687: You Can Bend This Line

Marco, we've covered this on the show before, but hi, it's me and I have no memory. Um you are using I I almost said iTunes, you're using the music app as your playback app of choice, is that correct? Um that makes it sound like I like it more than I do. Yes, I am using it to play music.

All right, here's what here's what I need from you. I need you and me, and I think we probably have some mutual friends that would be interested as well. And even though this is a terrible idea, it would be an it would be an amazing idea. I need you and me and maybe others to work on like a W I guess it would kind of be vaguely similar to a classical music app, but an app for people who are just binging the same like five artists nonstop forevermore. And there's 800 albums per f artist.

This is part of the Jams app. to do it. So here's here's the thing with the Jams app. So I this is an app that I intend to make

probably with the help of AI at some point. Um it's one of those apps that like it would never be worth the time to code the whole thing from scratch without something like AI helping. Um because again, like as we've talked about before, like I the market for an app that caters to Jamban users and Jamban users who buy a bunch of the downloaded music and jam band users who buy a bunch of the downloaded music and also want an app like this.

We're talking five people. Like it's every one of those just like it strips it down and down and down further. And the thing is like there are other music listening apps out there. and and and and even like the jam band um crowd, there's a lot of overlap between like the the like Audiophile slash like power user of music crowd and jam band listeners. So There are already apps, um I think is this one called Rune, I think is one of them.

Um there's apps that like specialize in things like, you know, high bitrate or you know high high sample rate, lossless playback and go into like fancy DAX and and DSD and stuff like that. Like there's all these like high end audiophile um you know, formats and apps that specialize in catering to those formats. That world already exists. And we wouldn't be any th like anybody who wants that world.

we wouldn't satisfy their their desire. And and so like we're we're gonna rule out people who don't care about jam bands. We're gonna rule out people who don't buy all the jamband recordings or otherwise acquire them. like people who just want streaming. We're gonna rule out people among who's left, we're gonna rule out people who

Who actually want like those like high end, you know, high bitrate audiophile, high fidelity, you know, kind of things. And then we're gonna limit it just to people who are on Apple's platforms'cause, you know, screw that. And then also where it's gonna be like people who who like our choices and our tastes. And so I think it would be a very small market, which is why it is probably worth doing it with AI, but probably not any other way.

Well, the reason I bring this up, as you well know, but our listeners may not, is that it is currently goose season and I believe you had told me before the show that fish season is coming soon. And there is a a really great service called Nuggs N U G S uh that Will let you stream or perch or I I I guess you can only stream from Nugs actually, but it will let you stream I think you can buy downloads.

Maybe you can, but one way or another, you can certainly stream um concerts in c in some cases as they're being aired. Like I could be watching Goose right now, but I'm talking to YouTube numbers. Uh and so anyways, you know, as I'm amassing more and more goose shows as each passing day goes on, I am finding myself more and more in want of a bespoke solution to manage all of this. And

So maybe I can convince you to let me work with you on the Jams app or something. I don't know. What is the maximum amount you can charge for an app? Is it a thousand bucks? If we ch if we get I don't know, a hundred people at a thousand bucks. That math might almost work out, maybe. But none of them would pay a thousand bucks for our app.

Well, based on Marco's description, I feel like you left out the last part, which is in it turns out Marco's taste is different than Casey's taste, and so now you have now you have to make your own separate vibe code. Yeah. Competing for the search keywords, you know, from for all six people who would ever search for it. Um

I am mostly snarking and mostly joking. However, I will say the thought of you and me in any capacity working on some sort of like actual development project together. I think would be a beautiful disaster and would make incredible material for the show. So I'll just put that out there. That's a I would it be would it be good for our friendship though? No, not at all. Not even a little bit. It would be so bad.

Somehow I you know, I was thinking recently that somehow this show has been going on what thirteen years and I'm still dear friends with the two of you idiots. And yet I think thirteen days of Marco and I working on this together it would be the end of everything.

Yeah, I think like, you know, there are certain you know, certain friendships that are that can be ruined by, say, becoming roommates. Um, or friendships that can be ruined by becoming romantic partners. And I I think our friendships between the three of us would be ruined with like shared coding projects. I mean in in your defense, our defense, and someone's defense, maybe John's defense, he's done a lot of work in your PHP, my friend.

Because he took it over. Because like if if he and I were working together, he would have killed me like two years ago. That's also very much. Or vice versa, because yeah. Probably that direction though. Probably you would kill me. Well, I can tell you you probably have a lot more opinions about Ph B than I do. I just wanna get the hell out of there most of the time. Yeah.

Before we derail this entire episode, uh let me tell you, the listeners, about a couple of fun things we have going on. First of all, We have, I'm gonna do this in reverse order, which John's gonna yell at me for. We have a new member special. Uh we have a new member special, ATP Dev Nuggets of Wisdom. Yeah, speaking of nugs. Might be a different root meaning there. Yeah, also fair. I didn't even consider that. Uh anyways, uh Nuggets Wisdom tells us. No I didn't.

Why a jam band site would be called Nugs? No, never even crossed my because I was never in that scene in no small part because I think if I ever, ever, ever tried it for more than a second, I would never stop. And so ignorance is lists, my friend. Anyways, uh John, tell us about the ATP dev nugs slash nuggets of wisdom.

