:53:45   I still have power though.

00:53:45   You'll be able to tell when I go out.

00:53:48   I get emails from my Synology downstairs

00:53:50   when the UPS kicks in.

00:53:53   It sends me an email and says,

00:53:54   "Synology is running on UPS power."

00:53:55   And then it sends me another email,

00:53:56   it says, "I'm back on regular power."

00:53:59   And when I get that, that means either someone plugged

00:54:02   in too many vacuum cleaners to the same circuit

00:54:04   and did a little power blip.

00:54:07   Or as we just had here earlier,

00:54:09   the houses on the other side of the street lost power

00:54:11   and our power flickered for a second.

00:54:13   So I know our power flickered because I got email about it

00:54:15   from my network attached storage device.

00:54:19   - See, that is technological advancement right there.

00:54:22   - That timing was flawless, well done.

00:54:26   You're gonna have fun editing this episode.

00:54:28   I'm just keeping that in.

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00:57:10   - All right, so let's talk a little bit about Yosemite.

00:57:13   I don't know why I said it like that,

00:57:14   but it sounded good in my head.

00:57:16   - What did Steven or Mike say?

00:57:17   Was it yo-es-ten?

00:57:18   - Yeah, yo-es-ten.

00:57:19   - That was amazing.

00:57:20   Steven, who yells at me for RetinaPad Mini, did I say RetinaPad Mini?

00:57:23   I meant RetinaPad Mini, said YoS 10.

00:57:26   And I yelled at him about this and he said, "Oh, it was an accident, dude."

00:57:29   Oh, I think it's better.

00:57:30   I think that's an improvement.

00:57:31   I think we should go with that, using YoS 10.

00:57:32   Well, I think so too.

00:57:33   But he's the king of the pedantic people when it comes to these sorts of things.

00:57:41   So we're going to talk about your "RIMAC" later.

00:57:43   Hi Steven.

00:57:44   But for now, let's talk about Yosemite.

00:57:48   So have you installed it, Marco?

00:57:50   Uh, no.

00:57:51   I have it on my laptop that I hardly ever use.

00:57:53   I have not installed it on my desktop for a reason that will make you angry.

00:57:59   I probably should know what you're alluding to.

00:58:01   Oh, because you're going to replace it?

00:58:03   Yeah, because Yosemite kind of apparently looks like crap on non-retina screens, so

00:58:09   I'm trying to never see it on a non-retina screen.

00:58:11   It doesn't look like crap.

00:58:13   It just doesn't look as nice.

00:58:16   It's so adorable for you guys who live—not you, Jon, I should say you, Marco—who lives

00:58:22   in this oh-so-mighty fine tower high up in the middle of the beautiful sea.

00:58:28   Oh, well, I will only look at things on my flick of the hair.

00:58:32   Retina screens.

00:58:33   I don't want to be—I don't want my actual retinas tarnished by non-retina screens.

00:58:39   Okay, I hate towers.

00:58:40   I have no hair.

00:58:41   I hate the water.

00:58:42   I'm over near the water.

00:58:43   You know what I mean.

00:58:44   You know what I mean.

00:58:45   Seriously, I have precisely zero retina max in my house and only a couple of people have

00:58:52   them at work.

00:58:53   Those of us who live in the real world have to look at Yosemite on regular screens.

00:58:58   And you know what?

00:58:59   I actually don't think it looks bad.

00:59:01   I will say, however, that there's so much white.

00:59:05   It's like white everywhere.

00:59:08   And I kind of miss having a little bit of contrast.

00:59:11   I do think it looks pretty, but gosh, especially since I've run multiple screens and I typically

00:59:18   don't use full screen mode for a lot of stuff, it's just white everywhere.

00:59:24   Where do you see all the white?

00:59:25   I've heard people say that, but that's not the impression that I get.

00:59:29   I have different impressions of the UI, but I guess there's less contrast, but I don't

00:59:34   see all the white.

00:59:36   Where are you seeing this white coming from where it wasn't before?

00:59:38   Well, here's a question.

00:59:39   Lucy, you are the most recent Windows user among us.

00:59:43   Are you a window maximizer?

00:59:47   Only for a couple of windows.

00:59:48   So I always run VMware Fusion, speaking of Windows, I always run that in a window, but

00:59:54   taking up an entire screen.

00:59:56   I find that it behaves better when it's in a window rather than when it's full screen.

01:00:02   My text editor of choice for my website, what I'm writing for that, which isn't that terribly

01:00:07   often, is Adam, judge as you will, I don't care, it works for me.

01:00:11   That's the GitHub one?

01:00:12   Yes.

01:00:13   Is it good, by the way?

01:00:14   I like it, but to be fair, I'm not a particularly heavy user of a text editor.

01:00:20   I don't have particularly involved or complex needs.

01:00:23   So those of you who are like face palming and like somebody in the chat is saying, "Yuck,

01:00:30   seriously?"

01:00:31   Yes, seriously, because you know what?

01:00:32   It works for me.

01:00:33   I don't have a lot of complex needs and it works just fine.

01:00:37   So that I run full screen, but just about everything else I run in a window.

01:00:41   So where is all the white?

01:00:42   Where are you seeing so much?

01:00:43   Any non-active window, which if you have a few of them on the screen, maybe they're gray.

01:00:49   Like I'm not a designer.

01:00:50   They are.

01:00:51   They're lighter gray maybe than they used to be.

01:00:53   And there's less contrast between the parts.

01:00:55   Like the window widgets go lighter gray.

01:00:58   There's not, doesn't contrast as much against the thing.

01:00:59   And even things like, you know, the window, like the toolbar thing, like in Safari or

01:01:03   whatever, is a little bit lighter and less of a gradient.

01:01:05   but I don't find it particularly blinding.

01:01:07   I still find it pleasing and nice,

01:01:09   and I think it's a nice aesthetic upgrade.

01:01:12   My one big complaint,

01:01:13   and I talked about it extensively in the review,

01:01:15   is the whole transparency issue.

01:01:17   The thrust of that section of the review was like,

01:01:23   here's what they're doing,

01:01:24   here's the technology behind it,

01:01:26   and here's how it manifests in the OS.

01:01:28   And then the question of why,

01:01:30   why are you doing this?

01:01:32   What's the point?

01:01:33   You've done this thing,

01:01:35   I see how you're doing it.

01:01:36   I see the different ways you're using it.

01:01:38   What are you trying to say?

01:01:39   What are you getting to?

01:01:40   What end is this transparency?

01:01:42   What is it behind the menu bar

01:01:44   that I desperately need to see?

01:01:46   Do I, you know, I don't need to see details,

01:01:48   but I need to see hints of the color of my desktop packet.

01:01:50   Like, what is that helping me?

01:01:52   All you're doing is like potentially impairing readability,

01:01:56   potentially making things ugly in exchange for dot, dot, dot.

01:02:01   And so I asked Apple this

01:02:05   And I pulled that also home quotes from WWDC,

01:02:08   which was public and everything.

01:02:09   Here's what they said in exchange for, you know,

01:02:11   the temperature and mood of your desktop background

01:02:14   leaking through into the things.

01:02:16   And by the way, this was discussed on the talk show

01:02:17   and lots of people were confused about it.

01:02:19   And I tried to clarify it in my review,

01:02:20   but maybe it was not enough sentences about it.

01:02:23   So there's two kinds of blending and vibrancy.

01:02:26   This transparency thing, one is in window blending

01:02:28   where you're scrolling up something behind the toolbar

01:02:30   and whatever it is you're scrolling up behind the toolbar

01:02:32   kind of like shows through the toolbar a little bit, right?

01:02:35   And the second one, the weirder one is,

01:02:38   I forget what it's called, I don't remember my own review.

01:02:41   But anyway, the other kind of transparency

01:02:43   is where it's composited with the other things

01:02:45   that are on the screen.

01:02:46   So like the sidebars have that kind of transparency.

01:02:50   Where if you have something with a sidebar

01:02:52   and you wave something around behind it,

01:02:53   like another window, you can kind of vaguely see

01:02:55   the thing you're waving around behind it

01:02:57   through the transparent thing.

01:02:58   You can do like control drag or something

01:03:00   so you don't bring it to the,

01:03:01   only the window in the front

01:03:02   has this transparent effect on it.

01:03:04   So you have to sort of drag a window behind something or drag the window in front back and forth in front of something

01:03:08   You can see that's going on right for that transparency mode where you can see the stuff that's behind the window

01:03:13   Apple also takes a

01:03:15   Touch of your desktop pattern and also mixes it into that right and it's subtle so that people don't even see it

01:03:22   if you don't point it out, but if you just take like a

01:03:26   Transparent I have little applications just as a you know a transfer of a light and dark

01:03:32   transparent windows that can just drag anywhere.

01:03:33   But if you take anything with a sidebar,

01:03:35   take a huge white text edit window,

01:03:37   put it behind it and put the transparent window over it.

01:03:39   You're like, all right, the only thing that's behind

01:03:40   this window is a totally empty 100% white thing, right?

01:03:44   And you'll put it over it.

01:03:44   And if you have like a very intense colored

01:03:47   desktop background, like one of Apple's things

01:03:49   where it shows grass or something

01:03:50   and everything's all green,

01:03:52   you'll notice that your sidebar is tinted green.

01:03:54   And you're like, why the hell is my sidebar tinted green?

01:03:56   The only thing behind this sidebar

01:03:58   is 100% white opaque window.

01:04:00   Where is the green coming out?

01:04:01   The answer is it's coming from your desktop background.

01:04:03   If you change your desktop background

01:04:04   to something that's all red,

01:04:05   suddenly your sidebar will be tinged with red.

01:04:07   Now, when you have something

01:04:09   other than a complete white behind it,

01:04:11   it's easy to miss this,

01:04:12   'cause if you take like a little hint of brown,

01:04:14   'cause your desktop is kind of brownish,

01:04:15   and you mix it with whatever is behind it,

01:04:17   like a picture that's behind it,

01:04:18   you'll never see that hint of brown.

01:04:20   But if you just have white behind it,

01:04:21   you'll see this hint of this other color.

01:04:23   And this does take the temperature and mood

01:04:27   or whatever of your desktop and put it into your windows.

01:04:29   but why?

01:04:30   I have a desktop pattern that I like at work,

01:04:32   which is like my son standing at a bunch of pumpkins.

01:04:35   So it's a lot of green, a lot of orange for the pumpkins

01:04:38   and then his blue jacket that he's wearing.

01:04:40   And now all of my sidebars are infected

01:04:42   with kind of this dull orange, you know, rusty tinge.

01:04:47   I love that desktop picture work.

01:04:48   I do not like a rusty orange tinge

01:04:50   on all of my menus and sidebar.

01:04:53   So I'm faced with a choice, change my desktop pattern,

01:04:56   picture, which is now leaking into all of my windows

01:04:58   or internal transparency.

01:04:59   And it's kind of like working as designed.

01:05:03   It is changing the mood of my desktop,

01:05:06   but not for the better, in my opinion.

01:05:08   - Yeah, I mean, that's,

01:05:11   it's so weird to me because I look at this

01:05:14   and I genuinely think, wow, this really is pretty.

01:05:17   And I think to myself, I like the look of it.

01:05:21   And then two seconds later,

01:05:22   I look at maybe the other screen

01:05:24   because I'm a two-screen kind of guy.

01:05:26   And that's where all the non-active windows are.

01:05:29   And yes, maybe it's gray, it's white, whatever,

01:05:32   it doesn't matter.

01:05:33   The point is there's no contrast.

01:05:34   It's just this like wall of very, very, very,

01:05:36   very light gray.

01:05:38   And that I don't care for.

01:05:39   But generally speaking, I do like the look of it.

01:05:42   It does seem more modern, it seems nice.

01:05:46   It's a little creepy going over to windows

01:05:49   and seeing, what is the metro?

01:05:53   - Herroglass.

01:05:54   - That's what I'm thinking of, thank you.

01:05:55   - I know this and you're done.

01:05:56   - I don't know.

01:05:57   So anyway, I look at the arrow and I'm like,

01:05:59   oh look, that's, oh no, no wait,

01:06:00   that's been that way for a while.

01:06:02   (laughs)

01:06:03   So they all kind of blend together a little better now.

01:06:06   But all in all, I like the look, even though it's weird.

