I'd write more here, but I've got places to be. Becky, Jeremy, and I are going to engage in some holiday festivities. We have a couple gingerbread houses to make and a tree to trim. And no nog to speak of. Really, that's all you get by way of show notes this time as a result, deal with it.
Send your complaints to [email protected] and they will be read on air.
Some bullet points below the fold:
[00:00:00] Thank you.
[00:00:29] Good morning, internet.
[00:00:32] I started speaking before I realized, as an asynchronous audio production, it's actually pretty unlikely that it's the morning where you are.
[00:00:43] Although, if it is the morning, coincidentally, please feel free to be creeped out, check over your shoulder.
[00:00:51] Today was, I woke up with Vim and Vigor this morning, super excited to take on the day, thinking maybe I've got what it takes to record an audio production today.
[00:01:07] And then we have an elderly coffee pot.
[00:01:11] I don't want to completely put the blame on it because we were using it wrong for several years.
[00:01:24] And it's a long story that I will shorten to say, any piece of consumer electronics or appliances in America, the half-life keeps decreasing.
[00:01:37] And so when I say elderly coffee pot, I mean that we bought this coffee pot post-COVID.
[00:01:42] And it's already feeling like, oh, we should probably get a new coffee pot, huh?
[00:01:45] What happens is, from time to time, heat will build up in the grounds dingus.
[00:01:55] I'm just realizing now that I'm like, you know, I'm not a coffee engineer.
[00:01:58] Some of you are.
[00:02:00] But, you know, of course, we all know that the dingus is connected to the water spigot, which is above the craft.
[00:02:09] And what happens, as far as I can tell, is once in a while, you get all that hot water and grounds swirling around.
[00:02:20] And if it clogs at all, like if it doesn't release just so, the whole little undercarriage, again, this is a technical term, just stay with me.
[00:02:30] And we'll pop forward like three millimeters, which is just enough for the water to kind of miss its target on the craft and then spray all who's he what's it's, as well as for the spigot to start just kind of like splurring, you know, this water coffee slurry everywhere.
[00:02:49] And so I went after, you know, but then you still get the triumphant ding dong sound that the coffee is ready.
[00:02:56] So I walked over to the coffee expecting like, yes, it's the best, best way to start my day or whatever.
[00:03:06] Pull out the coffee.
[00:03:07] And the pot is too light.
[00:03:10] And I had a familiarity of like what that means.
[00:03:13] It means like there is water somewhere.
[00:03:17] And it's not in this pot.
[00:03:19] And so it's just like, you know, this big, big machine we actually have we've put because of our Mr.
[00:03:26] Coffee's, you know, elderly onset incontinence.
[00:03:33] We have we have put the entire coffee pot on a tray, like a rimmed silicone tray that you would use for like, I guess, a dog feeding bowl, right?
[00:03:45] A dog, you know, messily eats food and slaps water around and stuff.
[00:03:49] And you don't want it all over your hardwood.
[00:03:50] Like you'd put this underneath that and it would catch some of the water.
[00:03:53] So we I spent the first 30 minutes of my waking life today getting my hopes up that I was going to have coffee, followed by, you know, painstakingly carrying this entire cradle of of of coffee pot full of hot brown liquid.
[00:04:10] That would stay in all of my clothes and, you know, get on the cabinets and stuff with a silicone underbelly thing.
[00:04:18] And just kind of like, you know, we've got one of those big we're very fortunate to have one of those big farmers, farmer house, farmhouse.
[00:04:25] I never know what to call it.
[00:04:27] Steel, basically a double wide sink.
[00:04:30] So what's nice about a double wide sink is that if you've got a problem in your kitchen and you're only a few steps away, whether it's the coffee pot part of the kitchen or the fridge or the freezer or the God forbid, the range or the oven, you can just sort of strategically hurl whatever it is you're holding just about into the into the sink.
[00:04:51] And then once it hits the sink, it's, you know, the the the potential damage is limited.
[00:04:57] So I gently hurled my coffee apparatus.
[00:05:02] Is that the plural of apparatus?
[00:05:04] One wonders into the into the into the sink and then spent the next 20 minutes, you know, scrubbing them and all to make another pot.
[00:05:13] And Becky, of course, walks down the minute that the second pot is about to be finished.
[00:05:18] And I'm like, I've already seen some shit and I'm going to go record a podcast now.
[00:05:22] And that swallow you just heard was me having a sip of coffee that was not disgusting, but not great.
[00:05:31] But I'll take it over where I was an hour ago.
[00:05:39] Thank you for for subscribing as a as a true believer in breaking change.
[00:05:47] We're coming up on one year now.
[00:05:49] It's hard to believe that it's already been a year, not because this has been a lot of work or a big accomplishment, but just because the the the agony of existence seems to accelerate as you get older.
[00:06:03] It's one of the few kindnesses in life and so as we whipsaw around the sun yet again, we're about to do that.
[00:06:11] This is the 26th edition version 26 of the podcast.
[00:06:17] I've got two names here to release titles and I haven't picked one yet.
[00:06:22] So as a special.
[00:06:24] Nearing the end of the year treat.
[00:06:29] I'm going to pitch them both to you now, right?
[00:06:31] So so we're in this together.
[00:06:33] I like to think this is a highly collaborative one person show.
[00:06:37] Version 26 rich nanotexture.
[00:06:42] And that's a nod to the MacBook Pro has a nanotexture anti-glare screen coding option.
[00:06:52] It's a reference to the rich Corinthian leather that was actually it's a Chrysler reference.
[00:06:58] It's a made up thing.
[00:06:59] There is no such thing as Corinthian leather, but like that's what they called their their seating.
[00:07:03] And Steve Jobs referenced that as being the inspiration for I think it was the iPad calendar app.
[00:07:13] With the rich Corinthian leather up at the top during the era of skeuomorphic designs back in 2010, 2009, maybe I can't remember exactly when they I think it's 2010 when he had his famous actually leather chair demonstration of the iPad.
[00:07:28] Maybe the reason that that stood out to me was the car reference because it is it is an upsell.
[00:07:34] The nanotexture $150 if you want to have a don't call it matte finish.
[00:07:41] The other one, so that's option one, rich nanotexture.
[00:07:46] And I didn't love it because I couldn't get texture.
[00:07:49] I couldn't get the same Corinthian, right?
[00:07:53] Like you want that bite, the multisyllabic bite that adds the extra, you know, the gravitas of a luxury good.
[00:08:04] Yeah, texture just didn't have it for me.
[00:08:06] But then if you change that word, it doesn't make sense.
[00:08:08] So I mean, the other option two that came to mind version 26 don't don't by the way, don't think I'm going to edit this in post and fix it.
[00:08:19] I will not.
[00:08:20] I will ultimately land on one of these and that will be the title that you saw on your podcast player.
[00:08:25] Or maybe some third thing will come to mind and then this conversation will be moot.
[00:08:29] I do not think of this collaborative exercise.
[00:08:32] Just imagine it's a it's a it's a quantum collaboration.
[00:08:37] So by observing it, that's you actually took part.
[00:08:41] You opened your podcast player and then the yeah, the entangled, you know, bits just they coalesced around one of these two names or some third name.
[00:08:58] It's all just statistics version 26 Luigi's Mansion, which is a nod to two things at once.
[00:09:05] I'm going to talk a little bit about GameCube, but also I'll probably not escape mentioning Luigi Manjoni Manjoni man.
[00:09:15] You know, I haven't been watching the news.
[00:09:17] I don't know how to pronounce his name, but it looks enough like mansion that I was like, oh, man.
[00:09:21] I bet you there's a Nintendo PR guy whose day just got fucking ruined by the fella who is a overnight folk hero.
[00:09:30] More attractive than most assassins, I would say.
[00:09:35] Great hair.
[00:09:36] Good skin.
[00:09:37] Apparently, skincare Reddit is all about this fella who murdered in cold blood the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
[00:09:45] If you haven't caught the news, if you're even less online than I am.
[00:09:51] And yeah, so I'm trying to decide.
[00:09:53] I think Luigi's Mansion is probably going to win.
[00:09:56] It's more timely.
[00:09:57] It's the first time the name Luigi has come up in the last year.
[00:10:00] And I may have mentioned nanotexture before when discussing Apple's very compromised studio display.
[00:10:11] So I'm leaning Luigi's Mansion, but, you know, don't tempt me.
[00:10:15] I might switch.
[00:10:18] I'm going to just keep drinking coffee because I got to power through this.
[00:10:21] Let's talk about some life stuff.
[00:10:24] I so when we last talked that way back in the heady days of version 25, I had just gotten off a plane from Japan.
[00:10:34] I was still a little bit jet lagged.
[00:10:36] I recorded later in the evening.
[00:10:38] I was tired.
[00:10:39] You know, I was still overcoming.
[00:10:41] I listened to the episode, realized I was overcoming a cold.
[00:10:44] You know, then Becky shortly thereafter, after recording, she developed a pretty bad cough.
[00:10:51] And so we've both been sleeping relatively poorly.
[00:10:53] And I can't complain about this cough because her having a cough for four nights is nothing like me snoring on and off for over a year.
[00:11:02] And I think the fact that her cough is consistent is actually a kindness compared to the sporadic nature of my snoring, where it's like I might go a week without it.
[00:11:11] And then all of a sudden there's like, bam.
[00:11:14] So she doesn't, you know, it's like sneaks up on her and that's not fair.
[00:11:17] So so she's got a cough and I haven't been sleeping particularly well.
[00:11:20] Maybe that's it.
[00:11:22] I also, you know, I wanted to dry out because I was living on shoe highs, you know, canned cocktails in Japan for way too long.
[00:11:30] Just drinking, you know, five whole dollars of alcohol every day, which is an irresponsible amount of alcohol.
[00:11:36] It turns out.
[00:11:40] Yeah, that's one nice thing about living in Orlando and theme park Orlando is that the average price of a cocktail here is seriously $20.
[00:11:49] I think it is.
[00:11:51] I am delighted and surprised when I find a cocktail under $20.
[00:11:55] That's any good.
[00:11:55] In fact, the four seasons right around the corner, their lobby bar has a some of the best bartenders in the state of Florida.
[00:12:05] Like they went all kinds of awards.
[00:12:06] And so when you say a lobby bar, you think it sucks.
[00:12:09] But it's actually it's like it's a it's a restaurant with a room if you're ever around and they still do a happy hour with like $4.
[00:12:18] It was $4 beers.
[00:12:19] I think they finally increased to $5 beers draft beer.
[00:12:23] And it's all craft.
[00:12:25] You know, it's all fancy people stuff.
[00:12:27] And they do it's I think it's $10 margaritas, French 75s, and they got some other happy hour cocktail.
[00:12:37] It was highballs for a while.
[00:12:39] Whiskey highballs was like probably centauri toki or something.
[00:12:43] I gotta say like that $10 margarita.
[00:12:47] They'll throw some jalapeno in there if you want some tahini rim, you know, they do it up.
[00:12:52] They do it well.
[00:12:54] But that might be the cheapest cocktail I've had in all of Orlando is at the Four Seasons.
[00:13:01] Famous for that TikTok meme of the Four Seasons baby, if you're a TikTok person.
[00:13:06] Anyway, all that all all this drinking talk back to the point.
[00:13:11] I've been not drinking for a week.
[00:13:12] And I, you know, I'm back to tracking my nutrients every day.
[00:13:17] The things that I consume and adding up all of the protein and carbohydrate and realizing
[00:13:21] if you don't drink, it's actually really easy to blow past one's protein goals.
[00:13:25] And so I had one day where I had like 240 grams of protein, which is
[00:13:28] enough protein that you'll feel it the next morning if you're not used to it.
[00:13:34] And I still was losing weight.
[00:13:38] I lost like five or six pounds in the last week.
[00:13:43] And to the point where it was like, you know, I was feeling a little lightheaded,
[00:13:47] a little bit woozy because I wasn't drinking enough is the takeaway.
[00:13:52] So so thank God we got to go to a Christmas party last night.
[00:13:57] It was it was great Gatsby themed.
[00:13:58] And I dressed up like a man who wanted to do the bare minimum to not get made fun of at the party.
[00:14:05] So I had some some suspenders on instead of a belt, which was the first time I ever put on suspenders.
[00:14:13] They were not period appropriate suspenders simply because they had the, you know, the
[00:14:18] little class B dues instead of how they had some other system for I don't I don't fucking know.
[00:14:25] Like I, I had chat GPT basically helped me through this.
[00:14:28] And it's like, hey, you want these kinds of suspenders?
[00:14:30] I'm like, that sounds like an ordeal.
[00:14:31] How about I just get some universal one size fits all fit and clip them in?
[00:14:36] I also had a clip on bow tie.
[00:14:37] So that worked.
[00:14:39] When you think clip on bow tie, I guess I'd never used one before, but like it, I always
[00:14:45] assumed it would just be like, you know, like a barrette clip that would go in front of the
[00:14:49] front button and look silly for that reason.
[00:14:51] And maybe that's how they used to be.
[00:14:53] But it seems these days, if you want to spend $3 on a fancy clip on bow tie with a nice texturing,
[00:14:58] I'll say, uh, it's just pre it's a pre tied bow with a still wraps around your neck.
[00:15:04] It's just, it has a class mechanism, which seems smart to me, right?
[00:15:08] I don't know what.
[00:15:09] Look, if you're really into men's fashion, uh, there's this weird intersection or this tension
[00:15:19] between I'm a manly man who, who ties my own shoes and, you know, kills my own dinner and
[00:15:25] stuff.
[00:15:25] And I, I, for fuck's sake, tie my own bow tie from scratch every day.
[00:15:29] Right?
[00:15:29] Like there's a toxically masculine approach to bow ties, but at the same time, it is such
[00:15:35] a foofy accoutrement.
[00:15:37] It's like an ascot, um, that the idea of like a manly man, like a man trying to demonstrate
[00:15:43] his manliness by the fact that he doesn't use a clip on bow tie, uh, came to mind yesterday
[00:15:50] when I was, uh, struggling even with the clasping kind.
[00:15:54] I was like, man, I wish I could just get this to anyway.
[00:15:58] Um, I had a vest at a gray vest.
[00:16:03] This is all brand new territory for me.
[00:16:05] Uh, yeah, I, I've, I've leaned pretty hard into the t-shirt and shorts and or jeans life
[00:16:10] for so long.
[00:16:12] Uh, the, the fella in front of us when we, when we were checking in, cause they took little
[00:16:16] photos of you, uh, all of the women had the same exact flapper dress from Amazon, you know,
[00:16:22] with the, the, the, the hairband thing with the, you know, fake, the polyester peacock tail.
[00:16:28] Becky's looked the best.
[00:16:29] I'm not gonna, I'm not even lying.
[00:16:32] Uh, uh, her dress actually fit.
[00:16:35] He had some, uh, very ill fitting flapper costumes that these women couldn't even move in.
[00:16:40] Um, it was interesting.
[00:16:42] Uh, but the, the fella in front of us at check-in was wearing a, a, a full blown, you know, tuxedo
[00:16:48] get up that he brought from home.
[00:16:50] And he was talking about, Oh yeah, well he's got two of them and his wife, you know, ribbed
[00:16:54] him a little bit that he could only fit in one.
[00:16:55] I was like, man, owning a tuxedo, that's nuts.
[00:16:58] Like, and then it like turns out he's like got all these suits and these fancy clothes and
[00:17:02] he's an older gentleman.
[00:17:05] Uh, but my entire career only the first few years did I have to think about what I was
[00:17:10] wearing and, and it never really got beyond pleated, you know, khakis and a starched shirt.
[00:17:18] And, and I had, I had to wear a suit maybe on two sales calls.
[00:17:22] Um, and they were always the sales calls that were just, uh, there were certain sales demos
[00:17:30] when I was a, a, a baby consultant, these really complex bids.
[00:17:39] I remember we were at cook County once, uh, uh, the, the county that wraps Chicago and it
[00:17:44] has a lot of functions and facilities that operate at the county level.
[00:17:48] So, but of course we're in Chicago in some, you know, uh, dystopian office building.
[00:17:54] That's very Gothic, I should say.
[00:17:57] And the, the solution that we were selling was a response to a bid around some kind of
[00:18:05] document, electronic document ingestion and, and, and routing solution.
[00:18:09] And so what, what that meant was it was like a 12 person team.
[00:18:14] It was a big project working on this pitch.
[00:18:18] And most of the work and most of the money came from the software side at the end of the
[00:18:23] process.
[00:18:23] It's like, you're going to get IBM file net and you're going to get all these different,
[00:18:26] uh, enterprise tools.
[00:18:28] And we're going to integrate, uh, with all your systems and, and build these custom integrations
[00:18:32] that you've asked for here and here and here.
[00:18:33] But the, the, the hard part is the human logistics of how do you get all of their paper documents
[00:18:41] into the system.
[00:18:42] Uh, and that was my job was I had to get paper and then scan it, uh, with a production, big
[00:18:50] Kodak funkin fucking scanner.
[00:18:52] Uh, and then use, what was it?
[00:18:54] Kofax capture or something like a, like an OCR tool of the era.
[00:18:59] And the thing about it is that scanning is not, was not ever a science and neither is
[00:19:07] OCR, the OCR stuff and OCR stands for optical character recognition.
[00:19:10] So you'd have a form and you'd write on the form, like, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, some,
[00:19:15] some demo address and name and all this.
[00:19:19] I spent.
[00:19:22] So like the people doing the software, like they, they could just like click a button and
[00:19:26] like, they could even just use fakery, right?
[00:19:29] Like, Oh, the API is not really there, but I'll always return this particular, like, let's
[00:19:33] call it an XML soap message.
[00:19:34] And so the, the software guys clocked in, clocked out, got back to their billable work.
[00:19:39] I, because the stakes were so high in this particular, uh, and I'm here right now explaining
[00:19:46] all of this nonsense because I had to wear a suit and that was also really bad, but I
[00:19:51] was in Chicago late at night with a group of like, at that point it was like 9 PM and it
[00:19:54] was just me and two partners.
[00:19:56] Cause the partners had a sickness called avoid family, stay at work.
[00:20:02] And, uh, I, I was just running over and over and over again where I'd like, you know,
[00:20:09] I'd take the paper, I'd put it through the scanner and it would get 90% of the OCR stuff
[00:20:13] done, or I'd get it perfect.
[00:20:15] And it would scan everything just right, which would result in the downstream, you know, after
[00:20:21] the capture, like all of my integrations, like would route it to the right thing.
[00:20:24] So that like, it was basically a game of mousetrap or dominoes where like my task was both
[00:20:29] the most important to being able to demonstrate, but also the most error prone, but also the
[00:20:37] least, uh, financially like, um, valuable to, to our services company.
[00:20:42] And so I had no support, uh, on top of that, they, the, our fucking it people pushed out some
[00:20:49] kind of, um, you know, involuntary security update security and bunny quotes that, that
[00:20:57] slowed my system down dramatically in the course of just like a day.
[00:21:01] And I had, I had no way to test for this.
[00:21:04] So I remember I was up at like 11 PM at that point, trying to make this work consistently
[00:21:10] and realizing that the only way to get it to run it all required me to, um, install a virtual
[00:21:16] machine, put windows in the virtual machine, install all this software inside that virtual
[00:21:22] machine, and then run it there because only in the black box of an encrypted virtual machine
[00:21:27] image or, uh, you know, a virtual machine, like disc image, could I evade all of the accountant
[00:21:33] bullshit that was trying to track and encrypt and, and, and muck with files and flight and
[00:21:38] so forth.
[00:21:39] And so it was only around like probably one 30 or two that I got to bed and our, our demo
[00:21:46] was like at seven in the morning and I had to wear a suit.
[00:21:47] So if you ever wonder, Hey, why is Justin always just in a, a t-shirt and shorts?
[00:21:54] Uh, I would say childhood trauma, fuck suits.
[00:21:59] The only, the only time I associate like nice clothes, you know, having a lot of
[00:22:03] having to dress up is church shit.
[00:22:05] I didn't want to go to.
[00:22:06] And usually it's like the worst church shit.
[00:22:09] Like there's some cool church shit out there, you know, youth group where everyone's a horny,
[00:22:14] right.
[00:22:15] And singing pop songs to try to get people in.
[00:22:17] That's as church shit goes, that's above average.
[00:22:21] But when you're talking about like, Hey, you know, this aunt you've never heard of died and
[00:22:27] we got to go all the way to goddamn Dearborn to sit in a Catholic mass, that's going to
[00:22:32] be in Latin.
[00:22:33] And they're going to, you know, one of those, you know, you should feel bad for him because
[00:22:39] he's abused.
[00:22:39] But one of the altar boys, he's going to be waving that little like incense thingy,
[00:22:43] the jigger back and forth and back and forth like a metronome.
[00:22:46] And, uh, you're going to get all this soot in your face, all of that, you know, frankincense
[00:22:51] and myrrh and whatever the fuck they burn.
[00:22:52] And, uh, yeah, then they're going to play some songs, but they're not going to be songs you
[00:22:57] want to hear.
[00:22:57] And you're going to be uncomfortable because I bought you this suit at JC Penny when you
[00:23:01] were like nine and you're 12, you're 12 now, and you've gained a lot of weight, but
[00:23:06] here we are.
[00:23:07] And then you got to go and, you know, like, don't worry because after the service, there's
[00:23:12] a big meal, but it's mostly just going to be, you know, styrofoam plates and plastic forks
[00:23:16] and, uh, cold rubbery chicken.
[00:23:19] And then a whole lot of family members who want to pinch your cheeks, uh, had an aunt that
[00:23:24] always wanted to, um, put on a bunch of red lipstick and kiss me and leave kiss marks.
[00:23:30] And she thought that was adorable and everyone else thought it was funny.
[00:23:33] And for whatever reason, I wasn't a fan, uh, that's the kind of, uh, yeah, so anyway, moving
[00:23:45] right along the, uh, the, the other than having to dress up, the, the Christmas party was really
[00:23:50] nice because it had an all you can drink martini bar.
[00:23:52] So that, that helped that took the edge off a little bit since I hadn't been drinking for
[00:23:57] the previous week.
[00:23:57] Uh, and it was, you know, uh, they, they had a great bartender, the, the, I assume that
[00:24:07] that people drank gin martinis back in the day of Gatsby, but it seemed to be a vodka forward
[00:24:12] martini bar, which I appreciated.
[00:24:15] Uh, as I get older and my taste buds start dying, uh, I found myself going from dry martinis
[00:24:23] to martinis with an olive to martinis with two olives to me asking for like a little bit of
[00:24:30] olive juice and then drinking the martini and realizing that wasn't quite enough olive juice.
[00:24:34] So that's just disgusting, but, um, it's where, uh, it's one of the signs of age, I guess.
[00:24:43] Uh, so the martini bar was good.
[00:24:46] Uh, they also had an aged old fashion that they'd made, you know, homemade, um, with like nutmeg
[00:24:51] and cinnamon in there.
[00:24:52] That was impressive.
[00:24:53] Uh, so yeah, had a, had a big old Christmas party last night, had a couple of drinks, uh,
[00:25:00] and, and, uh, because of the contrast, whenever I go, you know, go a week without any alcohol
[00:25:06] and then I have some alcohol and then I wake up the next morning and I'm like, oh yes, I
[00:25:11] know what people mean now that alcohol is poison.