Yeah, it's just what it says. Uh as usual we went in uh kind of blind on this one,'cause this is the first episode like this that we've done. Uh we are all developers, uh, and most of our development history is in the days before LLM. So we have a lot of uh things that we've learned over the course of writing all the code that we've written and figured we would do a member special with uh, you know, tips and tricks or you know, lessons or and, you know, nuggets of wisdom and uh

My idea was to come in with uh you know, what things that we've learned and that no idea was too small, uh and that even that in instruction turned out to have uh many loopholes. So you'll see how it went. Um there are nuggets and it is some wisdom. And if people like it, you know if people like this episode, we will have we'll probably do another one'cause we didn't get through all of our lists and there's surely more that we can add and even now we're getting follow up on it and everything. So

Um, if you are a developer for sure, check this out, especially if you want to hear from a bunch of old people who are developers. And if you're not a developer, maybe you'll learn something about development or just hear us yell at each other. So uh yeah, there you go. ATP dev nuggets of wisdom. Yeah, it was fun.

It was fun. Uh and yes, it's very small, has very different definitions between the three of us. And then uh we will make our repeat plea for the ATP store. You can find that at ATP.fm slash store. If you are in line for coffee, if you are walking the streets of Manhattan, if you're driving, pull over, step out of line, do whatever you need to do, and go to atp.fm slash store and get yourself some sweet, sweet ATP merch. John, would you like me to do the nickel tour or would you like to?

I will do it. I just wanna remind everybody the sale ends Sunday, April twenty sixth. This is the second of three shows that we will talk about it on. Just do it now'cause but but if you don't listen to the third show immediately, by the time you hear it, the sale will be over. So this is it. This is actually when you should if you're gonna want something in a store, get it now.

Um what we've got is we've got our ATP Neo shirts, which are in the colors of the uh MacBook Neo, which we'll talk about more in a little bit. Um we've got our Mac Pro Memorial shirt, which is just like the Mac Pro Believe shirt, but instead of saying believe, it has

uh birth date and year date on the bottom. It's very sad. Wear it to make Apple executives guilty. We've got the uh T five sixty eight A crossover and B crossover shirts, which are Uh like the T568 A and B Ethernet wiring shirts that we sold in a past sale, only now they're the fully crossed crossover cable for both of those standards, making the colors even more mixed up. Even nerdier than before, even harder to explain to people when you wear it. That's so much.

We have of course the M five Pro and M five Max shirts. People ask, did you ever sell uh sell a plane M five shirt? Yeah, we did when the plane M five was out on and then people are like well but I I want to get the plane M five one now. Well here's the thing we sell these CPU shirts.

when the CP like whatever the sale is after the CPUs came out. And then we tend not to sell them again except for the on demand ones, which the which are you don't want those. They're not as good. Although they are cheaper. Um But anyway, some people someone's like, Oh, I just got an M4 Max. I want uh where can I get an M four Max shirt? I always say this, it's like the old cliche of you know, dress for the job you want. Buy the shirt with the chip that you want, not the one you have.

Aspirational. These are aspirational shirts. Maybe you don't have an M5 Max. Maybe someday you think you're gonna own one. Get the shirt now because we won't sell it again. So M5 Pro and M5 Max shirts. Uh we brought bring you like to bring back an old shirt. This time we brought back ATP Pixels, a very popular shirt, which is the colorful ATP logo rendered in extremely non retina pixels, big chunky pixels that uh very difficult to print, but we figured out a way to do it. Uh that's very cool.

Yeah, the Pixel shirt, by the way, I th I I think among all the like regular ish ATP shirts we've ever made, the Pixel shirt might be one of the nicest. It's a really like I I really enjoy the complexity of the pattern, like the the Implementation details of it.

Uh it's a very nice shirt. That's part of why it has almost no profit margin because it it has very expensive printing methods to get all the sharp pixels and all the different colors. But it is worth it. Like if you just want a fun, nerdy ATP shirt, that's a good one to get. And fun fact, I made all those little squares. It's like one of those things where'cause I'm not a graphic designer, I have no idea how to use the tools. So I'm like, Well

I can brute force this. And they did. They're all little squares. It's ridiculous. It's terrible. Someone who knows how to do this would look at the file and say, why didn't you just do X, Y, and Z and just automatically cut up your pattern into squares? It's like, I don't know how. But anyway, they're squares. Um

We've got a regular ATP shirt, our hoodie, our polo shirt, uh which we sell in the warmer weather. It's got a collar on it, an embroidered ATP logo, and of course our hat. Um one other thing people are asking about is

um how the Neo uh sales the colors are doing,'cause we have like a indigo blush, citrus and silver to match the uh the MacBook Neo colors. Um What are we I don't know if either one of you guessed uh has seen it. If you've looked at the sales figures, don't say anything, but you hadn't looked at the sales figure, what is your prediction for like ratios of the colors that are available?

Alright, I have not looked at the sales figures. I'm gonna guess the blue one I'm guessing blue is number one and then it outsells the whatever's number two, two to one. Uh and number two, I would guess, probably is the the lemon color one. Citrus, please. Can I say you got anything?

So I didn't see numbers. However, I will say that I we we get emails once once we've crossed the threshold of oh, this will be printed by Cotton Bureau. And I feel like the Neo one came in just lickety splits. So clearly Marco would have seen that email too, so it's kinda cheating. Oh I don't read those emails.

