00:00:00 ◼ ► coincidentally i was going on the ferry back to the mainland john uh yesterday i'm just gonna always say new jersey every time you say that until you stop new jersey so as i'm on the boat i get an alert that all of my transcription servers in the data center are offline oh that's fun so all the mac minis and i'm like huh now fortunately they aren't literally all in that one data center i have a few that are at um cyberlink which is mac mini vault i believe was
00:00:29 ◼ ► their name for that but it's cyberlink is like the company that behind it um so i have a few at cyberlink and i have a few in my house and because transcripts are prioritized based on the show's popularity and i have something like you know 12 ish total macs that are not uh in the data center i can i can go without some of them for a while and you might not notice because the popular shows are still getting transcribed and so anyway so so i'm on the boat and i and i'm you know i get all this alerts i'm like huh okay so i do some quick diagnosis of like you know can i can i remote desktop
00:00:59 ◼ ► to any of them can i access any of them no um i open up the uh unify uh ubiquity portal thing of like their site manager like and it says the entire unify console is offline
00:01:11 ◼ ► hmm that's not great so i'm like well looks like i'm stopping at the data center on the way home
00:01:18 ◼ ► so i show up and you know i go into the cage and everything is off like the power is off all of the power lights are off to everything including the console and everything
00:01:31 ◼ ► now hold on let me stop right there to get into the cage you have to pass through humans right so when you say oh no definitely not i have to pass through with like a key card a data center does not typically have a ton of humans walking around
00:01:43 ◼ ► um at least not you know it's like there's like one guy at a security desk at the beginning who you know
00:01:49 ◼ ► you like wave to and that's it like but then oh okay yeah but between me between the entry door
00:01:54 ◼ ► uh to the building and the room that contains the servers there's like four or five key card doors
00:02:03 ◼ ► i see and you need the key card and the pin for most of them so like it's it's it's a good amount of security
00:02:09 ◼ ► because you know like data center like who rents servers in a small data center like this it's like
00:02:12 ◼ ► banks and you know government offices you know they have like compliance and security requirements and
00:02:17 ◼ ► everything so there's a lot of you know a lot of security and logging and everything so but what i'm driving
00:02:23 ◼ ► at is when you say that the cage was off you're not talking about like the entirety of the data center
00:02:29 ◼ ► you're talking about your particular rack yes in the data center yeah okay oh everyone else was fine
00:02:34 ◼ ► so my rack is just everything's off and i'm like hmm that's not great so you know i i opened the door
00:02:41 ◼ ► and even you know the door also had like there's like a big like swinging like cage metal door that
00:02:47 ◼ ► also has the keypad scanner on it front and back so you know nobody else who has access to the data
00:02:52 ◼ ► center room with servers in it can access my servers unless they have my key card you know like so it's
00:02:58 ◼ ► and i can't access everyone else's which again for security that's that's a good thing so anyway
00:03:03 ◼ ► um so i figure out that um remember i had mentioned when i was describing how i had to learn all this
00:03:09 ◼ ► stuff and all you know all the stuff i didn't know i mentioned a couple things one thing i mentioned is
00:03:12 ◼ ► that data centers all use 220 volts which i didn't know so everything has to be like dual voltage which
00:03:17 ◼ ► most stuff is which is fine um and also that it's fed from two different banks of power yeah and you
00:03:25 ◼ ► have to have a transfer switch anything that does not have two power supplies um you have to have
00:03:30 ◼ ► an automatic transfer switch that that like intelligently basically like keeps everything
00:03:34 ◼ ► plugged into one source and if that source goes away it instantly switches to the other source kind of
00:03:38 ◼ ► like a ups with no battery just switching between two two different power sources um well my ats was
00:03:43 ◼ ► dead and so the switch the power switch thing is just till i go and it's like blinking some weird
00:03:50 ◼ ► lights and it's totally dead like well that's the problem okay so long story short i have to replace
00:03:59 ◼ ► that now you know i had gotten some like cyber power thing and it was like it was about a thousand dollars
00:04:03 ◼ ► which i thought would be decent i'm kind of thinking maybe it's not decent now well don't you try and
00:04:08 ◼ ► plugging it and plugging it back in from both power sources of course that didn't fix it well it's like
00:04:12 ◼ ► blinking these weird you know a weird it's basically blinking it's blinking all of its lights at once
00:04:16 ◼ ► and what all the documentation and ai stuff i could find said it was basically like yeah some part of
00:04:21 ◼ ► the board probably failed great so anyway not super happy with cyber power and that i'm wondering if
00:04:26 ◼ ► anybody out there has any specific recommendations uh for what i can replace it with it's not still
00:04:31 ◼ ► under warranty it probably is it's like it's six months old so i'm gonna i want to order something
00:04:35 ◼ ► else i'm right now i'm borrowing one from the data center for you know until i get something else
00:04:39 ◼ ► because also all these things have lead times to order i'm curious like it seems like this is actually
00:04:43 ◼ ► not that common of a need because there aren't that many options out there and i think most people
00:04:47 ◼ ► who are racking servers like this generally use servers with dual power supplies so they can just
00:04:52 ◼ ► plug directly into both power sources and they're fine so i'm a little curious if anybody has any
00:04:58 ◼ ► recommendations for you know i need to plug in you know eight c13 plugs i think they are the the ic
00:05:07 ◼ ► little you know the three-prong thingies i think i think they're c13s um anyway i need to plug in
00:05:12 ◼ ► eight of those to something and they take power from two c20s so uh we'll see if anybody has
00:05:20 ◼ ► all right we have a new member special uh we did atp tier list emoji uh john can you explain to us
00:05:30 ◼ ► how we handled this how you assembled this for us please yeah so obviously we didn't do all emoji
00:05:35 ◼ ► because there's just too many uh we did a whole bunch though and uh all three of us just basically
00:05:40 ◼ ► submitted lists of emoji that we wanted to put into tier list and that's how we came up with the list
00:05:44 ◼ ► there was a little bit of overlap but actually not that much um and this was also another opportunity
00:05:50 ◼ ► for me to try out my tier list app last time a lot of people requested a feature where you could
00:05:55 ◼ ► see the tile that we are tiering at a larger size and so that feature was integrated and it was very
00:06:00 ◼ ► useful for the emoji although like i said on the the episode i could only get emoji at 160 by 160
00:06:07 ◼ ► pixels i don't maybe that's as big as they are in mac os but i don't know anyway well there was they
00:06:12 ◼ ► were scaled up past 160 by 160 so you could see them better in the video and yes like all our tier
00:06:17 ◼ ► list videos there is in fact our tier list uh specials there is in fact a video on youtube but a
00:06:22 ◼ ► secret url that you should not share with non-members but if you are a member in the show notes at the
00:06:27 ◼ ► very top will be a link to the video so you can watch us put emoji into tier list and as usual
00:06:32 ◼ ► um yeah the the episode uh always all these member special episodes but especially the tier list
00:06:38 ◼ ► ended up leading us into weird directions i feel like this one had like a a lesson at the end that
00:06:45 ◼ ► i didn't anticipate going in uh you know so maybe you're not interested in what we think about different
00:06:50 ◼ ► emoji but i think we did cover lots of aspects of what makes a good and bad emoji and at the end
00:06:53 ◼ ► there's a you know a little lesson of all this uh you know something i'll listen let's say something
00:06:59 ◼ ► that i learned from the special and maybe you'll learn it too and i have gotten a lot of feedback
00:07:03 ◼ ► from people who say they listen to the episode too and we're also surprised that uh they had
00:07:16 ◼ ► this uh absolute incredible podcast episode and watch the absolute cinema that is john's youtube video
00:07:22 ◼ ► how do you go about doing that atp.fm slash join and just give us eight bucks a month that's it it's
00:07:29 ◼ ► really simple oh and i will say that uh you know again like all the tier list things that i updated
00:07:33 ◼ ► the tier list app for this one during this episode i i thought this is great i've named all of the
00:07:39 ◼ ► little you know i've named the emojis with the apple name that they give them so we can read them
00:07:43 ◼ ► on the show they just appear in little tooltips that i have like a modifier key that i can hold down
00:07:48 ◼ ► and mouse over them and then it was just the tooltips for being so annoying about appearing
00:07:52 ◼ ► and we had to fight with that the whole episode well you'll be glad to know as soon as the episode
00:07:56 ◼ ► ended i fixed my tier list app much more reliable and easier to read tooltips basically the problem
00:08:01 ◼ ► was i was using the uh the browser native tooltips if you just do like title equal attribute on a thing
00:08:06 ◼ ► but just fine that works it's like native you get it for free but browsers tend to have a delay
00:08:12 ◼ ► before they show that like if you mouse over something with the title equals whatever attribute
00:08:16 ◼ ► it will show the tooltip eventually and that eventually thing is so flaky and weird and i guess
00:08:21 ◼ ► i was just not being patient enough or whatever but anyway i replaced that entirely with a better system
00:08:25 ◼ ► so next time zoomed in tile so you can see them and also tooltips that work and then the next episode
00:08:32 ◼ ► that we do is here list i'll find out the next feature that my app needs that it doesn't have
00:08:40 ◼ ► almost entirely vibe coded is that 100 haven't touched any of the code it's just entirely vibe
00:08:45 ◼ ► coded it was one of my first five coded things gotcha and you will not hear anything about those tooltips
00:08:53 ◼ ► oh you will you will hear casey try to come up with the name of the all of the emoji and then me jump
00:08:59 ◼ ► in with the actual name once i get the tooltips actually work that's exactly how it went it really is
00:09:08 ◼ ► apparently made a new vibe coded app or no yeah i talked about this on an earlier episode that i
00:09:14 ◼ ► i've had this you know i not that i do any video editing but when we do these member specials we do
00:09:18 ◼ ► the tier list where we have a video of it and again it's just a video of the tier list you can see us
00:09:22 ◼ ► dragging things up um at the very least that needs to be trimmed i don't do any editing on it it's
00:09:28 ◼ ► basically unedited like a bootleg but i trim off the beginning part where we're talking to each other
00:09:32 ◼ ► in the end part after we're done and me being me i want to do that in a lossless way and i had been
00:09:38 ◼ ► using ffmpeg and asking gpt for the for the ffmpeg invocation because i could never figure it out i
00:09:45 ◼ ► would just say you know i want to losslessly trim the ends off this thing here's the start point here's
00:09:49 ◼ ► the end point give me the ffmpeg command line and i will copy and paste it but that got old and so i'm
00:09:54 ◼ ► like okay in this vibe coding error i'm going to make a little video lossless video trimming app that
00:09:59 ◼ ► does the same thing i just give it a file i have two text boxes start and end and it just trims the
00:10:04 ◼ ► ends off that's all it's supposed to do and i talked about that app i don't know several episodes ago and
00:10:09 ◼ ► now i finally get to use it for the first time i get to use it for real we do a whole tier list thing
00:10:13 ◼ ► we record it we get a video recording i go to the video recording i find the time stamps put them in
00:10:18 ◼ ► hit trim check the video that it produced and it was messed up the video ended like 15 minutes before
00:10:25 ◼ ► the audio so like the video was not as long as the audio which is not something that should happen
00:10:30 ◼ ► because it was the full video and the full audio they were just massively different lengths probably
00:10:35 ◼ ► because of variable bit rate or something or not variable frame i don't even know all i can say is
00:10:40 ◼ ► it wasn't usable at all and when i made this vibe coded up i had mentioned this uh actual commercial app
00:10:46 ◼ ► called lossless cut that does the same thing and way more it's like a way more sophisticated app but
00:10:50 ◼ ► essentially does the same thing you want to losslessly trim audio and video this does it for you um and
00:10:55 ◼ ► so i had to use lossless cut because my stupid vibe coded app didn't work but of course after i used
00:11:00 ◼ ► lossless cut i went back to my vibe coded trimming app and i said i have a video file and i asked you to
00:11:06 ◼ ► trim it and the resulting file looks like garbage fix it and it did so maybe next time my app will work
00:11:12 ◼ ► cool making progress left and right i mean and i will i'll mention this as in another follow-up item
00:11:17 ◼ ► if we get to it but like this is you know i see lots of discussion about like everyone will be making
00:11:22 ◼ ► their own custom apps with vibe coding or whatever software development is software development even if
00:11:26 ◼ ► you're literally not writing the code you like that phenomenon i've made an app and i think it works on
00:11:31 ◼ ► all these test files and then you get a real file and you try and it doesn't work that happens with
00:11:34 ◼ ► apps the humans code too all the time like that's just app development you're like oh i'm done with
00:11:39 ◼ ► my app i made this little tool and it's great well have you how many bugs does your little tool have
00:11:43 ◼ ► probably a ton whether you wrote it or whether an lm wrote it it's probably filled with bugs and so
00:11:50 ◼ ► you're going to use it and then you're going to find more bugs and it's just like the the maintenance
00:11:54 ◼ ► there is no avoiding the maintenance of writing something keeping it working it and finding all the
00:11:59 ◼ ► bugs and all the dark corners where they're hiding there's no escape from that at least so far
00:12:03 ◼ ► with current technology there's no escape from that with or without humans so here i am making
00:12:08 ◼ ► these toy apps to make my life easier and all it's doing is reminding me that software development is
00:12:11 ◼ ► software development even if you're not writing the code all right uh i wanted to share with the
00:12:17 ◼ ► listeners that i have i think at this point i can say i have leveled up my sonos experience and if you're
00:12:23 ◼ ► not a sonos or unify person maybe you can skip to the next chapter because this may or may not be
00:12:27 ◼ ► relevant to you but uh i wanted to tell everyone that so when i first got my sonos stuff that was
00:12:34 ◼ ► when i was still on eero and it all worked pretty much flawlessly it was really really reliable then
00:12:38 ◼ ► i moved to ubiquity we talked about this um several episodes ago what episode was that i think it was
00:12:43 ◼ ► 693 and we talked about how what happens is and my understanding this is very faint so forgive me if i get
00:12:50 ◼ ► this factually incorrect but the gist is sonos stuff would create their own kind of ad hoc ish wi-fi
00:12:58 ◼ ► network that they call sonos net and what would happen is particularly if you plugged uh one of
00:13:04 ◼ ► your sonos speakers into ethernet which most of the non-portable speakers have ethernet jacks
00:13:09 ◼ ► um if you plug something into ethernet and had sonos net running it would try to bridge these two
00:13:15 ◼ ► networks and oftentimes because of spanning tree protocol or stp there would be some sort of thing
00:13:21 ◼ ► that would cause ubiquity to crash out to use what the children use these days or basically just freak
00:13:27 ◼ ► out and it was annoying and it and so that led me to following ubiquity's uh official recommendations
00:13:33 ◼ ► which is to either go all in on ethernet or not and so i took all my stuff off ethernet it was mostly
00:13:39 ◼ ► fine but like latency particularly when starting or stopping something was kind of a pain in the butt and
00:13:44 ◼ ► and occasionally i felt like i wasn't getting reception so to speak on a portable speaker where
00:13:50 ◼ ► i really should you know i'm not that far away from a ubiquity wireless access point and yet it's still
00:13:54 ◼ ► you know like pausing or or dropping the the audio every you know 30 40 seconds something like that
00:14:00 ◼ ► um and then if you recall in 693 what we were talking about was that uh ubiquity put a shot across
00:14:07 ◼ ► sonos's bow because they had a marketing video where they talk about oh and if you have trouble
00:14:11 ◼ ► troublesome iot equipment and they're focused on like a sonos speaker labeled as sonos on their
00:14:16 ◼ ► little ubiquity dashboard that mark was talking about earlier uh you can turn on the stp edge which
00:14:22 ◼ ► will prevent these sorts of issues yada yada yada and i tried that and it seemed to help a smidge but it
00:14:26 ◼ ► didn't really help that much well good news our long national nightmare is over or long international
00:14:33 ◼ ► nightmare is over because uh a few maybe a couple months ago uh ubiquity excuse me sonos this was about
00:14:39 ◼ ► two months ago came out with a new version of their apps that lets you turn off sonos net so it will
00:14:46 ◼ ► only use ethernet or wi-fi it will not create their own ad hoc thing and so on reddit's announcement
00:14:52 ◼ ► post there's a you know kind of an faq should i disable sonos net on my modern network to which the
00:14:58 ◼ ► answer is most for most modern high-speed routers disabling sonos net can actually help things run
00:15:02 ◼ ► smoother newer routers you've used wi-fi technology that can sometimes conflict with sonos net's mesh so
00:15:08 ◼ ► turning it off lets your system lean fully on your home network instead so if you think about it when
00:15:13 ◼ ► sonos was brand new the the quality of wi-fi this i don't know when this was this is like 20 years
00:15:19 ◼ ► ago the quality of wi-fi in the home was freaking terrible and they couldn't rely on your home or
00:15:24 ◼ ► apartment's wi-fi in order to be in order to have a stable connection and so sonos net made sense
00:15:30 ◼ ► 20 years ago but i'm not so sure it makes a whole bunch of sense now so there was a different post on
00:15:36 ◼ ► reddit where they have a full-on faq one of the questions was how does this affect surround stereo
00:15:40 ◼ ► pairs in home theater which is a question i had because you want extremely low latency between
00:15:44 ◼ ► like i have a sonos arc ultra which is wired into ethernet and then i have two uh arrow one excuse me
00:15:50 ◼ ► two one sls in the back in a sonos sub gen 3 and so how does that work so so the question was how does
00:15:57 ◼ ► this affect surround stereo pairs in home theater no changes to your surrounds or sub they still connect
00:16:01 ◼ ► directly to your primary soundbar exactly like like they do today with or without the setting