[00:25:13] And it's a mildly poisonous thing because I feel mildly poisoned.
[00:25:19] Um, and, and I just usually feel that most days until I forget about it.
[00:25:23] So it's a data point, uh, to think about, uh, uh, I, I, I had a good, good run for,
[00:25:30] for a while there, just cause like when you live in a fucking theme park and there's nowadays
[00:25:34] alcohol everywhere that I go and every outing, I had a good run for a few months.
[00:25:40] Um, not last year, the year before where I just didn't drink at home as a rule to myself.
[00:25:46] I was like, you know, I'm not going to pour any liquor for myself at home unless I'm entertaining
[00:25:49] guests.
[00:25:50] And, uh, even then go easy on it because I I'm, I'm, I'm going to just the background radiation
[00:25:56] of existence in when you live in a bunch of resorts.
[00:25:59] Uh, I'll, I'll get, I'll get, I'll get plenty of alcohol subcutaneously.
[00:26:05] Um, a contact tie.
[00:26:07] So maybe I'll, maybe I'll try that again.
[00:26:10] I don't know.
[00:26:11] It's the stuff you think about in mid December when you're just inundated with specialty food
[00:26:17] and drink options, uh, do other life stuff that isn't alcohol or religion or clothing
[00:26:27] related.
[00:26:28] Oh, uh, uh, I've been on a quest to not necessarily save a bunch of money, not necessarily.
[00:26:35] Uh, I was going to say, uh, tighten my belt, but, uh, I don't know what the suspender equivalent
[00:26:43] is because I did not wear a belt last night.
[00:26:45] I just wore suspenders.
[00:26:46] Uh, I've been interested in, in not budgeting either.
[00:26:52] Just, I think awareness.
[00:26:54] Like I want, I know that a lot of money flies through my pockets every month in the form of,
[00:27:01] um, SAS software subscriptions and streaming services.
[00:27:05] I mentioned this last, uh, last go round that I was recommending, Hey, let's say, go take a
[00:27:11] look at like our unused streaming subscriptions of those.
[00:27:14] Uh, yesterday I did cancel max.
[00:27:16] Cause I realized that, uh, if I'm not watching a lot of news, I'm not going to watch John Oliver
[00:27:20] and, and they frankly, a lot of HBO's prestige shows haven't been besides they cut a Sesame
[00:27:28] street and it just so happened that I canceled that day.
[00:27:31] So maybe there's a, some data engineer at HBO who's like, Oh man, people are canceling because
[00:27:37] we got rid of Sesame street.
[00:27:38] Uh, that would be good.
[00:27:40] That would be good for America to get that feedback.
[00:27:43] Uh, yeah.
[00:27:44] I just want awareness of like, where's the money going and in what proportion and does that sound
[00:27:50] right to me?
[00:27:50] Uh, and I've, there are software tools for this.
[00:27:53] Uh, they are all compromised in some way.
[00:27:57] For example, we just, uh, we'd used lunch money in the past, which is a cool app.
[00:28:02] And it has the kind of, you know, basic integrations you would expect.
[00:28:06] I don't know if it uses plaid or whatever behind the covers, but like you, you connect your, your,
[00:28:11] your checking accounts, your credit card accounts.
[00:28:14] It lists all your transactions is very, um, customizable in terms of rules that you can
[00:28:21] set.
[00:28:21] It has an API.
[00:28:22] Jen is a solo co-founder and she seems really, really competent and lovely and responsive,
[00:28:27] which are all great things.
[00:28:29] But the UI is a little clunky for me.
[00:28:32] I don't like how it handled URLs.
[00:28:33] It was like, once you got all the transactions in there and, and set up, it didn't feel informative
[00:28:41] because there wasn't like a good reporting or graphs that just kind of at a glance would
[00:28:45] tell you, this is where your money's going.
[00:28:46] At least for me.
[00:28:47] Uh, additionally, like it, it can't do the Apple card.
[00:28:51] That's the, that's become the crux for a lot of these services is that, um, Apple card
[00:28:55] only added support for reading.
[00:28:59] Uh, well now you can read, uh, uh, so I, Apple added away on iOS and specifically iPhone
[00:29:07] OS to read, uh, transactions from Apple card, Apple savings and Apple cash.
[00:29:14] And this was like nine months ago, if that, but copilot, uh, money is one of two apps maybe
[00:29:22] that supports this.
[00:29:23] And so if you, if you have, we have, we each have an Apple card and we use it for kind of
[00:29:29] our silly stuff whenever we're, you know, using a tap to pay.
[00:29:33] So, so if, if you want to track transactions and you don't want to manually export CSVs
[00:29:40] from your wife's phone every 30 days, which is the process that I'd fallen into with, with
[00:29:44] lunch money, then you, you basically have copilot money.
[00:29:50] And then there's another one, maybe Monarch, uh, the copilot money.
[00:29:53] People are always talking about this other app called Monarch.
[00:29:55] I haven't checked it out.
[00:29:55] I don't know if that's why they like it or if it's just the other one that's being developed
[00:29:59] right now in this post mint apocalypse, as we all grapple with the fact that mint was
[00:30:04] always bad, uh, but people got into it and I don't copilot money is like nice, but like
[00:30:11] it, like, for example, like if I'm, uh, if I buy a, uh, if I put $10, the equivalent of
[00:30:19] $10, so 1000 yen on my Starbucks card in Japan, which is totally separate because of course it
[00:30:25] is there's two Starbucks cards.
[00:30:27] There's the one in Japan and then the one in the rest of the world.
[00:30:30] So you open the Japanese only app, you put a thousand yen on it.
[00:30:33] Uh, you pay for that with Apple pay.
[00:30:36] So which goes to my Apple card and copilot money will read that transaction.
[00:30:40] But if you read like the text in the merchant description, it's literally like
[00:30:44] staba day and it's like all no spaces.
[00:30:47] It's just like 40 characters in a row to, and if you really squint, you can kind of see
[00:30:52] Starbucks, Japan, um, you know, app store payment, which is, you know, like I want to
[00:31:00] change that to Starbucks, Japan, and then set up a rule to just like always change that.
[00:31:05] So I don't have to like memorize these random ass merchant names.
[00:31:08] Uh, apparently like after, after two hours of setting up copilot money yesterday, I realized
[00:31:13] that there's like both no way to set up that kind of rule.
[00:31:16] The only rule that it supports is categorization of, of spending fine, but then if you set
[00:31:22] up a rule and you don't like it, there's no way to edit the rules cause there's no UI for
[00:31:25] rule editing.
[00:31:26] And so then, you know, where do you go, but read it and you're like, okay, well there's
[00:31:30] a subreddit.
[00:31:30] And then like, what's half the post in the subreddit?
[00:31:32] It's about, Oh, of course it's a bunch of dads who are like, I can't see my rules and I have
[00:31:36] to contact support.
[00:31:37] And it's been nine months.
[00:31:38] And I was like, Oh God.
[00:31:39] So that's, uh, if anyone's got any great budgeting software that supports Apple card, you let me
[00:31:46] know.
[00:31:47] Uh, and also isn't a part-time job.
[00:31:50] I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna spend all day on this.
[00:31:52] I'm not, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna check in on this, uh, the four times a year that I, that
[00:31:58] I wake up in a cold sweat wondering, Oh my God, how many subscriptions do I have?
[00:32:02] Which is, uh, I, I really missed my calling by not being a dad, I guess.
[00:32:07] But it did land me on looking at rocket money.
[00:32:11] Uh, so, so, so there was an app called true bill that marketed heavily with like a lot of
[00:32:19] other DTC apps where the pitch was, we will negotiate your bills for you.
[00:32:26] And by bills, I think that one of the reasons why this, this, this business probably struggled
[00:32:31] is that there's really only two that they could reasonably negotiate on your behalf.
[00:32:37] You know, you, you imagine they've got a call center or they've got people who've, who
[00:32:40] are trained, who have scripts that they follow, who, who will doggedly keep calling back until
[00:32:44] they get what, you know, the discount, the, just the steps that you would have to go through
[00:32:48] if you wanted to call Comcast or Verizon, they, they, they, they can basically could basically
[00:32:57] only really negotiate your ISP and your cell phone carrier.
[00:33:01] Cause those are the two sort of, you know, that are, that are transactional enough that
[00:33:08] are regionalized or nationalized enough that they, that they could train on.
[00:33:11] And then of course, like they, they're the ones that like get you in with a teaser rate and
[00:33:15] then gradually turn up the heat over the course of a couple of years.
[00:33:19] Well, Quicken Loans bought, they rebranded as rocket and then rocket fill in the blank
[00:33:26] with other products.
[00:33:26] And they bought true bill around the same time.
[00:33:29] And I, my understanding from a distance is that true bill, uh, uh, that became rocket money
[00:33:36] in order to be an entree into other rocket star services.
[00:33:41] So like you, you now, when you install rocket money, it's still got the negotiation thing.
[00:33:46] Cause that's what they market it on, but you have to slog through so much like, no, I'm actually
[00:33:52] all set with credit and, and, and, and debt repayment services.
[00:33:57] And I'm, I'm already all set with financial advisors and retirement goals.
[00:34:00] I just get me to the, to the thing where I can pay you 35% of whatever you save me on
[00:34:06] my ISP bill.
[00:34:07] And so of course, you know, like I, I, I signed up for the first time, went through the app
[00:34:12] onboarding.
[00:34:13] I was not impressed with the bugginess of the app, but I was able to soldier on through
[00:34:19] it.
[00:34:19] And where I landed was I was, uh, following its little setup wizard for first.
[00:34:27] Spectrum, which is my internet provider.
[00:34:28] And I was, I'd initially paid a hundred dollars when I moved here in 2021, uh, a month for,
[00:34:36] for one gig down, call it 30 megabits per second up.
[00:34:40] And I can't get a, another ISP here.
[00:34:43] They had an exclusive agreement.
[00:34:44] They're building neighborhoods bullshit.
[00:34:47] Uh, and I, I, so I can't get higher upstream and that really gets in my crawl.
[00:34:53] Nevertheless, they have increased prices about $15 a year.
[00:34:59] Each time I'm here to the point now where I think my monthly, you know, debit is like $150,
[00:35:05] $145 and you fill it out and you give them your pin number.
[00:35:11] You got this customer pin that like, you know, is secures your account.
[00:35:14] I'm like, eh, all right, well, that's four digits, you know?
[00:35:17] And besides I'm already on like this one dead simple plan.
[00:35:20] It's just their normal plan.
[00:35:22] And it's, you know, like I'm paying top dollar for it.
[00:35:26] So what's the worst that they could do if they, if somebody else were to call and change
[00:35:30] my plan up, you know, like it, it wouldn't cause that much lasting damage.
[00:35:34] Cause it's not like I'm on some teaser rate.
[00:35:36] It's not like I've got a great deal as it is.
[00:35:38] So I let them do it.
[00:35:39] And three days later, I had low expectations, right?
[00:35:42] Cause you go on Reddit, speaking of Reddit, you go on and you, you search other people's
[00:35:46] experiences and people will say, oh yeah, well like the, you know, I, some of them are
[00:35:52] pretty hyperbolic.
[00:35:53] It's like, you know, like they, they changed my plan to this and now I'm stuck with this,
[00:35:57] you know, TV subscription for the next four years.
[00:35:59] And then they charged me a thousand dollars in imagined savings that never materialized.
[00:36:03] I'm like, shit.
[00:36:04] All right.
[00:36:04] Well, that's, that's not good.
[00:36:06] But I, I gave them a shot.
[00:36:08] They came back three days later and they said, congratulations.
[00:36:12] We saved you $859.
[00:36:14] I was like, what the, excuse me over the next 12 months.
[00:36:18] And it turned out that they got me from $142, $145 down to 70 flat.
[00:36:25] You multiply that by 12 and then indeed comes out to eight something.
[00:36:28] And I was like, damn.
[00:36:29] All right.
[00:36:30] And so I've been, I've been looking for the other shoe to drop like ever since, like something
[00:36:36] is fishy here.
[00:36:37] Like I, they didn't sign me up for other services.
[00:36:39] I did receive, I'm looking over at it now.
[00:36:43] I did receive a relatively large box that has a, you know, one of those wifi modem router
[00:36:50] combo units in it.
[00:36:51] That was partly like apparently part of the deal.
[00:36:54] I don't know if they canceled my service and then in one fell swoop also signed me up for
[00:36:58] service.
[00:36:58] But now I've got this gigantic fucking wifi thing that wouldn't even fit in my patch box
[00:37:02] if I wanted it, which I don't.
[00:37:04] So I'm, I'm, I'm currently in this ether of like, well, if my modem that I rent is still
[00:37:11] going to work, I rent for $0.
[00:37:14] It's one nice thing about spectrum.
[00:37:15] If my modem that I rent is still going to work, uh, maybe I can just keep this wifi thing in
[00:37:20] the box and not call anyone.
[00:37:22] And maybe everything will keep working and I'll pay the $70 a month, or maybe I should send
[00:37:27] the other one back, but then that might trigger some other thing.
[00:37:30] Right.
[00:37:30] I, so look like, do I recommend the service?
[00:37:36] I don't really, I don't, we'll see.
[00:37:38] Right.
[00:37:39] Like call me in a year.
[00:37:40] I should set a reminder.
[00:37:41] Oh, I'm sure if something bad happens, I'll, I'll be right on the airwaves screaming about
[00:37:47] it.
[00:37:47] Like I, like I do, but even after this experience, saving me a lot of money, like what I trust
[00:37:53] them with my T-Mobile account, right.
[00:37:54] Where I have been grandfathered in on what was called the one choice plus plan in 2014
[00:38:01] or whatever.
[00:38:02] And it's genuine, honest to God, unlimited data without any real throttling.
[00:38:08] As far as I can tell, until you get to some absurdly high number where you can watch your
[00:38:12] videos in HD on your, you know, like, like it's, it's, it's a good one.
[00:38:16] It's better than their magenta crap.
[00:38:18] Um, and a lower price than their magenta max thing.
[00:38:21] Well, we got three lines.
[00:38:22] You got, you know, the watches and I would love to pay less for that, but I just don't
[00:38:27] try like you, you, you fill out the rocket money form, uh, with the, uh, the, the, it wants
[00:38:34] your T-Mobile, like login information.
[00:38:36] And that's, that was a bridge too far for me.
[00:38:40] I got there and I was like, you know, I could just imagine this going poorly.
[00:38:44] You know, these plans are so complicated and feels like even when I call T-Mobile and I
[00:38:48] ask, Hey, how's the weather?
[00:38:49] Like they click a button and it fucks up my shit for two weeks.
[00:38:52] So I'm, I'm, I'm good.
[00:38:55] I can probably afford a cell phone bill.
[00:38:57] Uh, I just, I just would prefer not to have to pay it.
[00:39:01] Only one other life item in the last week, I was given a special opportunity.
[00:39:11] Um, I've talked about massages a couple of times on this program and the, uh, I mentioned,
[00:39:15] uh, the one I went, uh, the one I had most recently in a previous episode, I, I, I was, I was wrapping
[00:39:29] up my massage with a human like you do.
[00:39:31] And the human said, have you, have you tried our robot massage?
[00:39:36] And, uh, I didn't know how to take that.
[00:39:38] And I said, I, I've heard of it.
[00:39:41] I know Becky tried it.
[00:39:43] If you check Becky's, um, Becky Graham, you'll see, uh, there's a video of her, uh, getting
[00:39:48] felt up by a robot.
[00:39:50] Uh, I forget the name of the company, but it's, it's, uh, it's like a robot that tries to simulate
[00:39:59] the experience of a human massaging you.
[00:40:02] So it's, uh, you're on a bed, you're face down.
[00:40:06] It's, uh, got arms that kind of go back and forth, uh, on a track and they, they push and
[00:40:13] whatnot.
[00:40:13] And it kind of reminds me of the white birthing robot from star Wars episode three at the end
[00:40:21] when, when Luke and Leah are being born, it does everything short of make the cooing
[00:40:26] sounds to get the babies to calm down.
[00:40:28] You know, like I, you do have a tablet and you can, you can pick out these pre-baked Spotify
[00:40:34] playlists while it's pushing on you.
[00:40:36] Anyway, all that to say, I signed up, um, mostly cause it was free.
[00:40:41] So I had a 30 minute trial and, uh, the fact is trying to imitate humans was really interesting
[00:40:49] to me because I had just spent a month in Japan, uh, getting, uh, what'd you call it?
[00:40:54] Uh, massage chairs, our hotel chain that we stay at has always has massage chairs and even
[00:41:01] bad massage chairs in Japan are pretty intense.
[00:41:03] Uh, uh, but, but good ones are just like, you know, you go in there and it's just like,
[00:41:09] I'm sure there's been, you've probably seen a horror movie image, right?
[00:41:13] Where it's like, you sit in a chair and then like 25 hands grab all the parts of your body
[00:41:18] simultaneously and that is meant to be horrific.
[00:41:20] But if those hands, if there was some nice music playing and it was illuminated and those
[00:41:25] hands were massaging you simultaneously all over your body, maybe it would be pretty, pretty
[00:41:29] great.
[00:41:29] And so that's what a Japanese massage chair is like.
[00:41:33] Cause they, they don't have this arbitrary conceit that a massage must happen in a format
[00:41:39] that resembles how it would happen if a single human on a bed surface was rubbing your tiddly
[00:41:45] bits, which is what this robot is.
[00:41:49] Right.
[00:41:49] And so it's trying to think of another analog, right?
[00:41:55] Like where we, we kind of retain the artifice of the way that it used to be before we automated
[00:42:00] it.
[00:42:00] And, and in some, sometimes we do that to keep people being comfortable like that rich
[00:42:05] Corinthian leather.
[00:42:06] It's like, we wanted to look like a traditional calendar.
[00:42:08] So people know what they're looking at instead of just a bunch of boxes.
[00:42:11] It's like, Oh yeah, this looks like a placemat style calendar that I would have had on my desk.
[00:42:15] And then eventually that ages out.
[00:42:16] And the younger people are like, I've never seen a calendar on a desk, even though my dad
[00:42:20] grew up with one, you know?
[00:42:24] So maybe that's it, right?
[00:42:25] Like, like sometimes that's why we would have a robo massage that like, you know, pressures
[00:42:31] and needs you, you know, kind of with just the two arms up and down in particular points,
[00:42:35] sometimes at the same time, sometimes just one arm, you know, it's, it's, it's less efficient
[00:42:41] is my immediate frustration.
[00:42:43] Cause it's like, you could have 45 fucking arms going to town all over my body and I'd
[00:42:49] get way more work done in 30 minutes.
[00:42:52] Right.
[00:42:52] Cause I'm just trying to min max my existence, but instead by, by, by, by imitating a human
[00:42:59] massage, like nothing is really gained because I can't see it.
[00:43:03] I'm facedown.
[00:43:04] I'm looking at a silly tablet and watching imagery, imagery of forests and, and, and ocean waves
[00:43:10] and whatnot, and I'm kind of getting a, you can look at a weird overhead view of what
[00:43:14] your body is looking at, looking like right then, you know, like it scans your body and
[00:43:19] then has like a little illustration of like, here's where I'm pushing you.
[00:43:21] Here I go.
[00:43:22] It's, it seems more to me like they designed this, you look at this unit and it's just like,
[00:43:31] this has got to cost at least 15 grand.
[00:43:34] This is an expensive, complicated piece of equipment.
[00:43:38] It feels like a lack of imagination, uh, to, to somebody had the idea, let's take human
[00:43:47] masseuses out of the equation and just make a robo masseuse thing that we could put in spas
[00:43:53] when, uh, you'd actually have a better experience.
[00:43:56] It would be cheaper.
[00:43:57] And there's like more prior art at Panasonic or these other companies in Japan.
[00:44:01] If you just made a, you know, massage chair, but that would be boring, I guess.
[00:44:08] Uh, and massage chairs, like you, you hear the word massage chair right now as you're listening.
[00:44:13] And if you haven't had like a real one, you know, at a Japanese Denki-yasan on the third
[00:44:17] floor, where all the salary men on their way home tell their wives, oh, I got a, I got a big meeting
[00:44:24] with the boss and then they go to, they go to Yamada Denki or they go to Yodabashi camera.
[00:44:28] And then they just, you know, they take their briefcase and they set it down next to one of the
[00:44:33] trial units of the massage chair.
[00:44:34] And then they, they, they, they, they go into this little like sensory deprivation pod and
[00:44:39] they get all their bits smushed simultaneously and they got a remote control and they can
[00:44:45] say, just do it hard.
[00:44:46] And then they can forget their worries for, for 15 minutes until, uh, one of the staff has
[00:44:52] to remind them that, uh, they don't live there and that they have to go home now.
[00:44:56] If you haven't had that experience, uh, you probably, when you hear a massage chair, think
[00:45:02] of like those $2, you know, leather chairs that are, you know, just like our just normal
[00:45:08] fucking chairs that may be vibrate, like the vibrating bed equivalent that you see at an
[00:45:12] airport.
[00:45:12] Um, this is not what I'm talking about.
[00:45:15] So get your head out of there and, and go Google, you know, for high end Japanese massage
[00:45:22] chair, and you might get some idea.
[00:45:24] Uh, also I, uh, in the course of a 30 minute massage, I encountered so many fucking Android
[00:45:32] tablet bugs.
[00:45:33] I, I didn't, I gave them a lot of feedback cause they, this is sort of a trial that they're
[00:45:37] doing.
[00:45:37] They wanted to want to know how, what I thought.
[00:45:40] And I gave them a lot of this perspective and feedback about like, well, you know, this
[00:45:44] skeuomorphic design, yada, yada.
[00:45:45] But I didn't even touch any of the software stuff.
[00:45:49] Cause like there's an absolutely nothing that they're going to be able to do with that much
[00:45:52] less like they won't even be able to communicate this back to the company in a way that's helpful,
[00:45:55] but it was, you know, it would freeze or the display would become non-responsive.
[00:46:01] One time I had the music just turn itself all the way up.
[00:46:05] The, um, the, so many things about this design are meant to make you feel comfortable are
[00:46:13] meant to make you feel safe.
[00:46:14] Like if, if you, it moves at all, or if it detects anything is off at all, it basically
[00:46:20] like will, will disengage entirely and reposition itself.
[00:46:23] And then you have to actively resume the massage.
[00:46:26] And then it's got to put the little flappy doos back over you.
[00:46:30] Like it's really worried about people flipping out about this robot pressing up against them.
[00:46:36] And it extends to, to like, you know, you pick your firmness, like light, medium firm.
[00:46:41] And I clicked firm.
[00:46:42] And then there, you could see there was like a little like pressure bar on the right.
[00:46:47] And that even though I'd clicked the firm preset, I wasn't at a hundred percent pressure.
[00:46:52] And I was like, well, that, that won't do.
[00:46:54] And so I jacked it up to a hundred percent right out of the gate.
[00:46:56] And the whole time, 30 minutes, like you could, uh,
[00:46:59] Hmm.
[00:47:01] It, I knew that a massage was happening.
[00:47:05] Like I knew when contact was being made, but like, it was not a massage.