01:06:10   I like a lot of the new features,

01:06:12   like the SMS relay that I was talking about.

01:06:15   That's really awesome.

01:06:16   But I mean, I don't know, it's new, it's cool.

01:06:20   I enjoy it, thumbs up.

01:06:21   - Yeah, I'm a little worried looking at this.

01:06:24   You know, sometimes when you introduce a new design,

01:06:27   it takes people a while to really adjust to it

01:06:30   'cause it's so shockingly different from the last one.

01:06:33   Like iOS 7, when that was unveiled,

01:06:35   it's like, whoa, this is so different.

01:06:37   But eventually people are like, this is really good.

01:06:41   I think heavy use of translucency in desktop interfaces

01:06:45   with overlapping windows is questionable.

01:06:47   It's always been questionable.

01:06:48   It was questionable when Windows Vista did it,

01:06:50   what, a decade ago now.

01:06:52   That's kinda sad actually, but anyway.

01:06:54   (laughing)

01:06:55   We are so old.

01:06:56   Looking at this, I think it's kind of up in the air,

01:07:01   like is this really a good idea?

01:07:03   And I don't think anyone's looking at this and saying,

01:07:05   this looks amazing, everything about this

01:07:07   is such a good idea.

01:07:08   Like I think it's a lot more measured.

01:07:10   It's like, well, some of this looks good,

01:07:12   some of this is kinda, I don't know what they're doing,

01:07:14   and I guess maybe we'll get used to it.

01:07:16   Like is anybody really enthusiastic about the design?

01:07:18   I haven't heard it.

01:07:19   - I have this to say for it.

01:07:20   Like if you look at the screenshots,

01:07:22   If you've scrolled through my review as many times as I have, just scrolling through, looking

01:07:26   at things and stuff like that, the screenshots in the Yosemite review I think are the most

01:07:32   visually interesting of any review.

01:07:35   Because all the other reviews, toolbars look like toolbars, window chrome look like window

01:07:40   chrome, but never change.

01:07:41   In this review, of course I'm explicitly taking pictures of the window with different things

01:07:44   behind it, with different things scrolling up into it.

01:07:46   They look amazing to me, as sort of interesting works of art.

01:07:51   I love when I scroll through I love the crazy rainbow colors through this through these things like it looks

01:07:57   It's pretty to me like obviously I made these screenshots to be I'm emphasizing

01:08:02   I'm picking the most extreme scenario to show you what your windows might look like and

01:08:05   Partially I'm doing it to show how bad it is like for example in the Safari screenshot where I show the different rainbow colored windows

01:08:10   Like this is all the same window. I'm just changing tabs look how crazily different the window looks

01:08:14   But if you just look at it in isolation as pieces of art or even like the docks on different backgrounds

01:08:18   They all look really nice and interesting like so I can that was the other reasoning like we're doing this because we want to

01:08:23   Let you control the mood of your OS by changing your desktop picture and also we're doing this

01:08:27   So that things look pretty like the same reason you do anything. It's like fashion like we want it to look pretty

01:08:31   I think it does look pretty in a lot of scenarios and

01:08:34   The thing is I think they just went a little bit over the line

01:08:38   I think I put this in the review like this habit they have of

01:08:41   Trying to do something going too far and then having to back it off

01:08:46   They did it in iOS 7 with the super thin fonts and backed it off before release and

01:08:49   You know, I did they back up any stuff in iOS 8 maybe a little bit more

01:08:53   I don't know. I don't know the details but in OS 10 they've done it like crazy in 10.0 and in the developer previews

01:08:59   They had a super translucent inactive title bar in all windows and they backed that off because it was a bad idea

01:09:03   They had all sorts of other kinds of pinstripes and translucency that were just way too strong that they had to back off later

01:09:09   Even the translucent menu bar, which I railed against and thought was ridiculous

01:09:14   They backed off on that and added a checkbox for it, right?

01:09:16   So I mean maybe this is just the way you go, you know

01:09:19   Go too far and then take it back a notch instead of being too timid

01:09:21   But I think they've essentially done it again. I think that only went a little bit too far

01:09:25   Like I like the translucent dock

01:09:27   I think that is a perfect use of hey make it pretty and have crazy colors behind it

01:09:31   But you can still see your icons because it's pretty chunky like it's huge icons

01:09:35   Maybe when you get it smaller gets worse. They could have had the opacity increases

01:09:39   They got smaller if they wanted to be clever

01:09:41   But I think I'm fine with that.

01:09:43   The translucent title menu bar, I really don't like.

01:09:46   I would have wished they had a check mark there,

01:09:47   but it's not the end of the world.

01:09:49   But the sidebars are what kill me

01:09:50   because like using Outlook all day at work,

01:09:54   I don't want to see this muddy, dingy sidebar

01:09:58   where some text is doing a vibrancy blend

01:10:00   and some text isn't.

01:10:01   And when you select things, it gets bold.

01:10:02   And it's just like the people who made Outlook

01:10:04   never designed their app with that in mind.

01:10:06   And then all of a sudden they find themselves

01:10:07   running on Yosemite and their entire sidebar

01:10:09   I just totally screwed over and looking ridiculous.

01:10:12   And I'm looking at it every day and it's like Casey said,

01:10:14   it's lower contrast now than it used to be.

01:10:16   It's muddier than it used to be.

01:10:18   And I'm faced with the awkward decision

01:10:19   about changing a desktop picture I like

01:10:21   because it's infecting my windows.

01:10:23   So they're so close.

01:10:24   Like if there was just one checkbox to say,

01:10:26   no translucent menu bar, no translucent sidebars,

01:10:28   everything else about the system I think is great.

01:10:30   I think the buttons look way better.

01:10:32   I even like the little skinny progress bars.

01:10:34   I think it looks clean and crisp.

01:10:35   I like the window widgets,

01:10:36   even though I keep moving the little things

01:10:38   with my eyeglasses because of chromatic aberration.

01:10:41   - Well, did you see there was that thing,

01:10:43   Stephen Hackett posted a pretty good photo,

01:10:44   I think it was him, that it actually,

01:10:47   like the X is actually off center in the bubble.

01:10:51   - It's just sub pixel rendering for that.

01:10:53   It's not actually off center.

01:10:54   - No, I think it actually is.

01:10:56   I think it's a half point off,

01:10:59   so on retina screens it's actually one pixel off.

01:11:01   - Someone sent in a screenshot of the actual pixels,

01:11:04   like from Pixy.

01:11:05   - Yeah.

01:11:06   and it was centered, but due to subpixel,

01:11:09   if you look at the picture elements, it gets off center.

01:11:12   But anyway, the chromatic aberration with my glasses

01:11:14   trumps all of that.

01:11:15   I can move that circle so the X is practically

01:11:17   poking out of the side of it.

01:11:18   - You can't just like turn your convergence knob

01:11:20   in your head and fix it?

01:11:21   (laughing)

01:11:22   - No, it's not that, that's not how it works.

01:11:24   Light enters the lens and has to enter the pupil

01:11:27   and all that stuff, and anyway.

01:11:29   That's a whole separate issue.

01:11:29   I almost put that in the review,

01:11:31   but I thought it would have been a distraction,

01:11:32   but I have been tweeting about it.

01:11:33   People don't know what we're talking about.

01:11:35   The window widgets in Mavericks are solid primary colors,

01:11:39   red, yellow, and green, and different colors

01:11:43   bend different amounts when they go through lenses.

01:11:46   And the little glyphs inside these circles

01:11:48   are completely black.

01:11:50   So if you have glasses, powerful glasses,

01:11:52   and you turn your head so that the red light comes in

01:11:55   at a different angle, the red, the green,

01:11:58   and the yellow widgets will move,

01:12:00   but the black will not move as much.

01:12:02   So what it looks like to you, what it looks like

01:12:03   It looks like the X that's inside the red circle looks like that X is moving to the side

01:12:07   And so now the X is touching the left edge of the circle now the X is touching the right edge of the circle now the X

01:12:11   Is touching the top of the circle like you want the X to be centered?

01:12:14   But as you move your head the X seems to move around what's really happening is that the circle is moving around the X was kind

01:12:18   Of staying still, but either way that will link to the Wikipedia article on chromatic aberration

01:12:23   This is just how lenses in light work

01:12:25   This is an effect that is emphasized by the fact that is just plain flat red instead of being like the little jewel like

01:12:32   Specular highlighted reddish thing where it is much less visible so a lot and even if you don't have glasses what Marco was talking

01:12:39   About is if you just look at the pixels. I know on the sub for sub pixel rendering

01:12:44   it's going to be off by at least a partial sub pixel and

01:12:46   Marco seems to think that it's also off by one hairline half a point pixel on retina

01:12:52   Which I'm not sure about but it wouldn't surprise me if they just didn't have the right number of pixels so anyway

01:12:56   I don't fault the design for that

01:12:59   I think the design looks great and people with glasses all the colors are always shifting

01:13:04   I mean everyone with glasses knows we used to look at CRT's you could

01:13:07   Deconverge the edges of the screen and see like a red line on one edge of the screen in the blue line on the other

01:13:11   Edge like that's just the way glasses work. I would I would not design an OS around avoiding that

01:13:16   There's no avoiding it a white square will demonstrate

01:13:19   misconvergence if you tilt your head and have powerful enough glasses, so we glasses wearers just deal with it and

01:13:26   Everyone else, you know, I think that's fine.

01:13:29   I guess that's why I didn't put it in the review

01:13:31   'cause I knew about it from a long time ago,

01:13:33   but I'm like, it's kind of like,

01:13:34   I didn't wanna make another Bendgate type thing.

01:13:36   Like Yosemite comes with a feature

01:13:38   that causes window widgets to leave their circles.

01:13:40   It's like, it's just physics, guys, chill.

01:13:43   - It could be a really advanced parallax feature.

01:13:45   - Yeah, I disable parallax on my phone too.

01:13:48   I don't need any extra elements

01:13:50   that are moving in relation to each other.

01:13:52   - So going back a minute before we move on,

01:13:55   let me back a minute to the blur being potentially annoying

01:13:58   or being a downside.

01:14:00   Certain designs, like if you look at the design

01:14:02   of Windows Phone 7 and the kind of Metro design

01:14:06   that brought in, it has a lot of downsides

01:14:08   and just like the design language it creates

01:14:12   has certain limitations with things like

01:14:15   showing complex navigation and showing things

01:14:18   being tappable versus not and things like that.

01:14:20   Like there's certain challenges that

01:14:23   that entire design language, that entire design style

01:14:26   just has certain built-in shortcomings

01:14:29   that like it is not possible to design X

01:14:32   well in that style.

01:14:34   Every design style has things like this.

01:14:37   Do you think the iOS 7-like aesthetic

01:14:40   and the way that it has been kind of half taken

01:14:44   for Yosemite, do you think that requires the blur

01:14:49   in its language, you know, to look right

01:14:52   or to be harmonious with the aluminium

01:14:55   and everything else around it.

01:14:57   Do you think it requires that?

01:14:59   Or do you think the blur is just a cost that we have

01:15:04   when building certain types of interfaces

01:15:06   with this new style that we're just gonna have to live with?

01:15:09   Or do you think they could have done something else there

01:15:11   that wouldn't just totally look crappy?

01:15:13   - You could have gotten the family resemblance

01:15:16   by using that blur in the places

01:15:18   that were already translucent.

01:15:19   So use it on the dock, obviously.

01:15:21   use it on the little overlays that come

01:15:22   when you change the screen brightness or volume, right?

01:15:25   Use it on like floating palettes

01:15:28   or like the pull down menus and stuff.

01:15:30   That effect, which is not just a blur,

01:15:32   it's a blur plus a pulling forward of certain colors

01:15:36   and increasing saturation in certain areas.

01:15:38   That is an aesthetically pleasing effect that adds interest

01:15:41   without taking away readability,

01:15:43   because that's the whole point of the thing.

01:15:44   It's like we want to show what's behind it,

01:15:46   but we don't want what's behind it to interfere,

01:15:48   so we have this crazy effect.

01:15:49   It's all over iOS 7 for transient things.

01:15:51   It could be on Yosemite for transient things as well.

01:15:55   Where you get into trouble is when you start making it part

01:15:57   of permanent interface elements

01:15:58   like the sidebars and toolbars.