So I knew that the Neo was selling the best. I would say I think Marco just said this as well, by a factor of two, maybe even three to one would be my guess. Because I haven't seen numbers. I just know that it's a good thing. Are you talking about Neo versus the other shirts or the colors within Neo? No, I'm sorry, th I misspoke. I think indigo is probably two, maybe even three X over the others. I would say Neo's probably second. God, I did it again. I would say Citrus is probably second. Yeah.

I'd say pink number three. And then Silver I would say Silver's third and blush is fourth. I'm kind of surprised that uh YouTube didn't make the prediction I thought you would make, which is that um You know, the sort of stereotypical like when when someone uh who uh is is like us is buying uh an iPhone or something, we just get the gray one or the black one, right?

Well but I figured like if you're gonna ha like I i if if one of these colors was just black, I think that would outsell by a by a pretty good mark. But like is indigo your stand-in for that? Yeah, in the same way like with the iPhone seventeen that they made like the dark blue one to for people who really want like the just the boring gray or black one.

Yeah. Anyway, um, as you know with these like these sales where we take a bunch of orders and then they print the shirts, you have to order a certain number of them before they print the shirts, and what Casey was talking about is

When we cross the threshold of like, now enough people have ordered this that we're actually going to print it. We get an email when that happens. And so that's where he was getting that info from. Um, and I can tell you the number required to print one of these shirts is not high. It's 12. 12 people need to buy a shirt. Yeah.

for it to get printed. If fewer than twelve people buy the shirt or or pre order the shirt, they'll just get their money refunded and the shirt will not be printed because it's not worth the time for the printing company to do that because of the scale of things.

Uh here's the thing. Uh it indigo is the most popular, as Casey noted, because that email came first. And they're they're not that distant from each other. The second place is Citrus and it is I don't think it's double, but it's, you know, it's it's a pretty big gap. All right. But here is the shocker. We are a week into the sale. You know how many silver shirts we've sold? One Oh, wow. Holy Jamolys.

We have sold one silver shirt. Nobody wants that. I mean I granted it is the color that is the least accurate to the laptop, so I'll that's true. I said I said it in the the the description I think when I when I was posting tooting about it or whatever that it's

Uh I thought felt like it was more important to get the same shirt from the same manufacturer for all the colors rather than having one be an entirely different shirt. And this is the close this is the best gray that they had to match the silver one.

But it's also very neutral in plain and kind of grayscale, so I'm like, yeah, maybe people will pick it just because they don't want a brightly colored shirt. Indigo is the most popular, and indigo, blush, and citrus are all going to be printed because more than twelve people have ordered them, although sometimes not much more than twelve. Silver one shirt. So whoever if you're out there and you ordered ATP Neo and Silver.

You're not gonna get your shirt unless eleven other people buy that shirt. I'm not encouraging people to buy it, because hey, if you don't want a gray shirt, don't get the gray shirt. But I'm just warning that one person who ordered the silver shirt. It's not looking good for you. Maybe change your order to indigo, it's very popular. Ha ha ha.

Uh and yeah, rem reminder that ATP members get fifteen percent off. So if you are a member, go to your member page to get your discount code for fifteen percent off. If you're not a member, It's worthwhile for you to sign up and get 15% off because you can make up the cost of one month of membership easily by ordering a couple things. So uh there you go.

And but you don't have to cancel after the month is over, just putting it out there. You have a lot of specials like ATP Dev Nuggets of Wisdom that you can check out as well.

All right, let's do some follow-up. Uh first of all, Marco made what I presume was just an off the cuff judgment call, which uh given the information you had made perfect sense. And oh boy, did we get feedback about it. So, Marco, would you like to t handle this? Yeah, so when I was talking about in the after show I was talking about um the Sunto watch I was trying uh as it compared to Garmin watches for f for sports and fitness watches.

Um and I referred to Sunto as as a young or as a new company, um, which I think was generally accurate for their presence in the sport watch market relative to Garmin, I think. Um however, everyone uh wrote in to tell me that Sunto uh it was actually founded in nineteen thirty six. Um they made like compasses at first and then dive computers later. So eventually like they they did get to the like the like the modern smartwatch.

Um but the actual company itself is like a hundred years old. So whoops. Yes, so uh Henry Sividan writes on the last episode Marco referred to Cinto as a younger company relative to Garmin, according to the Finnish language Wikipedia.

Cunto was founded in 1936, making it 53 years older than Garmin. Cunto started making dive computers in the 80s. The first PC connectivity for those was in the early 90s. And Sunto introduced a wrist computer in 2004. We'll put a link to uh English language Wikipedia in the show notes. And then Fugu writes, The only thing Sunto seems to have done later than Garmin is the release a GPS watch in twenty twelve.

The Garmin watch from two thousand three already had GPS, however, it is quite possible that the current Sun Sunto software stack is much younger than Garmin's, which seems to be much more fragmented. All right.

Uh last episode we were talking about uh color spaces and we were uh we were gushing about Eric Portis's really great uh uh webpage about that. which is linked in the prior show notes. Uh we were talking about Bartos uh Bartosz Schionowski's hopefully I got that close. Uh and basically everything that he has ever done is incredible.

Um and John, you had made an off the cuff off the cuff comment about how there was a really good thing that you had seen recently that you probably couldn't put your finger on. Well, Ben Landsberg figured it out. Uh this is what both John and myself were thinking of. It's ASCII characters are not pixels, a deep dive into ASCII rendering by Alex Harry Hari, which we'll put a link to that in the show notes for sure. And if I remember, I'll put the other links back in as well.