[00:47:08] It was, it was somebody kind of like, like, like back rub would be generous.
[00:47:14] It was like somebody like took an open palm hand and just pressed it.
[00:47:18] Just, just, just an obnoxiously against different parts of my body and no firmness beyond that.
[00:47:26] So you got a robo massage.
[00:47:29] It's limited in what it can do.
[00:47:33] Cause it's trying to imitate a human.
[00:47:34] It's very worried about liability, which is why I imagine the max firmness is light pressure.
[00:47:39] Uh, and it's fussy and it's buggy.
[00:47:42] And of course it can only do very limited regions of the body.
[00:47:45] Like if I was a massage therapist, I'd be like, Hey, sweet.
[00:47:49] You know, I'm going to keep having a job longer than all these programmer juckle fucks.
[00:47:52] You're going to get replaced by a Claude and open AI.
[00:47:56] So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm confident that a massage therapist is going to be a, a lucrative, you
[00:48:03] know, going concern as a career for a little while programming.
[00:48:08] I'm not so sure of, but most of us listening have already made our choice, whether we're
[00:48:14] going to be massage therapists or programmers.
[00:48:16] So we're just going to have to see how this, how this plays out.
[00:48:19] All right.
[00:48:20] Well, that's all, that's everything going on in my life.
[00:48:23] So let's, uh, well, let's follow up on stuff that had been going on in my life and is now
[00:48:30] continuing or is once again, I started to realize that there's a, there's a certain theme to this
[00:48:37] show.
[00:48:37] Hmm.
[00:48:38] All right.
[00:48:46] There's basically two major areas of follow-up today.
[00:48:51] Um, but somehow the two of them take up 11 bullet points in my notes.
[00:48:59] So I'll try to be expeditious.
[00:49:02] The first is I bought a, uh, M4 pro MacBook pro, I guess an Apple nomenclature, a MacBook pro
[00:49:13] left parentheses, 2024, right parentheses with M4 pro.
[00:49:19] I think is probably maybe the 2024 is at the end.
[00:49:22] Maybe they don't put the date now that they have the chip name.
[00:49:25] In any case, I needed a computer that was built for Apple intelligence, which is how they also,
[00:49:32] they crammed that in the fucking name.
[00:49:34] Um, and like the, every subheader says Apple intelligence on it, which, you know, I mean,
[00:49:40] if you're, if you're a marketing dude, it's the thing that, you know, like you gotta, every
[00:49:48] year is a struggle to goose people into, to buying computers.
[00:49:51] And, uh, it's been a while since they've had anything new to say that your computer can do.
[00:49:56] So it makes sense, but come on.
[00:49:59] It can't even make Genmoji yet.
[00:50:02] Uh, just if you've, if you've downloaded it, used 18.2 iOS or iPadOS, uh, go turn on the,
[00:50:13] um, you know, the AI feature, if it's available in your region and language, and then you open
[00:50:19] the image playground app and you click through there and let it download all of the image
[00:50:24] playground shit, uh, in particular, the image playground itself, where you can take a person
[00:50:30] and a place and kind of like, you know, create sort of a, uh, a witch's brew of bad imagery
[00:50:35] and then, and then have a keep swiping to the right as, as they just all look bad that I have
[00:50:43] no, no need for, but Genmoji, or at least the promise of Genmoji, I like quite a lot.
[00:50:49] I enjoy, you know, um, typing in little like name, like, so we were at the parks, uh, with
[00:50:57] our friends last week and it was a Jollywood Knights event, which is also Gatsby themed.
[00:51:06] There's a reason why ordering 1920s era costumes on Amazon in Orlando was like not an overnight.
[00:51:13] It was like a two, three day leg because this, this Jollywood Knights 1920s era themed, uh,
[00:51:21] ticketed event at Hollywood studios has been going on. And it was one of those nights. And so some
[00:51:26] flapper lady in line, she had a purse that had a phone handle on it. And her husband, who now that
[00:51:34] I think back on this was dressed very similarly to how I dressed myself last night. So something tells
[00:51:39] me he was sort of a long for the ride in this, she picked up the phone handle off of her purse and
[00:51:46] handed it to Becky. And then he, you could sort of see him on the phone being a bad ventriloquist
[00:51:53] and talking to her on the phone. So like his cell phone was somehow communicating to the purse phone.
[00:51:59] It was very, it reminded me of get smart, you know, like that spy TV show from the sixties that was on
[00:52:05] Nick at night in the eighties or nineties when I would have watched it. Uh, of course it didn't
[00:52:10] work. And then we were just in line and it was like, sorry, we're in line. It didn't work. And then,
[00:52:14] and then of course the way that lines work, right. As you turn left, turn right. And now it's up,
[00:52:18] here's the same people again. And so they're like, all right, try again. So she picks up the purse
[00:52:23] phone and here's the guy talk. And she's like, yes, this is indeed a telephone. That is a purse.
[00:52:28] My reaction, my contribution to this experience was to try to generate a Genmoji for the group
[00:52:35] that I was with. That was like purse phone. And, uh, wouldn't you know it, uh, it struggled to like,
[00:52:43] I was like purse with a phone handle on top. And it was, it gave me like one with like a,
[00:52:49] like a locker combination lock instead of a rotary dial in the middle. It was all, it was not,
[00:52:54] not good. And, and I think like a lot of these Genmoji, in addition to being bad and not good,
[00:53:01] they are when they, there's, they have to be so detailed because usually it's people mashing up
[00:53:07] different concepts. They have to be so detailed that when in line with texts, you have to squint
[00:53:12] and you can barely see what they are. And then if they're as a tap back, you have no hope of knowing
[00:53:16] what they are. Like if it's of a person, for example, like it's, you're going to get like 80% shirt
[00:53:21] and then like 10% head. So you're not going to be able to tell who's what. Uh, so those need work
[00:53:27] and no one wants my Genmoji. My, my brother has formally requested. I stopped sending them and,
[00:53:32] uh, I will, I will take that request under advisement. Anyway, uh, bought a MacBook pro. Um,
[00:53:42] Oh, I've got a, I've got a parenthetical as a C notes. All right, well, here's eight more bullet
[00:53:50] points. I'm going to rattle through these. So Becky, actually, it was her idea. She wanted to
[00:53:54] get me this. We were in Japan. She's like, Hey, you know, I heard you talking about the nanotexture
[00:53:57] display. And like, of course, you know, the, the, the brighter screen and us being in Orlando,
[00:54:01] you never use a computer outside or out of the house. So she wanted to buy it. And she said,
[00:54:06] it was just really complicated. I didn't want to fuck up. I didn't want to get you the wrong set of
[00:54:09] options. I asked Aaron and Aaron didn't know either. He said he hadn't really been on top of it.
[00:54:16] Uh, and I was like, honey, that's so I didn't say like, bless your heart. I, it was a such a sweet
[00:54:23] gesture. And it is true that I've been curious about it. Um, but I didn't feel like, uh, I had
[00:54:30] to get one right this minute. Uh, and, and honestly, the, the, the 14 inch MacBook pro is still too heavy.
[00:54:36] I, I, I, I lifted tonal my, my weightlifting robot, uh, reported in my tonal wrapped because
[00:54:46] everything has to do a goddamn wrapped dingus to try to share in social media as if like, you know,
[00:54:52] one assumes that all these wrapped posts just go to the goddamn bottom of every algorithm because
[00:54:57] they're all the same. But in any case, it showed me a little wrapped video and it said, I wait,
[00:55:02] I, I lifted one and a half million pounds last year or over the course of 2024. And I was like,
[00:55:07] that's a lot of weight that I lifted. I, yesterday I did the equivalent of like, you know, 250,
[00:55:12] 275 pound deadlift barbell deadlift. And that was hard, but not too hard. It's the max weight that,
[00:55:20] that tonal can do. Um, I, I, I, I like to think I'm pretty strong now. Uh, that four pound fucking
[00:55:31] MacBook pro is backbreakingly heavy, no matter where I am, I'll pick it up and like, that is denser than
[00:55:40] it looks. It's a, it's like when you pick up a baby, that's like a little bit too dense, you know,
[00:55:46] and you're just like, Oh wow. I was expecting this to be more fun. This is just going to give
[00:55:51] me pelvic floor problems. If I do this for more than exactly 30 seconds and then hand it back to
[00:55:57] its mother who surely has pelvic floor issues. Um, I don't want to be carrying around this MacBook pro.
[00:56:05] I don't want to carry it with my arms. I don't want to carry it in a bag. I don't want to carry it
[00:56:09] into the car. I don't want to carry it, you know, uh, in a Starbucks. I want to hire a Porter to
[00:56:16] bring it around to me, you know, from place to place. Maybe, maybe they could also saddle up and
[00:56:23] have a, uh, vision pro. So that's what I really want. Uh, at least until, and unless Apple releases
[00:56:30] the 12 inch MacBook pro, uh, that we were promised in our early years.
[00:56:34] Anyway, when Becky said that it was hard to configure and figure out what she'd want to order
[00:56:43] or what I would want her to order. And as a result would have made a pretty lousy gift because
[00:56:49] the likelihood of her getting it right. Where if you look at the number of configurations for these
[00:56:53] seeing this thing, like astronomically small, I actually spent, I sat down, I look, I, I said,
[00:57:01] I didn't need the thing. And then I come home and then within a day and a half, uh, my MacBook air is
[00:57:07] crying because it's out of storage to the point where like I composed an email and I hit send on the email
[00:57:12] and then Apple mail reported, yo, we just barfed on all this and just deleted all your shit. Cause we
[00:57:17] ran out of disk space, no warning. And in modern day Mac OS, you don't get to know how much disk space
[00:57:23] you have because all of it is like optimized storage. So like whether it's your iCloud drive
[00:57:29] or it's your Apple photos, once the system is under any sort of, um, storage stress, it'll,
[00:57:35] it's supposed to detect that and start deleting shit. Your phone does this too. So sometimes like
[00:57:41] you're like, like I was importing a bunch of raw images on the phone and it said, Oh, you're out of
[00:57:45] storage. And then I knew, because I know how it works under the hood, even though it exposes zero
[00:57:49] controls or visibility as to what is going the fuck on. I knew that when it ran out of storage,
[00:57:54] the right solution was sit and wait for 30 seconds while it deletes shit in the background and then
[00:57:59] just hit import again. Right. Well, I, that didn't work in this case. Like I actually went and deleted
[00:58:05] like a hundred gigabytes of garbage. It's a small SSD. It's a 512 gigabyte MacBook air. I deleted all this
[00:58:11] stuff, but, um, from my iCloud drive on another computer, because this one was finder was completely
[00:58:17] unresponsive. Uh, and it never got better because it had suspended all iCloud drive syncing as a,
[00:58:24] probably like some sort of like memory safeguard or storage safeguard to like make sure I didn't,
[00:58:27] it didn't fuck up anything in the cloud. And so like even going, I'm not going to,
[00:58:33] most of that storage was in my iCloud drive, which is how it got full while I was overseas.
[00:58:38] And when I came back, I, I didn't have like, I could, I could have gone through and like run
[00:58:47] RM dash RF from the terminal and deleted stuff from the iCloud drive to like as a, as an emergency break,
[00:58:52] like get, get this SSD empty enough that the operating system can run and then figure it out.
[00:59:00] But then of course it would have synced all of those deletions up to the cloud and deleted the
[00:59:03] same things off of my other computers. So this is a tractable problem. And I, I, I ultimately did solve
[00:59:10] it, but I, I realize now why Apple markets so much of its pro devices to photos and video people,
[00:59:20] because photos and videos take up a shit ton of space. Uh, they have different performance
[00:59:26] characteristics than programming and, and the, their needs in many ways are higher than what you need.
[00:59:33] If you're just writing Ruby code, right? Uh, it just so happens that Swift, the programming language
[00:59:38] that they wrote is also like, we'll, we'll take advantage of all of these cores during compilation
[00:59:42] in a way that like a lot of local development in other languages won't.
[00:59:45] But in my last year of doing a lot more video work, doing a lot more audio work, I can definitely
[00:59:52] understand now like, Oh yeah, like the, the MacBook air actually is inappropriate for a lot of the
[00:59:57] workflows of the things that I do. So that experience, I came to Becky and I was like, look, I know I said
[01:00:05] I didn't need this, but I think I might need this. Um, where need is in very, you know, very gentle
[01:00:12] text. It's, it's a thin font variant to say, I need this. What I mean to say is like, I, it would save
[01:00:19] me a lot of time and stress and headache and, uh, uh, rework to have a better computer, a more
[01:00:26] capacious computer. And of course you can't upgrade the storage and your existing max. So here we are.
[01:00:32] Um, but anyway, I was in the configurator for the new MacBook pro. And the first decision you got to
[01:00:36] make is do I want a regular M4 chip, which I did not, or one of the pro ones, which is a, you know,
[01:00:43] 12 or 14 core. I want to say a chip, uh, which is a huge upgrade over the M3 pro the M3 pro had a way
[01:00:53] more efficiency cores and the M4 pro has more performance score. So it's like a, it's doing
[01:00:57] much better in synthetic benchmarking that that's impressive. It's a big year over year change or the
[01:01:02] M4 max, which is, you know, uh, an incremental improvement over the M3 max, but to the extent
[01:01:10] that it's better than the pro it's like, you know, got another meat and quote unquote media
[01:01:14] engine of like encoders and decoders, uh, for, for, for video and audio, it's got a lot more GPU heft
[01:01:21] and day in day out. I, I, I knew I wasn't going to really use that often. It wasn't going to be the
[01:01:29] thing like holding me back. Most of the time, the thing that holds me back most of the time is like
[01:01:33] the spinning beach balls that one always gets when using Mac OS for more than a few hours. Uh,
[01:01:38] and those are just software bugs, like a faster processor doesn't help. Additionally, like the,
[01:01:42] the, the pro chips have better battery life. Um, they're, they're, they're less likely to get
[01:01:48] thermally throttled when they are under load. So I decided I was going to get a M4 pro. Uh, of course,
[01:01:56] like one of the things that's weird about this configurator is that not only are there a lot of
[01:02:03] decisions to make when you're, when you're configuring your Mac book pro, but changing one,
[01:02:09] and you may have heard this elsewhere. You've made, maybe you've played with this thing yourself.
[01:02:13] I think the M4 year is even worse than previous years, because when you change any one option,
[01:02:17] whether it's storage tier or Ram, it will upsell or downsell you into different computer,
[01:02:23] different, um, different chips. Uh, for example, if you're on the binned version of the M4 pro with,
[01:02:31] I think only either 10 or 12 CPU cores, then, uh, it will downgrade your power supply from 95 Watts to
[01:02:41] like 79 Watts, because you probably won't or can't benefit from the high power mode that the 96 watt one
[01:02:49] is designed to draw. Okay. Sure. Uh, if you have a pro and you want, it comes with 24 gigabytes or
[01:02:56] if you want 48 gigabytes of Ram, you can click that. But then if you want a max chip, if I'm looking at
[01:03:02] the max chip now, it's like, Oh, I want, I want at least 48 gigs of Ram. I want to future-proof this.
[01:03:07] I know like a lot of the, uh, the, the LLM and AI stuff really is Ram hungry. I'm looking at my Mac
[01:03:13] studio. I checked to that. I'm like, okay, yes, it has 128 gigs of Ram or whatever. And, and almost
[01:03:17] all of it's in use in, you know, whatever that means, because activity monitor also kind of lies
[01:03:22] about that. And I, you know, I, I wanted to try the max with exactly 48 gigs of Ram.
[01:03:31] problem is the max comes with 36 gigs of Ram. If you're on the binned version, uh, which is the,
[01:03:39] the, the, the chip with two broken cores on it. So it's like two fewer CPU cores at that point. I'm
[01:03:45] like, well, is the, is the unbinned pro better or worse at computing tasks, CPU bound tasks than the
[01:03:55] binned max. And we don't have an answer for that because we don't know if these performance cars
[01:04:00] cores are identical or very similar between the pro and the max. And nobody, I mean, nobody has done
[01:04:05] benchmarks comparing the unbinned pro versus the bin to max because Apple didn't send those
[01:04:09] configurations out. So we just don't really have a good idea. I could have gone scouring geek bench
[01:04:15] uploads, but like those are synthetic. It's not real world anyway. So I was like, well,
[01:04:20] I don't want the bin to max. Oh, well, oh. And then I click and we realize that the,
[01:04:24] the binned version comes with a 36 gigs of Ram. If you want to upgrade to 48 on the max, uh,
[01:04:32] you have to upgrade to the non-binned max chip. And then once you do the non-binned one has four, um,
[01:04:40] RAM memory banks and the binned one has three, which is how they arrived at 36. It's three
[01:04:45] memory banks of 12, but the non-binned one will use all four memory banks. And so the non-binned
[01:04:50] chip starts at 48 and then goes up from there, which means that just going from the pro to the
[01:04:57] max, if you want 48 gigs of Ram is a $900 upsell, right? And that now, now we're talking like now
[01:05:04] $3,000 computer thereabouts becomes a $4,000 computer. So that's, uh, it, no, a good purchasing experience
[01:05:15] results in you feeling like not exhausted at the end, not, you know, maybe you feel accomplished.
[01:05:22] Maybe you feel like, Oh, I picked out the perfect car. Look at this list of features and I can get
[01:05:27] so many little things to get excited about in, in, in whatever the purchase was.
[01:05:31] It should not leave you second guessing that you clicked the right buttons in the right order. And
[01:05:36] that when you clicked a button at the end of this list of, of buttons, that it didn't uncheck the first
[01:05:41] thing. You shouldn't feel like in the cart that you have to scrutinize every single little line item
[01:05:46] that is right. And then, and then the next morning I wake up and I'm like, did I get this right? Did I,
[01:05:51] did I, did I mess up? Should I gotten the max? You know, I felt very unsure about the order.
[01:05:58] The only thing that I was really sure about was I wanted the $150 nano texture, uh, which really does
[01:06:04] an impressive job of cutting on, cutting down glare from other light sources. And when you, when you live
[01:06:12] in Florida, uh, AKA the light source state, um, there's a lot of light everywhere bouncing every which way.
[01:06:18] So having that display, uh, really increases the usable range of, of the computer.
[01:06:25] So I, I, I knew that $150 was down. And then at the next morning I saw all these deals. Of course,
[01:06:31] I got like, you know, RSS feed of just, Hey, look, this, the, the $600 off the new M4 MacBook Pro.
[01:06:36] I was like, ah, motherfucker. And of course, like I had a shipping delay until December 24th anyway.
[01:06:42] So I was like, well, yeah, I'll, I'll go and play the field and look at discounts.
[01:06:45] I found a discounted MacBook Pro that would have saved me $300 or so. Yeah. Well, you know,
[01:06:50] it's economical and Apple care is the same thing. Maybe I'll just buy from them. But then as soon
[01:06:55] as I got to checking out there, I realized that that nano texture display is only available if you
[01:06:59] buy it, build to order from Apple, uh, which is in a sense really brilliant because it, it, it, it
[01:07:09] gooses first party sales because that's like one of the big selling points of this, of this particular
[01:07:13] laptop. And so I have a, whenever Apple sells you the computer directly at full retail price,
[01:07:19] like they're taking way more profit than when best buy or Adorama or B and H photo or whatever
[01:07:25] sells it. Uh, so, so that was clever on their part to not have any sort of a pre-boxed skews include
[01:07:33] that, that nano texture display. So that brought me right back to Apple again. Uh, and then at the last
[01:07:38] minute I remembered, Oh yeah, I know I have friends who work at Apple and there is an employee purchase
[01:07:42] program. Like I'll ask for our friends and family discount. And so I did that and I saved, uh,
[01:07:47] a decent chunk of change, but more importantly, like that, that, that shipped to me overnight UPS,
[01:07:53] like it was there 20 hours later. Uh, so, so I, I've received the new laptop. Uh, and ultimately I'm,
[01:08:02] I'm happy with the decision I made. I think that the, the, I S I spend more time worrying about battery
[01:08:07] life in these things than I spend feeling like I'm waiting on a build to finish. So I, I, I'm pretty
[01:08:16] happy that I picked the M four pro over the M four max this time around. Uh, if you've got one of these,
[01:08:23] things, I'd love to hear your thoughts, uh, on the process. You can, you can email me those thoughts
[01:08:28] at podcast at searls.com. No, no, not searls.com. That's that's owned by doc Searls, the Harvard
[01:08:34] business fellow. I lazily said, then this is why you use.com addresses podcast at searls.co.
[01:08:42] Please. When you buy not, when you buy a computer from Apple, of course, like it prompts you to trade
[01:08:50] in your current one. And so I went through the trading configurator and I got real mad real fast
[01:08:54] because I pasted the serial number from my, my M three MacBook air, which is all of nine months old.
[01:08:59] And it didn't say what it should have done is it should have said, Oh, we don't take these yet.
[01:09:04] Instead, it just kind of, uh, asked me what kind of computer it was. And so I clicked MacBook air and
[01:09:11] I clicked 2023 and I clicked the, you know, uh, uh, uh, processor and the Ram and the storage and the
[01:09:17] quality. And it gave, it spat out like $615. And I added that to my cart. And then I was about to
[01:09:24] check out and I realized, wait, I should double check that I type, I hit all those things correctly.
[01:09:30] And I went back and it said M two, not M three. And I realized now what happened was the M three
[01:09:36] MacBook air is not yet eligible for trade in at Apple, which is a weird, right? Uh,
[01:09:43] I get it. Most people wouldn't want to trade in their thing nine months after buying it.
[01:09:47] But not only is it like not trade in a bowl, but like if you give a serial number, it's as if the
[01:09:53] system doesn't know that serial number. And then in order to increase their, you know, conversion rate,
[01:09:58] they don't tell you that the serial number is either unknown to them or for a model that they
[01:10:03] don't accept. And so they just let you click through anyway. And I'm very confident that if
[01:10:07] I had sent in this computer configured, as if it was a prior year M two model that they would have
[01:10:15] gladly taken it and sent me back the marginally less amount of money than I would have had.
[01:10:21] Um, so that's shame on Apple, right? Like there come on, like their trade in system is actually
[01:10:29] kind of nice. It is convenient, but if you'll take a serial number and just like, I'll let people send
[01:10:34] in a newer, better computer than the one that like, you know, the configurator will, the wizard will let
[01:10:39] them choose, uh, you know, best case scenario, you mail it back to them at great expense and time,
[01:10:45] uh, worst case scenario, you take their money and bilk them. So not cool.
[01:10:50] Uh, once the computer came, but the setup took me all fucking day, like setup took me four or five,
[01:10:59] six hours. And that was weird. Uh, cause usually I actually have an old video I'll share in the
[01:11:05] show notes of, um, from 2019 or 2020 of setting up a new Mac. And it, it's a 90 minute video.