01:16:00   The toolbars, I can see what they're doing there

01:16:03   because if you just made the toolbar opaque,

01:16:06   as I said in the review, completely opaque,

01:16:08   it still looks pretty handsome.

01:16:10   It's a nice design, but it's also kind of plain.

01:16:12   And the in-window blending, as annoying as it can be

01:16:15   and as distracting as it can be,

01:16:17   and sometimes as ugly as it can be,

01:16:18   also sometimes adds interest and has less of a chance of impairing readability

01:16:22   because it's not a lot of words and toolbars like it's a bunch of big fat

01:16:24   buttons the buttons are still opaque you're not really hurting readability

01:16:28   the sidebars are just a bridge too far because they're filled with text you are

01:16:31   hurting readability and it's such a huge part of the application like a new

01:16:35   Safari window the toolbar is 100% gray because you haven't scrolled anything up

01:16:39   behind it yet or any web page scroll to the top like there's nothing behind it

01:16:42   yet it's just you have a chance for it to be 100% gray but the sidebar in

01:16:45   Outlook is forever infected by my desktop pattern and possibly even worse infected if there's nothing behind it except for the desktop or some other

01:16:51   Crazy window behind it. So I think you could have gotten the family resemblance

01:16:56   without

01:16:58   Going as far as they did but I think what more what they were going for is

01:17:02   How do we make this interesting and someone said hey look at this?

01:17:06   I can mix colors into the parts of the UI and it is kind of daring and like

01:17:10   Like the arrow glass which we talked about which is like kind of like what OS 10 did

01:17:14   I forget what it was in 10.0 or in DP 3 or DP 4 or something

01:17:17   Where like I said any window that was inactive its tile bar was kind of arrow glassy

01:17:22   They didn't have the they didn't have the ability to blur back then because it would have taken it been too slow

01:17:26   But they just made it super transparent like it really looked like frosted glass like 10% opacity, right?

01:17:32   But you know Yosemite doesn't do that. Yosemite doesn't make every single title bar translucent so you can see what's behind it

01:17:38   It makes the title bar is 100% opaque until something scrolls up behind it if you happen to do in window blending and

01:17:43   and developers can choose to do that or not.

01:17:45   It's not like Aero Glass.

01:17:47   Aero Glass was a bridge too far.

01:17:48   I hate seeing people's Windows machines

01:17:51   that have Aero Glass,

01:17:51   'cause they just look like a damn mess.

01:17:53   It's like, it's just too much.

01:17:55   Sidebars are also too much,

01:17:56   but not every window has a sidebar.

01:17:59   And you know, it's not like they took the entire OS

01:18:03   and said, "Everything you see through."

01:18:05   They just made maybe one or two, too many things

01:18:09   show what's behind them for no reason.

01:18:11   - See, I like the transparency in principle,

01:18:15   but I agree with you.

01:18:16   I think it's been turned up too high, if you will,

01:18:19   and it needs to be backed off a bit.

01:18:22   - And it's not even up too high.

01:18:24   It's like, it was, I think that it's the right amount.

01:18:26   It's just like, like I said in the review,

01:18:28   if you're developing an application,

01:18:30   it's this actually ties into the extension section,

01:18:32   believe it or not.

01:18:33   Like the old bad world of extensions is like,

01:18:35   I write a great app and then someone comes along

01:18:37   and jumps into the memory image of my process

01:18:40   and start screwing with it.

01:18:42   Like I wrote an app, I debugged it, I tested it,

01:18:45   I'm sure it works correctly,

01:18:46   and then you're gonna jump into my code

01:18:48   and put a jump instruction there

01:18:50   and jump off into some other section of code

01:18:51   and then jump back there

01:18:52   after you change the state of something in my program.

01:18:54   I can't defend against that.

01:18:55   How can I debug something

01:18:57   when someone is modifying my code while it's running?

01:19:00   Like I have no idea who these people are,

01:19:01   what their software does,

01:19:02   what it's doing to my application, it's unsupportable.

01:19:05   And that's why people hate extensions

01:19:07   that are memory patching extensions.

01:19:09   screw, you know, because as a software developer,

01:19:11   it's like the worst thing in the world.

01:19:12   It's like, look, debugging my own program

01:19:13   with code that I wrote is hard enough

01:19:15   on top of debugging the OS libraries

01:19:17   and everything like that.

01:19:17   But now you're telling me that while my perfectly debugged

01:19:20   nice program is running, some other program

01:19:22   that someone who I never met wrote

01:19:23   is gonna jump into my program and change how it behaves?

01:19:26   That's crazy, it's unsupportable, right?

01:19:28   Well, if you're a designer and you say,

01:19:31   I'm gonna design an application

01:19:32   and it's going to look like this

01:19:34   and I'm gonna make sure everything is nice

01:19:35   and I'm gonna make sure all the text is readable

01:19:37   and all the interactions are nice or whatever,

01:19:38   And then I have no control over what the background

01:19:41   of my sidebar is, it's up to whatever's behind that window

01:19:46   and whatever the person's desktop background is.

01:19:48   And I'm just relying on the system to keep my text legible

01:19:51   and not look ugly.

01:19:52   That's not as untenable as memory patching extensions

01:19:56   'cause it doesn't crash your app.

01:19:57   But from a design perspective, it's almost untenable.

01:19:59   You're like, I can't, you know,

01:20:01   if you don't even give me the option

01:20:03   to make that completely opaque,

01:20:04   I feel like I just can't use a sidebar anymore.

01:20:06   I just have to use a different UI element

01:20:09   because I do not want,

01:20:10   I can't control what you're going to put in my window.

01:20:12   How am I supposed to design it when I can't control that?

01:20:15   - Anything else on Yosemite?

01:20:17   - I have tons more on Yosemite, but not for today.

01:20:19   - That's fine.

01:20:20   I wanted to very quickly talk about Apple Pay

01:20:22   and complain that I haven't had a chance to use it yet.

01:20:25   And that was most of the reason for bringing it up.

01:20:27   The other part of the reason I wanted to bring it up,

01:20:29   the other part of the reason I wanted to bring it up

01:20:30   is it struck me just a few minutes ago.

01:20:33   It seems to me a little odd

01:20:35   that neither Target nor Home Depot, who arguably need Apple Pay the most, since they seem to

01:20:40   be leaking like a sieve when it comes to credit card numbers, neither of them are supported

01:20:44   right now, which is a bummer.

01:20:45   Well, there's a pretty big downside to this for them, and that is that the way they used

01:20:50   to run credit cards, they could automatically track you and everything you bought, identified

01:20:55   by your credit card number and the name that was read through the readers. And so they

01:20:59   They were, I don't know that they did this, but they probably did.

01:21:04   They had the ability to make money off of that and market to you in some way or at least

01:21:11   track what you were doing and sell that data to somebody.

01:21:13   So Apple Pay actually removes a revenue stream from these people.

01:21:17   And so I can totally see why certain vendors are not going to be interested in doing this.

01:21:23   And eventually they'll probably be pressured into doing it anyway, but I can see why they

01:21:27   wouldn't want to be launch partners at least and wouldn't want to do it sooner than they

01:21:30   have to because they depend on being creepy as part of their business model and Apple

01:21:35   is taking away one way that they can be creepy.

01:21:37   Well, yes, but they already have alternate ways of being creepy which is their shoot.

01:21:43   It's like a shopping cart app. I forget the name of it now and it's going to drive me

01:21:47   nuts but basically there's an app that you can get and you can scan barcodes while you're

01:21:54   standing in the store and it will selectively issue you coupons.

01:22:01   And so then when you go to check out, it puts up a QR code, Cartwheel, thank you Friday

01:22:06   Pants in the chat, interesting name by the way, it will show a QR code that they scan

01:22:14   on the Cartwheel app and then that will give you money off.

01:22:17   And granted it's nice for the consumer because you get a little bit of a discount, but I

01:22:21   I am quite confident they're doing exactly what you described, which is tracking that,

01:22:26   "Okay, Aaron and I went in and we looked at this thing and it didn't have a discount.

01:22:30   We looked at this thing and it didn't have a discount, but we looked at that thing and

01:22:33   it did have a discount," and piecing that all together.

01:22:37   Wasn't it Target that ended up telling somebody's dad that his daughter was pregnant?

01:22:43   Yeah, there was that story.

01:22:44   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:22:45   Yeah, they sent the house diaper coupons or something like that because the daughter had

01:22:50   had gone to Target and bought pregnancy tests or something along those lines. I forget exactly

01:22:55   what the details were. So you make a very good point, which actually I hadn't considered.

01:23:00   But nevertheless, I'm just bummed that I'm looking at the list of people that are accepting

01:23:07   Apple Pay. And I occasionally go to McDonald's. I actually happen to really like their breakfast.

01:23:14   I more often go to Panera Bread but haven't been back since Monday. We already spent all

01:23:18   of our money at Babies R Us. I know. Well I'm saying I haven't been there in a

01:23:23   couple of weeks. I haven't been to Panera in two days it's really rough. It's

01:23:27   terrible. We spent all of our money at Babies R Us a week or so ago, maybe two

01:23:31   weeks ago. I was actually at a Walgreens just a few days back but it was like

01:23:36   Sunday. So, man, it's terrible. I haven't used it yet. I don't know what to do.

01:23:41   Apparently I have to go buy some stuff I don't need. I assume you haven't used it,

01:23:44   Marco? I used it once at Whole Foods yesterday or something. Oh and how'd it go? Tell me about it.

01:23:50   It was great. What I what I was really

01:23:52   Incredibly impressed by was how insanely fast it was like so ever since I started using touch ID on a regular basis on my phone

01:24:00   My my typical thing is I pull the phone out of my pocket and as I'm pulling out of my pocket

01:24:05   My thumb is already on the home button and has already tapped it

01:24:08   So it is unlocking as I'm lifting it up

01:24:10   So by the time I raise it up to my face level or whatever level I'm using it at

01:24:14   It is almost always unlocking by then or has already unlocked by then.

01:24:19   So I just did this instinctively.

01:24:20   I raised it up and I saw on screen my credit card for a split second.

01:24:26   I saw the Touch ID thing fill in the fingerprint for like literally half a second and it was

01:24:30   done and that was it.

01:24:31   I'm like, "Whoa!"

01:24:32   Like it was so fast.

01:24:35   It blew me away.

01:24:37   I still had to sign though.

01:24:38   It was just over $100 so maybe that's why.

01:24:41   I did still have to sign, so that was a little bit like,

01:24:44   ah, like an animal, you know.

01:24:45   But then when I went to another store later on that day

01:24:49   to get some other stuff,

01:24:50   and of course I had to use a regular machine,

01:24:53   it felt so archaic.

01:24:54   Even using Apple Pay once,

01:24:56   I've been doing this every day of my life,

01:24:59   for my entire adult life,

01:25:01   and I've never thought this was really a problem,

01:25:04   and now all of a sudden everything else

01:25:06   feels old and broken.

01:25:07   - Why did you have to sign?

01:25:09   - I think it's 'cause it was over $100.

01:25:11   There's probably still a threshold.

01:25:12   - But you can't get out of Whole Foods

01:25:14   without spending more than $100.

01:25:16   - I know.

01:25:17   - It's impossible.

01:25:18   They don't let you leave the store, I think.

01:25:19   - I'm guessing it's just like other signature rules

01:25:21   where there's probably some threshold

01:25:22   that is possibly dependent on the store

01:25:24   or the type of merchant account they have or something.

01:25:27   But we will see.

01:25:29   I don't know.

01:25:30   - Yeah, I expect the rich people to rebel at that

01:25:32   'cause seriously.

01:25:33   The kind of person goes to Whole Foods

01:25:35   and comes out spending less than $100.

01:25:36   It's impossible.

01:25:38   - It's funny you bring up getting out of Whole Foods

01:25:39   for $100, a really quick story.

01:25:41   Couple years ago, I typically bring my lunch to work

01:25:44   and I just eat at my desk.

01:25:45   And a couple years ago, for whatever reason,

01:25:47   I had forgotten it or whatever, so I decide,

01:25:49   you know what, I'm gonna go to Whole Foods,

01:25:50   which is a store I very rarely go to.