00:16:04 ◼ ► that low latency link is its own thing and isn't part of sonos net so disabling sonos net doesn't
00:16:08 ◼ ► touch it the one nuance if you had a soundbar connected over ethernet hello with sonos net
00:16:13 ◼ ► off it'll stop bridging sonos net out to your other sonos speakers it'll still talk to its own surrounds
00:16:19 ◼ ► and sub and heads up disabling sonos net is not the same as disable wi-fi in a single speaker
00:16:23 ◼ ► that one does cut off a surround or sub entirely different settings different results so again you know
00:16:30 ◼ ► the sonos net thing was their own thing and you can turn that off now which is great and then additional
00:16:34 ◼ ► faq option or question i'm on unify can i finally mix wire and wireless without the network going crazy
00:16:40 ◼ ► i didn't write that question but i could have so the answer was with sonos net running it could create an
00:16:45 ◼ ► extra it could create extra network paths back to your unify gear and if spanning tree wasn't enabled
00:16:51 ◼ ► on all the ports with sonos players with the right port cost that's where a lot of the chaos came from
00:16:55 ◼ ► turning sonos net off removes those alternate paths and should clear up that common scenario
00:16:59 ◼ ► i can't promise it fixes every unify issue that really depends on your topology and the specific
00:17:03 ◼ ► problem but for the wired plus wireless makes my network misbehave headache this is the fix a lot
00:17:09 ◼ ► of you've been waiting for hello that's me that's what i was waiting for uh and then finally i thought
00:17:13 ◼ ► it was interesting uh the official guidance uh on the sonos like knowledge base if you will has changed
00:17:19 ◼ ► slightly and so we'll put a link to the support article in the show notes uh wired setup without
00:17:23 ◼ ► dedicated sonos wireless i'm sorry let me back up this is to choose between uh wired or wireless uh
00:17:30 ◼ ► sonos setup and then one of the options is wired setup without dedicated sonos wireless network
00:17:34 ◼ ► uh with sonos net disabled you can connect one or more sonos products to your router via ethernet cable
00:17:38 ◼ ► while the rest of your system stays connected to your home wi-fi sonos net can be re-enabled at any
00:17:43 ◼ ► time the setup is suitable for situations where your home wi-fi is strong but you want to hardwire
00:17:47 ◼ ► specific products for a more stable connection that's me you want the remaining wireless products to
00:17:51 ◼ ► continue using your home wi-fi directly also me and you want to simplify your network setup and keep
00:17:56 ◼ ► more control over your home network configuration yes yes and yes so i apologize for the a lot of
00:18:01 ◼ ► reading but i thought for the six of you that are in the same situation i am this is a very convenient
00:18:06 ◼ ► and useful psa so if you two don't have any questions i'll move right along excellent uh friend
00:18:13 ◼ ► of the show louis mantia wrote a very interesting blog post where louis was basically saying maybe
00:18:23 ◼ ► yeah he basically presents the argument for squircle jail here's why it's good um and even though i think
00:18:31 ◼ ► all the things he said are true i still hate it uh for the reasons he said so some some of his arguments
00:18:37 ◼ ► are um basically if you wanted to sum up the uh the gist of it is that uh squircle jail which as a
00:18:43 ◼ ► reminder is the uh enforced by the operating system rule that mac os icons must fit within a particular
00:18:49 ◼ ► shape squircle that apple defines and if your icon does not fit in that squircle apple will take whatever
00:18:55 ◼ ► your icon is shrink it down and shove it inside a gray squircle so it's very draconian big sir
00:19:01 ◼ ► recommended this way back when and some apps followed it and some apps didn't and apple decided you know
00:19:05 ◼ ► what we're done recommending no choice you go in the squircle that's squircle jail uh and so louis
00:19:11 ◼ ► basically says this effectively makes it so that the best icons have to be a little worse because the
00:19:18 ◼ ► best icons were not always constrained by the squircle so they are necessarily going to be worse because
00:19:22 ◼ ► now they have this new constraint that they didn't have before that makes them more samey and
00:19:26 ◼ ► everything but it also makes the worst icons better because the worst icons were really bad like even
00:19:31 ◼ ► in the the big sir recommendation the recommendation was you should be in a squircle that's like this
00:19:36 ◼ ► and the squircle was not the size of the full icon the full icon would be like 10 24 by 10 24 or
00:19:40 ◼ ► whatever but the squircle was inset from that but then things like games would ship and they'd be like
00:19:45 ◼ ► oh our icon is the the character from our game and he fills the whole thing and so you'd have like on
00:19:50 ◼ ► your dock you'd have a bunch of squircles and a bunch of other apps and then you'd have this big
00:19:53 ◼ ► square that is taller and wider than all the other icons because they didn't get the memo about using
00:19:58 ◼ ► margins because they don't care about the mac and you're just lucky this game runs on the mac at all
00:20:01 ◼ ► you'll take what you can get so squircle jail makes it so no matter what garbage you put in your your app
00:20:08 ◼ ► no matter what the developer of this app makes for their icon we will make sure that no matter what it is
00:20:13 ◼ ► it is within the new designated squircle and that does make it so that you don't have these ugly
00:20:18 ◼ ► third-party apps in your dock that just don't fit in and don't look right and look like they're
00:20:24 ◼ ► garbagey shovelware because that's exactly what they are so it's kind of a leveling force um he also
00:20:30 ◼ ► makes a mark and he's kind of like uh even though all the apps are the same shape now we can tell that
00:20:34 ◼ ► a document is like a tall rectangle and an app is a squircle and blah blah blah and it's like yeah that's
00:20:38 ◼ ► great but like i don't need to know their apps if they're in the dock i can tell their i can tell
00:20:41 ◼ ► their apps i don't get them confused with folders or whatever like that that apps are you know that
00:20:46 ◼ ► basically is the argument the the iphone defined an app as a squircle and apps are squircles and all
00:20:51 ◼ ► apps should be squircles because that's the app shape it's even used in like the sf symbols it's like
00:20:55 ◼ ► app it's just a squircle uh i don't find that argument compelling because i still wish my apps could
00:21:00 ◼ ► very least break the squircle if not be entirely non-squircle shaped um but yeah it is a leveling it is a
00:21:06 ◼ ► uh make the bad icons better and make the greatest icons worse and the average goes up as a result of
00:21:13 ◼ ► that but it makes this sameness that i do not find particularly pleasing and also i like people who
00:21:18 ◼ ► can't make icons to have terrible icons that's an important signal like like that's it's like oh if
00:21:25 ◼ ► only we could help them by programmatically trying to make their icon better it's like they should be
00:21:29 ◼ ► punished for not making good icons if it's a bad part of a game and they've used the full icon area and
00:21:34 ◼ ► that thing looks weird it should look weird let it work look weird i want the best to be able to
00:21:39 ◼ ► flourish and like i don't i don't like this leveling so anyway you can read it and he's an icon designer
00:21:44 ◼ ► and you know he goes through all like the the downsides of squircle jail and he has plenty of
00:21:48 ◼ ► complaints about uh this particulars of icon composer and how it works as we talked about last week and
00:21:53 ◼ ► when we talked about our icon so i encourage you to read the post because it's very interesting and
00:21:57 ◼ ► informed by literal decades of making icons professionally including i believe for apple
00:22:02 ◼ ► so uh this is not just like some random opinion but i personally wish that that constraint did not
00:22:09 ◼ ► exist i wish icons were free to look their best and their worst yeah i i think i love that louis wrote
00:22:16 ◼ ► this because it first of all i think it's a pretty uh bold stance to go to to write this in the sphere
00:22:23 ◼ ► that we are in like in like the apple nerd sphere and you know you have people you know people like
00:22:29 ◼ ► john gruber like you know holding up the the other end of the argument pretty strongly um and obviously
00:22:33 ◼ ► you know john you but um to come out and say like hey here's actually some pretty good reasons why
00:22:41 ◼ ► the squircles being enforced actually makes sense but i think what's you know you have to also kind
00:22:47 ◼ ► of i don't know if louis came out and said this but i think the strong implication is that these are
00:22:52 ◼ ► apple's reasons and i don't know you know because louis works very closely with in this world so like
00:22:57 ◼ ► my guess is he has heard from people who have told him this is the reason uh and that i think is really
00:23:06 ◼ ► interesting to hear that like the reason why apple makes the design decisions they do is not always
00:23:12 ◼ ► communicated to us it's almost never communicated to us and sometimes they do stuff like squircle jail
00:23:17 ◼ ► where you know we can't see any upside to this like we we from the outside look at this like why would
00:23:23 ◼ ► we do that why would they do that the only possible reason is that alan die sucks but there actually was
00:23:28 ◼ ► probably an argument internally about this particular thing and this was this is the reason they went with
00:23:34 ◼ ► this behavior and even though we don't necessarily agree with it it was really interesting i think to be
00:23:39 ◼ ► presented with that argument and to consider oh well it isn't just because somebody's stupid it's because
00:23:46 ◼ ► they had a trade-off that they were optimizing for and they chose differently than i would have chosen
00:23:51 ◼ ► probably but they did have a reason oh i i've always understood the reason like even when they
00:23:56 ◼ ► did it in big sir i totally understood why apple wanted to do this like it was obvious the thing that
00:24:01 ◼ ► i hate so much about squircle jail is not so much their decision which i disagree with that they made in
00:24:06 ◼ ► big sir that all mac icons should be squircles i disagree with is that they entirely threw out the
00:24:12 ◼ ► carrot and just brought stick and they were like we like because they tried in big sir they said
00:24:17 ◼ ► this is what we want to do and adoption was wasn't terrible adoption wasn't terrible like we all saw a
00:24:22 ◼ ► lot of mac icons go squircle in big sir which i think was mac os 11 we're very bad at remembering these
00:24:28 ◼ ► things but it was it was a while ago and obviously there's a discontinuity between 15 and 26 anyway
00:24:31 ◼ ► big sir was a while ago and when they did that it's like well obviously they want to do this because
00:24:36 ◼ ► apps on all their platforms are the same and this is leveling and blah blah blah and like it makes sense
00:24:40 ◼ ► from a platform owner's perspective and for someone who is in the mindset of like look i'm in charge of
00:24:45 ◼ ► all apple platforms and i want this uniformity but you know the argument against it then was like that
00:24:50 ◼ ► we don't appreciate that uniformity on the mac i don't care what icons look like i don't care what
00:24:53 ◼ ► app icons look like on the ipad and iphone blah blah blah but they weren't happy with the adoption
00:24:58 ◼ ► they were getting which again i think was pretty good i think most mac apps post big sir in a couple of
00:25:04 ◼ ► years went squircley but some of them like roguerima roguerima's app went squircley but like
00:25:09 ◼ ► oh the microphone and audio hijack is just poking out of the thing because it's just a fun way to do it
00:25:13 ◼ ► makes for a nice composition and the thing about squircle jail is not so much the decision that they
00:25:18 ◼ ► made back in big sir but it was now if you're one pixel outside that thing we punish you we make your
00:25:23 ◼ ► icons look worse your app that you already shipped that you didn't plan on updating the icon for like
00:25:27 ◼ ► there was no sort of like oh you get a pass because you built this app before like we made this decision
00:25:32 ◼ ► it was like nope i don't care when your app was compiled i don't care when it was built i don't care
00:25:36 ◼ ► anything about it you are going in squircle jail that's the the thing about it that i think is so terrible
00:25:41 ◼ ► obviously i disagree with the squircling decision too but the jail part the jail part adds an extra
00:25:46 ◼ ► insult because it takes people's work and it makes it look worse and demand let me maintain his point
00:25:51 ◼ ► it makes the terrible icons look better because they were so bad before that being put into squircle jail
00:25:56 ◼ ► improves them like they get a sheen on the top they're the right shape and the right size they
00:26:00 ◼ ► fit in better in the dock but i don't care about garbage apps i don't help the garbage apps at the
00:26:04 ◼ ► cost of punishing rogue amoeba for having a two pixel thing or what was the other one like paste bot had
00:26:09 ◼ ► like they had a clipboard icon and the little metal like the metal thing that you squeeze to to put you
00:26:14 ◼ ► know to hold paper in the clipboard the top of that poked out above the clipboard by two pixels squircle jail
00:26:19 ◼ ► so anyway please check out the post it comes from a a very informed position and it's it's balanced
00:26:26 ◼ ► and very nuanced it's not like he's coming out strongly in favor of squircle jail he's like
00:26:30 ◼ ► it sucks in these ways and it's good in these ways and in the end he is in favor of the leveling because
00:26:35 ◼ ► i think because the appearance of one terrible icon in his dock bothers him so much that he's like yeah
00:26:40 ◼ ► they deserve to be punished and shoved into a smaller spot but yeah opinions vary well and we've all seen
00:26:46 ◼ ► those apps like we've all we've all downloaded some like open source thing and you know it's and the
00:26:51 ◼ ► icon is just like a big square that filled up the entire bounds and or a squircle that's the wrong
00:26:56 ◼ ► size i just did that recently with an app i don't want to blame this app because it's not their fault
00:26:59 ◼ ► because i think they were trying to do the right thing but their squircle was was like top to bottom
00:27:03 ◼ ► that's right like there was no margins around the squircle so it was bigger than all the other squircles
00:27:06 ◼ ► it is a very modern appley thing to to to have the thought process of like let's make it impossible
00:27:15 ◼ ► for people to do the wrong thing let's let's make it let's enforce with technical measures the design
00:27:23 ◼ ► that we think is right and harmonious and whatever you know bs or terms you want to use it's a very
00:27:28 ◼ ► modern apple thing to enforce by like technical restrictions doing what they think is right
00:27:35 ◼ ► rather than competing on the merits you're right that is an apple thing well yes but yeah totally
00:27:41 ◼ ► but like you can see how they get there again like i don't i don't think this was the right decision
00:27:46 ◼ ► but you can totally see how how modern apple with their modern sensibilities would easily be able to
00:27:52 ◼ ► convince themselves that the right solution to a problem is to make it technically impossible to
00:27:58 ◼ ► break out of the bounds that they want to enforce yeah and they were they were so mean about it too
00:28:02 ◼ ► like they're just two degrees off of a perfectly valid solution to give just two quick examples one
00:28:07 ◼ ► they made it so that you get the squircle icon even on you can't have like like i was trying to do for
00:28:12 ◼ ► all those times i had these amazing hacks to be like on the old os i get the old icon like on a mac os 15
00:28:18 ◼ ► and earlier i get my old icon and then 26 and later i get the new one apple's like nope we're not going to
00:28:22 ◼ ► bother letting you do that oh you figured out a way to do that we're going to close that hole we don't
00:28:26 ◼ ► want that to happen which is so dumb because it goes against their uniformity thing because
00:28:30 ◼ ► a tahoe icon in mac os 15 does not fit in it looks really weird right so they did that and like if they
00:28:36 ◼ ► wanted to make it essentially like it's hard to do the wrong thing make it hard but not impossible
00:28:40 ◼ ► that's the power of the defaults people who don't care about their apps like oh by default they build
00:28:45 ◼ ► the new sdk we squircle jail them well but then you then you have the power user problem the world
00:28:50 ◼ ► is filled with people who are like i know what i'm doing so i'll check the power user box and then they
00:28:56 ◼ ► shoot themselves in the foot but it's not the shovelware game developers they're not going to
00:29:00 ◼ ► dig out the checkbox buried 20 levers deep to make their icon uglier like you just gotta the defaults go
00:29:06 ◼ ► a long way like there's a continuum which is like lead by example which they tried to do in big sir
00:29:09 ◼ ► it's a recommendation and lead by example and i think that got them really far but they're like no it's not
00:29:14 ◼ ► far enough there's still people who aren't following our lead so then i would have said
00:29:17 ◼ ► make it default make it actually hard to do it the other way and then allow people's old icons to
00:29:24 ◼ ► still be viewed on the old os and new icon on the new os like have this transition period right
00:29:28 ◼ ► and then see what your adoption is like and if it's in the mid 90s you'd be like ah we're probably
00:29:33 ◼ ► done we don't have to really but they just went straight to draconian punishing everybody and by the
00:29:37 ◼ ► way you can't use your old icon old os's either which really sucked anyway this is not the end of the
00:29:41 ◼ ► world is just i like i said when i posted about this literally the worst thing apple has ever done
00:29:47 ◼ ► related to design on the mac not because it's so bad but because it's so severe it is it is a minor
00:29:53 ◼ ► thing it's not that big of a deal but they have never like punished app developers in the same way
00:29:59 ◼ ► when it comes to design when it comes to pricing and stuff and and uh you know business practices
00:30:03 ◼ ► but they've done much worse things but design specifically never have they done anything this
00:30:07 ◼ ► bad i think even like brushed metal stuff that was not this bad what about all the icons of the menus
00:30:12 ◼ ► no not as bad oh brave bold stance john syracuse you can turn that off real easily one thing to
00:30:18 ◼ ► consider also is you know you're like you are characterizing this as a punishment and i'm saying
00:30:24 ◼ ► it's technically enforced but i think that also kind of kind of casts a an attitude or an intent that
00:30:29 ◼ ► might not have been that considered it's very possible that like as they were writing the you know
00:30:36 ◼ ► whatever parts of like the dock whatever parts of the system render icons they had to change a lot
00:30:41 ◼ ► of that when they brought in liquid glass and icon composer icons because now these icons are not
00:30:46 ◼ ► just bitmaps that they're rendering they're they now have this dynamic rendering that we talked about
00:30:49 ◼ ► last episode of like they were you're defining layers and effects and it's rendering them in real
00:30:54 ◼ ► time and so they had to probably rewrite a bunch of parts of the system that render icons in different