[01:11:12] And I was going at a relatively leisurely pace. These are all the settings that I use. This is how I go
[01:11:16] through it. Uh, it has become so much slower now, partly because there's more going on in Mac OS as
[01:11:23] it has become more and more iPhone-ified partly because the system settings app really hides a
[01:11:30] lot of important features and confusing nooks and crannies. Uh, partly it was, uh, the amount of
[01:11:37] video and audio tools and paid plugins that I have now that required me to intentionally deauthorize the
[01:11:44] first machine authorized on the second machine. Uh, I guess I recorded that video on probably my last
[01:11:51] Intel MacBook Pro. I hit a huge snag where I kept running into issues with, um, the, the iZotope RX
[01:11:58] plugin suite, which I install so that I could have, um, it, if you, if you want to know it mouth de-clicks
[01:12:06] me, so you hear fewer mouth clicks in, in, in this production. And it also reduces some of the
[01:12:14] background noise in my room. Installing that I just got this really Byzantine bizarre error over and over
[01:12:21] and over again. And, uh, Googling for just a snippet of the error, it was other people talking about
[01:12:26] Postgres and other people talking about Microsoft office. And, and I realize now, uh, that the common
[01:12:32] thread was Rosetta, the translation layer for, for, to be able to run x86 stuff on, on Apple
[01:12:38] Silicon, Silicon, Silicon, Silicon. There it is. Apple Silicon. Uh, I got to say it like that.
[01:12:45] And, uh, Rosetta wasn't installed because it wasn't installed by default. So I had to go and find
[01:12:50] something else or find a program to run that require Rosetta to prompt the Rosetta install,
[01:12:55] install Rosetta and then run the installer. And then the installer worked. And I was just like,
[01:12:59] fuck sake. Like this is the Rosetta experience in the M one generation. When Apple Silicon Silicon was
[01:13:06] new, was really, really delightful because a lot of things required it. And it was pretty straightforward.
[01:13:11] And I'm sure a lot of Apple engineers were using a lot of things, but now that we're scraping the
[01:13:14] bottom of the barrel and almost everything supports Apple Silicon by default, we, uh,
[01:13:21] I don't know how that's going to sound in post. Uh, now that everything basically supports Apple
[01:13:27] Silicon, we, we don't see the Rosetta pop up as much. In fact, like some of you may not even have
[01:13:33] Rosetta installed cause you don't have any of this kind of weird shit anymore. That tells me that we're
[01:13:40] probably looking at, we might be drawing near to the announcement that like, you know, this is the,
[01:13:46] like, like, like a WWDC, I wouldn't be surprised if they tell us like, you know, this subsequent
[01:13:51] Mac OS 16 version is going to be the last one that supports x86 instruction, uh, programs.
[01:13:57] I think it's time, uh, you know, yes, some things won't be able to run anymore, but the, uh,
[01:14:02] anyone who vendors Venn's who anyone who Venn's software on the Mac has had plenty of time at this
[01:14:10] point. Um, and the Mac has been so successful now that if you probably were to look at a,
[01:14:14] a pie chart of how many of the Macs out there are already running Apple Silicon, like, uh,
[01:14:21] I wish they'd just called it arm. I, I'm annoyed that the industry and the reviewers and everyone
[01:14:28] who reports on this shit has, has, uh, uh, gone along with Apple's marketing lingo for this, uh,
[01:14:39] calling it Apple Silicon. Uh, so anyway, yeah, uh, I was envious of that 90 minute video of past Justin
[01:14:46] because this took so long that my day was pretty much poisoned, wrecked. Um, one observation,
[01:14:54] my MacBook air from my office, it's Bluetooth radio is too weak to talk all the way to my phone,
[01:15:03] which is downstairs in a cradle near the entrance to the home. So I can't use the iPhone mirroring
[01:15:08] or the iPhone notifications. Not that I want to, I think it's probably a net bad feature,
[01:15:15] but there are so many times where it's like, oh, I need to get a code from the phone or something like
[01:15:18] that. And I, I, uh, I don't want it to get up and walk downstairs, even though it's probably good for
[01:15:24] me to get up and walk downstairs from time to time. The new MacBook pro can actually reach the phone,
[01:15:29] which was incredible. The, uh, uh, that's a much longer distance Bluetooth wise. The problem was I
[01:15:37] was using my vision pro headset and, uh, vision pro when you're using Mac virtual display that actually
[01:15:44] counts as sidecar. So you might've heard of sidecar as being the, the technology that Apple released a few
[01:15:49] years ago, 2019, 2020 let you run an iPad as if it was an external Mac monitor. Well, sidecar,
[01:15:57] the technology of like wirelessly, um, uh, uh, pushing the, the computer treating a remote wireless
[01:16:05] device as a additional screen for the computer, uh, is actually the same protocol that they're using to
[01:16:12] do the Mac virtual display. So when you have Mac virtual display on envision pro that counts as a
[01:16:18] sidecar session, uh, cause it's doing additional stuff above and beyond the VNC to traditional screen
[01:16:24] sharing. Well, when you're doing iPhone mirroring in Mac OS 15, that also counts as a sidecar session.
[01:16:30] And apparently a computer can only a Mac can only do one sidecar session at a time. So if you are in
[01:16:36] Mac virtual display and you try to do, uh, uh, uh, one of these iPhone mirroring sessions, you'll say,
[01:16:43] you'll get an error pop-up say, Hey, sidecar is already in use. So as long as I'm in the headset,
[01:16:50] I'm probably not going to be using it much, but the reason I was excited to use the headset was that day,
[01:16:58] coincidentally, uh, 15.2 and vision OS 2.2 both released. And that was the pair of releases that,
[01:17:07] uh, enabled what was, I mean, the vision, vision pros only real kind of marquee announcement from,
[01:17:14] from WWDC, uh, the ultra wide screen. And this is the swivel chair mode where, where I took a little
[01:17:22] video, uh, screencast. Cause it was just so wide. It was like almost 90 degrees to the left,
[01:17:27] all the way to 90 degrees to the right in this huge screen that wraps around your, your whole
[01:17:33] front half of, of the globe of your existence. Uh, the, the resolution wise, they say it is like having
[01:17:41] two 5k studio displays side by side, but because it wraps around you, it even feels more than that.
[01:17:49] And the way that it can pull off such a high resolution is because it introduces foveated
[01:17:55] rendering, which is to say, uh, it uses the eye tracking, which is built into the vision pro
[01:18:00] hardware to know where you're looking. And then it communicates to the Mac. They're looking here.
[01:18:05] And then the Mac will send a higher resolution, uh, uh, view of that part of the screen to the vision
[01:18:13] pro and lower resolution elsewise that are in the periphery of your vision. This is a trick
[01:18:19] that is used throughout other VR headsets as well. Um, any of them that support eye tracking will take
[01:18:25] advantage of this because in a 3d game, it allows you to run the game at a higher level of fidelity
[01:18:32] with, with better shaders and more detail at where the user is looking and, and not waste so much time
[01:18:39] post-processing and sharply rendering things that are, you know, at the periphery or even out of you.
[01:18:45] That's
[01:18:47] that's pretty neat. Um,
[01:18:50] I don't know how I, when you're, when you boot up this, you know, I'm sharing this because like,
[01:18:57] I had so many people texting me. It's like, you still use the vision pro you use it as a monitor.
[01:19:01] Like how's this ultra wide? So I had a lot of people ask, even that day they were like,
[01:19:04] they, they saw the maybe on Mac rumors or whatever, and they're like, Oh yeah, Justin does this.
[01:19:07] Several thoughts first, like this ultra wide mode. If you have it turned on,
[01:19:14] it's so goddamn big that there's not room unless you literally are in a swivel chair and you're
[01:19:19] kind of just doing this minority report or, or, you know, thing where you spin around or Ron from
[01:19:25] parks and rec. It's so big that it means using vision OS even less. So like they built this whole
[01:19:33] operating system, all of these, you know, here's how you drag and drop windows and here's how you
[01:19:37] resize them. And here's the vision OS version of Apple music. And like all these app, like all of
[01:19:42] this development went into making it a first class computing platform that is second class and that no
[01:19:47] one wants to use. And I'm sure that their analytics data tells them that like of the people who use
[01:19:52] their vision pro more than five minutes a week, they're using them to control their max is a strong
[01:19:58] suspicion that I hold. And I'm sure that designers and developers who work on the vision OS stuff are
[01:20:07] disappointed by this because they did all of this work. And then ultimately all people want is to,
[01:20:11] to, to create sidecar sessions from, from their Mac. And by giving into us sickos like me, uh, who,
[01:20:19] who basically only use the vision OS as a, as a dumb terminal to, to use a Mac without neck strain,
[01:20:24] right? Cause like leaning over a laptop, I can only do a couple hours before my neck pinches.
[01:20:30] Uh, and I just kind of have a tension headache or cranial headache for the next few hours.
[01:20:35] I, by introducing ultra wide and it, which is a very cool feature and does make the Mac virtual
[01:20:45] display very impressive. It's a, an admission or at all, at the very least it is, uh, if the person
[01:20:55] who's using the vision pro primarily as a Mac virtual display, if the screen is just a 4k thing in front of
[01:21:02] view, you can still have other vision OS windows to the left and to the right. And that's typically
[01:21:06] what I would do. I'd put like YouTube to the left or, or Apple music and maybe a notes to the right
[01:21:12] or to do list. Now with the ultra wide, I don't have room for either of those things
[01:21:18] because it's wrapping around my face. Uh, and, and instead of thinking about organizing spatial
[01:21:24] computing all around me, instead I'm thinking, okay, like how do I configure, configure Moom or one
[01:21:29] of these like window management tools to basically segment my screen into like four regions where two
[01:21:37] of those regions are, are effectively out of view most of the time. Uh, additionally, this new ultra
[01:21:44] wide, it comes with, um, like this, this software update for the first time, we'll stream the audio
[01:21:49] from your Mac to the, to the headset, which is what you want. And it's kind of a, it was a bizarre
[01:21:55] omission in the first go round because all these things are airplay targets and stuff like it should
[01:21:59] have just worked. But now I don't even have the need for running YouTube or Apple music on the vision
[01:22:04] OS. I can just run it on the Mac and then play the same goddamn audio through the wonderful audio pods
[01:22:10] that sound really nice and vision vision pro. And so I'm finding like, this is that this is the hallmark
[01:22:17] feature that they launched with vision OS two. You really wonder, is it coincidence? Uh, is it based
[01:22:25] on usage? And they're, they're trying to kind of like test out and see, you know, what are, what are
[01:22:30] the things people use similar to the Apple watch, right? Like they could, they, they had a shotgun approach
[01:22:34] here. It's like 15 different ideas. And it turned out that what people wanted for the Apple watch was
[01:22:38] fitness tracking and notifications by and large and like audio playback, you know, playing podcast
[01:22:44] while you go for a walk or a run or something. Maybe they're still feeling out like, what do people
[01:22:51] want with this particular product? But they clearly like, they know this isn't, this is a dev kit. Like
[01:22:55] they know that where they want to get is AR computing, spatial computing. So to see them
[01:23:00] release a thing that gets them even further from their users using the spatial computing
[01:23:07] has got to feel like a, a bit of a letdown for anyone who, who inside of Apple is really bought
[01:23:14] into this shit. Um, I personally am glad I want to see them move in more directions. I feel like the
[01:23:20] vision, the vision provide the opposite problem of the Apple watch. If you think about it, it couldn't
[01:23:24] do enough. Uh, we'll, we'll talk about gaming on the vision pro later, but it's really, I, I wish
[01:23:35] I want them to go in every direction at full speed, you know, create more content, faster,
[01:23:40] continue to nurse this Mac connection. If anything, maybe like launch first realized max inside of the
[01:23:45] vision pro headset. Right. So you could just travel with just a vision pro like it, wouldn't that be
[01:23:49] fucking great? Uh, I think that's possible. Right. And now we're like, you know, what if the,
[01:23:57] so, so some of the reviews of the iMac with M4 have said, you know, the, the era of the all-in-one
[01:24:05] computer that has like, you know, just a display built into the CPU and whatnot, it's like kind of
[01:24:10] outmoded. No one really uses it that way anymore. Those people just use laptops now. Well, what if
[01:24:16] the next all-in-one is the headset, you know, like if, if, if, if Apple's going to go with this fat
[01:24:22] device form factor, even if it's just transitory or even if like maybe vision pro eight years from now
[01:24:29] means has the computer in the headset and vision is, has the computer in some thing in your pocket.
[01:24:36] Right. And, and it was more like glasses. Maybe the next all-in-one should just be the goddamn thick
[01:24:42] headset. Right. Like that's the thing. If you want to run Mac OS, it's the car versus truck analogy.
[01:24:46] I think that there's something there. Uh,
[01:24:50] using the ultra wide, however, as much as I'm grateful that they did it and that they went that
[01:24:57] far using the ultra wide is a suboptimal experience to say the least, like the, the plumbing works,
[01:25:05] the protocol works, the, the, the display looks right, but zero people thought about like, how
[01:25:14] does Mac OS need to change? If Mac OS wraps around your entire field of view, like no one thought,
[01:25:20] because if you, let's say you hit a, looking at my keyboard command shift and slash or the question mark
[01:25:27] key, that brings up a text entry where you can search the menu bar menu items for like, you know,
[01:25:34] I don't know, duplicate or whatever command you're looking for. I kept doing this yesterday
[01:25:39] and it didn't work. It didn't seem to be doing anything. And then I realized, oh yeah,
[01:25:44] the menu bar is literally 90. The, the menu items are a little apple in the top left. That's 90 degrees
[01:25:52] to the left. I have to crane my neck all the way over there to see that. And then I can pick my menu
[01:25:58] item. And while that was happening, and I'm thinking about that, my wife texted me and I felt a buzz in
[01:26:03] my watch and I was like, oh, there's no text notification. There's no notification set up.
[01:26:06] I thought I had that turned on. And then I remember, oh, now that I'm looking all the way
[01:26:10] 90 degrees to the left, I actually have to look all do 180 degrees, look all the way 90 degrees to the
[01:26:15] right. Cause notification center is just this little strip of, you know, 10, 10 degrees of my field of
[01:26:22] view at the far right side. If you had a website, right. That had an ultra wide display would put
[01:26:30] the UI elements like the sidebar all the way to the left and the, um, maybe like menu items all the way
[01:26:36] to the right. You would have, it would be a suboptimal experience, which is why if you're designing a website,
[01:26:45] you would typically have some kind of max width set up and you would center those elements so that
[01:26:49] if you are on a super wide display, you kind of just get background, uh, you know, colors or something
[01:26:55] at the far extremes. And like the, the important things to click don't require you to travel the mouse,
[01:27:00] you know, three kilometers to get from left to right. Even that just, you know, met having a max
[01:27:09] width set on the menu bar and the notification center would be a massive improvement, uh, in usability,
[01:27:15] at least the doc, if you have that in sent in the dead center, which I guess like a lot of the
[01:27:20] hardcore users keep that pin to the left or to the right. Like if they're using this feature,
[01:27:26] they'd probably be similarly frustrated by the doc. The doc, at least for me is front center.
[01:27:30] And that's usable and spotlighting or raycast or whatever you use as your launcher, like that
[01:27:35] pops up in the middle. That works well. But, but again, like when you're doing setup,
[01:27:40] first time setup for a Mac means like downloading a lot of DMG files, disk image files, installers,
[01:27:46] a lot of opening windows, moving stuff around. And when your window, when your display starts to fill up,
[01:27:52] macOS will just kind of start, um, opening every single new window, like every new disk image that got
[01:27:58] opened all the way to the far left. I had, I had one open, not only to the far left, but it was
[01:28:04] actually partially occluded. Like, so like I had to look all the way to the left, like finding windows
[01:28:09] was so goddamn hard. Okay. And, and the way that you find your windows when they're all lost is you,
[01:28:14] you swipe up on the trackpad to go to mission control and you see like, you know, all of the
[01:28:18] windows kind of fanned out, but mission control similarly would just fan those windows out further
[01:28:24] to the left and right. It was a very bad experience. Um, and of course, you know, no one uses stage
[01:28:31] manager on the Mac, but if you do use stage manager, you will be frustrated to see that the piles of, of,
[01:28:36] of windows are at your far left. Like they're all the way over there. So it might even be that like
[01:28:43] the best experience because so many of these things are anchored to the left would be to just
[01:28:47] drag the, the semi-circle to the far, to your right. And then, and then kind of have the left
[01:28:54] side be your primary space that you work in. But at that point, like just downgrade from ultra wide to
[01:29:03] wide. There's a wide option. That is, if you push it out pretty much viewable all the time,
[01:29:10] by out of the corner of your eye, you'll be able to see stuff, but even that, like then you've pushed
[01:29:14] it out and maybe like, you know, UI elements are too small. So I found myself going back to the original,
[01:29:18] just the, the, the, the basic 4k display in a kind of standard 16 by nine, uh, aspect ratio.
[01:29:26] But now here's, here's where this went from exciting to disappointing to really concerning.
[01:29:36] I spent some time in the wide mode, not even ultra wide. And I, you know, I was an hour for setting
[01:29:44] this fucking Mac up and I was tired and I was hungry. I, uh, I was like, I need to take a break.
[01:29:51] I took the headset off. Uh, I stepped down and I, I set down the headset to plug it in. And as I leaned
[01:29:59] over to plug in the headset, I was like, I feel a little bit woozy. I know I'm not drunk. Cause at
[01:30:03] the time I hadn't had a drink for five or six days. I hadn't had any other fun drugs. So I was like,
[01:30:10] all right. So I'm pretty woo. Ooh. And then I was like a little bit, what's the opposite of sure
[01:30:16] footed, unsure footed. I was unsure footed as I walked, uh, back to the bedroom, I was going to
[01:30:23] change to, to go work out. And I, I, I spent like maybe four minutes just with my head between my legs
[01:30:31] in, in the closet. Cause I couldn't imagine putting on my gym shorts. I was like, man, I,
[01:30:39] I've been using VR since the Oculus DK one, whenever that was probably a decade ago.
[01:30:45] And I'll sometimes get like a little twinge of like, this game isn't fun for me because it is a
[01:30:52] little bit herky jerky motion sick, right? A little bit of that. But when I take the headset off,
[01:30:58] I'm fine. This is the first time I can remember using a headset, having it be fine. Like I wasn't
[01:31:04] feeling great, but I wasn't about to fall over the first time I can imagine. Like I was like legit
[01:31:10] motion sick as if I just got on the teacups ride and spun in circles worse. It didn't get better right
[01:31:18] away. I would, I, when I was in the closet there, I just like, I'd take a breather, deep breaths,
[01:31:23] head between the legs, you know, all this stuff. I changed into the workout gear and then
[01:31:28] at that moment, like I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to fucking throw up. Like I almost vomited.
[01:31:33] You know, I was like, did I catch Becky's sickness? No, she caught it for me. That's not it. It was like
[01:31:39] my, my gag reflex is like iron clad. And so like, it takes a lot for me to throw up.
[01:31:44] I can probably, I've probably done it a dozen times or fewer in my life.
[01:31:51] Uh, and so I didn't do it this day, but like, uh, a weaker throated individual would have absolutely
[01:31:58] blown chunks all over my closet. And please don't, that would be less fun even than picking up after my,
[01:32:05] uh, elderly coffee machine.
[01:32:07] I, I don't know what to make of this. Right. I talked to Becky about it. I don't know if it was like
[01:32:15] the ultra wide view was just too much. I don't know if it's the fact that the, uh, the, the vision
[01:32:21] field of view, like is now even on the non-wide versions, like it wraps around me. Like, I don't
[01:32:26] know if that taking a, uh, I was chatting with Adam Lizagor about this and he suggested that it might be
[01:32:31] the, the projection mapping of a flat thing into a spatial mode. Right. So like that it's a flat
[01:32:36] display, but it's curved. Maybe that was not helping. My worry is it could be the foveated rendering.
[01:32:43] It could be that the way Apple is doing foveated rendering is like, it's like, maybe it's got a
[01:32:48] really, really sharp core of pixels. That's like dead center where you're looking. But what if the
[01:32:54] halo of slightly more blurry pixels is too tight, is too much in your field of view or is causing
[01:33:02] flickering? If that's the case, then you could totally imagine like if you were looking at a
[01:33:06] computer screen and there were sort of like light flickering and color. Um, uh, uh, what do you call
[01:33:15] it? Uh, you know, I talk, I talk so much into this thing every now and then I run out of words and I
[01:33:21] got to go and put another quarter in the meter and then more words come to me. Uh, yeah. So if any
[01:33:27] colors are distorted, that might've been the word. Thank you. Got to feed the meter. Uh, if any colors
[01:33:32] are distorted, right? Like, like, like over the course of hours, maybe that has some sort of
[01:33:36] cumulative effect. And, and my hunch is that's what it is. And that unfortunately, I think that
[01:33:42] the foveated rendering is now just built into the protocol layer. I don't think that's a thing that
[01:33:46] turns on when you switch to the wide and ultra right. I'd love to be wrong and I'll, I'll report
[01:33:50] back, but I texted, uh, the same, the same friend from Apple who, who hooked me up with the, uh, the
[01:33:58] discount. I was like, do you, is there a radar for this? Is there a radar for this new ultra wide thing
[01:34:04] is neat, but it makes me want to vomit rocket my way out of here. Uh, you know, you think of like,
[01:34:10] you know, issue trackers and software, you don't normally have to deal with physical ramifications of
[01:34:15] using it, but boy. So yeah, if you're, if you're prone to motion sickness, uh, I would,
[01:34:22] uh, uh, brace yourself, come, you know, try it for sure, but bring a doggy bag, bring a little
[01:34:28] bucket, you know, uh, be ready to take a shower after just in case. Uh, so those are, uh,
[01:34:39] those are my only follow-up items, only follow-up items. I'm glad, glad, glad to be where I am,
[01:34:47] right? So this MacBook pro is look at the split. It's super fast. The screen is really lovely.
[01:34:52] The speakers are nice. The, uh, the, the, the, it's got a new, um, 12 megapixel center stage camera,
[01:34:59] which I mean, the Apple studio display. One looks like shit. This one looks less like shit,
[01:35:05] but I'm not convinced it's an upgrade over the 10 ADP camera that it replaces. Uh, you know,
[01:35:11] overall build quality looks solid. The space black is really nice. Uh, it's a, you know,
[01:35:17] you know what it is. It's, it's cool. Uh, the ultra wide thing is a bummer. Cause I spent most of
[01:35:25] the summer looking forward to that and I, I'm going to try it again cause I'm stubborn, but
[01:35:29] hopefully, uh, uh, Apple keeps iterating. Uh, speaking of keeping on iterating, uh,
[01:35:36] it's time for the next entry in a recurring segment, which is Aaron tells us a pun.
[01:35:49] All right. I'm sitting down for this one. Uh, I, you know, I mentioned that us picking what the
[01:35:59] version title, the release name for this, uh, episode would be is a little bit of a interactive
[01:36:07] collaboration between, um, you and me. I suppose this segment is similar because we're both hearing
[01:36:14] this pun for the first time simultaneously, asynchronously. Uh, so sort of like a, one of
[01:36:20] those YouTube reaction videos or a talk over a live stream or something where it's like, you know,
[01:36:25] childless men react to, uh, bad puns. Uh, so that's my role. I'm the childless man. And, uh, Aaron's role
[01:36:33] is to provide me a pun. Uh, I'm currently looking at an I message window, which I have dutifully
[01:36:38] scrolled up a few days of, uh, history. And before I read this pun and reveal it to the world,
[01:36:47] I will say that my, uh, lowly rating of his most recent pun, which I don't have in front of me.