01:25:52   And I'm gonna go to their little salad bar

01:25:54   that is way more than a salad bar,

01:25:55   I'm gonna get myself a little smorgasbord of randomness.

01:25:59   And so I get a little box and I put all the food I want

01:26:02   in there, thinking, yeah, this is probably

01:26:04   like five or 10 bucks worth of food.

01:26:05   And I go to check out and it was a solid $18 worth of food.

01:26:09   Too many hard boiled eggs that go by weight.

01:26:11   I know, to be honest, I think what it was, and this was my first thought as soon as I

01:26:17   was checked out, was "Mm, should have been a little lighter on the mac and cheese, that

01:26:21   stuff's dense."

01:26:22   Oh yeah, that's a rookie mistake.

01:26:23   All those like, like, buy miscellaneous hot and cold food mixes by weight things, like,

01:26:29   Manhattan's full of those places, I'm sure they're probably everywhere, but like, that

01:26:32   was like a rookie mistake, like if you get a job in the city and you're going out to

01:26:36   lunch with everybody and you go to a place that has one of those big hot bars in the

01:26:38   like rookie mistake never go to those things because like it like you all the

01:26:43   stuff that looks good is so freaking heavy and you know you put like a little

01:26:47   side of some pasta and like you know a little piece of chicken in there $11

01:26:52   like there's no way of getting out of there getting a good deal I think I've

01:26:57   complained about this before with the cut up fruit where they will take a

01:27:00   fruit and cut it into squares or something there's like a thousand

01:27:03   dollars a square of pineapple like I don't know how they're pricing the labor

01:27:07   but like you can buy a whole pineapple for X amount and you can buy a cut up quarter pineapple for 20x

01:27:12   I don't know what happens to it to make that price change. Yeah. Well clearly we're on we're in the wrong business

01:27:17   We should be getting into the cutting fruit business, right? That's obviously worth a large premium

01:27:22   Now John since you have an iPhone be it apples or whatever. No, I don't all my lone hardware is gone

01:27:29   And you mentioned before other people were telling me like well you think you're somebody's fine because you look at our retina screen

01:27:33   I also have no retina max either at home or at work, you know

01:27:36   So my loaner hardware that I used to review Yosemite is all gone including the phone. So I am back to my dumb phone

01:27:41   I'm back to all my non retina max. So I

01:27:44   Have not used Apple Pay to answer your question. Okay, and

01:27:48   What is the current plan with regard to getting an iPhone? Is that still happening is happening soon happening later?

01:27:55   Yeah, I'll probably get one Marco reminded me today that about Apple discounts

01:27:59   so they have those friends and family discounts,

01:28:01   and so I may be able to get one of those,

01:28:03   and if I do do that,

01:28:04   that will influence my hardware buying decisions,

01:28:06   and I gotta figure out how all those work,

01:28:08   and blah, blah, blah.

01:28:09   - I'm very annoyed that I didn't even know

01:28:10   these existed until today.

01:28:12   - I've known they existed because various people

01:28:14   have offered them to me in the past

01:28:15   when I wasn't buying hardware,

01:28:16   and I just keep forgetting that they exist.

01:28:19   - So with that in mind, let's really quickly,

01:28:20   I know we're running a little long,

01:28:22   Marco, did you order a Rymak?

01:28:25   - I think so.

01:28:26   (laughing)

01:28:28   It's a little vague with the business reps,

01:28:30   like when your order has actually been placed.

01:28:32   I have not yet been charged for it.

01:28:34   And I asked if they had an order number,

01:28:36   'cause they said it was already really preparing

01:28:38   for shipment, so I don't know.

01:28:41   I have no tracking number.

01:28:43   I have tried the look up my order number thing

01:28:45   on the website, and I don't even know what email address

01:28:47   they put in for me, and I tried a few,

01:28:48   and they couldn't find anything, so I don't know.

01:28:51   It's always vague with business reps.

01:28:53   - Fair enough.

01:28:54   And John, are you intending to buy a Retina iMac?

01:28:57   I'm not really I'm still waiting for everyone else to get theirs and see what they're like and you know all that jazz

01:29:03   Although I keep now that I hearing more and more about the iPad air - I'm lusting after it more

01:29:08   So, I don't know. I don't I don't know like after my review is done. I have all these like things

01:29:14   I'm gonna buy to reward myself for

01:29:16   Finishing it and you know and use some of the money I get paid for the review to buy stuff and like one of the

01:29:21   Things is I want to get a ps4 but I'm like, oh I don't really need a ps4

01:29:24   There's no games out for that. I want now I could still wait on that

01:29:27   Maybe by the time I buy it slim version will be out if I wait long enough

01:29:30   They the red and iMac well, I gotta wait till market says he'll tell me what all the problems are blah blah blah

01:29:35   The iPhone I'm probably gonna get one

01:29:38   But then I gotta deal with all the hassles of trying to like, you know

01:29:40   get a Verizon family plan and doing all that billing stuff that I know is gonna be a nightmare and and

01:29:45   Then the hardware discounts all mixed into this and so, you know

01:29:49   Paralysis means that I just end up sitting here not buying anything

01:29:52   but I will buy some things eventually, probably before the end of this year.

01:29:56   That's extremely useful.

01:29:58   You don't even know if you bought an iMac, so we're both in the same boat here.

01:30:01   That's true.

01:30:03   Hardware may or may not be showing up at both of our houses at some point in the future.

01:30:06   Yeah.

01:30:08   Goodness gracious.

01:30:09   Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Backblaze, Igloo, and Lynda.com,

01:30:13   and we will see you next week.

01:30:14   [music]

01:30:16   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:30:21   'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:30:24   Oh, it was accidental (accidental)

01:30:27   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:30:32   'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:30:35   Oh, it was accidental (accidental)

01:30:37   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:30:42   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:30:47   @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:30:52   So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:30:56   Auntie Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C

01:31:01   U-S-I-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:31:04   It's accidental, accidental

01:31:07   They did it in meme too

01:31:09   ♪ Two accidental accidental tech podcasts so long ♪

01:31:14   - So I went back to my smaller iPod touch now

01:31:20   and I just used the big phone

01:31:23   and then I went back to the smaller one

01:31:24   and the smaller one, the biggest things I feel are

01:31:28   it's so much skinnier, not so much the height,

01:31:30   but the skinniness.

01:31:31   I just feel like, I guess I just got used to the wider screen

01:31:34   and just having like more of a webpage visible and stuff.

01:31:37   Even like reading tweets where like, what's the big deal?

01:31:39   It just feels wider.

01:31:40   But the other thing is like,

01:31:42   even though I can reach so much more of the iPod touch,

01:31:45   I don't know, like I started to,

01:31:48   even if the short time I had the six,

01:31:50   I started to get like the hand motions

01:31:52   to reach the really far parts of the screen,

01:31:54   like the hand shuffle I would have to do

01:31:55   to reach the upper left corner.

01:31:57   I started to get good at that.

01:31:58   And now when I go back to the small

01:32:00   and I start doing that motion and it's like,

01:32:01   oh, you don't need to do that motion to get that corner.

01:32:04   And I like, I don't know.

01:32:06   It feels like I built up skills

01:32:08   playing a particular game and now the game has been taken away and the skills

01:32:11   that I built up are not useful anymore and I'm kind of sad about it. It's a

01:32:15   strange feeling. I did not expect to have this feeling but it just

01:32:19   feels like I was getting good at that big thing. I mean and it's not, there's

01:32:24   not so much positive feeling like oh this is so much smaller I like it so

01:32:27   much better. There's not even that much of that. I do feel it's a little bit

01:32:30   less kind of, it's less precarious but again I was using without a case so

01:32:34   So it's weird.

01:32:35   We'll see when we get my iPhone 6 eventually,

01:32:38   how I feel about it longer term.

01:32:39   - So out of curiosity,

01:32:42   what is making you not buy it yet?

01:32:45   If you've already decided

01:32:46   that you're probably gonna buy an iPhone 6,

01:32:48   the iPhone 6 has come out.

01:32:49   We know it's not going to change

01:32:51   until roughly a year from now,

01:32:53   when it will be a terrible time to buy an iPhone 6.

01:32:55   Why not get it now?

01:32:57   - Well, I just have to decide,

01:32:58   am I gonna go into an Apple store and do it?

01:33:00   How am I gonna deal with phone number stuff?

01:33:02   how are we gonna change our Verizon plan?

01:33:04   It's like just, you know, I'll do it eventually.

01:33:07   Like it's just, if there's anything involved with it

01:33:09   other than me clicking a bunch of buttons

01:33:10   and waiting for a package to show up at my house,

01:33:12   then it's like, it gets put off, you know?

01:33:15   And that's what's happening.

01:33:17   - Do you wanna make a bet, Casey?

01:33:18   I'm betting he doesn't get an iPhone 6.

01:33:19   I'm betting this takes until close enough to next fall

01:33:23   that Jon just decides to wait.

01:33:25   - I can't wait until next fall.

01:33:26   - All right, here's the bet.

01:33:28   I will take that bet.

01:33:29   But if you lose, I get to give you a playlist for pre-show music one night.

01:33:35   You picked the wrong thing to bet there, Casey, because you're going to win this bet, so you

01:33:38   should pick something much better than that.

01:33:40   I don't know if I'm willing to do that.

01:33:41   Yeah, exactly.

01:33:43   It's a mood anyway.

01:33:44   Yeah, no deal.

01:33:45   All right, what else is going on?

01:33:47   Do we have anything to say about this Gamergate stuff?

01:33:50   Is there really much to say other than it's terrible?

01:33:52   Yeah, I have two links that I'm going to put into the show notes.

01:33:57   It's still grinding on.

01:33:58   We talked about it in vague terms before.

01:34:00   We didn't get a lot of bad feedback about it, mostly because I think people who know

01:34:03   about or care about this usually don't listen to our podcast, which is nice.

01:34:07   Honestly, I'm kind of glad that the people who are all raging and crazy on the gamergate

01:34:14   side of it, like trying to abuse all these people, I'm kind of glad they don't listen

01:34:19   to our show.

01:34:20   Because that doesn't sound like very good fans to have.

01:34:23   Right.

01:34:24   We got one email from the well-meaning people who were affiliated with it, but couldn't understand

01:34:31   why I was trashing it and so on and so forth. And I replied to one of them by email, who sent a

01:34:35   longer email. And what I basically said is, "Even though your intentions may be good, and even

01:34:39   though..." This was like weeks and weeks ago. "And even though you may not have done anything bad,

01:34:44   and even though you agree with the stated aims of this movement, the movement itself has been

01:34:49   entirely co-opted and tainted by all the bad things that happen, that it is irredeemably

01:34:54   corrupted and by associating yourself with it you are bringing yourself down. Like it's basically,

01:34:59   you know, I don't know, if I try to think of some group that this applies to I'll just get into

01:35:04   other situations, but anyway, this group and this name has been irredeemably tainted. It doesn't

01:35:10   matter what they do going forward, it doesn't matter, like, the name, the banner, it's just too

01:35:15   Too many bad things have happened under this banner and you can yell all you want about

01:35:19   "that's not what it's really about blah blah blah it's too late now."

01:35:22   So if you really believe in the good things that you think that this thing, you know,

01:35:25   that the Gamergate said it was about, you must disassociate from them.

01:35:29   Start a new hashtag under a new banner with a new name and a new platform or whatever,

01:35:34   because this one is dead.

01:35:35   And if you really cared about the things you wouldn't care about the name it's associated

01:35:38   with because you would just go off and do something else and fight for whatever it is

01:35:41   you think you're fighting for.

01:35:42   But Gamergate is lost to decent people.

01:35:47   So anyway, there's been tons of links about this.

01:35:49   I keep tweeting about it.

01:35:50   People complain that I tweet about it, that they don't want to hear about it.

01:35:52   Yeah, tough luck.

01:35:53   If you don't like it, follow somebody else.

01:35:55   Lots of people talk to Jason Snell about how many people love to tell him what he should

01:35:58   be tweeting about or not.

01:36:00   That's the way it is.

01:36:02   It is the ultimate in luxury to be able to say, "I'm tired of this Gamergate thing.

01:36:07   Stop telling me about it.

01:36:08   Yeah, it must be nice."

01:36:09   Anyway, whatever.

01:36:10   I don't want to get into it.