Yeah, that's less of an explainer of more of like I was doing this software project and here's here is my here's how I progressed through the project. It's really fun. Uh again with m lots of interactive examples and explaining like uh the reasoning and the different things that uh Alex tried to do this

somewhat fanciful and whimsical thing that he's doing, which is basically like can you can you uh render things using only ASCII characters, which is something that you're very familiar with if you're a Unix nerd from way back, but people are still doing it.

All right. Uh is Apple running low on the Bind eighteen pros? Uh oh, Joe s Joe Rossingall from Mac Rumors writes, the all new Mac McNeil has been such a hit that Apple is facing a quote massive dilemma quote. According to Taiwan based technol columnist and former Bloomberg reporter Tim Culpan.

Cool Pan says the MacBook Neo is selling so well that Apple's supply of the BIND eight A eighteen pro chips with a five core GPU will run out before the company is able to fully satisfy demand for the laptop. Apple's initial plan was to have suppliers build around five to six million MacBook Neos before ceasing production of the model with the A eighteen pro chip.

uh Culpan said. But it sounds like demand is so strong that Apple might run out of the A eighteen pro chips before the second generation MacBook Neo with an A I with an A nineteen pro chip is ready next year. 18 Pro chips are manufactured with TSMC's N3E process. And Copan said that the N3E production lines are currently operating at maximum capacity.

As a result, Apple may have to pay a premium to restart A18 Pro chip production for the MacBook Neo, which would lower its profit margins. Alternatively, Apple could reallocate some of its chip production that was originally planned for other devices, but the cost would still be higher than what Apple paid for its initial batch.

of A18 Pro chips that were presumably binned. In either case, Apple would have to disable a GPU cpu core in these chips to ensure that they have it only a five core GPU, like all the other MacBook Neo units sold today.

Yeah, I'm not sure that's the case. Uh if like so the bin one, this is like way to uh, you know, make uh make lemonade out of lemons. So you're making a bunch of A18 pros, some of them have a bum GPU. Why don't we just save them? We just save keep put those off to the side. Don't throw those away. We might find a use for those and they use them in the MacBook Neo. So all the ones with the bad GPU core they can use in the MacBook Neo.

I don't know if that is the entire source of their A team pros or if they also took a bunch of fully working A team pros and disabled one of the GPU cores, but either way. When you buy a MacBook Neo from Apple, you get an A18 Pro. One of the GPU cores is either disabled or didn't work to begin with. Okay. So that's the deal.

If they're running out of those chips, yeah, it kind of sucks for them now. They have to start up the manufacturing line and start making more of them and that costs them money and they got to take capacity from other things and all that other stuff and it lowers their margins. They could also say, okay, well when we we start up the line now.

Will you you will take all the ones that uh have all the working GPU cores and then just update the d you know the Neo spec to say now when you buy a MacBook Neo, it's like a Rev, you know, not a Rev 2 or whatever, but like a second version of it, where now are all the GPU cores work.

Uh it just seems like a waste to take a perfectly working six, you know, six GPU core thing and disable one of them. Um and people are like, well, you can't do that because then the people who bought the first one with the with the core that didn't work, they're gonna be mad. It's like it happens all the time. Apple releases a new revision of a product that has some spec slightly better. That's

That's life. You buy, you buy the product you buy. And if in the future a slightly better version of that product comes out, you can't say, but but I bought one last year and it only had five GPU cars and now you're selling it for the same price with six. Well, that's technology for you. So they could do that.

Or they could pull forward the A nineteen pro product or whatever. So uh all I can say is this is a good problem to have. They made a product that everybody loves. It's sound like hot cakes so much so that even they're probably very accurate, usually very accurate planning.

Underestimated the demand. You'd rather have this than the opposite problem, which is you buy a home pod on its last day for sale and it turns out it was manufactured three years ago, and those are all the home pods they ever manufactured.

Yeah. I think though like, you know, in this case, um, you know, if they do have to make more A eighteen pros, I'm like, yeah, if they have to, they will. They'll f they'll work it out with T S M C and yeah, they might eat a little bit of margin, but they'll they'll work it out. Um

I think whether they, you know, hardware disable one of the GPUs even if it would have worked, or whether they do this kind of, you know, quieter revision where they just all of a sudden now they have six G six core GPUs. I don't think it really matters either way because the difference of that one GPU core is not a huge difference. We're not talking about like it'd be different if like, you know, the number of P cores on the CPU was cut in half. That's not the case here.

This is five of six GPUs or six of six GPUs. They scale almost pr almost perfectly proportionally so you can figure out the you know the math on that. Um, you know, what is that, like a sixteen percent drop in or difference in performance? It's not a huge difference here. So I I think in reality, whichever one of these they do, it shouldn't and probably won't be like a big deal to basically anybody.

The the one thing they can't do or prob not can't do but the one thing they probably shouldn't do is Uh manufacture a bunch of new ones. and then just put them into the Neos, whether they have five or six, because then you don't know what you're gonna get. And that you know, you know people are just that people are always waiting to, you know, file class action lawsuits against Apple, right? So if you decide that you're gonna do the six,

Then they all have to have six and you need to update it on your spec page and say it's a new revision of the MacBook Neo. It they all have six now. Right? Because that's no one no one can really sue you about that. You just made a better version of a product later. But if you don't update the specs at all, but some of them have six and some of them have five.