[01:36:54] And I've mostly forgotten. It had like a word choice issue that I quibbled a little too hard on,
[01:37:00] I guess. Cause I got a lot of email saying that, uh, you know, I was, uh, it was a better pun than I
[01:37:07] gave it credit for. Aaron actually told me that he got a text saying he got jobbed. I was like,
[01:37:13] yeah, sorry. That's, uh, you know, I'm, I'm not perfect. I'm just doing my best. Uh, the reaction,
[01:37:22] right. Is one part, the thing being reacted to and one part, the reactor, right? So I had headspace
[01:37:30] where my brain's at. That's all part of it. I gave him a bunch of different prompts. So let's see what
[01:37:36] he did. I once read a really great think piece on the business of recovering lost laptops.
[01:37:43] I found the article to be Mac book profound.
[01:37:47] Hmm.
[01:37:54] I'm going to steal myself.
[01:37:59] I'm going to take a minute and I'm going to read that again.
[01:38:07] Oh, like wincing. I once, God damn it. Aaron. I once read, I once read a really great think piece
[01:38:20] on the business of recovering lost laptops. I found the article, the article. All right. I got a,
[01:38:28] I'm breaking, right? Shit. It's not that I think it's funny. It's, I think it's just so bad.
[01:38:35] I once read a really great think piece on the business of recovering lost laptops. I found the
[01:38:40] article to be Mac book profound. God damn it. Uh, it's like, it's, it's the kind of laughter that
[01:38:52] brings him joy and not, not the laugher. It's, uh, by laughing at that in that way, I'm letting him win.
[01:39:04] God damn it. All right. That's, uh, let's struggle to figure out how to copy paste this text.
[01:39:12] Oh, Jesus Christ. And see where this ranks. I don't know. How do you, I don't know how you feel
[01:39:20] about this one. I don't love it. I'm going to be honest. It's, it's so simple in that the look,
[01:39:31] the best thing about this pun is that the setup is, even though it's concise, it's extravagant,
[01:39:38] it portends like, Oh, where is he going to go with this? It's going to be something interesting.
[01:39:42] And so the, the, this is a class of pun where it's, uh, sort of like if you have a song and it
[01:39:52] starts at a really high pitch and the singer successfully descends dramatically and quickly
[01:39:57] down to a much lower pitch, that is a sign of proficiency, right? His ability to set my
[01:40:07] expectations as I'm reading this pun pretty high. I once read, I once read a really great think piece
[01:40:12] on the business of recovering lost laptops. Okay. Yeah. There's a, there's a few different little
[01:40:16] threads you can pull there. I could see something. Maybe he'll tie it as something,
[01:40:20] you know, uh, uh, contemporaneous from the news, but then the sudden descent down the mountain of,
[01:40:32] I found the article to be MacBook profound, where the whole joke is simply that the word profound
[01:40:41] starts with pro and that pro is in the MacBook pro name. Like that's the whole word play. It's just
[01:40:49] that little nugget. It's not nothing, right? But it's the setup sets your expectations higher than the
[01:40:59] payoff. And the payoff is like, is that it? Um, so on a level, like as a, like, is this humorous?
[01:41:07] It is, it is very poor, but how humorous something is, isn't, doesn't determine how good a pun is,
[01:41:13] right? So like if, if Aaron's goal, when he says, he says that his, his goal, when he, he tells puns
[01:41:22] is to either make people angry or make people eye roll, right? This,
[01:41:28] this kind of makes me angry and eye roll. That's an angry role. And for that reason,
[01:41:37] cause I know he is accomplishing his aim. I think this is a highly rated one. I hate it. I'm mad.
[01:41:45] I'm mad and bemused.
[01:41:52] I'm inclined. I'm looking up the list here.
[01:41:56] This reminds me of our seventh ranked pun back from episode 17 says I'm in Singapore this week
[01:42:05] for red dot Ruby conf. I have learned that many people here either love the king of fruit or they're
[01:42:10] just enduring it. This is, this is of a piece with that one. Uh, six ranked going camping with my family
[01:42:23] this week. It's intense. That one is that one. It nails it. Like it's a set. Both of those follow
[01:42:31] the same kind of pattern of statement followed by disappointing pun, uh, or overly simplistic
[01:42:37] wordplay. Uh, I think, Oh, the durian one is too deep a cut. Cause a lot of people don't know what
[01:42:48] a durian is. I knew what a durian was and I knew that they're stinky. Uh, but I didn't know it was
[01:42:53] called the king of fruit. Uh, additionally, it's less of an eye roll and more of a, like, uh, huh? Yes.
[01:43:01] Hmm. So I think this is our new number seven pun. I'm going to slam it between those two.
[01:43:06] Uh, boy. Yeah. I'll clean that up later. That's well, here we are. Let's, uh,
[01:43:15] cleanse the palate with some news.
[01:43:19] I wrote about retirement in my newsletter. You can check it out at justin.searles.co
[01:43:30] slash newsletter, uh, discussed, you know, my career to date transitions. I'm going through.
[01:43:38] I used the R word, uh, to describe, uh, what I did, uh, at the end of last year, read it. It's
[01:43:47] good. It's one of my better ones. So people say I've gotten a lot of responses to it. All positive,
[01:43:54] which is always concerning might mean I didn't go hard enough.
[01:43:58] one person wrote in to say that it pushed him over the edge, them over the edge. I guess I don't know
[01:44:03] them. It pushed them over the edge to call it quits and quit while they're ahead and stop working.
[01:44:11] Uh, so, so if you see, um, a downtick in the, uh, labor force participation numbers this quarter,
[01:44:19] uh, I am now partly to blame, which I love to see. Hopefully that person has, uh, uh,
[01:44:26] the means to, to, to, to, to follow through. And I'm not just, you know, that's whenever I do
[01:44:33] anything and it has like a real world impact on somebody else, I'm like, Oh no, I just wanted
[01:44:39] attention. I just wanted your validation. I didn't, I didn't mean to break all this shit. I didn't mean
[01:44:43] to, uh, uh, but honestly, the, the, at the same time, being able to have an impact on somebody is,
[01:44:53] uh, it's, it's something that I've never really allowed myself to think for more than five minutes,
[01:45:02] because if I did, then that would become a new hypervisory process that rolled through my brain
[01:45:07] all the time. And I'd be worried. I'd be thinking right now, I was like, well, if I say that, and then
[01:45:13] somebody, you know, ends up cheating on his wife because of it, then I'm that's, I'm the reason those
[01:45:18] kids to grow up without a dad, you know, like I don't, I shouldn't be thinking that way. Cause then
[01:45:24] I would never say anything. And I, it's really hard to be a podcaster if you don't say anything.
[01:45:28] So I gotta, I gotta keep talking. If you're not talking, you're dying. That's what sharks do.
[01:45:34] Reason I mentioned the retirement newsletter is Jim Carrey is 62 and he's coming out of retirement
[01:45:43] after Sonic, the second Sonic, the hedgehog movie, where he plays Dr. Eggman,
[01:45:48] which is what Sega of America was forced to rename Dr. Robotnik to, because that's what he was named
[01:45:55] in Japan. Sort of similar how princess toadstool became princess peach all of a sudden with the
[01:46:01] launch of Nintendo 64. Dr. Robotnik is a cool ass motherfucking name. And Dr. Eggman is a stupid,
[01:46:07] goddamn stupid, stupid piece of shit name, garbage name. If you're an egg person, I apologize,
[01:46:14] but like, you know, get a better surname at least like, so yeah, Jim Carrey plays Dr. Robotnik in the
[01:46:21] Sonic, the hedgehog films. And after the second one, he declared his retirement. He said, I'm all done.
[01:46:25] You'd have to have this amazing script to, to, to lure me back. And so then he got lured back for
[01:46:34] Sonic, the hedgehog three. And, uh, this, this raised questions like, aren't you retired? And he,
[01:46:41] he said, yeah. And quote, you know, I bought a lot of stuff and I need the money, frankly.
[01:46:50] So Jim Carrey, Ace Ventura, the cable guy, the mask, the anti-vaxxer who is married to Jenny
[01:46:58] McCarthy, who now I don't know where he stands on vaccine because he's no longer married to Jen,
[01:47:04] Jen, Jen, Jen. I just said the name McCarthy.
[01:47:11] Uh, I have not seen the Sonic the hedgehog films. I hear that they are fine. If you're into that sort
[01:47:18] of thing, I don't know. Like I've, I've, I've bought a lot of Sonic the hedgehog games and I get bored
[01:47:24] after five minutes. I have a feeling this movie would work out the same way. So he's a, he, that Jim
[01:47:32] Carey, yes, man. Like he made so much goddamn money in the nineties that if he had just put it all in a
[01:47:43] target retirement account at, at Vanguard would probably be a billion fucking dollars by now.
[01:47:49] He is 62 and he can't retire. Insufficient savings relative to his burn rate. Now, I don't know what
[01:48:00] are you spending money on? Like if he bought himself a bunker to survive the next four years
[01:48:04] that was fully furnished and had all the stabilized water and, and a staff to pamper his ass, then Hey,
[01:48:11] sure. That's a trade-off. That makes sense. But I suspect it's like, he's actually not very happy
[01:48:18] because most people aren't very happy. And when you spend your, like a shit ton of money and it forces
[01:48:24] you to come out of retirement, it means something went wrong, right? It's not according to plan. And if
[01:48:30] you're 62 and you still don't have a goddamn plan for your life yet that you're executing on
[01:48:34] successfully, and you've all the privilege in the world of being Jim goddamn carry, like I lost some
[01:48:41] respect for this man who I had never thought about whether I respected him or not, but it's like,
[01:48:46] get together, dude. Like you're an old fucking man at this point. You're playing a two bit shitty
[01:48:54] video game villain. Who's got no personality and no character. And yeah, you're really good at
[01:48:59] being the Grinch and having the big, you know, exaggerated faces and stuff. And like,
[01:49:03] if you were smart at all, you would have just cashed the fuck out and done something with your life that
[01:49:10] mattered. Like you had a couple of Truman show, great movie, touching point, you know, go out on top
[01:49:16] instead, like a general, the, the last generation who will remember Jim Carrey, right? Will be the
[01:49:26] poor children who grew up watching the Sonic, the hedgehog movies over and over again on Paramount
[01:49:32] plus or whatever. Those are going to be the, that's your legacy. Now is like, that's who you are,
[01:49:38] who you will be remembered as. Uh, the only people who are going to remember the Truman show are the
[01:49:43] ones who are like, you know, doing these avant-garde YouTubes of YouTube channels of like old movie
[01:49:48] critique. So you're fucking loser. Like that's before you get to the anti-vax and like all that,
[01:49:56] that, that, uh, that other shit, however you feel about that. And I feel like vaccinations are good,
[01:49:59] actually. Uh, what a, what a, what a chuckle fuck loser. Sorry, Jim Carrey, get it together,
[01:50:07] read my newsletter, justin.searles.co slash newsletter. Have a plan for your fucking life,
[01:50:14] you piece of shit. I don't know. Sorry for piling on Jim Carrey there, but I'll honestly,
[01:50:19] if you go back and watch his movies, none of them were actually that good.
[01:50:23] he's a, turned out he was a one trick pony and we all just saw the one trick the like
[01:50:27] first couple of times. It was like, Hey, you know, like Chris Farley was too, right? Another
[01:50:32] great nineties comedian, but he could, Chris Farley died. And so we didn't get to see him,
[01:50:36] you know, fall apart like this in his sixties. I'm sure, you know, so we got to see him fall
[01:50:42] apart in his thirties. Sorry, too soon. Uh, next coming in hot, uh, this, uh, Reddit post titled,
[01:50:54] I bought my eight year old a switch and didn't realize how much games cost. Am I screwed?
[01:51:00] And this is really sad. This is a parent who, you know, doesn't have a lot of money. Uh, and
[01:51:10] their kid wanted a Nintendo switch, but, but they, you know, uh, okay. So, uh, she says,
[01:51:19] I am a 30 year old single mother and she could afford a switch. She saw it on discount. Um,
[01:51:26] and so she bought it and then she gave it to the kid and then she realized that the games cost a lot
[01:51:33] of money, right? Like Nintendo games, uh, Nintendo is very good at protecting its value. It doesn't,
[01:51:38] um, what do you say? It doesn't run discounts very frequently. Uh, it keeps the prices of their games,
[01:51:47] uh, you know, relatively like, you know, whatever MSRP is, that's where you're probably going to find
[01:51:52] the price of that game three, four or five years later. Only recently, some of the retro games
[01:51:57] around that Nintendo switch online service. Uh, but that took 20, 25 years. And the reason that they
[01:52:03] do that is that, that the rest of the industry, whether you're looking at the steam sales or,
[01:52:10] or the other digital marketplaces, like they're all in a race to the bottom or subscription services,
[01:52:14] right? Like it has never been, you can play so many fucking games for so cheap triple A games.
[01:52:21] Like, like, like if you just like watch for deals and it trains everyone, um, in non Nintendo ecosystems
[01:52:27] to never pay full price for a game. Like you are a absolute fucking sucker. If you pay 60,
[01:52:33] $70 for a new game, because if you just wait like 10 days, you could find a CD key for way cheaper or,
[01:52:40] or some other discount or it'll, it'll show up on one of the premium subscription offerings.
[01:52:44] Like I didn't, I paid like a grand total of $35 or whatever to pay, to play, um, star Wars outlaws,
[01:52:50] which I loved, but like it would have been $70 to buy it. Instead. I just subscribed to Ubisoft's
[01:52:57] subscription service and then unsubscribed as soon as I was done with the game.
[01:53:03] Additionally, and that's like, that's like games that cost a lot to make, right? Additionally,
[01:53:08] like if you are just a normal 30 year old operating in this world where, you know, you've had smartphones
[01:53:16] since you were maybe middle school, early high school have been ubiquitous. You know, games are free.
[01:53:25] Games are things you download on your phone. You watch ads, right? Where you pay for in-app purchases
[01:53:30] sometimes. So I'm sharing the link to this post to read, um, to see how people react, to see, you know,
[01:53:40] it's to me, it, it made it, it added nuance to this new sort of, um, the, the world we live in,
[01:53:52] right. Where, what does it mean to come of age thinking that games should be really, really
[01:53:57] cheaper free and finding yourself in exactly this situation being like, Oh man, like the, like I
[01:54:03] wanted to, I wanted to treat my kid to a Nintendo switch. So you'd have a dedicated gaming platform,
[01:54:08] good, high quality games, good for children, but then realize like you can't afford any of them.
[01:54:14] Right. And because you didn't budget for games to be, to, to be either not free or, or more than a few
[01:54:23] dollars. Never occurred to me because I was being older, right? 10, just 10 years older than this
[01:54:30] person. Like I remember paying $50 of all of my allowance money for a long time to get Dr. Mario on
[01:54:38] the NES at, at, uh, uh, uh, Toys R Us. And if you inflation adjust that, whatever it was, it might
[01:54:46] have been more, it might've been $60. If you inflation adjust that upward, you know, now I'm
[01:54:50] like Jim Carrey. I probably should have just bought a fucking mutual fund because it's, uh,
[01:54:55] I will leave it there. I think it's just interesting to think about like, Oh man, like this is the next
[01:55:04] generation of parents that Nintendo has to sell to don't know the game should cost money.
[01:55:08] Right. When we talk about problems facing the gaming industry of like costs a lot to build
[01:55:14] good ones. Uh, if you have a good one and it had a high production cost, the best way to
[01:55:21] monetize it is through shitty, you know, predatory, you know, in-app purchases and, and kind of
[01:55:31] like, you know, unlimited up upside, you know, transactions that prey on people's psychology
[01:55:39] is the best way to make money on a game is like make a cheap game. That's like a low quality,
[01:55:44] but is highly addictive is the best way to get a good profit. Nintendo is doing the thing where
[01:55:50] they're actually investing in the games and they're charging a high price and they're, they're eking out
[01:55:54] a profit that way. And while it is very laudable that they're protecting their sort of sense of value
[01:55:59] here, we are looking at like, how many of these parents are just like only willing to put up with
[01:56:04] this to buy their kids, these games, because they came up of the age where, where games in where I
[01:56:09] paid Dr. Mario, like $170 in inflation adjusted dollars to buy Dr. Mario when I was five or six,
[01:56:18] uh, which is wild to think about. So this is this new world that we're in where media doesn't cost
[01:56:25] anything or information is truly free. Uh, which means like all of it sucks. Uh, it's real neat,
[01:56:33] real neat. Uh, another, another sign of the times, uh, Ars Technica had an article up, uh, about a teen
[01:56:41] who created his own meme coin. So he did a, his own personal pump and dump scheme, just like,
[01:56:48] like on some service where you can make coins. And he did a live stream and he's like, buy this coin.
[01:56:53] And then suckers did. And then he did look, if I was like 15 and I made a meme coin and I did a stream
[01:56:59] and I saw people buying it, I'd be like, sweet. And then I would, I would, I would sell. And then I
[01:57:05] would log off. And he did that. And he earned $50,000. Uh, and then he got doxxed by people who
[01:57:12] bought his meme coin. And so his parents were confused and concerned and impressed. And then like their phone
[01:57:17] starts ringing and now like the death, death threats start coming. And the way crypto works
[01:57:23] is you can't just like refund the angry people, right? Like something tells me that the recent
[01:57:30] election result is only going to increase the amount of crypto shenanigans that we see and,
[01:57:35] and schemes over the next few years. And that's, you know, the Hawk to a girl just did a meme coin
[01:57:45] pump and dump. Everyone's pumping. Everyone's dumping. No, one's, no, one's asking me what I
[01:57:52] want. You know, Searle's coin would suck. You know, the funny thing about it is Dogecoin was
[01:57:59] meant to be an inflationary satirical response to Bitcoin. And then Elon's embrace of it makes it,
[01:58:06] you know, yet another one of these hyper volatile securities and that it had its own peaks and
[01:58:14] values before he got into this shit. But maybe we are due for a truly satirical
[01:58:21] cryptocurrency. If you want to build one with me, you let me know, but we got to come up with a funny
[01:58:27] name. Uh, ours also had a, another story startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids
[01:58:38] without refunds. Um, this it's a support robot for kids, not kids without refunds. That would be a
[01:58:43] funny charity kids without refunds. It's like kids who have toys that like don't quite work or, or, you
[01:58:50] know, clothes in the wrong size. And, and, you know, we're, we donate money because the store
[01:58:56] wouldn't refund them or they lost their receipt. No, this is, um, a startup was charging $800 for
[01:59:03] these emotional support robots that would, you know, uh, have various interactive experiences with
[01:59:09] children, uh, you know, maybe to coax them into socialization or, or, or comfort them after trauma
[01:59:14] or whatever the cause and the startup, you know, like a lot of startups, they had a funding round
[01:59:19] collapse at the last minute where a key investor pulled out. You don't want to pull out of your
[01:59:27] pump and dump scheme. You got to stay in there. How do we use these words with a straight face?
[01:59:33] So the investor pulls out and then they're like, you know, they send one of those sappy emails being
[01:59:39] like, just so you know, your, your, your robot will still be a, like a plush animal, but it's going to do
[01:59:45] no other things anymore. So you, you imagine you buy like a little, like, I don't know, a stuffed
[01:59:51] dinosaur for your kid. He develops, uh, a emotionally healthy relationship with this thing. It helped,
[01:59:59] it helps him process grief, you know, and it's, uh, he loves it and it's got a name and it's, it's like a,
[02:00:06] you know, my brother got a Furby for Christmas one year when he was a Furby appropriate age. I hope
[02:00:12] that's safe to say. And I remember the Furby after about three days was annoying enough that he just
[02:00:18] like lived in a drawer and woke up sometimes and freaked us all out in the middle of the night,
[02:00:22] which is funny. Cause they looked like the, um, the little animals from, from gremlins,
[02:00:30] you know, before they get wet. But then when they wake up in the middle of the night, you're like,
[02:00:33] Oh no, who fed it? Uh, how sad, right now that, so we've come to this point in technology where like
[02:00:44] effectively a, a smarter Furby is able to actually trick kids into loving it as if it's a pet.
[02:00:51] And then some faceless startup just runs out of money and they turn it off and all these kids are
[02:00:56] heartbroken. I mean, in a way the kid gets two life lessons, but, but that's a, that's a pretty
[02:01:03] painful rug pull. So yeah, think about that. If I was a ever at a startup or at a company that
[02:01:12] who, whose profitability depended on a live service, like piece of hardware for, for, for the,
[02:01:20] the mental wellbeing of children. I, even if I, if I had to do this defiantly and subversively,
[02:01:28] I would code into it some sort of kill switch that like, if the servers went off, it would keep
[02:01:33] working. Right. And yes, maybe that would make it easier to hack or to pirate these like, you know,
[02:01:38] emotional support robots, but like that is pretty fucked. I'm just, that's people.
[02:01:50] Speaking of people, uh, Ev Williams, uh, co-founder at Twitter, then later the founder of medium,
[02:01:58] he's exited medium, uh, at this point, he's, uh, a cool announcement post posted on medium about a
[02:02:08] social media app or so nice to say a social network that, that he has launched. Uh, he's like an advisory
[02:02:16] role and he, he, he, I surely helped fund it. It's called Mosey M O Z I dot app. And this social
[02:02:25] network, when you first look at it, it, it, it reminds you of all of like peach and these other
[02:02:33] ones in like 2010, 2011, 2012, before Apple locked down the contacts API behind a, behind a user prompt,
[02:02:39] a privacy prompt, it, it is very simple.
[02:02:47] It is reasonable to look at this cynically or think that they're just harvesting our data,
[02:02:53] but the message behind it in this essay that I'll share is so on point. It is,
[02:03:01] it is basically for the first time making a clear delineation between what is a social network and what
[02:03:08] is social media. And if you think of a social network as something that actually helps you
[02:03:13] keep track of the people you actually know in real life, you know, where they're located,
[02:03:18] you know, their address, you know, how to get ahold of them. You know, it's when their birthday,
[02:03:21] basically Facebook 1.5, right? Pre newsfeed Facebook. And when the newsfeed hit and then
[02:03:32] everything like in 2014, Twitter goes to an algorithmic timeline, Instagram goes from being a
[02:03:37] chronological feed of just your friend's photos. And again, to an algorithmic timeline that's,
[02:03:41] and now is increasingly pushing in other people's stuff or even artificial stuff into the feed.
[02:03:46] That's when they became social media replacing and really, you know, supplanting traditional media.
[02:03:54] And we can, we, we spend a lot of time talking about the media landscape and whether that's good
[02:03:59] or bad and how corrosive it's been for society and so forth. We talk less about what was lost from
[02:04:06] just having a glorified address book that was on a network and, uh, that was all synced, right?
[02:04:12] So we could know, cause even now, you know, you go to Facebook and you don't know if like friends
[02:04:16] deleted their account or if it's up to date because no one updates their Facebook shit anymore.
[02:04:20] We don't really have a place to go and look for even just how to contact people that mean something
[02:04:27] to us in our lives. And of course, starting a new social network now that looks at your contacts
[02:04:31] is not going to overnight restore this problem. But the, the, the main function of the app,
[02:04:38] other than just have a place to log all your friends and one, you know, kind of centralized place,
[02:04:43] which is maybe not of zero value, but there's a million ways to do that at this point.