00:31:00 ◼ ► places and maybe when they were doing that they were just like oh it's a lot easier to do this or it
00:31:05 ◼ ► avoid some complexity or to avoid some possible bugs if we just draw in a squircle shape like and if we
00:31:11 ◼ ► draw every icon in the same canvas shape it helps us somehow implement this feature and so it could
00:31:17 ◼ ► have just been as simple as they were doing that and they were like oh oh yeah we got to figure out what
00:31:22 ◼ ► to do with old icons and they might have just like crapped out a solution because they only had two seconds
00:31:26 ◼ ► because mac os is under-resourced all the time and they might have just like had to rush together
00:31:30 ◼ ► there's some kind of solution for compatibility with old icons and that's just what they came up
00:31:34 ◼ ► with as quickly as they could and maybe it wasn't that much thought about of like oh we should we
00:31:40 ◼ ► should enforce this technically maybe it was just as simple as like this is a quick hack and then it
00:31:44 ◼ ► passed some some review and they didn't have time to do anything better or no one really thought about
00:31:48 ◼ ► it well they have plenty of time to change it since then but i don't think your idea about the
00:31:52 ◼ ► circle simplification is true because all of the icon runtime icon setting apis let you set it to
00:31:56 ◼ ► anything you want and if you're not in the mac app store you can set it to anything you want too so
00:32:00 ◼ ► obviously their icon rendering system still 100 supports all the old icon sizes formats and
00:32:06 ◼ ► everything they just don't let you ship an app that does that by default through the mac app store
00:32:11 ◼ ► right again if you're outside the mac app store there's apis where you can get around this
00:32:14 ◼ ► but just it's it's punitive because it's punitive to your icon you did an icon design and they are going
00:32:19 ◼ ► to make your icon design look ugly because nobody's icon looks good shrunken 70 and put on a gray
00:32:23 ◼ ► background that is a that is a punishment that is a stick to make you do what you that you weren't
00:32:29 ◼ ► doing before you didn't follow their lead in big sir and you've got a tiny thing poking out of the
00:32:33 ◼ ► rim of your icon like they could have even made the maybe like you can have some things poking out and
00:32:38 ◼ ► it's okay we won't put you into squircle jail like nothing and again tahoe's been out for a while and
00:32:42 ◼ ► they haven't made any adjustments and i also think they haven't made any adjustments in 27 so it seems like
00:32:47 ◼ ► they're pretty dedicated to this and i'll just have to live with it but it will go down in infamy if i could
00:32:51 ◼ ► think of a shirt to yell them about it i would but i don't think this idea fits on a shirt very well
00:32:56 ◼ ► yeah i see what you're doing there i don't know that doesn't work now i need to workshop that one
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00:35:04 ◼ ► okay so last week on overtime we discussed how sony is no longer shipping playstation discs or game
00:35:14 ◼ ► discs after 2028 glenn jarvis writes one more aspect of sony's decision to no longer sell playstation
00:35:20 ◼ ► discs is its impact on competition in making games digital only sony will run the only store where you
00:35:26 ◼ ► can buy playstation games thus far sony has always had to compete with physical and online retailers
00:35:31 ◼ ► game stop amazon etc even if you only ever purchase digitally you still you have still benefited from
00:35:37 ◼ ► this competition and the impact it has on prices and sales and the effect that there's a resale market
00:35:42 ◼ ► for reselling discs that's going to drive down the prices of stores but yeah that's why companies love
00:35:46 ◼ ► but hey now we control all sales because we don't have to sell to retailers we don't have to you know
00:35:52 ◼ ► ship inventory we don't have to give the retailers a cut of the sales it's you know it's wonderful for
00:35:58 ◼ ► sony not so great for gamers yeah you know what you know what every company loves hey can we make more
00:36:03 ◼ ► money let's let's oh yes then we're gonna do it let's do that let's make more money that's that's
00:36:09 ◼ ► excellent all right and uh also within the same context uh cd sales are up as it turns out j peters
00:36:14 ◼ ► at the verge writes cd sales are apparently going up reportedly thanks to fans realizing they're an
00:36:18 ◼ ► affordable way to support their favorite artists according to a new report from research firm firm
00:36:23 ◼ ► luminate 16.3 million cds were sold in the first half of 2026 in the u.s a 16 percent increase year
00:36:29 ◼ ► over year the growth in cd sales was driven by collection building price accessibility massive albums such as
00:36:35 ◼ ► bts uh bts's arang i probably pronounced that wrong i'm sorry and strong k-pop release schedule luminate
00:36:41 ◼ ► says i feel like this is just a natural progression of the weirdos who were into vinyl but now there's
00:36:46 ◼ ► like hey hey hey hey a slightly younger generation who like okay well what is the equivalent you know
00:36:52 ◼ ► my age minus whatever equals vinyl and then younger people come along they say my age minus whatever
00:36:57 ◼ ► equals cds it's retro and and i've seen it in my daughter she suddenly got into cds and wanted to
00:37:01 ◼ ► see all my cds which i did not want to let her touch but she was going to destroy them but
00:37:04 ◼ ► she just took them anyway and she bought herself a little portable cd player and it's just like
00:37:08 ◼ ► yeah i remember this the new the new retro thing that instead of vinyl it's cds the good thing about
00:37:13 ◼ ► cds is they have better sound quality at least and they don't uh get worse every time you play them so
00:37:17 ◼ ► i endorse kids looking at and in fact they probably have better sound quality than most of the streaming
00:37:21 ◼ ► they're listening to probably another mastered blah blah blah yeah but uh i still think it's kind of
00:37:26 ◼ ► silly but it's less silly than vinyl so that's fine and i don't actually think people are buying them to
00:37:32 ◼ ► support artists but it is true that artists surely get tons more money from you buying one of their cds
00:37:36 ◼ ► than you streaming their song literally thousands or millions of times yeah i mean let's just let's just
00:37:41 ◼ ► be honest cds are cool that's it like and the reason why kids of various generations keep getting into
00:37:47 ◼ ► you know old media first of all it is novel to them and it has the appeal of retro stuff like that's why
00:37:53 ◼ ► do you know how many people i see walking around all the time wearing nirvana shirts who are you know like
00:38:00 ◼ ► 15 years old it's like yeah weren't born when yeah not even close to born like you know like
00:38:05 ◼ ► kirk cobain died probably 15 years before they were born like you know it's not not even close
00:38:10 ◼ ► um but that's you know look like when we it's like when we were in high school and you know somebody of
00:38:16 ◼ ► our generation was around like a pink floyd shirt yeah yeah i don't know what the offset is but like i
00:38:20 ◼ ► said whatever the number of years is that you have to subtract because we weren't going back to like
00:38:25 ◼ ► wax cylinders right like we weren't like oh rack cylinders are retro it wasn't that we weren't that
00:38:29 ◼ ► old job but yeah but we weren't going back to eight tracks right so exactly so there is there is some
00:38:34 ◼ ► offset of like this number of years before you were born is when things are retro cool things before that
00:38:41 ◼ ► nah don't bother things after that oh that's just normal so whatever that offset is i think now that
00:38:46 ◼ ► the generation that is of age to listen to music the offset lands them in cds well and it's you know it's
00:38:51 ◼ ► similar to like you know it's that same generation also thinks old crappy digital cameras are really
00:38:57 ◼ ► cool yes my daughter was into that and borrowed my old crappy digital i told her the camera on your
00:39:01 ◼ ► phone is better than this she's like i don't care yeah they they know it's fine i mean yeah just like
00:39:05 ◼ ► yeah everything sounds better than vinyl but no one cares right like that's people like novelty and
00:39:10 ◼ ► i think the reason we didn't go back to like eight tracks when we were young is that we didn't have
00:39:17 ◼ ► like ubiquitous streaming music that we that would that would be our alternative like we were living in
00:39:23 ◼ ► a music scarce world still it was just scarce on different media and if we were going to go back
00:39:30 ◼ ► and try to buy an eight track player and eight tracks they wouldn't have been nearly as cheap as cds are
00:39:35 ◼ ► today like cds cost nothing like if you if you want to go buy a used cd you can go on you know whatever
00:39:40 ◼ ► amazon or whatever or your local whatever store and get used cds for nothing like they they just cost
00:39:45 ◼ ► nothing and i'm sure you can get cd people still make cd players so that they're not that hard to
00:39:50 ◼ ► come by so for for a young person today to get into that kind of stuff like it's more different than
00:39:57 ◼ ► their experience of music today because it's it works so differently than streaming in so many ways
00:40:01 ◼ ► and it's super cheap and you're and their parents have a million of them so yeah and music scarcity is
00:40:06 ◼ ► novel like you said music scarcity was not novel to us when we were kids because it was just the
00:40:09 ◼ ► situation but once you get into a place where music is no longer scarce the scarcity itself is a novel
00:40:14 ◼ ► aspect of that draws into it and as for the cd players like the one my daughter bought is so
00:40:18 ◼ ► clearly made for people her age like it is it was like a so you're a teen in 2024 this whatever you
00:40:27 ◼ ► know ten dollar cd player is specifically for you like it's not if you look at it and like i think i
00:40:32 ◼ ► told you about it once like the door to the place where you put the cd didn't open all the way so you
00:40:37 ◼ ► like you had to kind of like slide the cd like you couldn't just put it vertically into it you had to
00:40:41 ◼ ► slide the edge in and put it down it's like don't they know they lost the they lost the knowledge
00:40:45 ◼ ► about how to make cd players non-stupid but she liked it that's all that matters you know your
00:40:50 ◼ ► your discussion about you know what's novel and what isn't reminds me the douglas adams quote
00:40:54 ◼ ► anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and it's just a natural part
00:40:59 ◼ ► of the way the world works anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting
00:41:04 ◼ ► revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it hello computers for at least marco and me
00:41:08 ◼ ► uh or not computers you know like internet etc uh anyway the quote continues anything invented after
00:41:14 ◼ ► you're 35 is against the natural order of things yeah that quote doesn't go backwards though they
00:41:18 ◼ ► should have said anything uh you know in in heavy use 15 years before you were born is retro cool
00:41:24 ◼ ► whatever that whatever the offset is all right uh then let's go to price increase corner my favorite
00:41:30 ◼ ► corner uh chance miller nine to five mac writes apple was raised the price of apple music which i saw and
00:41:35 ◼ ► was like yeah whatever it's i mean i'm not a fan of them raising prices but i mean i have apple one
00:41:40 ◼ ► it's fine right so chance writes uh apple music individual goes up to 12 i believe this is a month
00:41:46 ◼ ► family goes up uh i'm sorry 12 it's 12 from 11 so a difference of a dollar family goes from 17 to 20
00:41:54 ◼ ► difference of three dollars student goes from five excuse me from six to seven which is a difference of a
00:41:59 ◼ ► but then i kept reading and it says apple one uh-oh individual 1995 which is remaining unchanged family
00:42:07 ◼ ► goes up two bucks to 27.95 and premiere goes up two bucks to 39.95 and then uh one of you i presume
00:42:16 ◼ ► john found a chart by basic apple guy which points out that when apple one apple one premiere launched which
00:42:22 ◼ ► was roughly 2020 or thereabouts it was 30 bucks a month which i thought was actually a legitimately
00:42:27 ◼ ► decent to good deal now six years later it's 40 bucks a month and i'm not sure how much i feel
00:42:34 ◼ ► about how happy i am about does that even track inflation though like i put this in here i wish
00:42:38 ◼ ► they had drawn an inflation line what this shows is basically the prices of everything is going up but
00:42:42 ◼ ► that's just that happens with inflation inflation and we've had some difficult inflation times here and
00:42:46 ◼ ► you can see there's kind of an increase in the plateau than other increase so it's not steady
00:42:53 ◼ ► apple one is still a good deal at 40 bucks but just fyi the price and everything's going up and i'm
00:42:58 ◼ ► pretty sure apple music and apple one do not include any ram or storage uh no i thought apple one did
00:43:04 ◼ ► include storage you know what i mean like the actual service is not like it's not ram prices are not
00:43:08 ◼ ► going up you know sorry what's driving these price increases is because ssds and ram cost more no this
00:43:14 ◼ ► is just a service but yeah the price of things goes up over time and i think this kind of shows that
00:43:18 ◼ ► apple services are are i don't know what the economic term for it is but like changing the
00:43:23 ◼ ► price is probably not going to appreciably affect how many people continue to be subscribed to it
00:43:28 ◼ ► because people who have the service like the service and are not that sensitive to a one or two dollar
00:43:31 ◼ ► adjustment because like i said these all these adjustments are they're per month still but it's
00:43:35 ◼ ► like one dollar three dollar one dollar two dollar two dollar two dollar those are the increases so
00:43:39 ◼ ► even though percentages wise they might be high absolute value by wise this is like one extra cup of coffee
00:43:45 ◼ ► a month for these services so i think apple's going to get away with it just fine but fyi it's not just
00:43:51 ◼ ► things that have ram and storage that are increasing in price john that was a much better joke than i
00:43:54 ◼ ► gave you credit for i was not picking up what you were putting down and i apologize uh the offending
00:43:59 ◼ ► person will be sacked uh mark german writes prices for monthly apple care plus packages went up by 50
00:44:04 ◼ ► cents for macs and ipads while the annual offering rose by five dollars the increases are exclusively for
00:44:09 ◼ ► new signups so users of older plans will retain the current prices that's nice it's too bad they don't do
00:44:14 ◼ ► that with you with the other services right can you imagine like if you're already subscribed you keep your
00:44:18 ◼ ► old price but i guess that's probably not tenable but yeah pricing's increased corner i'm not sure when it will go
00:44:23 ◼ ► away but it just keeps coming all right so i asked it was either last episode of the episode before about file
00:44:29 ◼ ► and what the heck is it i think it was two episodes ago or no it was last episode then we got some
00:44:34 ◼ ► feedback about it and so some of that feedback includes uh anonymous who writes basically answering
00:44:39 ◼ ► the question why are people still using filemaker anonymous says filemaker developers would probably
00:44:44 ◼ ► admit that they are not the most technologically or excuse me technically knowledgeable but they
00:44:49 ◼ ► understand the business problem they are trying to solve better than most quote-unquote
00:44:52 ◼ ► developers in any language over the years many businesses have tried and failed to move
00:44:56 ◼ ► off of their old filemaker systems but now with agentic coding more and more people are thinking
00:45:00 ◼ ► it's possible claris is making a big deal about their upcoming agentic development support because
00:45:06 ◼ ► it's the only way filemaker will survive if it were actually possible to quote-unquote vibe code a
00:45:11 ◼ ► filemaker app versus a web app i think i still think filemaker has some advantages i promise this next
00:45:17 ◼ ► part is not meant to be a sales pitch but you asked what it's like to be a filemaker developer
00:45:20 ◼ ► and these are some of the key reasons people still use filemaker today filemaker doesn't scale
00:45:26 ◼ ► to thousands of users well but it's more than powerful enough for small businesses to run their
00:45:31 ◼ ► internal systems therefore if filemaker works why spin up all this extra web technology that you don't
00:45:36 ◼ ► understand as well filemaker is just an app that can work with no internet connection it's an easy way
00:45:41 ◼ ► to deploy an offline app on iphones or ipads to collect data in the field especially in low coverage
00:45:45 ◼ ► areas or on the ocean filemaker apps aren't subject to all the increased cbes due to ai making it a safer
00:45:52 ◼ ► choice for businesses to deploy internal tools i first discovered filemaker before i even knew how
00:45:57 ◼ ► to code and now even though i do know how to code and agents are helping me code much faster there's
00:46:02 ◼ ► still something special about filemaker being this all-inclusive app and platform that your app can
00:46:06 ◼ ► be deployed into securely that is intriguing for those of us who know how to write code it's easy to miss
00:46:12 ◼ ► this the miss the value in an app like this i think filemaker's biggest hurdle is their licensing
00:46:17 ◼ ► doesn't allow someone to try and use it for free for more than 45 days which allows more modern apps
00:46:22 ◼ ► like monday.com to gain more of the market i feel like this is a list of things that are you know uh
00:46:28 ◼ ► things that are still nice about filemaker and the largest argument for most filemaker things is
00:46:34 ◼ ► hey is it currently working and it supports your business then you don't need to change it so you
00:46:40 ◼ ► enjoy the advantages and it's working so it's fine but it is so clearly just technology that i don't think
00:46:46 ◼ ► anyone should start off using in this day and age even for a totally local thing it's possible to make
00:46:50 ◼ ► entirely locally running apps that are not based on web technology or like you know just a regular app
00:46:56 ◼ ► or you know even if it's like a local web app like we have so much better technologies and we'll see as
00:47:01 ◼ ► we go on like filemaker these you know the the apps and and forms and everything they make they never
00:47:08 ◼ ► looked good i remember back in the classic mac os days they always looked weird and they continued to
00:47:12 ◼ ► look super weird uh and as for them being no cves due to ai finding flaws i think that's just a
00:47:17 ◼ ► security through obscurity thing if you point if you pointed any kind of security researcher or human
00:47:22 ◼ ► or otherwise at filemaker and it's uh various apps it would rip it to shreds because they're not made
00:47:28 ◼ ► with security in mind now i granted they're not network connected so that helps them avoid things
00:47:31 ◼ ► like this but anyway um i do not endorse starting any new projects in filemaker but the people who like
00:47:37 ◼ ► it and use it there's no reason that they shouldn't continue to use it because if it's solving your
00:47:41 ◼ ► problem if it ain't broke don't fix it right and i think that is the largest argument and that's why
00:47:45 ◼ ► like i said the people who have a business running a filemaker as long as filemaker keeps going and
00:47:51 ◼ ► stays as a viable application and they keep updating it and your thing keeps working and they add little