I don't know if it would be a valid lawsuit, but I can almost guarantee you somebody would sue and say, Oh, I I paid the same price as this person and they got six and I got five and the spec page says five doesn't say anything about six. What's the deal, Apple? Someone would definitely sue over that. Again, I don't know if they would win or if that is even remotely valid, but people love to sue Apple over stuff like that, so

That's the only path they really can't take. Any other path is open to them, including disabling uh the working ones or just selling all the all the Mystics core. I'm guessing they would actually just disable the working one to to make it five because th I think that is the less problematic version of that. And there's a lot of precedent for that in the chip business.

You wouldn't you wouldn't waste the the the ones with only five then because if you disable the other ones then you can use every chip, well not every chip, any chip, every chip with five or six you can use. Um but if you only use the six ones, the ones with five, like what are you gonna save them for? Is there gonna be another product that's gonna want a five GPU?

No, I'm I'm saying like I I think the best course of action if they if they need to manufacture more A eighteen pros, I think the best course of action is Basically lock them all to five GPUs.

um and then and and continue to have the product be described and and performing the same way. And and there is a lot of precedent for that. Like in I mean like back in the old days, uh there were all these hacks about like overclocking certain Celerons uh because I believe Intel had uh a kind of a similar ish issue where like they were they had they were selling the seller on as like their discount chip, but their manufacturing at that time was pretty good and so they didn't really have enough

like crappy, low performing uh stu or whatever it was, like their their production was so good that they had to basically like soft limit the chips um just to make enough of them to sell. And your luck in overclocking the chip was kind of in part due to just like what however good yours happened to be above the spec they were actually selling it at. I bet they got sued by somebody about that too I doubt it.

You know, people can sue for anything, you know. I'm not saying they won the case, but like that's the type of thing that someone would sue over and say that shouldn't be a random lottery, you know. Yeah, but but it but it but it performed to what they advertised it as. I know I know I'm not saying they won the lawsuit I'm just saying that's exactly the type of thing people sue about

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All right, with regard to Apple IDs and pass keys, Vitor writes, uh the situation is even more bananas than you described last episode. Apple added a passkey to my account without my consent with when with my original Apple ID email. I've since changed that email, but every time I need to log in, they still push me to do so with the passkey associated with the old email.

There's no way to remove or update that passkey. I'm not alone with this problem, and we'll put in uh one link to Reddit, uh the Apple Help Sub Reddit. and a second link, in this case to the Pesky subreddit, where Apple claims, or so claims somebody on Reddit, that the fix would be made soon, two years ago.

Whoops. Yeah, I don't I don't quite understand the problem here, but it appear clearly it is a real problem of like Apple creating passkeys for you, but they're like like everything else having to do with Apple IDs or Apple accounts, that it's not normal. It's the It's it's its own special, unique snowflake that works differently than all the other stuff. So I guess it won't show up in the passwords app and

Again, uh surprise Apple implemented a supposed, you know, sort of quality of life convenience feature. Well now you can change your Apple ID email. I bet that won't cause any problems, just like

transferring purchases and all the other things they do that it seem they seem like a good idea until you actually try to use it and it turns out, you know, Oh, well I did I use that feature where you can change your Apple ID email and now you're forever prompting me for a passkey I no longer have access to, apparently. So Yeah, that whole system is so creaky. Talk about, you know, again, making a making uh a John Turner's to do list or whatever. It's like gee.

Just there's so many so many parts of Apple that have uh not faced any competition in so long and have not gotten any better that are just filled with garbage and the Apple ID system is one of them.

Oh yeah. Especially around PASKIS, around developer accounts being separate, like all of those conditions. And it's funny'cause like you know, the the developer account issue is like this is like every Apple developer hits this issue.

Um and and the the login process for a developer is so awkward because you have to first like hit cancel, no I don't want to use my passkey for my personal Apple ID uh and then log in for the developer, use the password, and then if it prompts you for two FA then you have to even if the machine that you're on is trusted

it will par it'll put up the dialogue box with the six digit code and the input box on the website that you're logging into is centered perfectly in the middle of the browser window. Well then the six digit code dialog box

is centered in the middle of the screen. So it covers up. If your browser window is centered on your screen, then the code that pops up covers up where you have to enter it. So you have to drag the code window off to the side a little bit to be able to then reaccess on the page. The six digit codes, you could type it in, which it would on autofill. Like, it's the worst experience. Like, Apple has made logins so much nicer for everyone else except Apple. It's very, very worse.

And you're forgetting my favorite game, which now I find myself doing unconsciously, which is um, you know, some when it sends me the little, you know, Apple ID logging thing that shows the map, it'll send it to my phone or whatever. And it'll say, you know, allow deny, and it shows the little map. I'm like, yeah, that's me. I hit allow. Um, after hitting allow, it then shows the six digits.

But sometimes, as I've complained about in the past, sometimes it will show those six digits for a fraction of a second before they disappear. So now when I when I hit that allow, I prime my brain to memorize the six digits as they flash on the screen.

Because sometimes, as I've said when I was setting things up, sometimes there's just no way to do like it will never stay, you know, unless like it comes up on my phone, I hit allowed, six digits appear and they immediately disappear. And I have to memorize them in that fraction of a second that they appear, so I get good at it. It's ridiculous. Ridiculous.