[02:04:49] It is to state where you are located and then to, when you're going to be located anywhere else,
[02:04:55] the only other activity really that you can do is you plan a trip. You say, oh, I'm in Japan from
[02:04:59] here and here. I'm in LA from here to here. I'm in Chicago on these days, or maybe I'm connecting this
[02:05:05] day and I've got a full day here. Uh, you enter those plans in and then any friends of yours that either
[02:05:12] live in that city or happen to also have a plan that has them in that city will be notified.
[02:05:19] You'll be, oh, so, and so is also connecting in LA this week, like, oh, and, or this day. And you,
[02:05:24] maybe you could see them in the terminal, like these, uh, the opportunity for serendipitous run-ins with
[02:05:31] people that, you know, now, Hey, you might be from a small town and everyone, you know, is from that small
[02:05:36] town. Right. And if that's the case, this app is going to make no fucking sense. But if you're like me,
[02:05:41] and like a lot of my friends are people that I met while traveling, uh, who, who do move around a bit,
[02:05:48] or if you're like me and you live in goddamn Orlando where 75 million people come every year on vacation,
[02:05:53] uh, they come because they don't pull out of their pump and dump scheme
[02:05:59] or maybe they do. And that's what, how they get the money. Oh, God damn it. The
[02:06:10] Aaron's pun just sent me on a path and I'm not in a good place right now. Uh,
[02:06:15] because people come to Orlando, uh, and me having a login to this account, right? Where people can,
[02:06:25] once I share my contacts, anyone else who joins and they ingest their contacts will see me and they'll,
[02:06:31] will be connected. If they've got notifications turned on and they land at MCO, they'll get a push
[02:06:36] notification right after they get there, you know, you know, the phone comes back online or
[02:06:41] whatever. They'll be like, Oh, Justin's here. Cause I've had so many friends come and go from this
[02:06:46] city since I moved here and forget that I was here or forget to contact me or claim to forget.
[02:06:51] Well, now they get an additional little tickle to say, Hey, go, go hang out with Justin. He'll buy
[02:06:56] you a coffee. Uh, so yeah, anyway, I installed it. I'll link to it. I think it's a good essay. I think
[02:07:02] it's important for us to think about what in this sort of, whether you call it federated
[02:07:07] fediverse or whether you just think about it as sort of like the, the sudden revolutionary
[02:07:14] aspect of creating boring ass web apps that don't try to be network scale media, uh,
[02:07:23] it, it, it, it opens the mind to what could a social network that refuses to be social media,
[02:07:32] what could it be? Right. Cause we look back on a lot of these things like four square and swarm
[02:07:37] as failures because they did get swamped by a naive populace that, uh, kind of gladly gobbled up the,
[02:07:45] the skinner boxes of social media apps and didn't leave any room for, for a social network app that
[02:07:53] was truly social. So Mosey and this, this essay, they exist in a point in time. And that point in time
[02:08:01] that it's like a month after this particular electoral result in the U S probably was very
[02:08:06] good timing for them to launch. So hopefully some people try it out. Hopefully you, you download it,
[02:08:11] prepare to be underwhelmed. I mean, it doesn't do very much, but that's also kind of the point.
[02:08:14] I told you I'd, I'd be talking about vision pro and video gaming. Uh, so video games chronicle,
[02:08:23] uh, I think they might've been the first with the news that the vision pro is getting
[02:08:30] PlayStation VR to controller support. No, it was Mark Gurman. I think, uh, you know what,
[02:08:36] maybe I should click the links and cite things properly. Yep. It was Bloomberg. So yeah,
[02:08:42] Gurman came up with this report. If you haven't heard of the PlayStation VR too, it's a followup to
[02:08:48] the place in VR, uh, except you need to have a PS five, which costs $600 and, uh, it doesn't play
[02:08:53] any of the PS VR games from the PS four. It can't play them. Uh, Sony really did put their back behind
[02:08:59] this, this product. It, it, it is a high performance, really cool headset, lots of
[02:09:04] advanced features like the eye tracking, like foveated rendering, like we talked about earlier,
[02:09:07] uh, HDR screens, like really beautiful, like OLED, uh, uh, displays. Uh, and, uh, then they,
[02:09:15] they built two games and then no one else built games because the VR gaming market is sort of, uh,
[02:09:22] metas right now. Like meta has bought a lot of VR gaming studios and they're paying big dollars still to
[02:09:28] get exclusives like the new Batman Arkham game. Uh, and so there's just like it, even before this,
[02:09:35] the PlayStation VR to launched, you could tell Sony knew it was going to fail.
[02:09:38] And so they didn't really put a lot behind the marketing for it. It had like a big day on the
[02:09:44] internet when the reviews went out and then it was mostly forgotten. And so there are a lot of
[02:09:50] PlayStation VR two units just sitting around in warehouses and Apple, I think has gotten the memo
[02:09:57] that when they initially announced the, the division pro and notably did not use the name VR,
[02:10:04] the word virtual reality anywhere in their presentation. And I don't think that they have yet.
[02:10:10] Uh, they wanted it to not look like a VR headset. They wanted it to look like not a gaming device.
[02:10:15] The only reference to gaming was playing flat Apple arcade games with a, you know, like a,
[02:10:22] like a PlayStation controller, like a traditional controller while strapped on to the headset, you know?
[02:10:33] It is limiting because even now that there are games that are made for the vision pro like fruit ninja
[02:10:39] or whatever, or some knockoff version of, uh, uh, blade dual blade, what is the beat saber?
[02:10:49] Uh, you know, hand tracking is not sufficient. It's, it's insufficiently accurate and consistent.
[02:10:57] And some games, you know, like you play like a table tennis kind of game.
[02:11:01] Uh, if you're not holding something in your hand or something that like a thing that vibrates or
[02:11:07] provide some kind of tactile feedback, like you're not getting as good of an experience at a certain
[02:11:11] point, you're just waving your arms around. And, uh, that was, you know, it's not, that's not a
[02:11:19] premium gaming experience, but Apple didn't want to pre position the platform that way. And they probably
[02:11:25] still don't want too much of such an association to develop. Like as much as I would love for them to
[02:11:31] add support for the steam OS, you know, like, like a steam link, right. Uh, or some way to like cast the
[02:11:40] VR from the computer. They're probably not going to do that. Cause they, they have nothing to gain by that.
[02:11:46] So it's interesting, but not surprising that this, uh, these two situations would coalesce where PlayStation
[02:11:56] has a whole bunch of these VR two units just sitting around in boxes and literally in the box are two
[02:12:01] really nice controllers that are full blown. You know, you take these two controllers and aggregate,
[02:12:08] like they can do everything that a normal gaming controller can do, but they are high resolution.
[02:12:14] like, uh, I say resolution in the sense of like very accurate, uh, uh, uh, easy to track devices.
[02:12:21] And Apple and Sony are apparently going to put their two unfortunate situations together to try to
[02:12:28] make some kind of headway, uh, by, by the vision pro supporting the VR two controllers and then selling
[02:12:35] those VR VR two controllers, which I imagine will be literally shucked out of these boxes and these
[02:12:40] warehouses and then repackaged for sale as a standalone skews in the Apple retail channel.
[02:12:46] Uh, people have had reactions to this. I mean, one of them is like, you know, the operating system
[02:12:55] level support was rumored from the get go that like they, they'd been playing with some sort of wand
[02:13:00] device. So like, you know, a thing that you would hold in your hand or a thimble that would, that would
[02:13:04] provide for, for, for pinpoint accuracy, cursor, like tracking in the vision pro. Uh, I think frankly,
[02:13:11] like I would still really like that just while I'm using a computer rather than forcing me to have
[02:13:17] a mouse or a trackpad next to me, if I could just point and use like a finger gun sort of thing, but
[02:13:21] like a highly accurate one, that'd be interesting, especially if I could still like the thimble thing
[02:13:24] in particular, like if I could still type with that thimble on, that'd be interesting, but I'm not
[02:13:30] concerned. Like I think the OS probably could support this with minimal effort.
[02:13:33] You get into the sick, so much of what makes the vision pro disappointing is the exact same stuff
[02:13:42] that made the Apple TV disappointing because the Apple TV waited for a long time before it had any
[02:13:47] sort of controller support. It finally got controller support. Uh, you could theoretically install games
[02:13:53] to it, but now you have such a tiny user base. Um, there might be a lot of Apple TVs out there,
[02:13:59] but there's a tiny user base of people who know how to install or will ever install an app other
[02:14:03] than whatever their primary streaming services are. Uh, you're already starting with a small group of
[02:14:10] people and now an even smaller group of even more hardcore people who would also have figured out how
[02:14:14] to pair a proprietary, you know, controller to your Apple TV is even smaller still. And Apple of course
[02:14:21] was requiring everyone to not require the use of a controller. So you had to, the games had to work with a
[02:14:28] remote. This strikes me as something that's probably going to be very reminiscent of that where, yeah,
[02:14:33] it technically is supported. Uh, you will, you know, be able to buy these controllers, but probably
[02:14:40] no games, approximately none of them will like actually support it properly. Now,
[02:14:45] if Apple wanted to make this headset more attractive to hardcore gamers or to any audience,
[02:14:53] they would throw money at independent developers to make compelling software for it.
[02:14:57] And games are very compelling software because you can't have a VR like gaming experience elsewhere.
[02:15:02] Now the M two is a, is a good processor. If they updated it to an M four or an M five,
[02:15:10] you know, down the road and otherwise kept mostly the same hardware people were,
[02:15:14] there was a report about that recently. Like, well, what would you, what would that really
[02:15:17] afford you as a user, you know, with the current software stack? The answer is not much, but
[02:15:22] you know, uh, let's say they do, um, a deal with CD project red and they bring cyberpunk in VR,
[02:15:31] right? Exclusive to Apple vision pro. Now we're talking, right? Cause the Apple vision pro as a
[02:15:36] standalone unit has just enough horsepower. If it had an M five in it or an M four to maybe possibly run that,
[02:15:44] or, uh, you know, uh, they're always willing to do a deal. Uh, uh,
[02:15:49] hello games could do no man's sky port for vision pro. Now, no man's sky is already available in VR on
[02:15:56] PC and on Sony PlayStation, but you know, it's, the game is sort of like a 3d outer space operating system,
[02:16:04] having 4k displays and, and having it all happen locally, it would be pretty sweet.
[02:16:10] Like if I could play no man's sky somehow from the airport or from a hotel, yeah, that would be like
[02:16:15] the only game I need to get, to get through a three day trip. But here I am dreaming and that's
[02:16:23] all it is is a dream. And I refuse to get my hopes up because, uh, when it comes to gaming,
[02:16:29] Apple is not to be trusted. Speaking of video games and, uh, the current media landscape, uh,
[02:16:36] there are fewer and fewer actual capital J journalists reporting on the video game industry.
[02:16:43] So even though the gaming industry is now worth more money than, than has ever been, there are
[02:16:48] probably fewer journalists doing actual muck raking than there have ever been. Uh, and you know, like
[02:16:55] games journalism has always been sort of a joke because the, your source is also the people who are
[02:17:01] using you to try to promote their wares. Uh, so, you know, you'd be a natural conflict of interest.
[02:17:08] Even if you try to keep the reviews, people separate from the news, people separate from the previews,
[02:17:13] people are the people who kind of go to the pressers and, and, and, uh, more or less just parrot,
[02:17:18] whatever the PR people say. So, I mean, it's always been complicated. Uh, but the current, you know,
[02:17:25] situation of how hard it is to turn attention into dollars means that, you know, influencers have
[02:17:34] sort of taken over the, the games journalism landscape. And if you have somebody whose opinion
[02:17:40] you really like, and they, they talk about the games you care about, then that's going to capture
[02:17:45] your attention. Uh, and the platforms will reward that person with pennies on the dollar
[02:17:50] as they capture most of the, uh, you know, the revenue from that. It just doesn't leave a lot
[02:17:56] of room for somebody who makes a salary and has benefits, uh, at a proper corporation, uh,
[02:18:02] or, or the various support that you would need to like, you know, be a real journalistic out outlet.
[02:18:09] And the same exact thing we're seeing and the tech press and the, and, you know, political press and
[02:18:14] newspapers video games chronicle that I'd mentioned earlier seems to be one of the last, um,
[02:18:24] yeah, their, their, their news seems good and they actually report things. Uh, so, uh,
[02:18:31] I'll link to them for their, their summary post of the, uh, 2024 game awards. Uh, the video game awards
[02:18:41] started on like maybe spike TV, like early two thousands. And then this fellow, Jeff Keighley
[02:18:49] was always kind of around and part of it. And it was like a big production with, you know, scantily
[02:18:54] clad women and, and Snoop dog. And it was, it was trying to figure out who was this for, uh, because
[02:19:02] video games are nerdy and, and you know, you had shitty television executives trying to sex it up.
[02:19:10] At some point, Jeff Keighley, like rested control of the, the name, uh, and just started doing his
[02:19:20] own things. He's got the summer games for us and then the game awards. And when E3, if you know about
[02:19:25] about the E3 show trade show, fell apart, uh, he stepped up in the kind of post COVID era,
[02:19:33] especially. And now, now Keighley and his, his events team basically, uh, provide the two biggest,
[02:19:40] at least in America, the two biggest, uh, events per year for, uh, video game publishers to show off
[02:19:49] their, their games. Uh, most game publishers, like the big ones, like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo,
[02:19:57] they prefer to directly just do their own events, do their own videos, uh, online without some
[02:20:05] intermediary, but for the third party publishers and for smaller publishers, they just want to get
[02:20:11] the word out any which way. And so they'll do exclusive game reveals and trailers at these two
[02:20:17] events, summer game fest and the game awards. So weirdly the game awards have become about
[02:20:23] everything other than the games we all just played and which one was the best.
[02:20:27] Like there are similar to how it spike TV. It was like about, you know, getting a random
[02:20:33] B tier celebrities on stage and tits and ass and that sort of thing. Like wasn't really about, you know,
[02:20:39] uh, the, the, the, uh, critical success of different video games and so forth.
[02:20:44] Uh, now the game awards is actually mostly about trailers for games that are coming out next year
[02:20:49] and beyond and much less about reflecting on the year that was, uh, although so many game studios have
[02:20:57] been closing lately that I kind of wish that they would do a, uh, an in memoriam section like you have
[02:21:02] at the beginning of the Oscars where you play some sad Sarah McLachlan when music and you say,
[02:21:07] say, Hey, sorry, arcane Austin, you know, you know, of course, like, because, and this is goes back to
[02:21:13] the conflicts of interest. They would never do something like that because the way that their
[02:21:15] bread is buttered is paying paid promotional. Like if you want to get your trailer in the video game
[02:21:20] awards, you're paying Keely and his people money to put it there. They have some that are sponsored,
[02:21:27] some that are just sort of newsy. Like they like where we're both parties benefit because it's a big reveal.
[02:21:33] probably money doesn't change hands, but then you like watch the 15th, uh, you know, trailer for some
[02:21:40] free to play Chinese mobile game. Right. That's like clearly kind of like a pump and dump scheme, but, but, uh,
[02:21:50] instead of cryptocurrency, it's just fake currency. Uh, yeah. So, so they would never go so far as to bite
[02:21:59] the hand that feeds and make fun of the fact that the big publishers, even when they're having record
[02:22:04] setting years will, uh, nevertheless shut down studios, uh, no matter how successful. So, uh,
[02:22:13] I can tell you that the game that won 2024 game of the year is called Astro bot. It's a platformer for PS5.
[02:22:18] And, uh, that, that, that, that award and that, that, that honor and that accolade was maybe
[02:22:25] 0.1% of the coverage as it were. Um, because no one fucking cares about that. Everyone only cares
[02:22:32] about what's what's next, what's coming. And there were like, I'll, I'll link to the overall post and
[02:22:38] you can scroll through. There's good trailers for Witcher 4, which is going to star Ciri instead of
[02:22:42] Geralt, but lots of different games, like some stuff that was surprising, some stuff that was less
[02:22:46] surprising. For example, you know, like the, uh, the, the studio that makes the Yakuza like a dragon
[02:22:51] series is making one called project century. That is a 1950, 1915 Japan. So pre war kind of height of
[02:23:01] the emperor empire pre war. And, uh, you know, looks like a kind of classic beat them up in an old
[02:23:08] setting. Uh, you know, interesting stuff, but far and away the most interesting and the most delightful
[02:23:16] trailer of these new reveals and part kind of impressive that they were able to keep this under
[02:23:22] wraps for so long was called intergalactic as an intergalactic, planetary, planetary, intergalactic
[02:23:30] colon, the heretic profit, uh, profit with a pH.
[02:23:39] Uh, and this is the new naughty dog game. So naughty dog, you know, they made crash bandicoot
[02:23:44] and then Jack and Daxter. Actually, they, they roll these all off in, in, in the trailer, uh,
[02:23:50] uncharted and last of us. And like a lot of places, uh, their, their output, uh, slowed down over the
[02:23:59] year because the costs and the complexity of developing a triple a game is more and more complex every year.
[02:24:05] So they released what, um, uncharted one, two, and three and last of us. So four games in the PS4 era
[02:24:10] and then the PS5 era. No, wait, wait, wait. Uh, sorry. Got that all wrong. Uncharted one,
[02:24:17] two, and three were on the PS3 last of us also on the PS3. Everything's it's been such an unproductive
[02:24:25] decade in video games that like, I'm already, I'm off by one in these generations.
[02:24:29] The PS4 then saw uncharted four, uh, and an expansion pack and it saw the, um,
[02:24:36] well, the first of what became two last of us re-releases and then last of us part two.
[02:24:42] So really just kind of like two and a half games on the PS4 and the PS5 so far has seen bupkis. Uh,
[02:24:49] Naughty Dog has released remasters of last of us and last of us part two. And you know,
[02:24:57] with the HBO series, um, being so successful, uh, one, I remember when last of us was first announced,
[02:25:06] I'm not a big zombie guy, but I was really impressed that they broke out of that uncharted series.
[02:25:13] Uncharted is kind of a, uh, uh, you know, it's, uh, an off-brand cereal in the bottom rack at the,
[02:25:23] at the grocery store version of Indiana Jones. Uh, it's, it's snarky. It's silly. Uh, it's, uh,
[02:25:31] you know, got a lot of shooting. It's kind of a shooting gallery with Indiana Jones-esque
[02:25:36] set pieces and cut scenes in the middle. Uncharted was much more serious and stayed and had less
[02:25:44] dissonance between the cut scenes and the gameplay. Cause it was slower and more stealth action.
[02:25:48] Uh, you wouldn't like, you know, in the uncharted games, the, the phrase, uh, the term ludo narrative
[02:25:55] dissonance, that is to say the dissonance between what the story is doing and what you, the character
[02:26:02] are doing was extreme. Like, you know, people, you'd be like, oh man, I can't believe I, I killed
[02:26:08] this guy. That's really something else. And then like the scene before that doesn't make any sense.
[02:26:14] Cause like you, you just had to mow down like 400 guards with an automated turret or something, right?
[02:26:19] Like each of the games that they've made. So like the, the, from, from uncharted to last of us,
[02:26:27] it was more grounded. It was more real. It was slower paced. It was the, them telling a story
[02:26:33] in interactive and non-interactive ways. They got better each time. And my fear was now that they've
[02:26:43] got this sort of marquee franchise that they would just keep on milking it into the ground. And that's
[02:26:48] just generally been the vibe of what Sony's output over the last five years is, is what they call them,
[02:26:54] uh, sad dad games. Like whether you're, you're Joel from, uh, last of us or your, uh,
[02:27:01] Kratos from, from God of war now with your sad kid. Uh, you know, there is, uh, something to be said
[02:27:12] for the fact that they're now doing a new series. They're doing something called intergalactic,
[02:27:16] the heretic prophet. And it is, it looks, I'll be honest, it looks dope as fuck. You see a, um,
[02:27:25] now I'm sure that the internet's not going to like this, but the apparent protagonist is a woman of
[02:27:31] color. So I'm sure that they'll find a way to shit all over it. And just like star Wars outlaws,
[02:27:35] which started a woman, uh, uh, character got just, you know, review bombed into oblivion to the point
[02:27:42] where now Ubisoft is potentially going to have to take itself private. Uh, cause gamers are toxic
[02:27:48] assholes and online gaming culture is just absolutely terrible. So, you know, we'll see how this goes.
[02:27:55] Uh, but God, it looks awesome. Like you, you're a fucking futuristic bounty hunter in space down on
[02:28:04] your luck. You solo in a ship, uh, the ship, you know, whenever you see an outer space themed game,
[02:28:11] you one assumes that there's going to be a lot of world building. Oh, it's like universe like ours,
[02:28:17] but not ours. And, you know, you got to learn all these faction names. And this is what
[02:28:23] was interesting to me was that you had Bethesda game works just went from like the similar sort of
[02:28:27] trajectory of the elder scroll skyrim and then the fallout. And then like, you know,
[02:28:31] the, now they go to outer space with star field and like, they're making the same game each time,
[02:28:35] basically just in different settings. Naughty dog, I think elevates each time that they, that they've
[02:28:41] jumped between series. Certainly if you, if you go as far back as like Jack and Daxter to, to uncharted.
[02:28:48] So what that they, that the first cut in this trailer, it zooms out and you see the, the,
[02:28:56] the ship moving forward towards this kind of sundered moon and the back of the spaceship that your
[02:29:05] protagonist is, is, is flying says Porsche in, in real, you know, Porsche typography.
[02:29:13] And then you realize, oh yeah, that's what this is. This is a real, our universe,
[02:29:20] just fast forward a few hundred years with just enough corpo dystopia that Porsche is still making
[02:29:26] fucking personal vehicles.
[02:29:30] I know if hopefully they were able to get Porsche to pay some money for that.
[02:29:35] But it's, um, I, I think one of the reasons why so many space opera kind of properties fail is that
[02:29:43] they all want to be the next star Wars. So they all want to create their own universe.
[02:29:46] Like mass effect was this way. And it's like manager. Yes. Technically earth was there and stuff,
[02:29:52] but like it, it was so much creating complexity and lore that it was, it became, it felt like work
[02:29:58] and halo has gotten to be that way. Right. And star field was from the jump that way where they try to
[02:30:06] like, you know, uh, hand wave away our, you know, our first planet as quickly as possible. And we'll see
[02:30:12] how this one plays out. But the fact that it says Porsche like that, I think that was a wink that was
[02:30:16] like, this is going to be pretty grounded. Uh, so, so I'll, I'll link to the YouTube of that one in
[02:30:21] particular because it looks real fucking good. Now you look at this list and you think, man,
[02:30:30] there's a lot of real bangers. There's some good fucking games coming out. And then, and this was
[02:30:34] kind of a dry year. A lot of indie games got highlighted. I, of course I want lots of good
[02:30:44] games to come out, but the problem is when I see like 15 really fucking
[02:30:50] high budget, great games that are exactly the kind that I say that I want, that everyone else says
[02:30:54] that they want is like, I'm not going to pay $70 to play each of those 15 games.