01:36:12   So the two links I have, these are actually from today,

01:36:14   and there's been a lot of good links,

01:36:15   and I've been reading them and tweeting them about,

01:36:17   but there's two good kind of bookends,

01:36:19   not that this thing is over,

01:36:20   but two good bookends as of where we are right now.

01:36:23   One is from the perspective of a journalist

01:36:25   who is trying to write stories about Gamergate

01:36:27   and was frustrated with the process

01:36:28   of trying to just do straight up,

01:36:30   this is the view from the outside.

01:36:32   This is the sort of disengaged,

01:36:35   dispassionate view of the thing where it's like,

01:36:37   I don't know what this is, I'm not a gamer,

01:36:39   but I'm a reporter, and I'm trying to report on this,

01:36:41   And here's the frustrating situation.

01:36:44   Here's why it's difficult to report on it.

01:36:46   And so I'll put this in the show notes

01:36:50   just from New York Magazine.

01:36:52   Who is the person who wrote this?

01:36:53   I had the name up before.

01:36:55   Jessie Singal.

01:36:57   I don't know if that's a man or a woman.

01:36:58   It shouldn't matter, but when it comes to Gamergate,

01:37:00   it definitely does.

01:37:02   So that's the view from the outside.

01:37:03   And the view from the inside is Felicia Day,

01:37:06   who you may or may not know as a actress

01:37:09   and an online media person doing all sorts of things,

01:37:12   and is also known as a gamer,

01:37:15   hasn't said much about Gamergate,

01:37:17   but finally posted something about Gamergate,

01:37:18   and hers is a personal story of like

01:37:21   how it is affecting her,

01:37:23   and why she was afraid to say anything about it,

01:37:26   and why she is ashamed for being afraid,

01:37:28   and just what this has done to the gaming community.

01:37:31   So two total huge, you know,

01:37:34   opposite ends of the spectrum talking about Gamergate,

01:37:36   and I think if you read both of those things,

01:37:38   have a good idea what this is like. You know, what the whole thing is about and what it's

01:37:43   like. And by the way, she posted this thing and less than an hour later the gamer gator

01:37:46   has attempted to dox her according to what people are tweeting these days. But you know,

01:37:51   par for the course. Anyway, I'll put those two links in. If you're sick of reading about

01:37:55   this stuff but you haven't read anything since you last talked about, just read these two

01:37:58   things and it will sort of get you up to speed, I think. Anyway, it continues to grind on.

01:38:05   Bad people continue to do bad things.

01:38:07   The rest of us continue to suffer under it.

01:38:09   There's all sorts of sideshows associated with it.

01:38:12   I really wish it would just go away.

01:38:15   I again urge everybody who is in any way associated with it, disassociate yourself.

01:38:22   Start something new.

01:38:23   That one is poisoned by bad people who no decent person agrees with.

01:38:28   Just stop.

01:38:29   Yeah, that's the thing is I just can't wrap my mind around

01:38:33   Being upset about whether or not there are women in video games or let's even assume being upset about supposed impropriety and in in

01:38:42   journalism how is how does that

01:38:45   Lead to forcing Brianna Wu and her husband out of her home

01:38:48   Like how is that a reasonable course of action and maybe it's because I'm sane

01:38:55   Maybe I I don't I don't I don't get it's just an excuse

01:38:59   It's just an excuse to lash out at things you don't like it doesn't matter what it is

01:39:02   And I'm not gonna use any analogies

01:39:03   But there are plenty of them like you hate something

01:39:05   Something happens and use it as an excuse to lash out of the thing you hate like no matter what happens

01:39:10   It's an excuse to attack women if women are tangentially involved in any way. It's an excuse

01:39:14   I mean the Felicia Day thing is like she wrote this heartfelt thing that is not really an attack on much of anything immediately gets

01:39:19   Attacked and various men have written things and not gotten attacked in the same way various men have written things

01:39:25   very recently that are much worse. Do they get attacked? No, they don't. Why? Because these people have, you know,

01:39:30   they have, they, they hate women. Like, they,

01:39:33   they're misogynists. Like, that's, that's their thing. And no matter what happens, it's an excuse to say, "woman, get in your place."

01:39:39   No matter what happens. It doesn't matter what it is.

01:39:41   It's like, "you gave my game a bad review," or "I don't like what you said," or like, it's like, "and therefore that is an excuse to attack women."

01:39:49   Everything is an excuse to attack women. They're just looking for it, right?

01:39:51   And again, this doesn't if you hear me saying this this doesn't apply to you because everyone says like you're saying all gamers hate women

01:39:57   Nope, nope

01:39:58   Not you I'm telling you the gamers who don't hate women don't associate with gamer gate because it's poisoned like go someplace different to do

01:40:04   What you wanted to do, which should be fine. You shouldn't care about this particular cause this particular decentralized thing this particular hashtag

01:40:10   You know if you care about corruption in the gaming press

01:40:13   Which is the thing and has been a thing for years and years fight that but has nothing to do with gamer get anymore

01:40:19   And never really did. But John, Gamergate is not about hating women. It's about journalistic integrity.

01:40:24   Right, and that BS is now finally filtering through to everybody. Now essentially everybody, even reporters who had no idea what it was,

01:40:30   and come in and like I tried to report on this, but everybody keeps telling me it's not about hatred of women.

01:40:34   And every time I look at the gamer gators, that's all I see. And they say, "Oh, those aren't the real ones."

01:40:37   It's like the no true Scotsman thing, which they talk about in this thing.

01:40:40   You know, every time something bad happens, someone says, "Oh, that's not really what Gamergate is about."

01:40:44   It's a decentralized thing with no actual leadership, with no actual platform, and anything bad that happens is say, "Well, that's not really what we're about."

01:40:51   That's not how it works. You know, you could pick

01:40:53   a political analogy. The Democratic Party, the Republican Party, they have platforms. They have leaders.

01:40:59   You can be expelled from them. You're not allowed to say that you're a member.

01:41:03   You know, "I am a representative of the Democratic Party.

01:41:06   I am their duly appointed representative, and I will tell you what their position is."

01:41:09   and then you say a bunch of hateful stelke,

01:41:11   you are no longer the duly appointed representative

01:41:13   of the Democratic Party.

01:41:14   They have an actual platform, they have actual leadership,

01:41:17   they have things they can say,

01:41:18   here's what we want and here's what we stand for,

01:41:19   but it's the Gamergate, completely decentralized,

01:41:21   terrible things happen and everyone's like,

01:41:23   well, that's not what we're really about.

01:41:24   Well, that's all you guys are doing.

01:41:25   If you go into these Gamergate boards,

01:41:27   it's all about attacking women

01:41:28   and saying terrible things or whatever,

01:41:29   but that's not really what it's about.

01:41:31   Well, it doesn't matter what you say it's about,

01:41:33   it only matters what you do.

01:41:34   And with no leadership and no platform

01:41:36   and no formal organizing party,

01:41:38   There's no way for you to say,

01:41:39   these people are not part of Game Brigade.

01:41:41   If they use the tag and they do bad things,

01:41:44   they're part of it.

01:41:45   If you, you can't kick them out

01:41:46   because there is no centralization.

01:41:48   Or if you can't kick them out, everything they do,

01:41:49   it just becomes what Game Brigade is about.

01:41:52   - Right, and because, and you know,

01:41:53   there's a difference between what you, one person,

01:41:56   might want it to be about or might believe it's about,

01:42:00   versus what it actually is about.

01:42:02   And what it actually is about is widespread abuse.

01:42:05   Like that's all it is.

01:42:06   It's widespread abuse of women.

01:42:08   - Like Brianna has said, it's like,

01:42:09   I don't care about what your theory is.

01:42:11   All I care about is outcomes.

01:42:13   - Exactly. - This is the outcome.

01:42:14   The outcome is so plain as day.

01:42:16   Like you don't, you know,

01:42:17   it's just ridiculous with the outcome.

01:42:19   And the worst part is the recent phenomenon

01:42:21   has been sort of right-wing political,

01:42:25   I don't know what you'd call them.

01:42:26   People are like D-list right-wing political celebrities

01:42:29   latching onto it as a way to further their agendas

01:42:32   'cause they don't know or care anything about games

01:42:33   so they see this thing is going on here.

01:42:35   And they're like, oh, well, you know,

01:42:36   we can use this angry mob to our advantage

01:42:39   to further our agendas,

01:42:40   which have nothing to do with video games

01:42:41   and certainly nothing to do with ethics

01:42:42   and video games for us.

01:42:44   It's all a ridiculous sideshow.

01:42:46   The worst thing about it is like,

01:42:47   it shows that sort of the immune system of decent people

01:42:51   and sort of like our way of handling,

01:42:53   like this movement should not be giving us the trouble

01:42:57   that it is, right?

01:42:58   Like where the Game Regators will organize

01:43:01   sort of ballot stuffing campaigns to tell a sponsor

01:43:04   enough to support some website that said something negative

01:43:06   about Gamergate and sponsors will be like,

01:43:08   "Oh, we're getting all these emails.

01:43:10   "We better stop doing this."

01:43:11   And then they'll bail out

01:43:12   because they don't know what Gamergate is.

01:43:13   They don't know anything about this.

01:43:14   And then we're like after the fact saying,

01:43:16   "No, what are you doing?

01:43:17   "Like you've been fooled by a bunch of trolls."

01:43:20   Yes, they did send you lots of angry letters,

01:43:22   but they don't represent anybody except for terrible people.

01:43:24   Like don't make financial decisions based on, you know,

01:43:28   a human driven letter writing campaign.

01:43:30   Like people were running stats on like the tweets

01:43:32   that are going up about this.

01:43:34   Like they said, I forget what the percentage was,

01:43:37   but some huge percentage of tweets

01:43:38   with the #gamergethashtag were made by

01:43:40   only 100 Twitter accounts,

01:43:42   most of which were created in the last two months.

01:43:44   Right, it's entirely a sock puppet type,

01:43:47   you know, like they are able to further their nefarious ends

01:43:51   through means that are completely transparent

01:43:53   and yet are able to fool large corporations

01:43:55   into believing they represent an important constituency.

01:43:58   And then all of us are out here like,

01:43:59   I can't believe this is even happening.

01:44:01   Like we don't have a good way to deal with organized,

01:44:06   extremely negative, terrible, anonymous trolling.

01:44:09   And hopefully this whole terrible experience

01:44:12   will sort of teach the civilized world essentially

01:44:15   how to manage situations like this better,

01:44:18   like make us all more savvy, give us better tools,

01:44:21   give us better organizing sort of antibodies

01:44:23   against this kind of disease.

01:44:25   I don't know, I mean, maybe it'll take two or three

01:44:28   runs at this, but you know, it's terrible. I wish it would get better, but who knows?

01:44:34   I disagree with one small thing that you said. You said that Gamergate doesn't have a platform,

01:44:38   and I don't think that's true. Their platform is hate. They just hate things. They hate women.

01:44:43   They hate, suppose, journalists. They hate things. Oh no, it's just women, because men journalists

01:44:49   seem to be doing okay. Fair point. They just hate women. That's the platform. Right, and I just,

01:44:55   I don't understand how any sane and intelligent human being cannot see through this and see that

01:45:03   this is wrong. Like these people who are doxing these women and making these threats against these

01:45:09   women, like I just, it does not compute how that is acceptable behavior. How is that okay? What have

01:45:15   these women really done to affect your world? And even if they have, how is that an okay reaction?

01:45:22   I don't understand how any of this makes sense.

01:45:25   It's lack of empathy, ends justify the means, all sorts of things that like,

01:45:29   you know, and really, as I said in the original show about this, that these people, you know,

01:45:34   don't understand what they're actually angry about. And so many people were insulted by that because

01:45:39   they always think I'm talking about them. If you know what you're angry about, then I'm not talking

01:45:42   about you. I'm talking to people who don't know. Anyway, it's kind of a tautology there, but like,

01:45:45   these are people who are in pain. People who act this way are not like happy, well-adjusted people

01:45:51   with awesome family lives and fulfilling jobs and like, you know what I mean?

01:45:55   That's, they're in pain currently, they're in pain from the past or whatever, and

01:45:59   they focus that on like, you know, why am I in pain, what's wrong with my life?