All right, and then finally for tonight, uh some updates with regard to stealing television. This is the uh overtime discussion we had in six seventy-nine about the super box and the other ways that people are stealing TV. And Nye Hughes writes, This reminded me of a Guardian article that suggests in the UK at least, modded Amazon Fire TV sticks are being used to log keystrokes and passwords to enable fraud.

Uh a recent survey, this is from the article, a recent survey from B B Streamwise, a UK initiative established to counter the problem. found two out of every five people who used illegal streaming were defrauded, they lost an average of almost seventeen hundred pounds each as a result. Whoopsie diopsies. Uh the potential for fraud happens the minute you connect the dodgy stick, or so it's called, to a lapto with a laptop or a TV, according to Rob Shapland of Psionic Cyber.

A uh quote A alongside the stream of T V or sports will also install some malware onto your computer and give the criminal direct access to your computer so that they can use it as if they were sitting there, he claims, says whatever. Uh quote or they can install keyloggers which will record any password you are typing, so when you're accessing online banking, it will record your banking passwords. You are essentially volunteering to have your laptop hacked in many cases. Whoopsi dipsies.

And then additionally, there was a Krebs on security article where Brian Krebs writes, Ashley, an engineer at Census, a cyberintelligence company, found that the Superbox devices immediately contacted a server at the Chinese Instant Messeng Service Tencent QQ. as well as a residential proxy service called Grass IO. Also known as getGrass.io, Grass says it is a decentralized network that allows users to earn rewards by sharing their unused internet bandwidth with AI labs and other companies.

Uh quote, buyers seek unused internet bandwidth to access a more diverse range of IP addresses, which enables them to see certain websites from retail's perspective, the GRASS website explains. By utilizing your unused internet bandwidth, they can conduct market research or perform tasks like web scraping to train AI.

Would just love to meet I think the person who did wrote this copy did such a good job because it's like, Okay, here's what we're doing. Uh we need to appear to be legitimate people. So we're going to commandeer legitimate people's internet connections. So basically we'll be indistinguishable from legitimate people. Basically we want to turn people into a giant bot nut we can control. All right, now you write copy for that and make it sound not nefarious. Uh huh.

They want to access a more diverse range of IP addresses, which enables them to see certain websites from a retail perspective. They did it. They did it. You you made it not sound terrible. But it is. It's really terrible. It sure is. Uh so finally from Krebs on Security, uh it may be that many Superbox customers don't care if someone uses their internet connection to tunnel traffic for ad fraud and account takeovers for them.

I forgot about ad fraud, yeah, making it seem like people are clicking on ad banners. That's they're coming from legit IP addresses. For them, it beats play paying, excuse me, for multiple streaming services each month. My guess, however, is that quite a few people who buy or gifted these products have little understanding of the bargain they're making when they plug them into an internet router.

Uh some of the other I didn't pull the quotes, but some other uh sections of the same article, I believe is the the Krebs article, talk about how they use some sort of hack I I'm outside my comfort zone, but basically they They force a device that's already on your local network to like crash or what have you. Again, my terminology is wrong. And they will then slurp up that IP address so it looks even more legitimate legitimate to your own network.

crazy some of the shenanigans these things do. Basically, do not touch. And then finally, with regard to this, uh David Brownman writes, the Darknet Diaries podcast did a pretty pretty detailed episode on the cybersecurity side of the superbox. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Yeah, so we did touch on this in the overtime that there's, you know, lots of these boxes are shady and people claim that the software on them is hacking people or whatever, but this is like a concrete study from the UK saying that people are getting their money stolen for real, like immeasurable large amounts. by using these products. And uh, you know, the the attraction of getting TV for free is apparently enough to keep people uh coming back, but uh they're bad news.

Indeed. All right. Let's talk topics. And uh maybe I should have poured a drink for this episode because we got to talk about ads and Apple Maps, baby. Uh for real this time. So uh Emma Roth at the Verge wrote, I don't know, I think a few weeks ago as we record this.

Apple will soon allow businesses to buy advertisements and advertisements in its maps app. In an announcement on Tuesday, Apple says ads may appear at the top of your search results and maps as well as in a new suggested places list. They will arrive in app in the US and Canada this summer.

Uh Marco, if you wouldn't mind, would you prepare your bleep gun? Because this is such fing bullshit and I hate it so much. I haven't even seen it and I hate it. Oh, it makes me so mad. It makes me so mad because

I and I think many like me came to Apple because we were so used to getting PCs filled with bullshit malware, just overflowing with it. But by the way, on that topic, I know this is not in the notes of this week and maybe we'll talk about it next week, but there was a recent interview that Jaws and Turnus did with Tom's hardware, and they were g they were fielding a bunch of softball questions about like what's great about

whatever. Uh and uh and they went through everything that's great about it, but then they were on to the next question and uh ATP style. One of them, I forget who it was, says, Oh yeah, and also don't forget, Macs aren't loaded up with bloatmare. That was their point that like unlike the competing PC products, the products that compete with the MacBook Neo, when you get a Mac, it's not filled with like, you know, like you said.