[02:30:59] No one is. You'll get game pass. You'll get a, you'll wait for them to go on sale unless they're
[02:31:04] from Nintendo and Nintendo is completely absent at this thing, of course, because they're going to be
[02:31:08] announcing their new switch product probably after the holiday. Uh, plus they go to direct anyway.
[02:31:17] So, so you have all these great games and really fundamentally, I think we got a supply demand issue.
[02:31:24] Like the demand for games has never been bigger. People are paying more and more money
[02:31:29] for games, except that the, like, like that pie is mostly in that purchases and like Apple is getting
[02:31:34] 30% of it. And those aren't, when I say games, that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking
[02:31:39] about these triple a experiences, but so many of them now, even if you just look at the triple a games
[02:31:45] or like live service games that try to like suck in all of your attention all the time so that you're
[02:31:49] living their battle pass to battle pass and you're not tempted to go and try other games or they are
[02:31:56] the high production, big budget thing. And they have a one shot chance to get your $70. Or if you want
[02:32:02] to play it three days early, you're a hundred dollars. And that's a one big bang revenue, you know,
[02:32:08] windfall. Sure. But it's got to fund several years of cost of, of developers and artists and marketing
[02:32:20] and all of the complexity that goes into building something that's like effectively as, as, as
[02:32:24] complex, if not more than a blockbuster film.
[02:32:27] So I, I see all, all of these games and I kind of felt like, oh, this is bad. This just means
[02:32:36] some of these games are going to come out and they're going to go up against GTA six next year,
[02:32:41] Grand Theft Auto six, and they're going to get fucking murdered. And they're just gonna,
[02:32:45] we're going to see these studios disappear. And it may be from a supply demand perspective,
[02:32:51] right? Like if the market for people who are willing to pay full price for games is way less
[02:32:55] than it used to be. You think about that mom earlier who bought a $200 switch and was like,
[02:33:00] whoa, what the fuck? No. I mean like the, you don't even just for inflation,
[02:33:05] like the NES was $200. The super NES was $200. The Nintendo 64 was $250. And then you gladly,
[02:33:13] you know, you're the mom who bought the Nintendo 64. You glad you fought tooth and nail to get a copy of
[02:33:19] GoldenEye, you know, for your kid for Christmas. And that was $90, right? Because, because, because
[02:33:27] retailers would mark them up because it was rare. So things have changed enough now that I worry that,
[02:33:35] you know, even with all these great games coming out, that doesn't mean that the industry is healthier.
[02:33:39] It means that like more shoes are out there and they must drop because the structural problems facing
[02:33:46] the gaming industry remain unresolved. So that's a bit of a douche chill. Sorry.
[02:33:51] Talking about games, let's talk about that new Luigi game. Everyone's
[02:34:03] all excited about it. Of course, I'm referring to the fellow Luigi Mangione. Don't write in to tell me
[02:34:17] how to pronounce it. I'm not going to just start watching the news. I thought about loading a video
[02:34:21] just to see how it's pronounced, but I don't care. I'm going to link to the Verges article because I think
[02:34:26] it did the best. Liz Lopata wrote it. I think it did the best job summarizing
[02:34:30] the media angle on this, which, you know, 10, 12 years ago, there was a movement in media to not
[02:34:43] report on the identities and the manifestos and the tawdry life details of mass murderers or murderers
[02:34:52] generally, because all you're going to do is encourage copycats. And if the thing that,
[02:34:57] if the reason that they're killing something, someone is to get attention, giving them that
[02:35:02] attention by, by virtue of, of talking all about them and their, their feelings and their thoughts
[02:35:07] and putting their picture on the TV is to reward the behavior. And like anyone who's so similarly
[02:35:13] disposed, we'll just go in and commit copycat crimes. And I think that became part of the,
[02:35:19] not just journalistic best practice, but a sort of like understanding of, well, you know,
[02:35:23] we want less school shootings. And one way to do that is to not, uh, glorify the shooters by,
[02:35:29] by giving them all of this attention. Well, unless you kill somebody that everyone hates,
[02:35:36] there's not a political constituency. That's like a huge fan of the CEO of United healthcare.
[02:35:44] I mean, there, there is like, it's called the shareholders of United healthcare, um, because
[02:35:51] CEOs in the modern day, they exist primarily as useful idiots to run companies, to extract profits
[02:36:02] for shareholders. They get their hands dirty so that the shareholders don't have to, and they are
[02:36:08] remunerated in the form of, um, you know, up to a million dollars in salary can be a tax deducted.
[02:36:16] Uh, that was a law passed during the Clinton administration. The idea at the time was, okay,
[02:36:20] we're going to put a cap on CEO pay because of the income disparity. And then of course, what all the
[02:36:25] companies did was, okay, well, I guess the rest of your pay has to come from stock, which means now
[02:36:29] you're, you're actually better aligned with us. So we'll, we'll pay you in stock options or stock
[02:36:35] in some kind of equity relief. And that means that if you can make that number go up, you, you get paid
[02:36:41] more, we get paid more. Right. But don't be fooled. Right. Even though the CEO is a shareholder, the CEO
[02:36:48] works for the board works for the shareholders. If numbers start going in the wrong direction,
[02:36:55] it doesn't matter how popular a CEO you are. Like, unless you have lock stock and barrel control of
[02:37:00] the board, like Elon does at Tesla, that he just reaffirmed with his $45 billion pay package, or like
[02:37:06] Mark Zuckerberg does and having like preferential stock and Sergey Brin and whatnot, uh, Larry page
[02:37:12] at alphabet as well. Unless you've got some kind of stock that basically makes you the only one with
[02:37:17] real voting rights. You know, if you're Tim cook, even right, like that's a normal fucking company.
[02:37:23] Like, like he's got two down quarters in a row and he's, they're going to people be talking about
[02:37:27] getting rid of him. So the loyalty only extends as far to a CEO and the, the job definition is only
[02:37:35] really like how much, what have you done for me lately? How's the, the IRR look for the investors of
[02:37:42] this, you know, equity. So yeah, you know, United healthcare CEO get shot. Luigi does it, which again,
[02:37:54] you know, I'm sure Nintendo is thrilled about.
[02:37:56] I, I don't have a lot to say other than I think the media angle is interesting that like, as soon as
[02:38:05] it was somebody we all hated, we're like, all right. And of course we don't, none of us knew
[02:38:10] the fucking UHC CEO's name right before this happened, the CEO exists as a figurehead in all
[02:38:17] of our imaginations of like, you know, cause we know that like the first story that you see about
[02:38:23] like this happening, right? Like, and this is before they had any, like the, the news had just broken.
[02:38:28] The first thing we see, like this happened, I was in the, um, Atlanta airport when I saw the news.
[02:38:33] First thing you see is like UHC has the highest, um, denials claim denials of any of the major
[02:38:41] for-profit insurers. And the second thing that you see is that their profitability was best.
[02:38:47] You take those two things together and doesn't take a genius to be like, okay, well,
[02:38:50] whoever the CEO is must've been really good at making more profits by denying care.
[02:38:55] So whatever his name is, right, he is, uh, uh, he was, and that company is a sort of example of
[02:39:02] exemplar of all the things about for-profit healthcare for health insurance that like
[02:39:09] Americans don't like that no one likes because it's unjust and because it's stupid and silly.
[02:39:14] And it's part of the system that we have. And you might, you might politically defend its right to
[02:39:18] exist and, and it's, it's superiority to having the government be more involved in it. But it,
[02:39:24] unlike so many other things in our two sides of the politic, like it doesn't make you like, like
[02:39:30] rooting for this guy, right? This is, you know, if you're the hardcore right wing Gordon Gekko greed is
[02:39:39] good kind of person, the UHC CEO fucked up because he wasn't rich enough to have a private security detail
[02:39:46] that was robust enough to protect him from this event. You know, if you believe in survival of the
[02:39:52] fittest, this CEO should have had a huge bump, like, like, like secret service around him and he should
[02:40:00] have paid for that. Otherwise he was just being insufficiently ruthless. And so like at both
[02:40:08] ends of the spectrum, basically they look at this killer and they're like, yeah, all right, good game.
[02:40:13] Right. And so like, that's, uh, huh? I don't have strong feelings about it. To be honest,
[02:40:22] I, I, I'm just, you know, like I said, uh, around the election, I realized at some point that I don't
[02:40:28] actually have any stake and, and I feel like I'll probably be fine either way. I just want to know
[02:40:37] what the future is. And in this case too, I kind of wonder as like, is this like the, uh, the gilded
[02:40:43] age where all of a sudden we saw, you know, railroad barons and other people, you know, from the trusts
[02:40:49] kind of become targeted by an increasingly furious populace, you know, and populace movements that
[02:40:56] were kind of like violent at times. Like, is that where we're going?
[02:41:02] I'm just curious. I, yeah, I don't know, but it's definitely been interesting to see the contrast
[02:41:08] between how this person's being covered and how viciously the internet is attacking
[02:41:13] news sources that, you know, try to downplay, you know, are still playing by the playbook,
[02:41:19] like the Boston marathon bombings of like, you know, like trying not to like, you know,
[02:41:22] get the message out about the person. Uh, I, I, I was scrolling through Reddit and like one of the
[02:41:28] whole threads here was like people getting mad at McDonald's corporation because they hired a snitch
[02:41:33] because it was somebody who worked at a McDonald's that turned the guy in like this.
[02:41:37] This is a materially different. So I mean, my first reaction seeing this was like, well,
[02:41:46] every CEO on the planet now is going to insist on us like, like if they work for an immoral industry,
[02:41:52] like an extractive resource industry or something like for profit health insurance,
[02:41:57] they're all going to demand in their contract, just like they demand private jets and whatnot,
[02:42:01] effectively a PMC, a private military contractor, right. To guard them. And that's,
[02:42:08] you know, you can, one can imagine the sort of dystopian corporatized, uh, military protection of the
[02:42:15] executives of, of companies that do bad things. And we're only a hop, skip and a jump away from,
[02:42:21] you know, Mad Max
[02:42:23] dystopia. That's punctuated by these sort of biosphere bubbles over safe zones, uh, 20, 30 years
[02:42:30] out. So this is, you know, maybe this is how we get to outer space driving really cool spaceships.
[02:42:36] Let's say Porsche on the back is all I'm saying.
[02:42:40] Uh huh. Don't have a segue here. Next item. There is a,
[02:42:45] an invisible desktop application that you can run is available on, on github.com called interview
[02:42:53] coder. And, uh, if you are being interviewed for a tech job, uh, you can run this thing while you're
[02:43:02] your pair programming and you can have it perform various, uh, functionality to either give you the
[02:43:09] answers in a way that is invisible to the interviewer or, or auto complete code for you.
[02:43:14] If you're an employer and you want to hire a programmer, it is really, really hard to ascertain.
[02:43:25] Are they good at programming or are they good at talking about programming or both or neither?
[02:43:31] Additionally, even somebody who's good at programming might not be a good team member.
[02:43:39] They might not be a strong communicator. They might have other quirks and quirbles and,
[02:43:43] and, and, and, and, and, and pros and cons that are difficult to assess inside of an hour or two hours.
[02:43:51] And just like Jane could all observe that, like, you know, you cannot observe the apes
[02:43:54] without affecting them. So you may as well just dive in like, there is no way the best programmers
[02:44:01] that I've met are relatively emotionally sensitive and hyper aware. And so like, there's no way to
[02:44:10] interview somebody who is, who is extremely in tune with their mind and their feelings and their thoughts
[02:44:17] and present without assuming a relatively high level of stress and anxiety during something that's as high
[02:44:26] stakes as a job interview. You know, like I've had to interview a lot of programmers and I've actually
[02:44:31] had to interview a lot of sales reps. And I took from my experience interviewing programmers, like
[02:44:38] it is my job as the interviewer to make them feel safe, to lower the stakes. I've had new,
[02:44:45] once I had more notoriety as a developer, I had numerous candidates cry, breakout crying when they
[02:44:51] didn't know an answer. Cause they were like, I am not only unlikely to get this job, but this guy who
[02:44:57] I look up to is going to think I'm stupid. I, I remember I'll never forget the first time it happened.
[02:45:03] The person turned off their video and then they, they, they made an excuse, you know, when I could very
[02:45:08] obviously hear that they were crying and I was, you know, I was at a conference, I was in like one of
[02:45:13] those little like cubbies, uh, in a lobby and a Hilton trying to do this call on bad wifi.
[02:45:20] And I was like, what am I even doing? You know? So I took those experiences with me when I started
[02:45:26] interviewing sales candidates and the sales candidates were so polished and so, uh, unflappable
[02:45:35] and so seemingly comfortable and self-confident and so self-assured that at first glance, I was like,
[02:45:44] all right, like these, these people are generally pretty good. You, then you hire a few and you're like,
[02:45:49] well, you're really good at thinking that you're really good
[02:45:54] and being impervious to the judgment of others. And, and that's not a skill, right? That's not like a
[02:46:03] something to celebrate, but it's, it's a factor here. When we talk about how to best hire programmers,
[02:46:12] it's like, well, no amount of quizzes, no amount of pair programming exercises, no amount of take home,
[02:46:20] you know, questionnaires and, and, and, and, and puzzles is going to actually accurately tell us how
[02:46:28] the person shows up for work because none of that is the work. Increasingly, I feel like the only way to
[02:46:34] do it is to hire somebody on contract for a couple of weeks or maybe a little longer if you need to give
[02:46:40] them a little bit more runway. You know, you know, that's the last phase is we hire everyone provisionally
[02:46:47] and not on a full-time basis. And, you know, again, that's exclusionary in certain ways. Like
[02:46:53] some people, like maybe they're at a current job and like, you know, if they were to go and jump ship
[02:46:57] to work for you for a couple of weeks or whatever, on a, on a, on a contingent basis, like that's too
[02:47:02] much risk that, that you're then loading from the company to the employee. And I get it, but I, you know,
[02:47:10] short of doing the work with me, I don't know if you can do the work with me and no one has yet found
[02:47:15] a good substitute for that. Uh, probably the best thing that you can do as a potential programmer
[02:47:22] is because programming is something that is an individual can do with a normal fucking computer
[02:47:27] at home is like program a lot of stuff and then post it for free on the internet and show your work.
[02:47:32] Right. It's why I did a lot of open source. It was a way to, um,
[02:47:38] you know, GERD my sort of bona fides. If I ever needed to, I could say, well, if you don't, if you
[02:47:43] think I here, I'm blowing this whiteboard interview, I'm really sucking, I'm, I'm huffing and puffing,
[02:47:48] and I'm crying too. And this goddamn thing. Well, at least I can prove to you that I know how to program
[02:47:53] because look over here, here's this gigantic, like sprawl of repositories of code, whose test to pass.
[02:48:03] Not everyone feels this way, right? Some people feel like the pair programming interview is sufficient,
[02:48:09] is good enough. Uh, well now you got to ask, are they running a invisible AI interface to give them
[02:48:17] the answers in real time as you ask questions and as they work through the code?
[02:48:21] That's, uh, uh,
[02:48:26] the hacker news thread. I think I'll link to the hacker news comment thread as well.
[02:48:32] There was a, um, a back and forth that one would expect. It's like either this is an arms race and you
[02:48:40] have HR departments and hiring managers on one end, trying to figure out who's going to actually be good
[02:48:46] good at the job. And then you have, uh, candidates on the other who are trying their best to get the
[02:48:52] job. And it's not the, it's, it's, it's rare for us to have a story where the company isn't the evil
[02:49:00] guy by default. Cause like really well-intentioned companies are doing these things and asking for
[02:49:04] these things very, not, not, it's not for their health, right? They're not trying to, you know,
[02:49:10] hire only white guys. They're not trying to, you know, make this really hard and stressful.
[02:49:15] They're just trying to arrive at the right answer. Cause like they know how expensive a mishire is.
[02:49:19] Instead, the tension is really between candidates. It's like, if I'm candidate a, and I have a moral
[02:49:29] upright, you know, attitude that says, I'm not going to cheat on this test, but candidates B through Z all
[02:49:37] do, I will not win the interview. Does that mean that I'm putting myself at a huge disadvantage in
[02:49:46] what might be one of the most momentous things for determining in this capitalist society, whether I
[02:49:51] fucking have healthcare from United healthcare or not, or nothing at all. Right. At that point,
[02:49:58] you know, like do you, how much do you judge the use of these things? Does that just become kind of
[02:50:04] part of this? And that's why it was positioned by some as an arms race, even though effectively,
[02:50:09] what we're saying is, uh, there is a, there's a way to view this that provides moral cover to people
[02:50:15] cheating on tests and subverting what is meant to be an honest assessment of a person's abilities.
[02:50:21] Yeah. So I think that's really interesting. Uh,
[02:50:25] I, I wouldn't refer the record. If I was being interviewed, I would not use something like this
[02:50:33] because I, in real time, if my anxiety is high, I am really bad at lying. And if I was ever asked,
[02:50:40] I would probably break down and melt into a puddle of goo in real time.
[02:50:43] I worry about the people who wouldn't melt into the pile of goo.
[02:50:48] Last, last bit of news, Sora, which is the Japanese word for sky is out. Open AI has a video generation
[02:51:00] tool. You type in, um, a little bit of text and then a video you don't want to comes out. It's very
[02:51:06] similar to mid journey and Dali in that way. Uh, the videos are bad. Uh, they, I, I tried it out
[02:51:12] just to make sure that they're bad. Uh, and I can confirm that the videos that it makes are bad.
[02:51:17] They, they have moments of greatness or in still images, like it may be like a few frames at a time.
[02:51:23] You're like, Ooh, that really looks like a
[02:51:25] furry animal and it looks, or this is a photo realistic mountain range, but you try to do anything
[02:51:32] like real. It's just, uh, stuff just flips around and it's like, it's all over the place. It's like,
[02:51:39] it's like, there's no respect for physics. It's just comparing, you know, frame by frame,
[02:51:44] by frame, by frame, like get me from this frame to the next frame. And so it results in like a kitty
[02:51:49] turns around and then in order to turn around, it ends up having two heads for half a second and then
[02:51:54] the heads recombine, um, or, or, or the legs of animals will, will the hind leg will become the
[02:52:02] front leg foremost leg, uh, randomly and then back and forth. So there's a lot of visual quirks that,
[02:52:08] that, that, that tend to be dead give us giveaways of this thing. But what I want out of it, and the
[02:52:14] reason why I'm actually excited about Sora is that it, if I paid the $200 a month for a GPT pro,
[02:52:21] God forbid, I could use it to generate stock videos that are way more interesting, way more
[02:52:30] on point with whatever I'm talking about. When I use stock videos and YouTube videos, it's like as
[02:52:34] an explainer video to kind of set the table. But like when I use story graph or story blocks, uh, uh,
[02:52:41] the story graph friend of the show, uh, Nadia's, uh, startup, that's like a Goodreads competitor.
[02:52:47] That's not what I'm talking about. Story blocks, which is like a stock video site,
[02:52:50] this subscription site that I pay for, uh, via descript, which is a video editor.
[02:52:55] Story blocks only has like, and I, all of these stock video things that like, like, like they over
[02:53:02] index on videos that are easy to take of, you know, just actors that do this kind of thing,
[02:53:08] you know, like, like lots of stuff in the home, lots of stuff at the office,
[02:53:12] you know, some sports, there's not a lot there. You can't get a stock video of somebody in outer space,
[02:53:19] you know, um, drinking Tabasco sauce out of the bottle, you know, while, while, while they shoot
[02:53:27] somebody, that's not a thing you can just get a stock video of. But if I wanted that in my video,
[02:53:33] uh, I could use a tool like Sora to generate five seconds of video. And so people are looking at
[02:53:39] this, they're like, what good is five seconds of video? Well, for me in a stock in the way that I do
[02:53:45] YouTubes or that I like to five seconds is all I ever want of one of these. Additionally, like, oh,
[02:53:51] there's no audio, it's video. And there's actually, I don't want the audio because I want to talk over it.
[02:53:58] So that's what I see. The supplanting first is stock video. And I, I'm here to report. It is not
[02:54:04] there yet. Uh, unless you have all of the patients in the world to sit there all day continuing to
[02:54:08] refine and refine. And then once you download it, crop and stretch and pull and whatnot, uh, it's just
[02:54:14] not, it's not that there are mistakes, which there are, and there will be for a long, long time. It's
[02:54:19] that it is insufficiently expressive in that it fails to convert your prompts to what you're actually
[02:54:26] asking for. I've only done a few of these, but it's pretty clear. It's, it's many notches behind
[02:54:31] like mid journey is for generating images that you're asking for. So I'll, I'll pop in and out,
[02:54:37] but I'm not, I'm not about to quit my day job and start making YouTubes just yet. But as soon as,
[02:54:42] as soon as we get there, hold me back.
[02:54:51] All right. Uh, gonna keep this brief. He says almost at the three hour mark. Cause I've got,
[02:55:00] I got places to be, uh, recommendation. Number one with a bullet is a video game titled Indiana Jones
[02:55:09] and the great circle. Uh, or if you're, uh, on my windows PC, you'll see the, uh, Japanese version of the
[02:55:16] name because one time on one game, I set localization to Japanese and now the Xbox app is extremely
[02:55:23] confused. Uh, and so I had to, had to pin it to the desktop because I don't have actually like the
[02:55:31] Japanese input method editor and I can't type in Japanese. I couldn't search for it real fun. Um,
[02:55:37] so like always with PC gaming, the launching of the game is most of the fun. Uh, great graphics,
[02:55:44] looks really good. Uh, they, they got Indiana Jones, uh, Indiana Jones. He, he is the character.
[02:55:50] They got Harrison Ford's likeness. Uh, so the first trailer or whatever, it didn't really look
[02:55:55] very Harrison 40, but now it looks extremely Harrison 40, uh, which is, uh, one of my turn-ons.
[02:55:59] Uh, it, it, the tutorial is literally the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark,
[02:56:07] except you get to do it as Harrison Ford looking Indiana Jones.
[02:56:13] It is made by, um, machine games who are the people who made the Wolfenstein remakes.
[02:56:23] And those are run and gun, shooty, blasty, kill a bunch of Nazi games. So when this was announced
[02:56:29] and it was going to be a first person game, everyone kind of walked in assuming it's like,
[02:56:32] well, apparently it's going to be Indiana Jones, just mowing down motherfuckers.