00:47:55 ◼ ► handprints over time there's no reason to look elsewhere uh but yeah if you're starting something
00:47:59 ◼ ► fresh i would still recommend maybe not filemaker in 2026 point of order you said that they're not
00:48:05 ◼ ► network connected i think that can be true but it's not exclusively true because i believe a few people
00:48:08 ◼ ► wrote in and said that they have a way to deploy filemaker stuff to the web so before we get a bunch of
00:48:14 ◼ ► feedback yeah it's this the there's the argument this person was making is like you can use them
00:48:17 ◼ ► entirely offline and so on and so forth so but yeah i i would not vouch for the security strength of
00:48:24 ◼ ► filemaker at this point yeah because you could also use like a sqlite database and any app like there's a
00:48:30 ◼ ► lot of ways to solve this problem with today's software and tools um especially as we're about to get to
00:48:35 ◼ ► yep so uh robert thompson writes marco got me off filemaker after 18 years which of course uh definitely
00:48:42 ◼ ► piqued my interest and i presume marco and john's as well uh robert writes for the last 18 years i used
00:48:47 ◼ ► it to run the back end of my wife's wedding business it handled leads contracts staffing timelines payments
00:48:52 ◼ ► and automated tasks like email reminders it was also slow looked terrible never worked on mobile and
00:48:57 ◼ ► required basic plugins that cost hundreds of dollars every few years worst of all building anything and it
00:49:02 ◼ ► felt like coding and scratch with commands uh dragged and dropped into a script editor john nailed
00:49:07 ◼ ► it it's software anyone can use to create a database one step above excel this past may when our renewal
00:49:12 ◼ ► came up we were quoted four thousand one hundred dollars for a three-year server license that same
00:49:17 ◼ ► week hp 690 was released i heard marco talk about using claude code to build his saunter map app in
00:49:23 ◼ ► under an hour i thought if marco can submit to the app store in under an hour i can do this in a month
00:49:28 ◼ ► so i said screw it installed claude code on a local linux box hit to hit the fable window and ran it
00:49:33 ◼ ► uh we should disclose once again that we have been sponsored by claude we will be sponsored by claude
00:49:38 ◼ ► this obviously does not we we didn't write any of this stuff but just so you know they are a former and
00:49:43 ◼ ► future sponsor anyway continuing with what robert said within three days i'd recreated and greatly
00:49:49 ◼ ► improved the system we had used for 18 years everything is better it's fast it's organized in a proper web
00:49:54 ◼ ► app i can process a detailed lead with fancy timelines on my phone and under a minute standing
00:49:58 ◼ ► in line it's amazing the entire rebuild cost me 100 we've now been using it for two months and it's
00:50:04 ◼ ► been remarkably solid and i've been having a blast adding new features i hadn't caught that episode i
00:50:08 ◼ ► would have paid four thousand one hundred dollars and been stuck in filemaker hell for another three
00:50:12 ◼ ► years instead i got out for a hundred bucks yeah so this is the other thing about people who are
00:50:16 ◼ ► using filemaker like if it's working for your business or whatever there's no need to change it
00:50:20 ◼ ► but when you're in a market like that where it's like you are using some very old technology and your
00:50:24 ◼ ► business relies on it someone out there knows that your business relies on it and maybe they also know
00:50:29 ◼ ► that you're not in a particularly in a position to change that which is why you've been using filemaker
00:50:33 ◼ ► for 18 years to run your wedding business right but lo and behold now suddenly you're not stuck in
00:50:40 ◼ ► filemaker there's this new alternative that is not open to everybody but if you're the type of person who's
00:50:44 ◼ ► basically a filemaker expert it's not that far of a leap to go to like i bet you could do some vibe
00:50:49 ◼ ► coding stuff to make a decent app now how will this turn out again see my caveats about vibe coded apps
00:50:54 ◼ ► it's really easy to get the first one up and you're amazed that it works and everything where are all
00:50:57 ◼ ► the bugs is it going to be as problem free as the thing you've been using for 18 years so on and so
00:51:01 ◼ ► forth but on the flip side of that is the excitement of building something new with modern technologies and so
00:51:05 ◼ ► on so i'm not saying everybody who's on filemaker should vibe code their replacements but
00:51:08 ◼ ► the fact that that's now a viable alternative i would imagine is going to further accelerate the
00:51:14 ◼ ► decline of filemaker usage and i'm not sure if it's going to raise or lower the prices of these weird
00:51:19 ◼ ► server plug-in licenses that people are charging but uh yeah when you're in a technological backwater
00:51:23 ◼ ► things get weird yep and then uh both of or all three of us i should say really wanted to shout out
00:51:29 ◼ ► adam one who wrote us uh john apparently computed a nearly 3 000 word email with 15 screenshots explaining
00:51:37 ◼ ► the history and functionality filemaker it was fascinating um i don't think it's published
00:51:41 ◼ ► anywhere public so i can't share it um but and i wouldn't even begin to try to summarize it but we
00:51:46 ◼ ► wanted to shout out to adam uh because that was really incredible so thank you for taking the time
00:51:50 ◼ ► you asked like what is filemaker and why do people still use it i feel like that could have just been
00:51:54 ◼ ► like a blog post somewhere and that answers every one of your questions with copious screenshots and
00:51:58 ◼ ► history like the background where did it come from how do people use it like if you're interested in
00:52:02 ◼ ► filemaker that was the answer it's a shame that uh he just emailed us and did not publish it on the
00:52:07 ◼ ► web but maybe you know he'll make a filemaker database people can view it through their cloud
00:52:12 ◼ ► integration right right also i for an email to stand out among the the filemaker emails that we got which
00:52:20 ◼ ► we continue to get one just came in while we were talking by the way yes for one to stand out as being
00:52:24 ◼ ► long really is saying something because yeah i think the average word count of the filemaker emails
00:52:30 ◼ ► we've gotten has got to be like a thousand at least like yeah it seems like everybody who uses filemaker not
00:52:35 ◼ ► only is emailing us but also has a lot to say about it i'm going to shout out to adam too i think it was
00:52:42 ◼ ► his email i think he's actually a pretty good writer i think it's maybe because i'm reading too much
00:52:45 ◼ ► german stuff and i was reading this like look at these sentences they make sense they logically connect
00:52:49 ◼ ► they're just it's never confusion about what uh what uh you know something refers to it's like wow
00:52:55 ◼ ► i don't know if adam is a professional writer or something but it was very well written i think at this
00:52:58 ◼ ► point everyone who uses filemaker is a professional writer like that's that's what our emails are showing
00:53:02 ◼ ► right but yes this adams really did stand out as being especially good and thorough yeah maybe it's
00:53:07 ◼ ► because they're all older and actually learned how to write in school or something i don't know
00:53:10 ◼ ► it's just ageism i i'm thinking all the old people are writing about filemaker all but anyway
00:53:14 ◼ ► filemaker fans are out there and they're writing us and i salute them but i think uh the the the
00:53:21 ◼ ► filemaker is not ascendant let's say we are sponsored this episode by atp membership please consider
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00:55:12 ◼ ► all right let's do some topics uh we have speaking of german we have a german sandwich we have two german
00:55:22 ◼ ► topics with something else in the middle uh and we start with uh german writing a few days ago as we
00:55:28 ◼ ► record uh early in the development of apple silicon apple was working on a processor that would be even
00:55:33 ◼ ► more powerful than its ultra chips offering twice as many graphics and main processing cores these chips
00:55:39 ◼ ► had or are often referred to as the extreme chips i'm told apple had developed both m2 extreme and m3
00:55:46 ◼ ► extreme chips before winding down those projects due to cost and demand concerns all right pause here for a
00:55:50 ◼ ► second i'm paraphrasing as i often do with german and i'm like editing him on the fly to try to make it
00:55:55 ◼ ► sensible but i think what he said was that he refers to them as extreme chips i'm not going to say
00:56:00 ◼ ► we're the first people to refer to the quad chip as an extreme chip i think it was an obvious kind of
00:56:04 ◼ ► like suffix with the suffixes that we knew to call you know they got the pro the max the ultra and imagine
00:56:10 ◼ ► if they had two ultra stuck together that would be extreme um so he has to establish up front hey they
00:56:16 ◼ ► were making the m1 extreme which i think there was like leaked like diagrams of how the four things
00:56:20 ◼ ► were going to interconnect like the inter you know the interposer on it on the ultra is just like
00:56:24 ◼ ► and and they just connect to each other we know what that looks like uh and then it was like well
00:56:28 ◼ ► they never came out with anything bigger than that but here was the plan for the m1 extreme or the m1
00:56:33 ◼ ► quad or whatever and here's how it was going to connect and stuff and obviously they didn't ship
00:56:36 ◼ ► that this post here which was like i don't know a few days ago was the first time i've seen a
00:56:41 ◼ ► source non-frivolous like you know a information from what we has historically been a reliable source
00:56:48 ◼ ► which is german even mentioning an m2 and m3 extreme maybe i've forgotten the history and
00:56:53 ◼ ► those were like road mapped out or whatever but it's saying it his his wording here which i didn't
00:56:58 ◼ ► change is apple had developed both uh i'm told apple had developed both m2 extreme and m3 extreme chips
00:57:04 ◼ ► before winding down those projects due to cost and demand concerns what does developed mean does that
00:57:10 ◼ ► mean they were they were uh on a roadmap as in like we had a bulleted list of the chips we're gonna make
00:57:15 ◼ ► those were on the bulleted list does that mean some people were at the point where they were designing
00:57:19 ◼ ► that does that mean they had like how far did they get in development before they canned that because
00:57:25 ◼ ► if they canned the m1 extreme for cost and demand and blah blah reasons like as far as i can recall
00:57:34 ◼ ► that's like the last we heard of extreme was like they were gonna do the m1 one and it was too big and
00:57:37 ◼ ► they just really never revisit that topic and like i said in a past episode at some point during this
00:57:41 ◼ ► when i was talking about this topic we got that other completely unsourced unreliable who knows
00:57:46 ◼ ► rumor that like oh yeah don't expect anything extreme size until after the m7 or the m7 or later
00:57:50 ◼ ► because the current roadmap includes none of them but maybe he just only has vague information so that's
00:57:56 ◼ ► all i can give but saying they developed them before winding down those projects doesn't tell me how far
00:58:01 ◼ ► along they got so it's not actually that interesting it could be that when they laid out apple silicon
00:58:06 ◼ ► before a single chip had been designed they just laid out all the chips they're going to make and
00:58:09 ◼ ► these were on the list and then just when they canned the m1 extreme because we know about the
00:58:14 ◼ ► m1 extreme because like we saw they got at least this far because here this diagram this is apparently
00:58:18 ◼ ► supposedly an officially leaked apple thing so they got as far as this drawing did they get further than
00:58:23 ◼ ► that i don't know but i've seen nothing about the m2 or m2 extreme but just fyi german now says
00:58:27 ◼ ► those were apparently more than a twinkle in someone's eye oh they were certainly more than a twinkle in
00:58:33 ◼ ► your eye but no i i hear what you know they were only a twinkle in my eye i i cannot make them
00:58:38 ◼ ► myself it sounds like it it lines up with you know roughly what we have heard already they had these
00:58:46 ◼ ► extreme chips that were like in development or being considered or being worked on and they decided for
00:58:51 ◼ ► whatever reason probably cost not to ship them that i don't think is new um or not to make them like
00:58:58 ◼ ► not just not to ship them but like yes we're not gonna even make this because i i don't remember if i
00:59:01 ◼ ► talked about this on the show but i had some information back in the day of like that they
00:59:05 ◼ ► they got to the point with the m1 extreme where they were asking vendors if we asked you to do
00:59:09 ◼ ► this for us how much would it cost and uh they would give back numbers that were basically like the
00:59:15 ◼ ► equivalent of saying go away as in they would give a number that they know no sane person would ever
00:59:20 ◼ ► accept like that we just won't we won't do this for you here's here's a made-up number that is so
00:59:24 ◼ ► much higher than anyone will pay and of course apple said yeah we're not paying that and that basically killed
00:59:28 ◼ ► the the project the m1 extreme yeah so uh mark german continues as for new mac pro hardware there
00:59:35 ◼ ► were two additional models developed by apple that never saw the light of day j170 and j190 the
00:59:41 ◼ ► former was a new intel corporation mac pro so a new mac pro with the intel cpu sorry i didn't edit out
00:59:47 ◼ ► the corp one i usually usually edit his thing when he says apple inc until that's a bloomberg style
00:59:51 ◼ ► thing not german's fault but yeah a new intel mac pro thank you uh the latter was an m3 ultra version
00:59:57 ◼ ► that was supposed to launch alongside the m3 ultra max studio in early 2025 which were you at the point
01:00:02 ◼ ► that you would have bought that john no i would not have bought that um so this is the you know the
01:00:06 ◼ ► code name so again that uh there were two additional models developed by apple what does developed mean
01:00:12 ◼ ► well apparently they were developed far enough to get code names i don't know how when that happens in
01:00:16 ◼ ► the process do you give them the code name before you start work on it maybe um a new intel one is
01:00:20 ◼ ► interesting just because like i guess they could have put newer zeons in it or whatever like i'm not sure
01:00:25 ◼ ► what kind of revision that would be because it's not like the intel one was like super dated and
01:00:29 ◼ ► in desperate need of an update um but okay so there was another intel one and it makes sense to can that
01:00:34 ◼ ► one because apple silicon's coming along the m3 ultra version is what everybody thought when they came
01:00:38 ◼ ► out with the m3 ultra max studio whereas the mac pro does the same thing not that it would have been
01:00:42 ◼ ► great because we think it's stupid the mac pro would be exactly as powerful as the mac studio and it's
01:00:46 ◼ ► like well you did it once before it's no stupider when you do it the second time but they didn't even do
01:00:50 ◼ ► that so i maybe that one got farther along maybe they got to the point where they actually did work
01:00:57 ◼ ► on that one and then just decided we're going to can this whole thing let's not bother but again this
01:01:01 ◼ ► is the first information i've seen certainly about oh there was going to be a second intel mac pro
01:01:06 ◼ ► somewhere in the timeline i mean i guess that was maybe there is a hedge like we don't know when apple
01:01:10 ◼ ► silicon's going to be ready so we better get another intel mac pro ready just in case this takes longer
01:01:15 ◼ ► than we think and it didn't and then the m3 ultra studio or ultra mac pro to go with the m3 ultra
01:01:20 ◼ ► studio the the m3 ultra max studio was already pretty weird because it was a generation older chip
01:01:27 ◼ ► introduced but still it was apple's most powerful chip and if they were going to keep the mac pro on
01:01:31 ◼ ► life support for a little bit longer this is what they should have made again i don't know how far along
01:01:35 ◼ ► but oh well uh more details for the sad death of the mac pro was sad anyway uh eu drops the battery
01:01:45 ◼ ► removal requirement for apple watch and airpods hartley charlton over at mac rumors writes european
01:01:51 ◼ ► commission on july 14th adopted new exemptions to its batteries regulation that free the apple watch
01:01:57 ◼ ► and airpods from having to offer user removable and replaceable batteries the commission has expanded
01:02:01 ◼ ► its list of exempt products product types to six additional categories folding and wearables like
01:02:06 ◼ ► smart watches and fitness trackers reasoning largely mirrors why devices like electronic toothbrushes were
01:02:11 ◼ ► already exempt opening a compact sealed enclosure and failing to reseal it properly could let water in
01:02:17 ◼ ► and create a safety risk products can also qualify for exemption if their construction makes battery
01:02:21 ◼ ► removal inherently dangerous or if there is no realistic way to build in user access given current
01:02:26 ◼ ► manufacturing methods the iphone was already exempt from the removability ruled under the original
01:02:31 ◼ ► regulation thanks to its battery cycle life and water resistance rating yeah i've seen a lot of
01:02:37 ◼ ► people speculating that this was like the evidence of some kind of lobbying effort because like the
01:02:42 ◼ ► electric toothbrush exception well there are electric toothbrushes with replaceable batteries it's not
01:02:47 ◼ ► technologically impossible so did the electric toothbrush manufacturers just lobby better somehow um and you
01:02:52 ◼ ► know seeing a regulation like this where it's like well we don't want to require things that are
01:02:58 ◼ ► yeah you know as this thing said no realistic way to build it uh with current technology that seems to not
01:03:04 ◼ ► be a thing they worry so much about when making software regulations not so much because you know that's
01:03:08 ◼ ► the problem with software anything's possible in software but there is a feasibility curve to software
01:03:13 ◼ ► like what are you asking people to do and how long would it realistically take and what kind of impact would
01:03:17 ◼ ► have and how much would it cost whereas with hardware they're like ah people probably can't make an electric
01:03:22 ◼ ► toothbrush with a replaceable battery that's safe even though those products already exist
01:03:25 ◼ ► it doesn't quite make that much sense but i'm sure apple is super excited to not have to worry about
01:03:31 ◼ ► it for the watch and especially the airpods and i feel like the airpods is the only product where it's
01:03:35 ◼ ► like okay well you could do it there are earbuds with replaceable batteries like airpods themselves use
01:03:43 ◼ ► those little coin cell whatever that's smaller than a coin but the little disc batteries like you could see how it
01:03:48 ◼ ► could work but exempting it is just like do we want to fight this fight it's not that big a deal and
01:03:54 ◼ ► we did talk about this ages ago that the iphone was exempt simply because the battery in it lasts so
01:04:00 ◼ ► long like they have some threshold it's like how many cycles does the battery have to survive to and
01:04:03 ◼ ► maintain 80 of its life or whatever and because the iphones use expensive batteries or good batteries