01:46:04   And you know, they're placing a lot of the blame on that, on the perceived

01:46:08   enemies, whatever they may be, and in this case it's women and progressives and

01:46:12   whatever it is that they're, you know. But like, the people who do this, like, you're

01:46:15   like, "Oh, I can't understand how people..." Like, how can people believe that they're

01:46:18   the bad guys in their own stories and

01:46:20   Sometimes they don't sometimes they don't believe that the bad guys in their own stories

01:46:23   But sometimes they do believe they do believe in their heart of hearts that they're the bad guys in their own stories

01:46:27   And they're doing it because they're in pain for unrelated reasons

01:46:30   And they feel like they they deserve to be the bad guy or they should be or like it's not you know

01:46:36   I have I have empathy for the people who are on that side of the fence because really like in my experience people who

01:46:43   Do terrible things unless they're actually clinically insane, which most people are not

01:46:47   It's because they're in pain, right? It doesn't make it any better and we

01:46:51   need to find ways to deal with this and help ourselves and secondarily help them, you know, but it's

01:46:57   You can't it's easy to demonize people who do terrible things

01:47:01   But really like if you think about it, like when you're trying to get into their headspace

01:47:04   Imagine your life was not like it was imagine your life was just terrible in all possible ways

01:47:11   And you had an amazingly bad childhood or you're super angry about something or you have, you know some kind of

01:47:17   undiagnosed, unmedicated emotional imbalance that you have not been able to deal with.

01:47:22   All of that dissatisfaction and hatred and anger has to go somewhere, and it ends up landing in

01:47:28   weird places. Sometimes it turns inward on themselves, sometimes they're outward, sometimes

01:47:32   both. So I think I vaguely understand what it is that's making this happen. It's just that, like,

01:47:37   as a society, one job is figuring out why that's happening, and we should prevent these outcomes

01:47:43   by making people have better, happier lives and not end up in these terrible situations.

01:47:46   And and you know, but the other aspect is how do we protect ourselves as a society against the to not to essentially say

01:47:53   You know as you will find out when your child arrives, you know, this is not okay

01:47:57   This is not okay behavior to you know, enforce limits on you know, it's so difficult to do that online

01:48:02   What is okay behavior online in real life? This is not okay

01:48:05   We don't accept this and that's the worst thing is like part of what the whole

01:48:09   You know

01:48:10   What's happening in games these days that sort of progress games are making and doing and saying more interesting things

01:48:16   if the people who are on that side of the fence doing bad things to women had grown up in a world that sort of

01:48:23   post, you know, like

01:48:25   Feminist revolution of gaming, you know

01:48:28   Like if these people had grown up in a world where women were not as objectified as they are in popular culture now

01:48:33   They would be less likely to direct all their hatred and bad feelings towards women

01:48:38   You know what I mean? Like if they could see women as human beings instead of people, they would actually be happier

01:48:42   people. Like they're fighting against something that could have saved them from being the things that they are today.

01:48:47   You know what I mean? Like, because all this contributes to like,

01:48:50   why am I miserable and where do I direct that energy?

01:48:54   The stew that you grew up in, the same thing that's making me say unintentionally, you know,

01:48:58   racist or sexist things because that's just how I grew up, that

01:49:03   that influences all of us and like these people working for change in the games and everyone else are trying to make a world where

01:49:08   People are less steeped in these bad things growing up so that when they come to adulthood, hopefully they won't hold on to these

01:49:14   You know antiquated and harmful notions about other people

01:49:18   yeah, I just it seems like the same kind of playbook that all

01:49:24   Oppressed groups have gone through and I'm coming from very much a position of luxury because I don't really know what that's like

01:49:32   I mean my dad's family is Jewish, but I never really practiced growing up

01:49:37   So I've never personally been exposed to any sort of anti-semitic behavior

01:49:42   But it seems like from an outsider's from a luxury point of view

01:49:47   It seems like the same playbook that you know, let's hate Jews and no let's hate

01:49:52   Black people and it's and now it's oh, let's hate women. And when does that ever work out?

01:49:58   When does that ever end up okay?

01:50:00   It's been working out well for hitting women because that is evergreen.

01:50:03   Women have been subjugated for millennia and it will continue to be the case.

01:50:08   Like that's, you know, progress has been made on all these fronts,

01:50:13   but like they seem to go in cycles and women is the one that most people don't.

01:50:18   I have to admit that I did not think about as much like it was when I'm growing up.

01:50:21   And again, this is through education and environment and who you are.

01:50:24   growing up as, you know, like you, Casey, just a white male, you know, the same as all

01:50:29   of my peers, not different in any particular way. You learn about in school, you learn

01:50:33   about Martin Luther King, you know, you learn about slavery, you learn about the Native

01:50:38   Americans, you learn about all sorts of things, and you do women's suffrage in voting and

01:50:42   you're like, "Oh, that's so silly, at one point women couldn't vote, that's obviously

01:50:46   ridiculous, they can vote." But you don't go that far. Like in my education at least,

01:50:50   We talked about the basic human rights of women being able to own land and vote and

01:50:55   stuff like that.

01:50:56   And we talked about slavery and civil rights and stuff like that.

01:50:58   And then it's like, "And we come to the present day and everybody's equal."

01:51:01   And it's like, "No, not exactly."

01:51:04   And at least in my education, in my pre-college education, there wasn't a lot of time spent

01:51:09   on talking about feminism or the objectification of women or whatever.

01:51:12   They're just sort of like the natural undertones of everything you live in.

01:51:17   You just accept it.

01:51:19   You could say, "I understand that racism is terrible and still exists, but white women

01:51:25   are treated perfectly fairly now."

01:51:27   And women, that's not the issue.

01:51:28   The issue is minorities, that's where all the problems are.

01:51:33   But you know, well, everything's fine there.

01:51:37   It becomes the baseline that you don't even notice.

01:51:41   It doesn't even seem like...

01:51:42   That's the whole thing with the gay and gay people.

01:51:44   It doesn't even seem like women are oppressed, but it's like, "What are you talking about?

01:51:47   That's just the way things are.

01:51:48   That's not oppression.

01:51:50   Everyone's in their designated roles.

01:51:51   The woman stays home and cooks, the man goes to work, and like, that's just the natural

01:51:55   order of things.

01:51:56   That's not oppression.

01:51:57   What are you talking about?

01:51:58   And it just, it seems so far, it's like slavery, that's oppression, obviously, right?

01:52:02   But it's, you know, it's, I have to admit, it took me a much longer time to have a clear

01:52:09   view on pervasive sexism in the world than it did for any of these other things.

01:52:15   And as I said in the last time we talked about this, like, if you just expose yourself to

01:52:19   these things, don't necessarily engage with them, don't argue with them, like, just expose

01:52:24   yourself to women explaining what it's like to be a woman in the world and don't like...

01:52:30   And just take it in.

01:52:31   Like, just accept it, listen to it, don't take offense at it, because you're not the

01:52:35   one doing these things to them, right?

01:52:37   You know, maybe think about things you might have done to other people that are like this,

01:52:39   maybe you can decide whether you think it's good or bad, but if you listen enough, the

01:52:44   ponderance of stories about this happening will slowly make the gear start turning your head and

01:52:50   realize the ridiculous inequalities that existed that you didn't see before. And I don't have any

01:52:55   hope of that happening for people who are involved in game-breaking. Maybe when they're older, if

01:53:00   they're young. Like, I mean, again, it took me until my 30s to start to even think about these

01:53:05   things in a serious way. And if you're an 18-year-old in a chat room trying to figure out

01:53:10   "how are you going to send anonymous death threats

01:53:12   "to a woman?"

01:53:13   You got a long road ahead of you.

01:53:16   (laughs)

01:53:16   - Certainly do.

01:53:17   It's just, it's so terrible.

01:53:20   And I don't know, I just, it's not fair.

01:53:25   It just plain isn't fair.

01:53:27   - I think, you know, Jon, you said something earlier,

01:53:30   much earlier now, but you said something earlier

01:53:32   that we as technology or as a society

01:53:39   with the modern internet, we don't really have good ways

01:53:42   to deal with very strong anonymous negative feedback.

01:53:47   Among the many other things that we need to work on

01:53:49   as a society that are more long-term and difficult to attack,

01:53:54   this might be something we can do sooner,

01:53:57   or at least start thinking about.

01:53:58   In designing our systems, in designing social networks,

01:54:03   in designing technology, in designing the tools

01:54:06   and the networks and the media that we,

01:54:08   as modern technically connected people use,

01:54:12   we need to consider what are the possible abuses here?

01:54:18   How much damage, how much abuse can a very small group

01:54:23   of determined individuals dish out

01:54:24   with this thing that we're building?

01:54:26   And is there a way that we can design it

01:54:28   in such a way that both they can abuse fewer people

01:54:33   or in fewer ways and that somehow we can reduce

01:54:36   their incentives to abuse?

01:54:38   So, and this is, you know, in many ways,

01:54:40   like when I've designed similar systems for Tumblr,

01:54:43   for Instapaper, for Overcast,

01:54:45   I've always been concerned about spam.

01:54:46   And so like one of the big things like in Overcast,

01:54:49   you can recommend episodes to your Twitter followers.

01:54:53   There is nowhere in the entire app,

01:54:56   and there probably never will be anywhere in the entire app,

01:54:58   where you can see a most recommended global list.

01:55:02   And the reason for this is very deliberate.

01:55:04   It's because I didn't want anybody to be able to spam,

01:55:07   to create a whole bunch of accounts

01:55:09   to all recommend certain things

01:55:10   to boost them to the top of that list.

01:55:11   It's like the old dig front page problem.

01:55:14   I didn't want to have to deal with that.

01:55:16   And same thing with Instapaper.

01:55:18   There was never like Instapaper had

01:55:19   its recommended global stories,

01:55:20   but those were human picked.

01:55:22   So there's never like,

01:55:24   I intentionally try to avoid creating things

01:55:28   that can be reasonably spammed.

01:55:31   Or I try to avoid spam by avoiding

01:55:34   creating incentives to spam.

01:55:36   Like there's no reason to spam with a bunch of overcast

01:55:40   accounts recommending episodes because only people

01:55:41   who follow you on Twitter will ever see them.

01:55:43   And it's attached to your name.

01:55:45   And so like that kind of solves itself, right?

01:55:49   In designing systems now and in the future,

01:55:53   I think we should, in addition to considering things

01:55:55   like spam incentives, we need to consider abuse incentives.

01:55:58   And how much attention can one person get

01:56:02   with relatively little validation from others?

01:56:05   how much can anonymous comments be heard?

01:56:08   Right now on Twitter, anybody can @reply anybody else

01:56:14   and it will show up in their replies timeline.

01:56:18   And Twitter, obviously, Twitter is,

01:56:20   a lot of people are pointing out and have been pointing out

01:56:23   Twitter's policies on dealing with abuse complaints,

01:56:27   I don't know the details of them,

01:56:28   but they sound pretty terrible.

01:56:30   That might not be solvable, I don't know.

01:56:32   It sounds like, 'cause you know, it's always a problem

01:56:35   like saying oh well Twitter should always suspend

01:56:37   these accounts and then it becomes a question of well,

01:56:39   you know, what if somebody files a false report against you

01:56:41   and so it's, these are all tough problems.

01:56:43   I think Twitter can do better but I don't think

01:56:46   they can magically solve the problem.

01:56:47   Like I don't--

01:56:48   - Like they could do a lot with just,

01:56:50   I've been looking more at like the problems

01:56:52   of reporting on Twitter and it mostly has to do

01:56:55   with how Twitter approaches the problem.

01:56:58   Like if they approach their form for reporting people,

01:57:02   more like a sort of a crisis center would approach

01:57:06   supporting someone who's having some kind of crisis,

01:57:08   like domestic abuse or something like that,

01:57:10   like it's a different approach.

01:57:11   Like you assume that the person is in crisis.

01:57:13   You don't, you know what you can't demand of the person.

01:57:15   Like one of the big things is like,

01:57:17   enter all your information in this form,

01:57:18   including your real complete first and last name.

01:57:21   And by the way, we may send this information

01:57:23   to the person you're reporting.

01:57:24   Like I know what they're kind of getting at in that,

01:57:27   But the way it's worded isn't made for a mindset

01:57:31   for a person who's coming in like in crisis and saying,

01:57:34   or sorry, we rejected your report

01:57:36   because you're not the person who is being attacked.