[02:56:36] And I am, if you followed this game at all, you know, that is not what it is. Instead,
[02:56:41] what it is is it's an adventure game that actually reminds me more than anything of Indiana Jones
[02:56:49] and the fate of Atlantis, which was, uh, the, probably the best LucasArts, uh, point and click
[02:56:56] adventure game from the early to mid nineties, uh, voice acted, you know, by not Harrison Ford at the
[02:57:03] time. And it was a genuine, like slow paced, puzzley, you know, you go through these different
[02:57:11] locales, you have different conversations and so forth. This one feels a lot like that. People have,
[02:57:19] have called it sort of like the evolution of the walking simulator, which is a pejorative given to games
[02:57:25] where you don't fight. There's not really combat. It's mostly you go from A to B and you let the narrative
[02:57:31] wash over you, but this is like way more interactive. And of course there is combat. It's just,
[02:57:36] you know, you're a college professor. Combat is almost never going to be like
[02:57:41] the best course of action to solve a problem. You know, if you get in fisticuffs with a Nazi or whatever, like
[02:57:47] he's just as likely to win as you. Uh, one thing that I've heard other people comment and I,
[02:57:55] I'm now experiencing this as well as like, I'm, I'm several hours into this game and I've
[02:57:59] not shot a gun yet. I listened to one person say that they got through the whole first area. You
[02:58:05] start in the Vatican. It's the big first set piece. They got out of the Vatican to the next area and they
[02:58:11] found a gun and they're like, Ooh, there's guns, you know? And then they remembered, or they looked in
[02:58:15] their inventory, realized that they actually had a revolver all along through the whole Vatican sequence,
[02:58:20] like five, six hours of the game and they just never used it. And I think that is a radical,
[02:58:27] uh, success for machine games, not only to escape that, like first person means shooter, but they'll
[02:58:37] like triple a game means shooter. I, one of the reasons I like these games, like farming simulators
[02:58:43] and space trucking games is not just the, the game loop of resource acquisition. It's because
[02:58:48] it's so boring that every game mechanic ultimately redounds to combat. What if I could just solve
[02:58:57] interesting problems and not have to do combat? And as, as a result, the immersive sim genre, like, uh,
[02:59:03] Deus Ex, uh, through prey, you know, Bioshock and all these, well, less so Bioshock, but games where you can
[02:59:09] ostensibly solve levels without just resorting to going through the front door and, and killing a bunch of
[02:59:19] motherfuckers. I find that appealing partly because I'm not really good at combat. I get nervous about
[02:59:25] it. Like I get, you know, sweaty palms and stuff and, and I need to take breaks because I can, I can get
[02:59:30] overwhelmed easily. Uh, uh, I don't know just how I am. What else is boring, right? Like there's so
[02:59:37] many other interesting things in life and, and to see the video game world always just resort to,
[02:59:44] you know, this is a twin sticks, you know, shooter, basically we're just call of duty, but instead of
[02:59:49] military stuff, it's Indiana Jones stuff or call of duty, but instead of, you know, Indiana Jones stuff,
[02:59:55] it's outer space stuff or it's call of duty, you know, and it's just different themes on the exact
[02:59:59] same game over and over with the same UI with the same control layout. This is really,
[03:00:03] really repetitive. And they're just, it becomes a vehicle for narrative devices. So
[03:00:08] it's unforgettable to, to play a game that has these high production values, has interactive stuff to do.
[03:00:20] You are sneaking and crawling and solving puzzles and, uh, without necessarily resorting to violence and,
[03:00:28] and action and combat and gunplay as being the only mechanic. It is there and maybe,
[03:00:36] and I'm sure I'll get to a point where like, it's the tool that I have to use, but it's just one tool
[03:00:40] in the toolbox. That's really impressive. Um, it reminds me a little bit of hitman in that way,
[03:00:47] the new hitman games where the world is very large. There's a lot to explore. There's a, there's a, um,
[03:00:55] vibrance in the livelihood in the world where people are moving around, they're living their lives.
[03:00:59] And if you listen to the people, you will learn things and then you can take action based on those
[03:01:04] things. So you, I heard a, a nun speak in Italian saying that this book was out of reach in a library.
[03:01:11] And I, you know, I don't know Italian, but they have subtitles for foreign languages. And I was like,
[03:01:18] oh, okay. And I look up and I grabbed the book and I hand it to her and she thanks you. Right.
[03:01:23] Different nun says she wants a picture of this guy. And just like, I was running up the stairs
[03:01:28] and she mentioned she wanted a picture of, of this fella. I knew where he was. I knew his name
[03:01:33] and I had just acquired a camera. So I ran upstairs, took a picture of the guy, ran back downstairs and
[03:01:36] just dropped off the, the, the photo. And she said, thank you. Right. Little things like that. Like
[03:01:43] the game rewards you for paying attention and living in it. And there's of course more intricate.
[03:01:47] It's not just all simple fetch quest stuff. That's really nice because I want to live and
[03:01:55] feel immersed in a, in a world. And I want to be rewarded for exploring it in a way that's more than
[03:02:01] just like, you know, collect all of these resources, you know, go and scour every single room and every
[03:02:06] single box to max out the number of coins that you collect. There's that too. It also reminds me a lot
[03:02:14] of the Quantic Dream games, which are similarly like walking simulators with, you know, fail states like,
[03:02:20] uh, uh, heavy rain or, uh, Indigo prophecy, you know, or, or Detroit become human or that one with, uh,
[03:02:30] uh, Elliot page that I forgot that was less good. Um,
[03:02:38] Quantic Dream's actually been, been working on a star Wars game for a while. So that's, uh,
[03:02:43] a narrative experience that feels high stakes. It feels high production value that you get to,
[03:02:49] you know, feel like you're the protagonist through, except this time you get the protagonist is Indiana
[03:02:54] fucking Jones. And he looks like Harrison Ford and actually like Troy Baker, who is, uh, you know,
[03:02:59] the aforementioned, uh, last of us, uh, Joel and last of us was, was voiced and, and, and mo-capped by,
[03:03:06] by Joel Baker or Troy Baker, who's who, and who has become the basic, like default male protagonist in
[03:03:14] every single piece of voice acting in video games. Like they only know one person, but he is very good
[03:03:18] at it. But when I found out that he was the voice of Indiana Jones, I was like, ah, he's probably going
[03:03:22] to be, you know, how good could he be? He sounds, he doesn't sound exactly like Harrison Ford sounded.
[03:03:31] He sounds like Indiana Jones should sound. It's so, so on the money. It doesn't sound like he's
[03:03:37] doing an impression. It sounds like he is fucking Indiana Jones. Uh, so if you have any interest at
[03:03:42] all in that, and it doesn't scare you off to hear that it doesn't, you don't get to shoot Nazis all day
[03:03:47] long, check it out. It's real good. Sink your teeth into it. Uh, it's rare for a game to come out in
[03:03:53] December and be good. But, uh, uh, incidentally it's when Oscar bait movies come out, but it actually
[03:04:01] missed the, uh, the deadline for the video game awards. So instead that goes to Astro Bot. That's
[03:04:05] too bad. Only other recommendation this, uh, this time around is the steam deck last, last, uh, last week,
[03:04:15] it was steam deck with a question mark. And this time it is steam deck with a period. We'll see what,
[03:04:20] what happens if it earns an exclamation point. At some point, I finally got time to set, set up,
[03:04:27] set it up a little bit yesterday and play around a little bit. One of my goals was to see how emulation
[03:04:33] was like, could it emulate GameCube and Wii games sufficiently? And how did it do with Dreamcast and
[03:04:39] what, what other options are there? I gotta say that I normally am quirky and I want to like, you know,
[03:04:46] I got the Mac in part because no one used Macs in 2003, right? Like, like, like the Mac was the uncool
[03:04:53] platform. Uh, I try to avoid following the herd, you know, like my brother bought a Tesla and yeah,
[03:05:00] that was kind of like, eh, cause I don't like Elon, but it was also like, I want, I want to get one of
[03:05:05] the, like, I want to get the, uh, best challenger to the incumbent brand, which would have been Rivian,
[03:05:13] except Rivian is going to be out of business in 18 months. Uh, I don't want to get the brand that
[03:05:19] everyone else is getting. Cause I'm, I'm that kind of person, but the Steam Deck is a reminder to me that
[03:05:26] sometimes there's a virtue in following the herd because you can just on your Steam Deck launch into
[03:05:31] desktop mode, open a browser, and then type emudeck.com and then download a script that will basically run for an
[03:05:39] hour or 40 minutes or half an hour, whatever it was and, and install every single emulator, organize all of the
[03:05:46] folders just so it knows all the hardware that you're running it on. Cause it's always running on a Steam Deck.
[03:05:51] And so it, it, it, it configures all of these things and like, you know, what resolution to run things at,
[03:05:56] what, what, what, what are the performance characteristics that you can handle and so forth in terms of upscaling.
[03:06:01] And, uh, it was like literally a one button, wait a while and then drag an ISO file over and then you're
[03:06:06] playing the game that you want to play all of my legally ripped genuine GameCube collection because I
[03:06:12] literally own every fucking GameCube game. Uh, thanks to working at blockbuster video and, uh,
[03:06:19] EB games in high school. Uh, so I have a couple of review copies floating around. Nothing, nothing cool.
[03:06:25] Ubisoft sent me Tom Clancy's very first ghost recon game. I don't know why, but that's still in a box
[03:06:32] somewhere. Uh, yeah. So, you know, I fired up the original Pikmin game and I just had like a little
[03:06:39] moment of nostalgic joy. Cause I remember where I was when I played the first Pikmin game. And I
[03:06:45] remember how absurd that game felt, uh, and how it still feels absurd and the, the lighthearted,
[03:06:51] joyful approach of just like, you know, yeah, you, you, you crash land on the planet and you find
[03:06:56] these onions and then you pluck these little like, uh, random characters out of the ground once their
[03:07:02] leaves sprout and then, and then you command them to do your bidding. Like I came out of somebody's
[03:07:07] brain and they just made it. And then it was a massive hit. Uh, and it's still a series that's
[03:07:11] going on now. Like you don't see a lot of that anymore outside the indie scene. Um, but that's,
[03:07:18] you know, I guess I'm also recommending Pikmin. All right. That's a, that's all I got for
[03:07:24] recommendations. Maybe I'll play a bunch more games and I'll have more next time.
[03:07:28] I made a mistake when it came to the mailbag. Uh, so last time around, please write me
[03:07:38] [email protected] or [email protected] so I can put it in the right mail hole before I pull out of my
[03:07:47] pump and dump scheme. Uh, I jokingly said you should pull over and then write a subject lines like
[03:07:56] something like, you know, you are making me do this and I feel threatened. Please stop threatening me or
[03:08:00] something like that. And then I got a whole bunch of email the next day. And then over the course of
[03:08:04] the week, a whole bunch more email with, uh, terrifying subject lines, like stop threatening me.
[03:08:10] And I, uh, you are making me do this and things like that. And because no one, no one actually
[03:08:18] transcribed it perfectly correctly. And each time it was like, you know, I normally check my mail first
[03:08:25] thing and I was like, Oh God. Oh no. Oh no. What's that? And the, Oh, right. They listened
[03:08:29] to the podcast and they typed in the words that I told them to type. I played myself. So I, I had like
[03:08:36] several heart rate spikes over the course of this week, uh, uh, looking at emails that I jokingly told
[03:08:42] people to write, uh, that they then follow through Don followed through on, uh, Patrick was the first
[03:08:50] person to do it. So he gets, they get credit subject. You are making me do this. Uh, well,
[03:08:57] the, the unique part of this message is I don't know who a care bearer is care bear, but you know,
[03:09:04] I guess if you don't know who the care bears are, you probably don't know what the phrase is.
[03:09:07] These are, these are bear like animals with, uh, stars in their bellies and different colors and they
[03:09:15] talk. So I can't name a favorite one. Well, I will name a favorite one and I will name bedtime bear.
[03:09:21] It's the blue one. He's easy going. Solves problems. I don't know why he's called bedtime
[03:09:25] bear. Cause they all got the energy to like, you know, help the others out. Uh, you might've assumed
[03:09:31] I'd like grumpy bear, but like I, I bring enough grumpy for the whole crew. I don't need more grumpy.
[03:09:36] I, I got that cornered. Uh, next email from, I apologize for not asking how to pronounce this.
[03:09:44] Uh, Kabiru K A B I R U Kabiru writes new subscriber here. Great talk at rails world, which is how I
[03:09:54] learned about your pod. I have to say it's intriguing that you like, prefer email communication. I just
[03:10:03] listened to the ghost engineering episode. And my thought was that you sound like James Spader,
[03:10:07] AKA Ultron. Has anyone said this to you before? Right. I'll see myself out. Uh,
[03:10:13] uh, Kabiru, thank you for writing and thank you for listening. I appreciate having you here. Yeah.
[03:10:17] Welcome to the tribe, the J hive. Uh, uh, I didn't, you know, when you said AKA Ultron,
[03:10:30] Ultron, I remembered Ultron being a character in the one Avengers movie that I watched and
[03:10:35] promptly forgot. So I had to go and like Google who James Spader was. Cause he's one of those
[03:10:39] Hollywood people who Hollywood people reference sometimes, but like that, I don't think a lot
[03:10:43] of people themselves know or follow. And so I Googled him and he looks a little bit like a,
[03:10:48] like a silly guy. Um, and then I asked a friend, I said, Hey,
[03:10:55] is it a compliment to be said that I did to be told that I sound like James Spader? And he said,
[03:10:59] that is not a compliment, uh, with a laughing emoji. So thank you for the comment. Uh, if you,
[03:11:08] if you think that I sound like someone or something, uh, feel free to write in [email protected]. Uh,
[03:11:14] but next time, please include whether or not you consider it to be a compliment. That would be helpful.
[03:11:20] Then I would know how to reply. Uh, Ben writes, I know you use chat GPT a lot. What is the difference
[03:11:27] between GPT 4.0 and O1? When do you pick which? So 4.0 is, uh, the model that they've had for a
[03:11:36] while. O1 is a slightly different model that who, whose hallmark feature is it basically folds in on
[03:11:43] itself. It'll resp it'll respond in its head, quote unquote, and then run that through subsequent like
[03:11:48] levels of prompting. For example, if you say, Hey, you know, how much glue should I put in my pizza?
[03:11:54] Uh, typical chat GPT 4.0 might just start replying right away. Even if the answer is a little bit of
[03:12:03] glue is okay. Right. Uh, but for O1 will first, you know, think the, the, whatever response 4.0 would
[03:12:13] have had or similar, and then ask itself a follow-up like, is this true? Are there other angles here to
[03:12:21] consider? And basically kind of, it's not that it's better. It's that it has a lot of the conversational
[03:12:26] back and forth for you. So that when it starts writing and I've, I've asked it things where it's
[03:12:31] had to think for two seconds and I've asked it things where, where it has quote on thanked,
[03:12:35] uh, for, for, for 30, 40 seconds. Uh, O1 is also different from 4.0 and that 4.0 can search the web
[03:12:46] and O1 is locked to just its training data. So if I'm asking for like, Hey,
[03:12:52] give me a coupon code or whatever, like it's not going to be able to search the web. It's not what it's
[03:12:57] for. Oh, one usage is also limited. If you pay for GPT plus, I, I use O1 when I'm asking a really
[03:13:04] a question that requires a lot of deep thought, you know, if I want to write, have it, have it
[03:13:11] right pros for me, like, Hey, write me an email to this accountant in Japanese based on this context.
[03:13:16] I'll ask O1 because it'll go through a couple, you know, a couple of rounds of review for me
[03:13:22] that I don't have to do. When I ask it, um, like after I wrote my newsletter that came out Sunday,
[03:13:28] uh, I just ask for a diff of proofreads. Uh, just, just show me the typos and this and this
[03:13:35] GPT four. Oh, had a lot more editorialization and style stuff that I didn't like.
[03:13:42] Same prompt. Oh, one just spat out changes to this, this, to this otherwise looks good,
[03:13:48] right? Was actually way less work because I didn't have to do the labor of teasing out a
[03:13:54] overly confident for, Oh, that would just start talking immediately. Uh, and, and spit out 2000
[03:14:01] words that sound like very self-assured, but we're not necessarily correct or helpful.
[03:14:06] And that's maybe one of the most depressing things about the success of chat GPT is, is
[03:14:11] Bill Clinton and then, uh, said, I think it was, I don't know if he was still president or if it was
[03:14:18] after his presidency said, you know, strong and wrong beats right and weak every time. I think that, uh,
[03:14:24] you know, in our politics, we see that a lot, but to see it also in the revealed preferences of,
[03:14:31] of the popularity of chat GPT, people would much rather have a strong and wrong, confident answer
[03:14:38] that comes bold and in their face than a thoughtful mealy mouth one that embraced nuance and trade off.
[03:14:43] So that's depressing next. Uh, Kate asks if you had to give an impromptu Ted talk on something
[03:14:54] unrelated to software or Japan, what would it be?
[03:14:57] Uh, and now I'm at the point where I'm just going to say, uh, to like fill air so that you know that,
[03:15:09] like your podcast didn't just pause or your AirPods didn't just disconnect while I struggle to think
[03:15:15] of what, uh, I could talk about Ted talks. I could talk about the organization of Ted a little bit
[03:15:21] because Ted is a former client of test. Maybe like, maybe still a current client. I know that they're,
[03:15:26] they're, I can say it cause I remember getting, um, permission to put the, the logo on the website.
[03:15:35] I have not really thought seriously about this. Uh, if I, if I give a Ted talk and I wasn't allowed
[03:15:43] to talk about software or Japan, Oh man, am I that boring? Um, I would, I would probably talk.
[03:15:57] Oh, and then I just realized that this idea that I just had was actually Japan adjacent.
[03:16:03] Uh, so that's out. I, I might talk,
[03:16:10] you know, and that this is, it's hard to talk about startup culture and stuff without being also tech
[03:16:18] adjacent. Doesn't the T and Ted stand for technology. I think it's, I think I would talk about, um, a
[03:16:24] little bit of what I did in my last newsletter of the sickness of, um, founders, like dispelling notions
[03:16:32] around entrepreneurs as good. Um, of S of what the, I phrased it based on an illusion that,
[03:16:42] that, um, Chris Hayes made in his book, twilight of the elites, this image that, that, that accumulating
[03:16:49] wealth is like a Mayan step pyramid. And you, you, you can only ever see the stairs in front of you.
[03:16:54] You climb those stairs and you think I've made it. I, this is all I ever wanted. I've achieved my goal.
[03:17:00] I'm making this much money now. And you feel great for five seconds. And you look in front of you and
[03:17:04] you're like, Oh, there's another fucking set of stairs to climb. The example that he gave in the book was
[03:17:09] at Davos, um, the big, you know, Switzerland meeting of all the billionaire minds. Uh, you'd have
[03:17:16] everyone, uh, at the airport, which is a small little runway and there are all their private jets
[03:17:21] just taking turns landing. Everyone would get the limo ride, which took a while to get up the mountain.
[03:17:27] Like, so they'd get in their limo at the airport and then they'd all like, you know,
[03:17:31] they're in a limo in, um, a really ritzy, amazing luxury place, uh, in a meeting of billionaires,
[03:17:39] like the, the wealthiest of the wealthy in the world. And all any of them could think about was
[03:17:43] how jealous they were that they couldn't afford the helicopter because the helicopter service was
[03:17:48] limited to the people who had lots of money, right? That would take them straight up the mountain
[03:17:53] instead of spending two hours kind of curving around it. And, uh, yeah, I don't think enough
[03:18:00] common people think that if like, you know, look, America doesn't have poor people. America has
[03:18:07] temporarily down on their luck millionaires. And I think the reason that we as a culture venerate,
[03:18:17] uh, wealth and success is that we want to see that as a destination that will cure what ails us.
[03:18:27] So
[03:18:29] it, it strikes me as something worth talking about now that I've had some amount of success enough to
[03:18:38] not have to, you know, go and apply for a job right now to share stories of founders that I've met.
[03:18:47] And how, and, and, and, and ultra wealthy people, I've met billionaires as weird as that is, uh,
[03:18:54] to, to humanize them a little bit and put them in a context that dispels the notion that once you've
[03:19:06] reached financial success, you've really made it. In fact, to do the things you have to do to, uh,
[03:19:12] accumulate a massive amount of wealth while you're still young enough to spend it.
[03:19:17] The act of doing those things requires a loss of self. It requires a personal sacrifice that actually
[03:19:26] indicates you're more likely to be like living an unbalanced, unhappy life. You're more likely to burn
[03:19:34] bridges or, you know, uh, not invested in your health or your family or your, your ability to
[03:19:41] just have a day and, and navigate life in a sensible way without using as a crutch,
[03:19:49] this treadmill that you've built for, for, for, for always reaching for more. And so that's why you see
[03:19:55] these ultra successful people. They always move on to the next thing. And it's not because they're on,
[03:20:00] they're geniuses, which I think is the narrative that we typically see, but it's, it's just that
[03:20:04] they, they don't know what to do with their hands. So, uh, that's, I would, I would find a way to build
[03:20:11] that talk. And then I'd be very interested to see it, how it would play it. And when we say Ted,
[03:20:17] I'm talking about Ted, not Ted X. Ted X is just like, you know, franchise local events. As far as I know,
[03:20:23] like I would want to talk to Ted because I'd, I'd want to be talking to the billionaires and I would write
[03:20:27] it that way. And I'd probably make it probably wear a top hat and a monocle. I'd lean in a last one.
[03:20:37] Mark writes and he says, you talked about learning Swift and Swift UI at some point on one of these
[03:20:44] podcasts. Maybe it wasn't a newsletter. Who knows? How's that going? Do you have any app ideas?
[03:20:50] Uh, it is already over three hours. I'm not going to talk about app ideas. I will tease that I am
[03:20:55] setting up my streaming setup now and it's going pretty well. Uh, and so I'm going to probably in
[03:21:02] earnest tomorrow morning, uh, get back to setting up my streaming setup. I'm building in like a tape
[03:21:08] delay. That's the hard part. Uh, I was hoping, so I would be able to do like, like intro outro, uh,
[03:21:14] technical difficulties, play cards for me and stuff and loops, but it's just not there yet.
[03:21:18] So I'm going to go and cut a few of those. Uh, and then once I'm up and running, my plan is to learn
[03:21:24] Swift in a stream setting. So Searles goes Swift or something like that. And it would be a series
[03:21:31] that I run on my YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com slash at Justin Searles.
[03:21:36] Uh, and, uh, you know, if any of you listening look like not everyone, I don't expect more than
[03:21:43] a few people are going to actually like tune into a live stream of me because, because who knows when
[03:21:49] you're at the computer, who knows how long these things are going to be. I, I just want to share
[03:21:55] in the open what I'm learning. And then not like, of course, at the end, it becomes a really long video
[03:21:59] of Justin getting mad at his computer, which is separately entertaining.
[03:22:04] If any of you are interested in potentially watching these things and trimming them down,
[03:22:12] like if you want to edit me live streaming several hours of work, if you're interested in doing like
[03:22:20] a smash super cut of just the useful 20 minutes in there or 30 minutes, uh, into a shorter video that
[03:22:26] we could then post after the fact, uh, as an intern, uh, reach out to me, [email protected]. I'd like to
[03:22:33] hear about it because I think that's, that's really where I'm stuck right now is I want to
[03:22:37] create content that is genuinely useful, but I don't have the energy to plan in advance the useful
[03:22:44] parts to make a highly produced video upfront, but just by my sheer existence and wanting to learn Swift
[03:22:52] anyway, uh, I will be going through those motions. So why not do it on camera? Then the missing link is
[03:22:59] just how do I take all that uncut stuff and cut it down? And, and that would also end me, uh,
[03:23:04] especially staring at yourself on camera over and over again. So if anyone's interested in taking on
[03:23:09] that responsibility, you let me know. I don't expect any takers, but please, uh, I'd love to hear from you.
[03:23:16] And thus concludes today's episode, which I am. I'm deciding now I'm going to, to call version 26.
[03:23:33] I still don't like either of these names. Version 26, Luigi's Mansion. There we go. All right. Bye.
[03:23:53] Bye.