01:04:08 ◼ ► that it gets exempted as well and so when this when the rumors about this was first swirling was like
01:04:13 ◼ ► in europe everything's going to have replaceable batteries the phones are going to go back like
01:04:17 ◼ ► the old days where you could when you drop your phone the battery cover falls off and the battery
01:04:21 ◼ ► flies out remember those days it's the thing that used to happen kids if we would drop our phones and
01:04:25 ◼ ► the battery cover would fall off and your battery would come out and we didn't care because it was
01:04:28 ◼ ► uphill both ways in the snow yeah put the battery back in and anyway and you know air airpods will have
01:04:34 ◼ ► replaceable batteries and apple watches and everything will have replaceable batteries and they've just
01:04:38 ◼ ► that's not the reality of these regulations your regulations are much more pragmatic it almost makes
01:04:43 ◼ ► you wonder like okay well what does this apply to what benefit is this giving to customers
01:04:55 ◼ ► its innovation was not the fact that it had replaceable batteries but that it had replaceable batteries that
01:05:00 ◼ ► were even easier to change it looked kind of like they're like kind of like cartridges think of like a big
01:05:10 ◼ ► manufacturers compete with each other to uh not just you know say okay well our thing is like
01:05:17 ◼ ► has replaceable batteries is more reusable just to make that experience better i think they were gaming
01:05:20 ◼ ► headsets like and that makes kind of sense like if you're in this really long gaming session and you're
01:05:25 ◼ ► you're uh your what do you call it headphones die that's really bad you're like oh well i can plug it in
01:05:31 ◼ ► is there a cord that can reach while i'm still playing the game because you know if it's a built-in
01:05:35 ◼ ► battery you need to charge them first of all you better hope your your headphones can charge while
01:05:39 ◼ ► they're in use because some of the worst ones are like okay when you're charging it doesn't work like
01:05:43 ◼ ► you can't use it while it's charging because it will outrun the charger or something because the
01:05:46 ◼ ► you know the charging wattage isn't enough but even if you can plug them in like the sony ones
01:05:51 ◼ ► like oh i can kind of snake the cable from my playstation and it barely reaches my ear if i
01:05:56 ◼ ► don't move my head too much and it's just but what you can do in two seconds oh my headphones are dying
01:06:01 ◼ ► swap swap and that's what these things are fighting on which uh you know like competing on it's like
01:06:05 ◼ ► not only can you change the battery you do without even taking your headphones off because they're
01:06:18 ◼ ► stuff is coming from any of the apple stuff at all as far as i can tell including i guess the
01:06:23 ◼ ► airpods max if they ever revise them again so i guess uh chalk one up for apple in the battle
01:06:29 ◼ ► versus european regulations and i think also like it's it's worth looking at like the actual problem
01:06:35 ◼ ► they're trying to solve here making regulations is hard because when you when you make a regulation
01:06:48 ◼ ► replaceable batteries first of all it makes things last longer so it reduces e-waste it also makes
01:06:54 ◼ ► things more repairable which helps people afford them and use them longer and so like it helps people
01:07:00 ◼ ► who are need to be on a budget it helps reduce waste it helps just make devices better and you know
01:07:07 ◼ ► just more functional to be able to have you know better batteries easily replaceable for longer so like
01:07:12 ◼ ► there's also like i said having like long use sessions without pausing to recharge you just
01:07:17 ◼ ► swap your battery we used to do it on plane flights when when laptops batteries didn't last as long
01:07:21 ◼ ► or in a long gaming session you just swap your battery and keep going right like so there's there's a lot
01:07:25 ◼ ► of reasons why a regulator would have the idea or we'd be presented with the idea we should have
01:07:32 ◼ ► we should require that all these gadgets that currently have these like sealed up batteries we
01:07:37 ◼ ► should make them all replaceable there's lots of good reasons for that yes there are but see the
01:07:42 ◼ ► problem with designing regulations is that a lot of times the implementation details are like actually
01:07:48 ◼ ► going to be impossible or will work against your goal or work against other important goals or will
01:07:55 ◼ ► be will have to have so many holes poked in them that the regulation is effectively useless and i think
01:08:01 ◼ ► this is you see exactly what happens here like okay you know with this particular regulation well how do
01:08:09 ◼ ► you make how do you take a device like an apple watch or an airpod and how do you make the battery
01:08:14 ◼ ► replaceable well first of all you have just sheer size issues of like okay batteries in in a device like
01:08:23 ◼ ► this if you're going to open up an airpod say what are you opening it with like what tools these are
01:08:30 ◼ ► sealed up devices for water resistance as well so there's a lot of sealing and gaskets and glues and
01:08:35 ◼ ► stuff to to seal up water well how are you going to get to the battery and then how are you going to
01:08:41 ◼ ► close the device back up after you get to the battery and that's a really tricky thing the smaller and
01:08:47 ◼ ► more intricate and more precisely manufactured these devices get generally what that means is you have
01:08:53 ◼ ► to have some kind of like removable panel or some kind of you maybe if you have it can be like
01:08:59 ◼ ► screwed on or something but you have to have then screws and you have to be able to open those screws
01:09:03 ◼ ► or like some way to pop the thing open or something and then you have to have some way for it to like
01:09:09 ◼ ► assemble back together snapping or you know tabs or panels you know all those gaskets for waterproofing
01:09:15 ◼ ► things that are currently glued have to become gaskets and what that does is that adds a bunch of size
01:09:19 ◼ ► and mechanical complexity it adds points for mechanical failure and it adds it adds ways that
01:09:27 ◼ ► the water resistance can fail either before or after the battery is replaced so by saying you want
01:09:34 ◼ ► the batteries to be replaceable to extend the life of the device what you're also then mandating if you
01:09:38 ◼ ► don't make any exceptions you're also then mandating oh well the device also is going to have to kind of
01:09:43 ◼ ► get bigger and bulkier and you know maybe less reliable and maybe less water resistant when when
01:09:49 ◼ ► the battery is healthy um so that's that's problem that's full of problems right there then the batteries
01:09:56 ◼ ► that are in these devices that are not user serviceable can also not have a bunch of safety um like
01:10:03 ◼ ► guards against them like you don't want if someone's going to be opening up your device and swapping
01:10:08 ◼ ► out a battery you don't want that battery to just be like a raw lithium ion cell with two wires
01:10:13 ◼ ► coming out of it you want some kind of you know look at look at what replaceable batteries are
01:10:17 ◼ ► they usually are themselves encased in plastic or metal and they have you know custom connectors that
01:10:25 ◼ ► are like safe so like if a baby licks it you know it's not a problem like there's all these different
01:10:29 ◼ ► you have to have all these different safety considerations around well what is the the battery
01:10:35 ◼ ► part that you were inserting and removing how do you get those over time is it a standard or is it
01:10:41 ◼ ► custom like all these different considerations you do and then what that does when you when you have
01:10:46 ◼ ► like the additional layer of plastic or metal around the battery and whatever is keeping the battery safe
01:10:51 ◼ ► when you are removing it and inserting it that also adds bulk and size and weight and material and waste
01:10:59 ◼ ► to those products so it really does start to become pretty cumbersome in a product that's very small
01:11:06 ◼ ► like a watch and like an earbud but even phones like you know the phones these days don't have a lot of free
01:11:11 ◼ ► space you know like i don't know if you've seen the inside of a modern iphone or you know it's it's pretty
01:11:16 ◼ ► crammed in there so you can start to see like okay this regulation it's very well meaning but
01:11:21 ◼ ► the actual implementation of something like this in the modern world has all sorts of complicating factors
01:11:28 ◼ ► that either make it nearly impossible to do in a lot of devices or make it such that if you did it you
01:11:36 ◼ ► wouldn't really want that resulting product or it would make the product substantially worse
01:11:40 ◼ ► so it's a hard problem and like i think it's worth considering like when you hear about a regulation like
01:11:46 ◼ ► instead of doing some kind of knee-jerk reaction going back to the squircle jail with louis post
01:11:52 ◼ ► earlier like it's worth kind of learning the other side of the argument like why wouldn't apple want
01:11:58 ◼ ► airpods batteries to be replaceable by users is it only because they want to sell you more airpods like
01:12:06 ◼ ► that's certainly a reason but that's probably not the only reason and there might be really good reasons
01:12:10 ◼ ► that you might not be considering or you might know about you know interestingly at this point in
01:12:16 ◼ ► technology i actually think replaceable batteries in airpods is easier than replaceable batteries in
01:12:21 ◼ ► phones obviously there are already phones and earbuds that have replaceable batteries but if you look at
01:12:26 ◼ ► the battery in an iphone that's not that changes from you that's not a standard battery it's custom and
01:12:32 ◼ ► not only is it custom it's custom usually for this specific model of the specific phone it's not the
01:12:37 ◼ ► same even within a generation between the pro and the pro max totally different batteries next
01:12:40 ◼ ► year's pro is going to have a different battery there's no standardization there so it's very
01:12:44 ◼ ► difficult and just to reiterate this regulation according to this uh mac rumors article is about
01:12:49 ◼ ► user replaceable it's not just about like you'd send it to a shop and they replace it um whereas
01:12:53 ◼ ► earbuds they just use coin batteries from watches or whatever why you know watch style batteries like
01:12:58 ◼ ► even the airpods if you crack them open all is in there is a standard coin cell battery thing
01:13:02 ◼ ► or airtags airtags that you know how are you going to figure out to have a door and do the extra stuff
01:13:08 ◼ ► and blah blah blah and is it a standard the answer is yeah they're standard batteries that already
01:13:11 ◼ ► fit in there in fact the entire air target tag is defined by the battery that is inside it which
01:13:15 ◼ ► is very standard that that defines the entire product and they find a clever way to make a little
01:13:20 ◼ ► door and it doesn't matter about waterproofness because whatever and by the way i don't even know
01:13:24 ◼ ► what the waterproofness uh if that's that's not really worth i don't really know how waterproof
01:13:28 ◼ ► the air but uh airpods are because they have like you know the speaker grills where the moving
01:13:34 ◼ ► air from the speaker driver makes sound that goes into your ear i don't know if you immersed it and
01:13:40 ◼ ► that filled with water would it be fine i don't want to find out i know people have sent generally the
01:13:44 ◼ ► the guideline is they're okay with like sweat and rain but not immersion i think is the although some
01:13:49 ◼ ► people have sent their airpods through the washing machine and said they work fine so you know your
01:13:53 ◼ ► mileage may vary and they've gotten better over time and it varies between models also but the point is
01:13:57 ◼ ► we have a large menagerie of uh differently sized standardized extremely inexpensive coin cell
01:14:07 ◼ ► batteries available for devices that size whereas for the phone we do not have a large selection of
01:14:14 ◼ ► adequately powerful standardized easily to buy batteries it's all 100 custom with literally little
01:14:20 ◼ ► wires and a press connector like it's not not friendly at all so if i had to pick like what device do i want
01:14:27 ◼ ► this regulation to land on i would pick the smaller ones and not the phones because the phones everything
01:14:30 ◼ ► you talked about the you know that the size the bulk the the the phones would get hit by it so bad
01:14:36 ◼ ► because phones really are pretty darn waterproof these days and phones are totally non-standard and
01:14:39 ◼ ► there is no room in phones and every millimeter counts and it would just be really bad so i'm kind
01:14:44 ◼ ► of surprised that they didn't end up applying it to uh airpods but you know just like the toothbrushes
01:14:49 ◼ ► the electric toothbrushes that have replaceable batteries that have been on the market for years and
01:14:52 ◼ ► they're fine there's earbuds that have been on the market for replaceable coin cell batteries and
01:14:57 ◼ ► they're fine like it's technologically solvable but when you're talking about like it's difficult
01:15:01 ◼ ► to make regulations i was kind of thinking like um uh you guys know the monkey's paw i have to ask
01:15:06 ◼ ► because this is not a movie but it's a pop culture thing yeah i it's it wasn't a poe story or something
01:15:11 ◼ ► like that yeah and it's been parodied in a million things you may have seen the simpsons
01:15:14 ◼ ► yeah yeah the idea is that there's the monkey's paw which is this magic thing i mean you see it with
01:15:20 ◼ ► like a making a wish on a genie you know you rub the bottle the genie comes out and you make a wish
01:15:23 ◼ ► lots of make-a-wish stories do the same thing and same thing with the monkey's paw which is this will
01:15:27 ◼ ► grant you your wish and so you say i wish for whatever and it always grants it in like the worst
01:15:30 ◼ ► possible way it's like i wish for a million dollars and then it like it kills your mom because she had a
01:15:34 ◼ ► million dollar uh insurance policy so you got a million dollars but now your mom's dead how do you feel
01:15:38 ◼ ► right that's the monkey's paw the monkey's paw curls right whatever you ask for it's gonna the worst
01:15:44 ◼ ► possible thing's gonna happen making regulations is like making a wish on a monkey's paw no matter
01:15:49 ◼ ► how you phrase it okay i want a million dollars i don't want anything bad to happen i don't want
01:15:53 ◼ ► anyone to lose a million dollars i just want to have it and you have to go through all these caveats and
01:15:57 ◼ ► no matter how you say it it's like okay and it's not it's not the magic of the monkey's paw that causes
01:16:01 ◼ ► this to happen it's the adversarial companies that don't want to do what you're asking that you're
01:16:06 ◼ ► asking them to do so they will find a way you know malicious compliance or whatever to not do it or
01:16:11 ◼ ► just leave the market or whatever so it actually is a difficult problem and it is not a friendly
01:16:16 ◼ ► relationship between regulators and the products but uh that's not a reason not to do regulation
01:16:21 ◼ ► like that is entirely a reason to just get better at it uh you know so we'll see how uh this goes in
01:16:30 ◼ ► the eu but it seems like the eu is being very pragmatic and careful and maybe bowing to lobbying
01:16:35 ◼ ► efforts so that they can sort of and i think this is a good approach you know like a ratcheting
01:16:38 ◼ ► approach don't do it all at once do it a little bit at a time allow give people time to adjust don't do
01:16:43 ◼ ► it in the really hard cases oh if the if the electric toothbrush people complain fine you don't have to
01:16:46 ◼ ► do it but little by little bit by bit you know as the years pass you keep changing the regulation
01:16:52 ◼ ► making a little bit hard we get solid state batteries and we can put way more power in less
01:16:56 ◼ ► volume and weight oh we ratchet up a little more uh that's what the whole world should be doing so i
01:17:07 ◼ ► ww jacobs again we regret the error someone in the chat room said they wouldn't have come up with a
01:17:12 ◼ ► monkey's paw example that was that bleak i think that's literally from one of the stories i don't
01:17:16 ◼ ► think i came up with that on my own and it may have been from the original story but that that's the
01:17:21 ◼ ► monkey's paw for you don't make a wish on the monkey's paw it's bad news gracious all right uh and
01:17:27 ◼ ► then finally tonight uh there is an oled imac rumor that has just sprung up literally earlier today
01:17:33 ◼ ► mark german writes apple's working on a new imac with an oled screen that's about it that is the
01:17:37 ◼ ► entirety of the rumor that's it the whole thing i mean that's incredible i think that's exactly the
01:17:44 ◼ ► level of reporting that most people care about the imac and it's not to say the imac is like a bad
01:17:49 ◼ ► computer it's just not an exciting computer it it serves its role very well and people like it for its
01:17:55 ◼ ► role and for the most part it's pretty unexciting yeah so that the non-interest in the imac is why
01:18:03 ◼ ► this rumor is interesting even in its totally sort of like detail-free form and there was like no
01:18:08 ◼ ► timeline given although again trying to parse what german wrote because he wrote about other imacs coming
01:18:16 ◼ ► with an m5 or an m6 chip or those two machines is that one presumably that's coming before the oled
01:18:22 ◼ ► one or whatever so don't expect the next imac to have an oled screen but the rumor is apple is working
01:18:27 ◼ ► on a new imac that has an oled screen timeline and everything else unknown okay and presumably like i
01:18:31 ◼ ► said there will be a refresh of the current version imac with a different chip at some point before the
01:18:35 ◼ ► oled one the reason i think this is interesting is because the imac is like not a top priority let's
01:18:42 ◼ ► say from apple's mac division and macs themselves are not really a top priority it's it's kind of at the
01:18:46 ◼ ► bottom of the barrel in terms of macs that need to be updated and unlike the mac pro and the mac studio
01:18:51 ◼ ► with you know for reasonable reasons that make sense people who buy an imac don't need a newly
01:18:58 ◼ ► refreshed computer every single year they're not on the cutting edge running the the hardest uh you
01:19:02 ◼ ► know lms on their system they just need the most power no they're fine with it for years so it's fine
01:19:07 ◼ ► for this to be in a slow update cycle which is why i think it is fascinating that there even is a rumor a
01:19:13 ◼ ► glimmer of a rumor of a plan of anything about an oled imac because it's like whoa whoa whoa
01:19:19 ◼ ► why is the imac going to get an oled screen i understand that like the laptops are going to
01:19:25 ◼ ► get they're the most popular line of macs and it just so happens that the laptops have smallish
01:19:30 ◼ ► screens because they're portable and so it's a lot easier to make a 12 a 13 inch and a 15 inch or 16
01:19:35 ◼ ► inch whatever oled screen is cheaper it's smaller it's like it's great imacs are what are they 24 inches
01:19:41 ◼ ► now i believe that's right that's getting pretty big apple just came out with a bunch of 27 inch
01:19:47 ◼ ► screens and they don't have oleds and they cost a bazillion dollars including the one that they
01:19:52 ◼ ► didn't even really change and again there are no timelines involved here but i would really not expect