A bunch of crappy software that you don't want that's throwing a bunch of stuff in your face. And I felt like reaching through the YouTube screen and saying, But it is. Increasingly it is. No, I know exactly. Try the new version of pages. So I actually have seen the default dock because bec when I was setting up forty eight Mac minis uh without doing any kind of MDM, one of my steps was taking all of those out one by one. Whoosh. Whoosh.

You can you can automate that by just uh deleting the changing the P list. Well I didn't know that at the time and I didn't want to ask you because then it would spoil the bit. So I did a I every single Last chap GPT. Forty eight Mac minis, one of my setup steps was dragging out all like, you know, fifteen of the dock icons out of the dock except for And f you'd you get really good at figuring out where the remove thing appears?

Yeah,'cause it it's not you have to you know you have to go up a little bit. Like, you know, it's it can't just be like, you know, the first pixel. You gotta go up like, you know, of two hundred pixels up. Yeah, exactly. Those are the days. Anyway, sorry to derail you, Casey. Not filled with bloatware. Hmm. I'm not sorry.

So anyways, you know, uh so many of us, and I think especially those of us who had grown up with PCs like Marco like me. Came to Apple because especially circa you know mid 2000s, my recollection, maybe I'm just looking with road rose-colored glasses, but my recollection was. I had been using PCs for so long. They were utter crap. They were crap in ways that I knew and crap in ways that I didn't even understand yet. And they were crap.

And then finally, and and John, I mean, my the the timeline may not be exactly right, but the way I recall it is that it was around the mid aughts that. Mac OS X was really starting to get its junk together. Now you could argue it was great from the beginning, but it was like properly good at this point. And so I moved to the Mac and I think it was 2008, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe it was 2007. No, it was 2007. Um and

It was such a breath of fresh air. Everything worked. It was intuitive. It was beautiful. There was no garbage. I didn't have to put my wrist on an Intel inside sticker for the rest of time and just watch it peel away slowly but surely. And everything was so amazing and so wonderful. And I feel like in the last five, maybe 10 years in particular, all of that goodness has gone away in various different ways.

software isn't as isn't as stable as it the the Apple software isn't as stable as it was, and it does so many things. And I think Apple is is spread so thin that They lose track of things, like we were t just lamenting a moment ago, like Apple ID. I feel like the software's been spread so thin. There's so many edge cases that Apple no longer conquers. Now, in the defense of Apple, it's also gotten way more complicated, which is hard. It's very hard.

But it doesn't just work anymore. And that bums me out. Additionally, the search for evermone and ever more services revenue means that instead of just being a company that makes their money off of hardware. Now they have to make their money off of recurring revenue from me paying them for things that sometimes I think, yes, they deserve money for this. And sometimes I'm like, what is going on here? For example, iCloud storage.

I should probably pay them for some amount of iCloud storage, but should that iCloud storage still be five gigabytes in the year 2026? I think not. And it's just frustrating that this is yet another example. This is yet another example. Of things just getting ickier and getting more Windows-like. And honestly, I haven't used Windows in over a decade. And it is, I I genuinely wonder at this point. Is Windows less garbaged up than Apple stuff?

No, windows are getting worse. They're putting ads in the start menu and stuff. All right, well that makes you feel a little bit better. And and this is like this is part of the shame of it. And this is kind of part of what I was hoping what I was trying to get at with my letter to John Turnus blog post. Apple is getting significantly worse in certain ways in areas that are very important to us. But

No one else is getting better at it. Like it's not like Win it's not like Windows is amazing at this. Yeah, Windows is worse than it's ever been at this argument. Yeah. Industry-wide, the there is a slow process of uh I I won't use Corey Doctorow's word necessarily because I don't think it quite fits here, but like there's a slow process of just Erosion of respect for users' time, attention, and resources. motivated by the possibility of making more money.

Right. And and even and if it's the reality is like in in many industries, their margins get super squeezed and they get desperate. And they start doing things that are crappy because they kind of have to to make any money at all. And the really sad thing is. That's always been Apple's competitors. That's never been Apple's situation. Apple I mean, not never, but you know, certainly not in the modern era.

Apple's modern era is they have more money than they know what to do with. They don't need to become desperate to find ways to make five percent more money. they can just make better products. We look, we were just talking about the MacBook Neo doing really well, like blowing away expectations because

They made a really good product and people like it. It fits the market well. It's it's there at a good time. Uh you know, the opportunity to take market sh share from PCs right now is really huge for lots of reasons. And so what a great product. Look at the success of the iPhone 17 Pro.

They made the cool orange one and it's a great product. They like so they had this cool color that that did the marketing for them largely. And then they made this amazing pro phone that took what we wanted about iPhones and m removed certain pain points, made things better. Like it's just the iPhone seventeen Pro is an amazing product. Look at the modern Max. The modern Max it beyond just the Neo.

They're amazing. They're so amazing you can't even buy the desktops anymore right now'cause they're all sold out. Like they're The modern Mac lineup is so good. There is not a single bad laptop that Apple sells anymore. What a thing to be able to say after, you know, some of the the kind of mid twenty twenty tens kind of years there got got kind of kinda bad. But

what what an amazing state the products are in and they can make more money by expanding the market of those products or by making people upgrade when they're compelling upgrades. And they do. That is still how they make most of their money.

They can even have this whole thing called services, even though what services makes most of us money from is rents and you know, but let's we'll put that aside for for this particular d part of this discussion. Um you know, services makes tons of money based on delivering additional revenue sources to their products, most of which don't annoy or badger or harass their users.