01:57:39   Like if you send someone a link to an abusive tweet,

01:57:41   but if you're not the target of it,

01:57:42   like they've just rejected out of hand,

01:57:44   like it's just not designed the way it should be

01:57:47   for something that people go to when they're in crisis

01:57:49   or when someone they care about is in crisis.

01:57:51   It should be totally designed to put that person at ease,

01:57:54   to give strong guarantees that the things

01:57:56   that they would reasonably fear, for example,

01:57:58   that you reporting someone,

01:57:59   the person you report would know who you are

01:58:01   and would have more information about you

01:58:03   because you reported it.

01:58:05   Like you can't have a form that even hints at that,

01:58:07   let alone, firstly, you should obviously

01:58:08   never actually do that.

01:58:09   And I don't think they would actually do that,

01:58:11   but the form makes it seem like they would.

01:58:13   And so if you're in a crisis situation

01:58:14   and you land on that form, you hate Twitter.

01:58:16   It's like, what the hell?

01:58:17   I have a problem here.

01:58:18   Or if they bounce back your thing

01:58:20   with a automatic response says,

01:58:22   "Sorry, your report could not be processed

01:58:24   because you're not the target of the abuse.

01:58:26   - Yeah, that's pretty bad.

01:58:27   - Like, and someone just posted it,

01:58:28   someone just posted a death threat

01:58:29   with someone's full name and address on it.

01:58:31   And you get a robo response.

01:58:33   Like, there are tons of things Twitter can do

01:58:34   to make this better, but you're right

01:58:36   that at the root of it, it's like,

01:58:37   anonymity is important for large classes of people

01:58:40   on the internet, and you can't just say,

01:58:42   oh, everyone can't be anonymous,

01:58:43   you need to use your full name and social security number

01:58:45   and everything to have a strong correlated ID.

01:58:49   Like, anonymity needs to be there,

01:58:50   but once you have anonymity,

01:58:51   then just people keep making new accounts,

01:58:53   and like, it's not 100% solvable,

01:58:55   but Twitter could be doing a hell of a lot better job.

01:58:58   - Right, but I think though ultimately,

01:59:00   this is a design flaw of Twitter and systems like it.

01:59:02   Like this, when I had the whole Wirecutter drama,

01:59:07   I quoted Howard Stern in a blog post saying,

01:59:10   Howard Stern, he uses Twitter here and there,

01:59:13   but he said on his show a few months ago,

01:59:16   he was, you know, 'cause he always complains

01:59:17   about how like everyone on Twitter is basically a huge,

01:59:20   you know, bad person to everyone else.

01:59:23   And he said, you know, why do we give these people

01:59:27   so much access to us?

01:59:28   Like why do you let any random person yell at you

01:59:33   10 seconds after you post anything,

01:59:34   and why do you go and read it,

01:59:35   and why can anybody in the world

01:59:38   have your attention so easily?

01:59:41   That, I think, the question of the amount of access

01:59:45   we and systems like Twitter allow other people

01:59:49   to have to us. That is something that I think we've assumed in designing social and internet

01:59:57   communication systems for the last decade or so. We've all assumed that it had to

02:00:01   be this way, that of course that's the power of the internet, anybody can talk to anybody

02:00:04   else. But maybe that's a bad assumption, maybe that is a fundamental design flaw and

02:00:09   maybe future social networks and future directions of current social networks maybe. Maybe future

02:00:16   networks and future communications, things like that, need to be more limited. Maybe

02:00:21   I shouldn't be able to @reply Howard Stern whenever I want to and have him see it.

02:00:26   But don't you think that's part of the beauty of Twitter? When it's good, that is an advantage.

02:00:31   I think that's what we want out of Twitter. We like that direct connection to people we

02:00:35   otherwise wouldn't have had a connection. Part of the reason that works at all in Twitter

02:00:39   is because people are constrained. They can't send 500-paragraph screeds to Howard Stern.

02:00:43   they just have to send one line or insults.

02:00:45   But like, the problem is when it's not, you know,

02:00:47   because the block function does exist.

02:00:49   Like a system like Twitter without a block function at all

02:00:52   would be terrible.

02:00:53   The block function is not perfect, but it does exist.

02:00:55   But the problem with the block function

02:00:56   is it's totally defeated by the ability

02:00:58   to just keep creating new accounts, right?

02:00:59   So if you are super famous and you get that abuse,

02:01:02   you're like, oh, well, no problem.

02:01:03   I manage that with blocks.

02:01:04   And eventually you block all the most horrible people

02:01:06   and you're fine.

02:01:07   No, you're never fine.

02:01:08   They just keep creating new accounts

02:01:08   'cause they're crazy people, right?

02:01:10   And that is, I guess, the anonymity.

02:01:14   You couldn't keep creating new accounts

02:01:15   if an account was strongly tied to your ID,

02:01:17   but anonymity, I think, is an important feature of Twitter

02:01:20   and other internet services.

02:01:21   So you can't say, like Google tried to do,

02:01:23   oh, no anonymity, real names only.

02:01:25   Like, that's not a tenable solution either.

02:01:28   So it is a very difficult problem.

02:01:29   But when I was talking about the tools

02:01:31   we need to deal with this,

02:01:32   I was talking more at the macro level than the micro level.

02:01:35   'Cause at the micro level, you can just get off Twitter,

02:01:37   like either permanently or for a certain period of time.

02:01:39   but at the macro level it's like when sponsors are pulling ads from websites

02:01:43   financially impacting that entire site and the jobs of various people

02:01:47   because of a coordinated fake letter writing campaign of people like

02:01:50   pretending to be concerned about some BS issue when in reality they're trying to ruin the lives of women

02:01:55   and journalists who happen to write for the site.

02:01:57   When that happens it shows that our corporations and organizations are not internet savvy enough

02:02:02   to know when they're essentially being trolled into stupid behavior

02:02:05   that has real consequences for real people.

02:02:07   Neither are politicians with all the policies that they make.

02:02:10   We assume like, you know, this is like Intel and Adobe.

02:02:13   We assume companies like Intel and Adobe

02:02:14   would be a little bit more tech savvy than politicians,

02:02:17   let's say.

02:02:18   You know, and then finally, like obviously

02:02:20   anonymous death threats, completely untraceable

02:02:22   with no, you know, I mean, it goes with the anonymity.

02:02:25   You don't want, you want anonymity

02:02:27   when you're trying to talk about how your husband

02:02:29   is abusing you and you're afraid for your life.

02:02:31   But you would like the person who threatened your life

02:02:33   to not have anonymity.

02:02:34   So we kind of can't have it both ways there.

02:02:35   I don't know what the solution is to that but you know

02:02:38   I guess a step would be law enforcement taking these reports seriously being able to do anything at this point

02:02:43   Like all these things get reported to the authorities. It's like it's like reporting a stolen bicycle to the police

02:02:48   Basically, I think stolen bicycle probably has a higher priority to the police than anonymous internet death threats

02:02:52   stolen bicycle you're disappointed about it and it might have been expensive, but it's not a big deal but

02:02:59   series of considered death threats associated plus your real address being sent out to people

02:03:04   Like you don't even care if the person who sent that death threat meant it all you care is that other people who might be

02:03:09   Seriously unbalanced now have your address and now hate you because they've been riled up by this group or whatever and yet what the heck can

02:03:15   The police do they're not tech savvy

02:03:17   They can't get IP addresses for these people even if they could could they track it down to you know, it's just I

02:03:22   Don't know what the solution to that is, but I can tell you that I would imagine law enforcement

02:03:27   Maybe you would put on a good face, but what the hell are they gonna do?

02:03:30   It's just they're not gonna give you a personal bodyguard for the rest of your life

02:03:34   And if you unless if you're rich you can't unless you're rich you can't afford to have a personal bodyguard

02:03:38   You're not a celebrity with an entourage and a compound in a fortress

02:03:41   You're a person living in a house and up or in a partner

02:03:44   And now you're scared for your life and the police tell you realistically there's nothing they can do about it

02:03:47   So I don't know what we can do about that, but we're not doing a good job right now

02:03:51   And this is a a new kind of threat. You know I mean, it's kind of like and people you know shrug it off

02:03:57   But as many people pointed out like that that crazy misogynist guy who went and shot up that school

02:04:01   Where was that I forget what that was that? I don't know it was it was a while ago

02:04:03   But anyway, this guy had a series of, you know, anti-woman screeds that he had written on the internet,

02:04:09   YouTube's videos that he had written, then he went and just shot up a bunch of women and himself, right?

02:04:12   It's not as if we're saying, "Oh, this is never gonna happen." Like, it has happened in the past.

02:04:16   This is a plausible threat that some crazy person who hates women and has put all his hatred for and all his pain in life into that

02:04:23   can get a gun and go shoot people up. So when you make a threat like that, it's like, "Haha, funny troll.

02:04:28   That would never happen, right?" It has already happened.

02:04:30   It is so plausible and yet we have no tools to deal with it. All we can do is like, well,

02:04:35   we'll have to wait till someone shows up with a gun and then maybe we can do something about it.

02:04:38   And it's like, it's too late now. Yeah, well, and that's why I think like,

02:04:42   you know, you're right that like, there's always going to be like this, like a baseline number of

02:04:46   disturbed people in the world that, you know, we just can't do anything about that. Like,

02:04:52   we have like, that's, they're always going to be there. And we can, you know, we can attempt to

02:04:57   do our best to produce fewer crazy disturbed people in the world. That's the best we can

02:05:01   really do and we can try to find them and treat them or imprison them or whatever. But that's a

02:05:07   really hard problem to ever eradicate. It's like we're going to eradicate all bad people. Well,

02:05:11   that's not real. But I do think there's a lot to be said for removing the incentives here. So,

02:05:19   you know, right now if Twitter removes the ability for crazy people to coordinate their efforts and

02:05:26   and stalk people and creep people out

02:05:28   and docs them and everything.

02:05:30   Those people all have different places they can go.

02:05:32   They can all go to private message boards.

02:05:34   They can go to--

02:05:35   - I mean, that's where they are.

02:05:35   They're coordinating on these private message boards.

02:05:38   The worst thing is the message boards aren't even private.

02:05:40   They're public.

02:05:41   These people aren't the brightest,

02:05:42   but they're public message boards

02:05:44   where they're talking about how they're gonna do

02:05:46   these things that if they had real names

02:05:48   and addresses associated with these posts,

02:05:50   you could arrest them all now

02:05:51   for the things they're all doing

02:05:53   and talking about are already illegal.

02:05:54   It's just that, well, you just have no idea who they are.

02:05:56   - Right, and that's never gonna be solved.

02:05:59   That problem, the way the internet works,

02:06:03   that's anonymous coordination of things

02:06:05   is always going to be possible.

02:06:07   It's always going to be,

02:06:07   and it's just gonna keep getting easier

02:06:09   as tools get better.

02:06:11   We're never gonna solve that problem.

02:06:12   What we can solve, or what we can help,

02:06:16   what we can reduce is the access people have

02:06:20   to anybody they want, anytime they want.

02:06:21   And that's what I'm saying.

02:06:23   I think we need to really rethink

02:06:24   these social systems we've built

02:06:25   and to say like, is this really a good idea

02:06:28   to allow this kind of totally like open,

02:06:32   you know, in a way, you know, democratic, but like--

02:06:35   - But like, what would your solution be?

02:06:36   Like, you know, make it like LiveJournal,

02:06:38   where you only have to invite people to see your Twitter.

02:06:39   You can already protect your Twitter feed,

02:06:41   but that's just not how Twitter works.

02:06:42   Like, the openness of it, that anybody can follow you

02:06:44   and that anybody can contribute,

02:06:46   like when it's working well,

02:06:47   and when people are all nice to each other,

02:06:49   that is the beauty of Twitter.

02:06:50   That's the beauty of, you know,

02:06:51   life and relationships with people.

02:06:53   So I don't see how you can fix that

02:06:55   without sort of going insular and making everybody

02:06:58   sort of in their own little cocoons,

02:07:00   like that would take away what's good about Twitter.