01:19:58 ◼ ► to see an oled mac rumor until oled had spread to every or at least oled rumors had spread to every
01:20:06 ◼ ► nook and cranny of the mac line and i would think the oled oled imac would be the last one because
01:20:11 ◼ ► again a 24 inch oled screen maybe it's not hdr i guess maybe you can get it cheaper because it's not
01:20:16 ◼ ► hdr and still the studio display xdr will be better because it's brighter and blah blah blah but what a
01:20:21 ◼ ► weird place for oled to appear not weird for it to be in the laptops first and we'll see if those make
01:20:26 ◼ ► it into this year or early next year that makes perfect sense but the next place i would have expected
01:20:31 ◼ ► it before the we just have the new monitors come out which resets the clock for six years or whatever
01:20:35 ◼ ► is on the super expensive big mac monitors that's where you'd expect to see oled next they're already
01:20:41 ◼ ► three grand or whatever throw an oled on there but they were like nope mini led special custom blah blah
01:20:46 ◼ ► blah and so i guess the imac gets the oled before essentially before the mac studio because from apple
01:20:52 ◼ ► anyway obviously there's third-party oled monitors and believe it or not i know we talked about these
01:20:56 ◼ ► ages ago i'm still waiting for some of the stuff that was announced to ces to come out because that's
01:21:00 ◼ ► how ces works uh so still we're halfway through the year and a bunch of stuff that they announced
01:21:05 ◼ ► is not out so we don't have any great recommendations for mac ish mac compatible oled monitors but
01:21:12 ◼ ► eventually they'll be out but yeah you get a fancy mac studio and your choices are uh apple super expensive
01:21:18 ◼ ► mini leds third-party oled or mini leds um and then the imac is going to be out there at some point
01:21:24 ◼ ► with its own oled and the laptops will have oleds maybe the macbook air will have oleds in the next studio
01:21:28 ◼ ► would be like where's my apple oled i don't know when that's going to happen all right let's do some
01:21:33 ◼ ► ask atp and jack johnson writes as someone who's never considered having a 3d printer i was very
01:21:37 ◼ ► interested to hear how marco and the family have found it to be useful what are the sorts of problems
01:21:41 ◼ ► it solves how often do you experience a situation where a 3d printer is useful i have an 11 year old
01:21:46 ◼ ► and imagine it would be easy for her to find fun things to use it for but i'm more curious about
01:21:50 ◼ ► non-toy applications this has been something that i really enjoyed um the toy applications are very
01:21:56 ◼ ► fun you know you can go on the different sites like maker world and thingiverse and all this you know
01:22:01 ◼ ► you can find lots of fun toys and they delight people like one of the things that like i i found
01:22:08 ◼ ► like a little tiny milk crate like somebody like replicated the design of like plastic milk crates
01:22:12 ◼ ► and you can scale it to whatever size you want you if you make it really tiny they're really cute
01:22:16 ◼ ► and it's really fun to have them on my desk and i i printed one one or two on my desk and then
01:22:20 ◼ ► instantly uh adam and tiff spotted them and each demanded their own so now i have a few more and
01:22:25 ◼ ► like they're all over the house now and they're adorable um so there's all sorts of fun stuff like
01:22:28 ◼ ► that that you can do of course everybody prints like you know the the dragons and all sorts of stuff
01:22:32 ◼ ► that you know kids like to play with but um the toy applications i would say don't discount those but
01:22:38 ◼ ► on the functional side what i what i enjoy about a 3d printer functionally is i i think this is maybe
01:22:47 ◼ ► like the the satisfaction that a lot of people have gotten um when they get into woodworking um that i've
01:22:53 ◼ ► never done but if there is a problem that i spot around the house i can have a pretty good chance of
01:23:00 ◼ ► being able to solve it that also applies to other people's problems around their houses and so for
01:23:05 ◼ ► instance having the restaurant there's like there's a bar it has like this wood ledge around the bottom
01:23:11 ◼ ► of the bar like you could rest your feet on and that piece of wood cracked um along like where people
01:23:17 ◼ ► if you like stand up and put all your weight on it it can crack in like the part over the ledge
01:23:21 ◼ ► and we needed something that would hold it up that was strong um while you know for like a day
01:23:27 ◼ ► while we went and you know went off island and got got some other stuff but like we need we need
01:23:31 ◼ ► like a fast solution like what can we do to hold this up today so i printed a little bracket i quickly
01:23:38 ◼ ► designed it in uh on shape and i printed a little bracket with like you know little ridges like
01:23:43 ◼ ► triangular ridges ridges to support it and i printed it in pet cf so it's super strong and resists moisture
01:23:50 ◼ ► because that's important and where we are and um and i made a really really strong corner bracket
01:23:55 ◼ ► to help hold it up until we get some metal in there and you know what it's still there it because
01:24:01 ◼ ► it's actually stronger than most metal brackets you can find around here and it's strong enough to last
01:24:06 ◼ ► the rest of the season and then you know in the in the off season we're going to replace that piece
01:24:10 ◼ ► of wood so like that's one example another example is um i go to a physical therapist sometimes and
01:24:15 ◼ ► um she was saying that that she had um one of those uh vaso machines that like it's basically
01:24:21 ◼ ► like inflatable pants like you wear these like airbag things around your legs and they inflate
01:24:26 ◼ ► and squeeze different parts of your legs and it can help you know a lot of leg stuff they have some
01:24:29 ◼ ► connector that attaches air hoses to a machine and it's a plastic connector and she said she has a
01:24:35 ◼ ► whole machine out of commission because the plastic connector on it broke so she can't attach the
01:24:40 ◼ ► hoses correctly and the company's out of business and nobody sells these parts so i said all right
01:24:45 ◼ ► give me the part and in one day i quickly replicated the part and printed one out in a pretty hard tpu
01:24:53 ◼ ► so it's it's very very strong because tpu is a little bit flex like it's like it's bamboo's tpu for ams
01:24:59 ◼ ► so it's a pretty firm tpu as they go but because it is flexible and has really good layer adhesion
01:25:05 ◼ ► it's really strong in a lot of ways um and i was able to print that out and it the whole thing took me
01:25:10 ◼ ► including printing time an hour and a half like it was like a half hour to model it and an hour to
01:25:15 ◼ ► print one and i brought it to her and it fixed the machine like just having this part now like
01:25:20 ◼ ► you have that kind of thing enabled um we have uh wagons here at the beach like you know you you like
01:25:27 ◼ ► haul like a farm it's like a big farm wagon you like haul it up to the to town to pick up your freight
01:25:31 ◼ ► and you haul it back and the hardware store in town sells these wagons so everyone in town has the
01:25:35 ◼ ► same wagon and they all look the same also when people come over here they don't know that these wagons
01:25:40 ◼ ► are actually purchased and privately owned so we've had people just kind of grab our wagon
01:25:44 ◼ ► thinking oh these are just public for anyone to just take whatever they need um so as a result many
01:25:48 ◼ ► wagons have name signs on them and many wagons have air tags attached to them somehow i solved both of
01:25:55 ◼ ► those problems i made a custom name sign out of asa because it has very high uv resistance um with two
01:26:01 ◼ ► colors uh that's has our last name on it and has a big cavity behind it to mount an air tag in one of
01:26:09 ◼ ► elevation labs uh 10 year air tag battery enclosures um so i'm going to screw that onto the wagon tomorrow
01:26:16 ◼ ► and with some security screws and now i have a name badge with a 10 year air tag for my wagon in town
01:26:22 ◼ ► all again all custom modeled stuff i've made um to solve very specific problems um the in town there's
01:26:29 ◼ ► the chamber of commerce in town has these like animals around town that like and they had these qr codes
01:26:34 ◼ ► under them and the way they put the qr codes on them was basically by cutting out like pieces of
01:26:40 ◼ ► like cardboard with you know a taped on sign like laminated to resist the rain so and they look
01:26:46 ◼ ► terrible and the head of the chamber is a friend of mine and she learned how to 3d printing and she's
01:26:51 ◼ ► like can you make us qr codes and oh my god siri is talking in my pocket it's it's going great guys
01:26:59 ◼ ► anyway so i again use the asa because it's very high uv resistance and i have black and white asa and so
01:27:06 ◼ ► i made little qr badges for and they're now all over town so i improved my town by like being able to do
01:27:12 ◼ ► this tiff had uh she has like a square ice cube maker and like for like cocktails that she makes
01:27:18 ◼ ► fancy cocktails and she brought it over from the mainland john and jersey it has like a special storage
01:27:24 ◼ ► box to store the square ice cubes in the freezer so they don't touch each other and stick together you
01:27:30 ◼ ► know melt together and ruin like the clear awesomeness of them well she left the tray back and back on the
01:27:35 ◼ ► mainland john and so jersey yeah yeah so so it took me five minutes to model a quick little like plastic
01:27:42 ◼ ► divider that she could then put four of them in this plastic divider and just put it in a plastic bag
01:27:47 ◼ ► and that replaced the need for this you know box in our freezer i have a coffee filter holder that i
01:27:54 ◼ ► made where like next to my coffee station where i like make coffee every day i make coffee at the
01:28:00 ◼ ► beach two different ways depending on how many people i'm making it for either a regular coffee pot which
01:28:04 ◼ ► has those cone shaped paper filters or aero presses if it's just me or just me and tiff which has
01:28:11 ◼ ► small circular paper filters i made a coffee filter holder that mounts on the wall fits exactly like
01:28:18 ◼ ► snaps on to like the gap between like the tile backsplash and the wall so like it fits perfectly
01:28:24 ◼ ► with no adhesives no anything just like snaps on there and it has nice like wave shapes on it because
01:28:30 ◼ ► it's the beach and holds both of those coffee filters my flagpole mount here at the beach um i i have a
01:28:37 ◼ ► flagpole at the back of my house um sometimes it's american sometimes it's fish sometimes it's
01:28:41 ◼ ► the progress pride flag but it depends on my mood and um it's metal and it's the beach so it all
01:28:47 ◼ ► corroded and rusted like crazy so i printed a flagpole mount that somebody else modeled but i modified the
01:28:53 ◼ ► model to to account for a couple of screw holes i wanted to add to it um and i printed that also out
01:28:57 ◼ ► of pet cf because it's super strong and very moisture resistant because super strong carbon fiber
01:29:02 ◼ ► reinforced plastic at the beach will probably not corrode as quickly as metal it probably will just
01:29:07 ◼ ► be there and last for a very long time so this is just like a subset of you know i've mentioned in
01:29:13 ◼ ► the past i made like a custom shower drain filter back in the other on the mainland john um i made a
01:29:18 ◼ ► custom shower drain filter and say in new jersey this much you're overwhelming me see i'm breaking the
01:29:23 ◼ ► system galloping me with the mainland yep ddos uh so if only you could fix my uh my breaking oxo cheese
01:29:30 ◼ ► grater thing but unfortunately the part that breaks is essentially paper thin and i'm not sure if
01:29:35 ◼ ► there's any 3d printable material that can withstand that if you're willing to be a little bit flexible
01:29:39 ◼ ► on the design details try me but no like can you do things like paper thin it depends on where the
01:29:45 ◼ ► strength has to be and in what direction and how like if can i add some like support it has to be
01:29:50 ◼ ► paper thin because it slides into a paper thin slot unfortunately well look i could try like it i could
01:29:55 ◼ ► also maybe the next the next broken one i have i'll mail to you and you can see what you can do about it
01:29:59 ◼ ► because i have one that's in the process of breaking right now and it's probably going to be
01:30:02 ◼ ► totally broken soon yeah so like what i would say is if you are interested in like the functional
01:30:08 ◼ ► side of 3d printers they are definitely very satisfying for that you almost definitely want
01:30:13 ◼ ► an enclosed one now fortunately there's a lot of really good enclosed printers uh now like you know
01:30:19 ◼ ► i would definitely go bamboo because they're easy and i know open source people i please don't make
01:30:24 ◼ ► me fight that fight um bamboo printers are easy they're awesome i would say right now the ideal sweet
01:30:30 ◼ ► spot of functionality to price in their lineup is the x2d uh it's it's a relatively new model um it's
01:30:37 ◼ ► the one i have here at the beach and it is awesome because it's dual nozzle which helps with a lot of
01:30:42 ◼ ► like support tasks and things like that um and it only costs a it's cost like a hundred bucks more than
01:30:46 ◼ ► the p2s or something like that um and it also has a heated a heated enclosed chamber it has dual part
01:30:52 ◼ ► fans it has a really good filter like an air filter so if you have it in your office it's not
01:30:56 ◼ ► going to kill you hopefully maybe um and so with that you can print basically any material you'd want
01:31:02 ◼ ► to print on a home 3d printer including all these cool carbon fiber ones like the the x2d can print
01:31:07 ◼ ► all of those um if you want to go a little bit higher end you can use you can get the one i have
01:31:12 ◼ ► on the mainland john um the h2s which is um basically all the same capabilities but single nozzle and larger
01:31:18 ◼ ► or the x2d if you want dual nozzles on that um and that you can print larger parts there but for most
01:31:24 ◼ ► people's needs i think the x2d is awesome and uh it's about with all the accessories you're looking
01:31:29 ◼ ► at about 900 um but it's i can strongly recommend it um anyway having that having that like creative
01:31:38 ◼ ► outlet for me i've loved every bit of it it's absolutely fun it's absolutely great and it's super
01:31:43 ◼ ► functional and and you can kind of you kind of have a superpower like if you can just fix your problem
01:31:49 ◼ ► or someone else's problem like when i fixed my pt's vaso machine like she's thrilled about that because
01:31:54 ◼ ► it was literally like this probably i don't know probably a thousand dollar machine um that was useless
01:31:59 ◼ ► and she had no other way to fix it and i spent an hour and a half and probably i don't know two
01:32:04 ◼ ► dollars worth of tpu and fixed it um so to have that ability is really fun and i've never had that
01:32:11 ◼ ► in any other way um i really enjoy this um and so i would say definitely get get an enclosed printer
01:32:17 ◼ ► try it out it's super fun and you can start like the the first custom parts i made i was using using
01:32:24 ◼ ► tinkercad which is this web app the autocad makes for children to learn how to how to 3d model in school
01:32:29 ◼ ► and it's very simple it's you know just drag and drop modeling um i did move to i did migrate
01:32:35 ◼ ► to on shape for almost everything i do now because on shape is parametric which is wonderful because
01:32:41 ◼ ► like you know once you are especially if you're a programmer like if you're listening to this show
01:32:45 ◼ ► it's likely you'll enjoy on shape there's a bit of a learning curve you know i watch a couple of
01:32:49 ◼ ► youtube videos to learn you know the basics of how to navigate it and what to make and stuff like that
01:32:52 ◼ ► but what i like about on shape is you can basically define things as variables so you can you know
01:32:59 ◼ ► instead of drawing the circle and saying this hole is five millimeters across you can say this hole is
01:33:04 ◼ ► hole width across and then later on you can change hole width and so if you if you're as you're like
01:33:10 ◼ ► iterating a design that can be very handy i love on shape for that and on shape allows you to do
01:33:15 ◼ ► things that are impossible or difficult in tinkercad like if you want to have like a nice uh you know
01:33:21 ◼ ► fillet or five i hope it's not pronounced fillet i don't think it is but if you want to have like a
01:33:25 ◼ ► fillet like a curve on an edge or if you want to chamfer an edge like johnny eye like you can do stuff
01:33:30 ◼ ► like that a lot like very easily in on shape um whereas in tinkercad you really can't and that makes
01:33:35 ◼ ► your parts generally look and feel and often work a lot better um than you can do in tinkercad but
01:33:42 ◼ ► tinkercad is really fast and easy to learn and so you can you can do a lot with it uh and as you're
01:33:48 ◼ ► learning that's a great place to start so yeah i would if the price is okay with you i'd say start
01:33:52 ◼ ► with the bamboo x2d and tinkercad all right thank you to our sponsor of this episode lisa and to our
01:33:58 ◼ ► atp members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join one of the many perks of
01:34:04 ◼ ► membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic this week on overtime we're gonna be talking about
01:34:09 ◼ ► the internal roles system in modern llms and how that relates to prompt injection vulnerabilities
01:34:16 ◼ ► this is gonna be a deep dive it's gonna be kind of fun so listen atp.fm slash join to get overtime and
01:34:22 ◼ ► all of our other membership perks thank you so much for listening everybody and we'll talk to you next
01:34:46 ◼ ► who is accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into mastodon you can follow them
01:35:00 ◼ ► at c a s e y l i s s so that's casey list m a r c o a r m and g marco r meant s i r a c
01:35:35 ◼ ► say that i've hit this bug to the best of my recollection but i believe this is not uncommon
01:35:40 ◼ ► so tell me about this well this doesn't say that it's a bug it says you fixed airplay was airplay
01:35:46 ◼ ► broken well that depends so all right tell me more it was kind of broken um when i first made airplay
01:35:54 ◼ ► 2 support in overcast which i think was around ios 13 or something like that like whenever airplay 2
01:35:59 ◼ ► came out ios 12 or 13 i think when i first did that it was a huge undertaking because the way airplay
01:36:05 ◼ ► one works is it just has like a fixed usually a two second long buffer and you just play audio in
01:36:12 ◼ ► your app the way you're playing audio anyway and airplay just buffers it up for two seconds and routes
01:36:17 ◼ ► it to the speaker and that's fine um but it's you know everything has a two second delay including like
01:36:24 ◼ ► you're pausing and everything and that that's kind of an inconvenient you know the the ui showing two
01:36:28 ◼ ► off on the time stamps like it's not great airplay 2 works totally differently and the main behavior
01:36:35 ◼ ► that you need to know for apps is that airplay 2 buffers up to usually about a minute and a half
01:36:40 ◼ ► of audio so the way the entire way the app deals with it and supplies audio to it has to be aware of
01:36:46 ◼ ► that it has to work in a few different ways to be able to like render ahead all of that content
01:36:51 ◼ ► without the ui showing that you're a minute and a half ahead you know etc um so there's there's an