02:07:03   Like when I think about how to try to fix this,

02:07:06   I think for the people who are doing all these bad things,

02:07:11   the people of those, those people in that group

02:07:14   who live in the first world,

02:07:16   who otherwise have more or less comfortable lives,

02:07:19   and because you don't know what country these people are in,

02:07:21   they could have, they could be in war-torn countries

02:07:23   that we're currently bombing and their whole family is dead

02:07:26   and they're starving to death

02:07:28   and they're on internet cafe somewhere

02:07:30   that we're like so many more problems.

02:07:32   But if your baseline comfort is taken care of

02:07:35   and you sort of like have food and have shelter

02:07:37   but you're still super angry at the world

02:07:39   which is probably a large portion of this thing.

02:07:41   It's like if we could have helped those people

02:07:44   have their lives turn out differently

02:07:47   and have the things that influence them be different

02:07:50   they would not be doing this now.

02:07:51   Like it's the long-term plan of like

02:07:53   We have to change society so that people are not raised in an environment where they see

02:07:57   women as less than human and direct all their anger at them when things don't go the way

02:08:02   they want.

02:08:03   You know what I mean?

02:08:05   That's the long-term solution.

02:08:08   I think I have a more pessimistic view of the Twitter type stuff.

02:08:11   Like you said, you can't stop them from making anonymous chat boards.

02:08:14   You're never going to.

02:08:15   You can't get rid of anonymity.

02:08:17   And I don't think the solution is to not give people public access to you, like to retreat

02:08:22   to your compound to keep yourself in a circle of people.

02:08:25   We just need to make a society and a world that

02:08:30   produces fewer of these people who are this angry

02:08:33   about these things.

02:08:35   Yeah, and I think, Marco, your point

02:08:37   about when you're designing overcast,

02:08:42   when you were designing all the other things you've

02:08:45   designed in the past, and not encouraging

02:08:48   that kind of nefarious behavior.

02:08:50   A lot of times I ask myself or sometimes others, and I think a lot of good intentioned individuals

02:08:57   ask, "What can I really do?"

02:08:59   Well, something that may seem as silly but really obviously isn't silly is you doing

02:09:03   the right thing and trying your best to not encourage nefarious behavior and overcast.

02:09:09   That's something that can be done.

02:09:11   That's what you, the royal you, can do is make those decisions and make them intelligently

02:09:18   and try to do the right thing, even if it's the harder thing, do the right thing to prevent

02:09:23   this kind of BS behavior.

02:09:24   Yeah, I mean, I don't know what else to do. I really do think there is a lot of low-hanging

02:09:33   fruit with the design of these systems that we can do to improve conditions. And yeah,

02:09:37   we're not going to get rid of these problems totally, but we can certainly start to address

02:09:42   them and start to reduce their impact and start to reduce the incentive to be problematic

02:09:46   on these systems. Like if Twitter just had some simple filters you could set, like I

02:09:51   would love, like I would love for, you know, because I, you know, whenever I say anything

02:09:55   remotely controversial, like which text editor I prefer, which is more dangerous to discuss

02:10:01   than the Palestinian situation, whenever I say anything about text editors, I would prefer

02:10:07   to have some kind of setting on Twitter where I could say like, "Don't show me any, don't

02:10:11   even show in my timeline any responses from people who maybe I don't follow or are not

02:10:17   like within two degrees of following or something like that like because sometimes it gets really

02:10:21   out of hand and I can't handle it and I can't even imagine like if you have if you have

02:10:26   a bigger audience or and especially like if you're a woman with a big audience and you

02:10:31   say anything remotely controversial like I can't even imagine what like there are there

02:10:36   are many people, not least of which celebrities, but there are many people out there who would

02:10:42   leave a control like that on all the time.

02:10:44   Yeah, I think that's actually an actionable thing, because we talked about how you could

02:10:47   have a protected account or it's open to the public, and I think that the openness is a

02:10:51   strength of Twitter, but if there was a range between there where you could do something

02:10:55   like Margo said, where—this is kind of techy, but like, set up rules that say, "Don't

02:11:01   me replies from someone who doesn't follow me, who has fewer than 50 followers, whose

02:11:06   account was created in the last month, basically like sock puppet detection or a degrees of

02:11:12   separation limit or a temporary degrees of separation limit because you know you just

02:11:16   said something controversial.

02:11:18   Those are controls that you can give individuals that is not turning Twitter into a live journal

02:11:23   or some private type thing.

02:11:25   Twitter is still open but give people control.

02:11:27   Some of the things people have been doing outside the system, like have you seen the

02:11:30   community block lists where they will sort of pull together their blocks because everyone is blocking

02:11:35   the same sort of and I know they're sock puppets and they just recycle the accounts and everything

02:11:38   like that but just to have a communal block list that can be shared among people so that if you

02:11:44   know if basically the decent people all band together chances are good that one of the decent

02:11:48   people in the circle has already blocked this troll so you'll never see his tweet and you didn't

02:11:51   have to see it and block it like why are we all individually blocking the same stupid accounts as

02:11:55   they wander through saying terrible things to people right if one person could block it we could

02:11:59   all benefit. Now, there are downsides to communal block lists as well, but this is the type

02:12:03   of feature that if Twitter supported it and Twitter was more serious about those type

02:12:06   of controls, you could make a communal block list, there could be a master block list of

02:12:11   sock puppets, there could be, like, it becomes a big thing. It becomes, and this has to be

02:12:15   part of Twitter stuff anyway, like, dealing with abuse in the system becomes a major part

02:12:19   of what anyone who runs any big community site knows. Suddenly you find out your real

02:12:22   job is just spending all your time moderating and dealing with trolls and dealing with sock

02:12:26   puppets and dealing with hacks and stuff like that.

02:12:29   That's probably not avoidable, but low-hanging fruit, Twitter could start by making their

02:12:34   reporting system for abuse be a lot friendlier to the people who are reporting it, a lot

02:12:39   clearer, a lot nicer, framed in terms of someone who is in crisis, not in terms of "here's

02:12:43   a dry clinical form that protects us as a corporation and doesn't really make any acknowledgement

02:12:49   of what you might be going through."

02:12:51   Real time follow-up from Holgate in the chat room.

02:12:54   Apparently Twitter verified accounts, which just make me angry

02:12:57   Twitter verified accounts already have features I've been talking about

02:13:02   Yeah, no that I've mentioned that I've been talking about that on Twitter people

02:13:05   Why isn't verified something anybody can get if anybody like like if you're like we would pay for like whatever it costs Twitter in

02:13:13   Terms of like they can even make a profit on it

02:13:14   Whatever it costs them in terms of manpower and time like is there is some you know

02:13:18   It's not an automatic system. Like someone has to verify your ID. You probably have to make a phone call

02:13:22   Maybe you have to send someone a fax because it's 1991 again, like whatever you have to do, right?

02:13:26   That because people do get verified check marks, but it's not on demand

02:13:29   So a lot of these people who are getting all this abuse

02:13:31   the trolls make fake accounts and pretend to be them and then the people the angry people get

02:13:36   Reangry all over again because they believe a fake tweet really came to happen to Brianna's the other day

02:13:40   They made a fake account with her made her say something terrible and she got attacked from 50 different directions again, right?

02:13:45   Why does she not have a verified check mark? Oh, it's because she's not important enough because she can't control it

02:13:50   She should be able to call Twitter on the phone and say here's a hundred bucks verify my damn account

02:13:54   I'll send you like IDs and stuff like that

02:13:56   That is an example of another piece of low-hanging fruit

02:13:58   Anybody should be able to get verified if they're willing to pay that's take the time and money

02:14:02   I mean if you want to do the cost you like oh that that cuts out people can't afford $100 or whatever like

02:14:06   There's two ways Twitter can just be more proactive at realizing what this person is under onslaught

02:14:10   Give them a stupid verified checkmark don't charge them for it, but they're not they're dropping the ball on that and there's no

02:14:16   There's no way you can request verification and actually get it because you know

02:14:19   You can say I've been impersonated. I've been attacked look at all these people that I'm blocking look at my daily activity

02:14:24   Can I get a verified checkmark and you get nothing from Twitter?

02:14:26   So it is insane that those people don't have verified checkmarks and the the reporting system is stupid and broken

02:14:31   and this is before we get to the things that you were talking about of like

02:14:34   having those type of controls about seeing replies and having sock puppet detection and all the type of things anybody who is like

02:14:40   You know

02:14:42   Does anything with big data like I feel like it's so easy for humans to detect sock puppets and trolls

02:14:47   I think computers could do a really good job of it, too. Yeah

02:14:50   One one more item before we finally leave this topic someone someone in the chat room was complaining like, you know

02:14:56   Isn't it okay to just dislike Anita Sarkeesian who's another person's talked about?

02:14:59   Feminist issues and sexism in games, you know, can I can I dislike her whatever? Yeah. Yeah fine, right?

02:15:06   I think I was like, I just happen to believe that she's a snake oil salesman who's lying to us and blah blah blah

02:15:10   So I'm putting one more link in the the show notes here is this is not a conspiracy theory

02:15:16   It's an ongoing video series that I think is only about two parts so far. It's by who is it by?

02:15:21   You guys should know it's like I did everything's remix Kirby Ferguson

02:15:26   Yeah, so I think this is like a funding thing where like I paid for it

02:15:30   Whatever you had to pay when you did a Kickstarter or whatever. So I'm seeing the new things as they release

02:15:33   I'm assuming you'll be able to see all of them

02:15:35   Eventually once this is all over. But anyway consider funding it. They're really good. I

02:15:40   Think you can see the first part for free. The reason I put this in there is there is a very

02:15:45   long, long, long history.

02:15:48   And this is something as an engineering major,

02:15:50   I can't believe I'm saying this,

02:15:51   but like if I can make everyone in the entire world

02:15:53   take one sort of major in a college education,

02:15:56   I would make everybody learn about history

02:15:57   because everything, you know, it's a cliche to say it,

02:15:59   but if you know anything about history,

02:16:01   how can you not see the same things happening?

02:16:03   Because people haven't changed that much

02:16:05   in the past 10,000 years or so.

02:16:06   Anyway, conspiracy theories have a long

02:16:08   and illustrious history.

02:16:10   They're readily explainable, obvious reasons

02:16:12   why people love conspiracy theories,

02:16:15   People fall from conspiracy theories.

02:16:17   They believe them with every fiber of their being.

02:16:19   And it is just part of the human condition.

02:16:22   And yet when people are in the midst of a conspiracy theory,

02:16:25   like that there's a giant cabal of feminists

02:16:28   who are controlling the gaming industry,

02:16:29   and Anita Sarkeesian is stealing money from people

02:16:32   and getting rich and selling snake oil,

02:16:34   these crazy conspiracy theories,

02:16:35   which everyone else sees as crazy,

02:16:36   seem perfectly rational to a lot of people.

02:16:38   So I feel like rather than attacking that issue head on,

02:16:41   if you just learn about the history of conspiracy theories

02:16:42   and how they work with the human mind and society,

02:16:45   you will eventually, I have to feel,

02:16:47   at the end of all that, perhaps re-examine

02:16:51   what you believe about whatever conspiracy theory

02:16:54   you happen to believe in.

02:16:55   So anyway, it's a really entertaining video series,

02:16:57   even if it doesn't change your mind about any of Sarcasm,

02:16:58   you should still watch it and fund it because it's good.

02:17:01   - It's sick to me that we still have to talk about this,

02:17:04   but I'm glad we have.

02:17:05   - I try to like, I could talk about it every week,

02:17:07   and I tweet about it all the time too,

02:17:09   but it's just like, I don't know.

02:17:12   I mean, we have to do something,

02:17:13   and talking about it is one of those things.

02:17:16   - No, no, I'm not complaining.

02:17:17   - This is a tech show.

02:17:18   I know people will complain,

02:17:19   but we saved it for the after show.

02:17:21   - Yeah, honestly, this could have been

02:17:22   like a quote, official topic.

02:17:24   We just didn't get to it until the after show.

02:17:27   But I mean, it is an important enough story in our industry.

02:17:29   Like this is not, this is just as valid of a topic

02:17:33   as what we think of the new iMac and all that crap.

02:17:35   I mean, this is more important than everything

02:17:38   that we had as real topics tonight.

02:17:40   This is not a "How to Make the World a Better Place" podcast,

02:17:43   but we're in the world too.

02:17:45   [BLANK_AUDIO]