01:36:57 ◼ ► api to do that and if you just use av player like the default media playing api for apple apple handles
01:37:03 ◼ ► all that for you you don't even have to know and most podcast apps that's just what they do because
01:37:08 ◼ ► they don't what they what they need to do fits within av player's capabilities um but av player's
01:37:14 ◼ ► capabilities do not allow for a way for me to do smart speed so i've never used it um with the
01:37:20 ◼ ► exception of a few contacts on the watch which i'll get to so airplay 2 it was it was a pretty
01:37:24 ◼ ► big undertaking to use like the the other api apple provider that gives you like more raw access it's
01:37:30 ◼ ► this whole like sample buffer renderer thing and that's for apps that that like play basically raw
01:37:35 ◼ ► custom audio streams to work with airplay 2 and there's like this one sample project that they
01:37:40 ◼ ► published back when they launched the api and that's basically the only documentation for this api it's
01:37:46 ◼ ► it's very limited almost no one uses it so the information available out there on using it is
01:37:52 ◼ ► pretty slim it's pretty difficult and cumbersome to use it seems easy until you try to do anything and
01:37:58 ◼ ► then you run into problems and you're like oh this is a weird book okay anyway before the overcast
01:38:02 ◼ ► rewrite which i guess is now launched about two years ago maybe what i had written for the airplay 2
01:38:08 ◼ ► system basically worked like it didn't it wasn't perfect but it worked enough now when i did the
01:38:17 ◼ ► rewrite that required me to change a whole bunch of the code around the airplay audio stream player that
01:38:24 ◼ ► i wrote i didn't actually change anything about the airplay stream player but i changed all of the code
01:38:31 ◼ ► around it that like manages open files that you know sets up the audio stream and and manages what
01:38:38 ◼ ► file is playing and how times are reported and everything like that like all of that changed with
01:38:42 ◼ ► the new architecture but the actual airplay component i had written didn't but for some reason after the
01:38:49 ◼ ► rewrite everyone was complaining about airplay bugs and i would occasionally see them myself too
01:38:52 ◼ ► like bugs i'd never seen like you know playback would sometimes just stop randomly or it would glitch
01:38:57 ◼ ► and like that's what's going on here what what changed around it that would cause that kind of
01:39:03 ◼ ► problem and i couldn't figure it out and it's been one of the one of the most common complaints
01:39:08 ◼ ► about overcast so much so that i actually added a checkbox um saying uh basically force airplay one
01:39:14 ◼ ► usage yeah when i saw that option appear in overcast i'm like oh there must be some real problems
01:39:18 ◼ ► with uh airplay 2 because when that option appears i could not figure it out so a few days ago like i over
01:39:26 ◼ ► the weekend i was playing an episode of a podcast that i noticed was making audible glitches over airplay
01:39:33 ◼ ► like every about every second or two it would have like a little like static blip in in the stream as if
01:39:40 ◼ ► it was garbage audio data being played in the sample buffer and it was happening every time on this one
01:39:45 ◼ ► file so i'm like oh this is interesting i have a reproducible case now i just want to pause here for a second
01:39:50 ◼ ► just to say that the excitement that programmers feel when they get a 100 reproducible instance of
01:39:56 ◼ ► a bug they've been chasing for years it's like i don't know i'm sure there's like a an equivalent of
01:40:01 ◼ ► scientists like when they do an experiment and something happens that they can't explain because
01:40:04 ◼ ► when you're a scientist you're doing experiments you kind of know what's going to happen or whatever
01:40:06 ◼ ► but if something happens that you can't explain you get so excited if you're a scientist you're like
01:40:10 ◼ ► was it a mistake am i just mistaken let me just look at it again maybe it's just like an
01:40:13 ◼ ► experimental error blah blah it's the most exciting thing ever for a programmer it's like
01:40:16 ◼ ► it reproduces 100 of the time because once you get something that reproduces 100 of the time
01:40:22 ◼ ► you will fix it because like now you can't there's nowhere to hide exactly so you know first i'm like
01:40:28 ◼ ► i'm looking through i'm like i don't i still don't see why this file is doing this and why other files
01:40:32 ◼ ► aren't either always or never doing this there's nothing special about the file but whatever reason
01:40:37 ◼ ► that file was doing it great so i bring up fable by the way claude has passed in a future
01:40:43 ◼ ► sponsor of our show um so i bring up fable and clog code and i'm like this file that i'm playing
01:40:49 ◼ ► is glitching about once a second maybe a little little more but you know about once every second
01:40:54 ◼ ► or two it's making these audible glitches every time when i play through airplay audit the airplay
01:40:59 ◼ ► code try to figure out why and fix it and fable goes you know churns away for you know 10 10 minutes
01:41:05 ◼ ► whatever you know like it's not a fast model but i'm like it's churning away for like you know 10 minutes
01:41:13 ◼ ► yeah fine go ahead and run grab you know if do you want to fetch this sample project on the web
01:41:17 ◼ ► yes please fetch the sample project on the web like we do it do whatever you want to do to try to solve
01:41:21 ◼ ► this problem well not shift tab for auto mode marco oh really yes yes i've discovered this recently as
01:41:28 ◼ ► well and i i stand by that that i think especially as you're getting used to how this whole flow works
01:41:34 ◼ ► i wanted to be you know uh i wanted it to come to me after basically every step and say is this cool is
01:41:40 ◼ ► this cool is this cool is this cool but as i got more and more confident with the tool and and
01:41:45 ◼ ► instructing it and so on yeah shift tab to go into auto mode and then basically just walk away for 20
01:41:49 ◼ ► minutes and come back that's great until it deletes everything yeah well exactly right right right did you
01:41:54 ◼ ► hear the story from ranz he was working with one of the another company's models and he put it into
01:41:58 ◼ ► auto mode and just delete it all this code oh that's fine i fixed all the bugs that's still a
01:42:03 ◼ ► danger so just keep that in mind but uh but anyway yeah uh you know make your estimation about the risk
01:42:08 ◼ ► versus reward right i had to go through and it's like all right i found a couple of edge cases like
01:42:14 ◼ ► this apple's documentation of this feature says you should be calling it this way you miss this other
01:42:18 ◼ ► chase this other chance here and if this thing ends up failing then this thing is null and this thing
01:42:23 ◼ ► fails out and like it found a bunch of like you know kind of minor bugs like that all around my
01:42:27 ◼ ► code and it's like all right i fixed all those bugs try it now so i i try it again and it's still
01:42:32 ◼ ► glitching and i went back i said that didn't fix it keep looking so it turns away you know another 10
01:42:39 ◼ ► 15 minutes like it's turning away i'm improving everything all of its grep commands and uh you know
01:42:43 ◼ ► eventually it's like all right i i made regression tests and i tracked the entire audio path and i looked
01:42:50 ◼ ► through every single possible way that your audio engine generates audio for this and i found
01:42:57 ◼ ► everything was sample perfect there wasn't a single sample drop so it's not garbage data and so but i
01:43:03 ◼ ► found this some other little edge case over here and i fixed that so try it now okay so i built it try
01:43:09 ◼ ► it now it's not fixed so i go back it's i'm saying it's still not fixed sorry sorry keep going keep
01:43:14 ◼ ► looking so it's like okay it goes you know 10 minutes later it's like all right i found i dug
01:43:20 ◼ ► through i replicate i made sure that your structure of your code matches the structure of the sample
01:43:24 ◼ ► project exactly so you're calling it exactly the same way apple is calling it build and run apple's
01:43:29 ◼ ► code on your device and see if that has the problem so i build and run apple's code and i know it doesn't
01:43:34 ◼ ► have the problem okay so let's go back okay so eventually fable's like all right try playing it with
01:43:40 ◼ ► smart speed and voice boost turned off try playing it at 1x and 2x and i'm like oh actually the glitches
01:43:47 ◼ ► are faster at 2x and then i eventually learned the reason why apple's code wasn't glitching was that
01:43:52 ◼ ► apple's code doesn't have a speed control and when i played it at 1x with or without smart speed at 1x
01:44:00 ◼ ► it didn't glitch so i was like okay all right so fable's like all right i got you so i went over
01:44:07 ◼ ► you know audited the whole like speed control thing and it's like all right well if you call the speed
01:44:11 ◼ ► it's like it's probably some kind of like difference in device clocks like in not like the time of day
01:44:16 ◼ ► but like the audio refresh clock or the audio sample rate clocks so it added all this logging it's like all
01:44:21 ◼ ► right run on your device and airplay at this and see what this log says and it's logging like
01:44:25 ◼ ► which clock is being used to determine what the time is and everything and it's like you know is it
01:44:30 ◼ ► is it the sample rate of the hardware is the sample rate of the file if those things are different
01:44:33 ◼ ► and you know what is airplay using a different uh you know media time clock and you know for its
01:44:39 ◼ ► algorithms and everything all this logging didn't fix it okay then it's like okay well that you should
01:44:46 ◼ ► file this as a bug with apple this is a platform bug and i said i'm not doing that and by the way i think
01:44:51 ◼ ► i talked about this before but earlier than you've gotten to now in your story i would have turned to
01:44:55 ◼ ► the thing i've done a few times which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't but at least i enjoy
01:44:59 ◼ ► doing which is hey this apple framework that doesn't have good documentation that uh is obviously involved
01:45:06 ◼ ► in this problem that i'm seeing decompile that sucker tell figure out how it works i can't do this i
01:45:11 ◼ ► literally can't i don't know how to decompile i don't understand the assembly code the i don't
01:45:15 ◼ ► understand like machine code what i like but these things like i have hopper installed i have a
01:45:19 ◼ ► license for it it's got an mcp thing decompile the airplay 2 library figure out how i'm supposed
01:45:26 ◼ ► to be using it because i don't trust the apple sample code from two years ago i'm not saying this
01:45:30 ◼ ► would have solved your problem but i've done this multiple times which is again why i said like i
01:45:33 ◼ ► said in an earlier episode i love having the source code for darwin because that's where all the low
01:45:38 ◼ ► level file system stuff is and i just go to the source code man like it's so glorious but yeah
01:45:43 ◼ ► airplay 2 source code not available to you but you know who it is available to an llm with a
01:45:48 ◼ ► decompiler that's i never thought of it doing that i've heard i've heard of people having
01:45:51 ◼ ► success with decompiling with llms but i i've never thought to do that i mean it's only it's
01:45:55 ◼ ► only if that's the source of your problem it sounds like you've already narrowed it down to smart speed
01:45:58 ◼ ► which is not like really airplay 2's fault you know well no it's it's narrowed down to speed like
01:46:02 ◼ ► to like and so so the way overcast has done the audio engine so far i write the whole pipeline that
01:46:10 ◼ ► deals with smart speed voice boost and like the sample decoding from the file and everything
01:46:14 ◼ ► but i use apple's audio unit for speed up and slow down like the base speed changes so when you're
01:46:20 ◼ ► playing at 1.2x like smart speed is engaged if you have it but like i'm using apple's audio unit to
01:46:27 ◼ ► to change like the actual media time of the file because apple has a really good algorithm for that
01:46:33 ◼ ► it's really power efficient it sounds really good i set it on its highest quality mode and i just go
01:46:37 ◼ ► and that's served me very very well there's a couple of problems with that algorithm uh one of
01:46:43 ◼ ► them is that the highest it goes you can set it to whatever speed you want but if you set it higher
01:46:49 ◼ ► than 2.9x the way it speeds up audio after that is just by cutting out chunks so it's not really
01:46:56 ◼ ► speeding it up after that it kind of maxes out at 2.9 and just starts cutting words and you know
01:47:03 ◼ ► cutting like you know subsections of the audio after that which is not helpful i don't think and
01:47:07 ◼ ► that's why in overcast the overcast speed label that says 3x is not 3x it's 2.9x and 2.9 and 2.8 and
01:47:17 ◼ ► 2.7 i like shifted them a little bit to kind of ramp up to that fake 3x that wasn't really 3x from what i
01:47:25 ◼ ► understand almost every other app does something similar or it just does 3x and lets it cut out
01:47:30 ◼ ► those chunks which i find unacceptable um and that's at that point smart speed is getting you more than
01:47:34 ◼ ► that anyway so it doesn't really matter um but anyway so i'm like how how can you work around this
01:47:40 ◼ ► so fable churns away and churns away and it's like okay the problem is that apple's airplay system library
01:47:48 ◼ ► when you use the playback speed on this file like when you when you tell apple's code to play this
01:47:56 ◼ ► file at 1.2x or whatever anything other than 1x it glitches so it has a problem so you should file
01:48:03 ◼ ► this with apple and i'm like well i'm not i'm not doing that you know work around it what fable then did
01:48:08 ◼ ► was go and write its own speedup algorithm now the main algorithm to do this it's called wsola
01:48:17 ◼ ► i'll link to a an obviously chat gpt written blog post about wsola i have known for years that if i
01:48:24 ◼ ► ever wanted to write my own speedup algorithm i need to write my own wsola implementation and
01:48:30 ◼ ► the the algorithms i've written for voice boost uh especially i know that by having written those
01:48:37 ◼ ► i know enough about signal processing now that if i if i needed to write my own w solo i don't know
01:48:41 ◼ ► how it's how it's pronounced um i could do it but it would take me probably like two weeks to get it
01:48:46 ◼ ► right and i don't know if mine would sound as good as apple's or if it would be as power efficient as
01:48:51 ◼ ► apple's you know i use all the accelerate vdsp code as much as i can uh but i'm sure they're doing lots
01:48:57 ◼ ► of tricks and you know they've had this forever and there's sounds good so i've never touched it
01:49:01 ◼ ► um the other problem with relying on apple for this though is that on the apple watch i've never been
01:49:10 ◼ ► able to run smart speed and voice boost because the apple watch does not expose that api in av audio
01:49:17 ◼ ► engine and the av audio engine on the apple watch is the only way to achieve smart speed so like i have
01:49:23 ◼ ► to use av audio engine on the watch to get smart speed but if i do i don't have access to the speed
01:49:29 ◼ ► up component so i would i wouldn't be able to play it at beyond 1x if i had smart speed enabled or voice
01:49:35 ◼ ► boost so on the apple watch i've never had smart speed or voice boost i've just used av player because
01:49:41 ◼ ► it allowed me to at least do the basic speed ups so as fable's trying to fix this airplay problem
01:49:47 ◼ ► with apple's speed up algorithm it just wrote its own wsola algorithm and just tried that and it's
01:49:56 ◼ ► like okay i wrote my i wrote my own with solar or whatever see if this has the problem and so after i
01:50:02 ◼ ► picked my job off the floor and looked at the code i was like wow it's full of vdsp accelerate code and
01:50:08 ◼ ► it's like this is a really good implementation it looks like has all the right windowing functions
01:50:12 ◼ ► i'm like oh wow this is huh isn't that interesting so i pick up my jaw off the floor and i go test it
01:50:20 ◼ ► and it works perfectly the airplay problem is solved and so i was like okay uh use that algorithm whenever
01:50:28 ◼ ► you're using airplay then huh and then it took me all of about five minutes before i realized
01:50:34 ◼ ► well now that i have my own wasola algorithm also add speeds above 3x that's where that came from
01:50:43 ◼ ► because why not add speeds now that i have this like this was holding me back all this time and now
01:50:49 ◼ ► listeners if you are saying who would possibly ever want speeds above 3x i assure you there are people
01:50:55 ◼ ► who want them not least of which blind people um because blind people especially blind people who
01:51:00 ◼ ► like podcasts and are nerdy like us um tend to ramp up the speeds of things like voiceover on their phone
01:51:05 ◼ ► and everything as as they get used to it and and you once you start ramping up your speed of processing
01:51:10 ◼ ► speech you'd be surprised what you can understand um once once you are accustomed to it so there are lots
01:51:16 ◼ ► of people out there who actually want podcasts faster than 3x so i said why don't you make speeds up
01:51:22 ◼ ► to 5x or first i said up to 4x uh and it's like all right i did it i also and by the way i didn't tell
01:51:29 ◼ ► fable about my little not really 3x 3x but when it was adding all those speeds between three and four it
01:51:36 ◼ ► said i also fixed your fudge about the 3x speed earlier and all the speeds leading up to it so i was
01:51:42 ◼ ► like okay touche like you that's pretty good all right i would have asked to do it anyway but i didn't
01:51:48 ◼ ► have to so it added all the speed and then one one beta build later i'm like why stop at four let's go
01:51:54 ◼ ► to five i tested it out like does five work yeah does it strain the cpu no okay go to five why not
01:52:02 ◼ ► so in the current pending version of overcast that's waiting for app store review as we speak
01:52:07 ◼ ► um it goes to 5x and it's a real those are real speeds that don't cut any audio out because now i have
01:52:12 ◼ ► my own wasola algorithm um that was stolen um and so i'm also like okay while i have this
01:52:19 ◼ ► why not bring smart speed and voice boost to the watch now because now that i have this part i can
01:52:26 ◼ ► then use that to bring the entire av audio engine so i had fable do that and it literally took one
01:52:33 ◼ ► prompt and about 15 minutes of churning and it brought the entire audio engine to the apple watch
01:52:42 ◼ ► i had to modify a couple of things about the ui because it made some crappy ui to to toggle on and
01:52:47 ◼ ► off in the watch screen i made it less crappy and i was looking at holy god i'm like all i really needed
01:52:53 ◼ ► was that w solo algorithm everything else i had all the other components i had written worked fine
01:52:57 ◼ ► um on the watch like i had written them all across platform everything else was there except that
01:53:02 ◼ ► and for me to do this ever in the past again this would have been at least two weeks for me to write
01:53:07 ◼ ► my own one and it probably wouldn't have sounded as good or or been as performant i even did a stress
01:53:12 ◼ ► i'm like all right what if i play this on the watch at 5x with smart speed and voice boost is this
01:53:18 ◼ ► going to crush the watch's cpu no five percent wow oh my god like this is amazing so i am blown
01:53:27 ◼ ► away by first of all how much work fable did to help me find the airplay bug and it was really
01:53:37 ◼ ► really good and it made the entire rest of the airplay subsystem much better and more stable and
01:53:44 ◼ ► it accounts for more conditions it complies better with what apple sample code wants you to do like
01:53:50 ◼ ► it fixed all of those problems it audited the entire rest of the of the audio stream that i build to
01:53:57 ◼ ► see is anything generating garbage data and like make sure nothing possibly can like it did amazing
01:54:04 ◼ ► work it found tons of small stuff and a couple of big things and then it wrote me this algorithm that
01:54:12 ◼ ► like again it would have taken me a while if i if i could even do it well at all and that that enabled
01:54:18 ◼ ► me to do these other two major things that people have been asking for for years and yesterday i went for a run
01:54:25 ◼ ► and i had overcast on my watch and i played a podcast with smart speed and voice boost and it was
01:54:31 ◼ ► amazing and i just i'm so blown away by how well these modern high-end models are able to find and fix bugs
01:54:42 ◼ ► in code and the code they write i'm still not letting it write that much code um i i but the its ability to
01:54:55 ◼ ► flawed humans are like because like i'm not a i'm not a bad programmer i'm not an amazing programmer but
01:55:04 ◼ ► i'm not a bad programmer i'd say i'm like a decent to good programmer a lot of this code that i've written
01:55:09 ◼ ► over the years like this audio processing code or like the low-level database code like a lot of that
01:55:13 ◼ ► i've written very carefully much of which i actually have done tests for by there's tons of
01:55:18 ◼ ► tests now and overcast thanks to all of this work from fable look at that i wrote almost none of them
01:55:23 ◼ ► but there's a lot of tests now uh and all that code that i've written over the years like i would have
01:55:30 ◼ ► like i went through all my emails recently i went through one star reviews on the app store i went
01:55:36 ◼ ► through the reddit comments and anytime i found a new bug for the last like you know couple of weeks
01:55:40 ◼ ► i've just had fable like hey uh some users report that like the it's showing an infinite spinner on the
01:55:47 ◼ ► purchase screen for some users i don't know why figure it out and it'll churn away for a while and
01:55:53 ◼ ► it'll usually come up with something that i didn't come up with of like oh well if the connection fails
01:55:58 ◼ ► over here because this variable is set to nil it never retries the connection i'm like huh look at that
01:56:05 ◼ ► so i'll say all right fix it and i'll look over the fixes it makes it's usually only you know a
01:56:11 ◼ ► couple of lines difference it's usually not that much code that it's writing to fix these bugs it's
01:56:15 ◼ ► just changing a couple of lines and i look and i'm like holy crap it's right i missed that and so i've
01:56:22 ◼ ► been going through and the last couple of weeks again i've been fixing so many bugs because i'll tell
01:56:27 ◼ ► it like i'll think about some part of the app that people complain about i'll say hey uh people complain
01:56:32 ◼ ► about the reliability of streaming playback under low network connections go look at the streaming
01:56:37 ◼ ► code and fix anything you find and it'll go it'll churn away in the streaming code and i'll say
01:56:40 ◼ ► actually yes here's in this case you know you didn't account for this and over here if the server
01:56:45 ◼ ► return to 200 here it would corrupt the data here it's like oh my god and again like you go look you're
01:56:51 ◼ ► like it's right oh my god so fix that or you know people people have reported for years like
01:56:57 ◼ ► hey uh ever since the rewrite it doesn't show up very well after you talk about on the show it doesn't
01:57:02 ◼ ► show up very well as the suggested app when you plug in airpods or when you connect airpods and it
01:57:07 ◼ ► used to so i i told fable that i said hey this used to work works worse now figure out why and fix it
01:57:13 ◼ ► and it'll churn away on my like upcoming media intent code that handles all that and sure enough
01:57:19 ◼ ► it found some stuff oh well actually if there's a race condition during launch and if this database
01:57:23 ◼ ► loaded before that database then this one would fail here and it would cause this problem and also you
01:57:27 ◼ ► messed up you messed up here here and here oh my god and sure enough you go look yep i sure did
01:57:33 ◼ ► and now it's fixed this is such a game changer for so much because as it turns out as i said humans are
01:57:44 ◼ ► pretty imperfect and there's and so many of these of the bugs that it's finding for me are bugs that have
01:57:51 ◼ ► been keeping me down for years and and i've you know i've kind of alluded to this recently but like
01:57:57 ◼ ► i've been i've had a really hard time staying motivated to work on overcast recently because
01:58:04 ◼ ► it seems like i'm just bogged down by just like old bugs that i can't find or fix because i've looked
01:58:12 ◼ ► for months or years and i can't fix them and i can't figure out why and i've never been able to make
01:58:16 ◼ ► tests that actually show them or whatever it is and now i can just ask this ai thing to fix it and like
01:58:23 ◼ ► this is the kind of thing there are lots of programmers out there who you can like you can
01:58:27 ◼ ► hire they can contract hire somebody who's like a real expert in this kind of thing who's really
01:58:33 ◼ ► good at debugging who can look at the kind of stuff like this has existed for a long time but
01:58:37 ◼ ► to hire somebody like that would cost a lot of money and i usually have either not been able to afford
01:58:44 ◼ ► that or if i could afford it it's like i could just barely afford it with overcast profits and i'm
01:58:49 ◼ ► like you know what i don't really want to like that's not really worth the cost of maybe getting
01:58:54 ◼ ► someone to maybe fix it if it's going to cost you know tens of thousands of dollars you know
01:58:59 ◼ ► for the to have them here it's like this is going to be like a lot it's like that's that's going to be
01:59:02 ◼ ► you know pretty difficult for me to justify or or do whereas like now for like i'm on i'm on the
01:59:10 ◼ ► two hundred dollar a month plan now only because i've been hammering fable like crazy but i did most
01:59:15 ◼ ► on the one hundred dollar a month plan for a hundred dollars a month now yes claude's a past
01:59:20 ◼ ► informer and future sponsor um for a hundred dollars a month now like i can have this amazing
01:59:25 ◼ ► bug fixer available to me whenever i want so i am so literally every single time a bug comes to mind
01:59:34 ◼ ► that people have reported or that i see myself i'll just go tell fable hey this audit the code paths
01:59:39 ◼ ► around this and see if you find anything and fix it and it has fixed so many bugs in overcast so
01:59:46 ◼ ► if app review ever actually reviews this i'm on day three right now waiting but if after you ever
01:59:50 ◼ ► actually reviews this the the like the twenty twenty six point seven point one version of overcast
01:59:55 ◼ ► contains major bug fixes major improvements because it's all like stuff that was on my my bug hit list
02:00:04 ◼ ► like in the last version the the point seven that one i included things like priority playlist
02:00:09 ◼ ► priorities were messed up after the rewrite yes they were it fixed it and it was so subtle it was
02:00:15 ◼ ► like you know like there was like a reverse greater than less than thing and like a couple other like
02:00:18 ◼ ► minor things like that that like i would never have caught it fixed it and then it made a bunch of
02:00:22 ◼ ► tests to make sure it fixed it like in this one i fixed storage usage bugs airplay bugs sync bugs i had
02:00:29 ◼ ► i had to look at the server sync code and the app sync code and say hey this is how this syncs figure out
02:00:35 ◼ ► any possible way that the sync might have a race condition or lose data or anything like that and it
02:00:41 ◼ ► found some and it fixed them so this has sync fixes this has airplay fixes storage usage fixes
02:00:49 ◼ ► so background execution fixes like there's so many fixes in this build and i did it for almost almost for
02:00:57 ◼ ► free and in almost no time so i do think again as i was as i say every time i talk about ai coding
02:01:04 ◼ ► these days uh obviously this does not come with no downsides or no cost to society or no cost to
02:01:11 ◼ ► developers like this all has some costs and some downsides and and depending on how you how you stand
02:01:17 ◼ ► on certain things those may be you know significant to you or or not but i think if if you put these tools
02:01:24 ◼ ► in the hands of conscientious people who know how to make good software and who know what to ask for
02:01:31 ◼ ► the implications of to software quality are massive and again like i don't i don't want people to gloss
02:01:41 ◼ ► over the fact that apple is themselves using clawed heavily and when you see that giant list of fixes that
02:01:49 ◼ ► apple's delivering in the 27 os's those obviously came with tremendous help from ai like if you think
02:01:56 ◼ ► otherwise i think you're you're deluding yourself ask anybody who's working in this business today if
02:02:02 ◼ ► you know anybody in apple ask them they're using it heavily and so to see in one year a huge list of
02:02:10 ◼ ► performance improvements bug fixes like little nice to haves being finally added that's because
02:02:16 ◼ ► they're getting assistance again this is a bumpy road and it's not without its problems but the
02:02:22 ◼ ► implications here for the the possible improvements in software quality are just so immense and granted
02:02:32 ◼ ► it is also allowing people to make more crappy software every time programming has been made
02:02:38 ◼ ► easier it enables people who are not very good programmers to make software you see you know php
02:02:45 ◼ ► visual basic you know like this i've i've been a user of all every language has done this
02:02:50 ◼ ► and every time the accusation is always like oh look at all this crap written in php and like yeah
02:02:55 ◼ ► but php also like enabled a bunch of first of all enabled people who couldn't program before to program
02:03:01 ◼ ► at all and people who were good programmers were perfectly able to write good software with php
02:03:08 ◼ ► ai is kind of that same that same type of step but in a much greater step all at once it is enabling a lot
02:03:18 ◼ ► more people to write software and in good hands it is also an amazing tool to enable people who know what
02:03:26 ◼ ► they're doing to make even better software than they've ever made before so i i wanted to tell this
02:03:33 ◼ ► story in part because i'm just so blown away by it and also in part to maybe you know if you're a
02:03:39 ◼ ► programmer out there and you're inspired like have it tackle whatever bug is on your hit list that you
02:03:44 ◼ ► haven't been able to find or reproduce just say hey go look at this part of the code i'm pretty
02:03:48 ◼ ► sure something is able to cause this behavior and i can't figure it out give it a shot you'll be
02:03:53 ◼ ► shocked what i can find you know it's funny if it's funny you bring this up because uh over the last
02:03:59 ◼ ► few days especially when fable was i don't know if it was unlimited or if it was just more uh uh more
02:04:07 ◼ ► flexible usage you know or whatever i forget exactly what the situation was but i know that i am now
02:04:18 ◼ ► john in you know in the little disembodied head of john syracuse in front of me saying you know
02:04:23 ◼ ► every time there's a new uh you know a new model especially with fable you should just put it pointed
02:04:30 ◼ ► at your app or your you know your your repository and say find bugs and i did that and for the handful
02:04:38 ◼ ► of you that are on the call sheet test flight i can i can assure you and you've seen there were a
02:04:44 ◼ ► couple of builds that were just like boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom yeah like all of these
02:04:49 ◼ ► different admittedly fairly esoteric bugs like it's not the same win that you're talking about although
02:04:54 ◼ ► i have had those in the past we've talked about on the show but a lot of little things that were like
02:04:59 ◼ ► the edgiest of edge cases that i wouldn't in a million years have found and were they really
02:05:05 ◼ ► affecting that many people i don't think they really were but is it better that they're now affecting
02:05:11 ◼ ► hypothetically no people yes yes it is better yeah i prefer it that way and i've been really
02:05:18 ◼ ► pleased with how this has gone and i have run it in auto mode but when it's done churning and whatever
02:05:25 ◼ ► i will go through line by line like it's some fresh college graduate and make sure i understand
02:05:32 ◼ ► everything it's done and what it's doing and why it's doing it and there are times that i will go back
02:05:37 ◼ ► and forth with it and be like i don't think that's right or why did it justify to me why you made
02:05:41 ◼ ► choice a b or c and usually i end up realizing oh no no i see what it did and it's right but i want to go
02:05:48 ◼ ► through that process for me anyway i want to go through that process of understanding what it's done
02:05:53 ◼ ► because otherwise i feel like i now have some phantom co-worker whose code i don't understand and that's
02:05:58 ◼ ► not good when you're a team of one and so i like spending the time to go through and understand
02:06:05 ◼ ► top to bottom inside and out you know what's being done to what i still consider to be my code but the
02:06:11 ◼ ► point i'm really trying to make is i have fixed a plethora of bugs that i wasn't even aware of much
02:06:18 ◼ ► less things that you know have been latently bothering me for years i think your story is more
02:06:23 ◼ ► impressive and more interesting because this is a problem that it certainly affects way more people
02:06:28 ◼ ► than any of my silly bugs do but nevertheless it's still useful to get rid of these bugs no matter how
02:06:34 ◼ ► big or small yeah i've been doing this for a while and i wanted to give you the same caution i gave you
02:06:39 ◼ ► last time i was talking about my uh lm bug fix releases which is you know there's some error rate
02:06:44 ◼ ► per line how many defects per line of code do does any individual create and humans are flawed so that
02:06:49 ◼ ► that is the non-zero value it's also true of lms the more code they write the more defects they're
02:06:53 ◼ ► going to add and me being the person who was always uh pitting my uh speaking cylinders against each
02:06:58 ◼ ► other to see who's better well i've been doing the same thing with all the various coding models
02:07:02 ◼ ► uh and in particular a fun thing to do is to you know you know as as gacy said i'm always saying
02:07:09 ◼ ► find bugs find bugs like bugs and by the way on that topic i was trying uh google's anti-gravity
02:07:14 ◼ ► recently uh their like coding agent thing and i said find bugs in my program and it was like nope
02:07:19 ◼ ► can't do that that would be insecure i don't find oh interesting i i you know i figured what his
02:07:24 ◼ ► message was was like i can't find i can't take an open-ended request to find bugs because there's a
02:07:29 ◼ ► security problem i tried to phrase it 17 different ways and every time it would come back to me with
02:07:33 ◼ ► some snarky thing it's like even if x y and z i still can't do it i'm like all right well you suck
02:07:38 ◼ ► anyway uh and i and also i did have i did have fable dropped down to opus 4.8 at one point because i did
02:07:44 ◼ ► something that pissed it off and it was like nope i can't do that yeah i had that too like it's all my
02:07:48 ◼ ► own source code man give me a break but anyway since i have multiple models going against each other what
02:07:52 ◼ ► i will often do is first of all i'll always ask them all to find bugs and see if they find the same
02:07:58 ◼ ► bugs and they don't they don't find the same bugs which is not which is like a little bit
02:08:03 ◼ ► disconcerting because like how many bugs are there that they can find entirely disjoint sets
02:08:07 ◼ ► and why are they not finding each other like why it is this bug that once it's pointed out like margo
02:08:12 ◼ ► said like greater than her last end flip once it's pointed out to you you're like oh yeah that was
02:08:16 ◼ ► dumb must have been a typo or i was just stupid fat fingered or just wasn't thinking right but why did
02:08:20 ◼ ► the other model not find that and it's like i guess they're just not looking at the whole code base or
02:08:24 ◼ ► whatever but anyway so they find different bugs and on occasion i will ask them you know i usually phrase
02:08:30 ◼ ► it as propose a fix for this bug because there's seven ways this can be fixed and i know which way
02:08:34 ◼ ► i would go but you propose a fix to it and often they will propose something and i've been doing
02:08:38 ◼ ► this thing where i would where i will have multiple checkouts and i will say okay model one you fix the
02:08:43 ◼ ► bug model two you fix the bug and then i will show each other the the fixes made by the other models i
02:08:49 ◼ ► actually do this across three models and i will say and i will be like here's a fix for this bug
02:08:53 ◼ ► are there bugs in this fix for this bug and then they will find bugs in each other's fix for the bug
02:08:58 ◼ ► and all that this told me that basically they're other than their ability to you know inexhaustively
02:09:06 ◼ ► like search forever and ever and do things so much faster than a human they still create some number
02:09:12 ◼ ► of defects per line of code they generate and i don't know if it's higher or lower than than any
02:09:18 ◼ ► particular human would be but either way it's non-zero so keep that in mind when you're there
02:09:23 ◼ ► messing with things when you find that bug that's like oh that's never going to happen like that's such an
02:09:28 ◼ ► edge of an edge of an edge case but i feel better with it being fixed if the fix has lots of lines
02:09:34 ◼ ► of code think twice about it because you may have just introduced a much worse bug than the one that
02:09:38 ◼ ► you were fixing and you're like oh i'll solve that problem by having another model or even the same
02:09:43 ◼ ► model look at the fix and find bugs in that it's not a um it doesn't uh converge as far as i can tell
02:09:49 ◼ ► so far again with current technology this changes every freaking week we say this all the time like
02:09:53 ◼ ► just because we're saying this now doesn't mean it's going to be true literally next week
02:09:56 ◼ ► which is why we keep going back to this well and trying it again but right now in my experience with
02:10:01 ◼ ► the top end models they do not converge on perfection just like humans don't converge on perfection
02:10:06 ◼ ► but they do like as we've all pointed out a million times they are such an incredibly powerful tool for
02:10:11 ◼ ► helping that you absolutely should use them if you can stomach it uh and they do amazing things that
02:10:15 ◼ ► were not possible before but they do not yet converge on perfection which is kind of a shame
02:10:20 ◼ ► and what's also a shame is that we don't use curse words on the show or in our titles most of the time
02:10:28 ◼ ► youngsters don't get the 2004 that this the onion article is uh they don't know about the gillette
02:10:36 ◼ ► razor because 2004 i guess we're probably still watching ads on tv maybe people who didn't have tivo
02:10:40 ◼ ► so we knew about the gillette five-bladed razor or actually was it just three blades then and five