And then they started selling ads, first in the app store, um, and you know, now it coming to maps. And there's a few things about this that irritate me greatly. Number one. It's just not that much money relative to the services category. Especially since Apple's really bad at selling ads against anything. See that yeah, that's that's the second part that annoys me. Like is there what is the potential upside for Apple? Not what is the potential upside for Google? Because Apple's not Google.

Yeah. I have been an Apple Search Ads customer since Search Ads launched. I actually I just paused my Search Ad campaign for the first time in years, um, just about a month ago, because I'm mad at them. But the Apple Search Ads product. is awful. The only thing holding it up as being anything that is worth anyone ever spending money on is that there are still a lot of people in the apps that are searching for things and now they've created this this awful situation for all of us, which is

if you don't buy like your own name and your own keywords, everyone else will buy them and you will have to fight you'll and now you have to pay Apple extra just to get to your own customers that you were already going to get before. And It's and they're still taking their thirty percent, of course, of all your in app purchases and stuff. So it just it feels a lot like double dipping. Um and But it's just it's a crappy ads product and it makes the app store worse.

For everybody except Apple. Apple makes a little a little bit more money from that. Great. Good job. Everything else is worse. It's worse for customers. It's worse for most developers. And it's mostly just a way for big companies to pour a bit more money into Apple's pocket with high bids on keywords. Uh and now they're bringing that same benefit to maps. Great. Adding ads in places like this to make reasonably small amounts of additional revenue. Sells out the user experience.

Yes. A little bit.

It matters less to us to have a a great high end premium user experience. We would rather make one percent more money. And they have seemingly run out of ideas to make one percent more money in other ways, I guess, or they just don't care. And this is like the hallmark of the Tim Cook era is like Product direction by numbers. And there's a place for numbers. Try the new version of numbers.

Oh my god. Oh, that's a whole other don't even get me started on that. Oh, I'm so mad about that. Um, but again, but that's it that's actually a similar problem here. It's like Nothing is sacred to them anymore in the user experience. They are willing to put promos, which are ads, and actual ads, all over their products now.

There is no more premium experience with Apple products because now it's all full of ads. Because what are you gonna do? Where are you gonna go? There's nowhere else. So they can now make one percent more money from you. Old Apple wouldn't have done that. You know, you don't I don't like to invoke Steve Jobs that often. I know there were a couple of cases where Steve Jobs floated the idea of putting ads in different places, but Under previous leadership.

Apple would not have been putting ads in the places they're putting ads now because I think the previous leadership had more appreciation for a premium user experience. And when you start being managed as, you know, just bean counter only numbers matter and nothing else matters, i if this thing can increase numbers by five percent, why wouldn't we do it? Obviously we must do it because the numbers will go up.

That is a pretty rapid path to mediocrity. And that's never been what has made Apple stand out. They have certainly had many mediocre products and services and times in the past, no question. But where Apple succeeds. is making nice products with nice experiences. And ads don't have a place in that. And I wish Apple's leadership would realize where their own success comes from.

Like you said before, like uh it's not uh you were saying like uh have they run out of idea other ways to make money. It's not that they've run out of other ideas for incremental revenue or other ideas to innovate. It's that Uh, in addition to those ideas, these ideas which used to, as you noted, used to be get shot down, no longer get shot down. And that is the dysfunction in the organization. Someone in the org is always going to say, Hey, we can make more money if we

did this that would annoy users slightly, but what are they gonna do? Like that idea will always exist, will always be presented, is always compelling. Uh it's a compelling business case to Apple because you can say, look, I can show you how this will make us more money. It will make us more successful in this way. And what the what Apple needs to do, and which they're getting n less good at doing, is saying, Yes, but

our brand promises that we don't do crap like that. And long term, even though your idea will make a little money now, it will erode that brand promise, the the value proposition, it will it will

In the long run, it will make us less money. It's the exact opposite of the the thing that made Apple successful, which is do the difficult thing that everyone thinks is a dumb idea, because if you do it long enough or hard enough and it makes users happy, you will make more money than them in the long run.

And Apple does st still fight that. They're not saying yes to every one of those ideas, but they're saying yes to way too many of them. In particular, they're saying yes to like their own internal things. Like what this part of the org says.

We need to, you know, pr uh do upsells inside the uh iWork applications because that's the only way people will pay for this. And we need to do this and we need to put you know, like we need to advertise the uh, you know, new Apple Care plans inside system settings because

Uh I know the people who are writing system settings, they don't care about that, but this part of the org cares about selling Apple care. And we need a way to sell Apple. Hey, we're all Apple here, same team, so let's do it. And that's what they're saying yes to. They're saying yes to.

you know, letting themselves advertise their own crap everywhere, which is already terrible. And then in these cases like search ads and map ads, they're saying we can get money from third parties here too, because we have all these customers, we have their eyeballs, they're doing something related to maps. They're in the app store searching.

Like you said, Marco, it's a it's a win for Apple, they think, because it's like, look, uh we annoy the user and we uh suck more money from developers and we annoy the developers. Mm-hmm. So everything is worse. The only m arguable possible user benefit is

If you're searching for an app, you get to see some possible alternatives to that app. Like if it's a really well known app, you would otherwise never find the alternatives. That is the only um benefit I can think of for that for the user. But mostly it's a it's a it's a net negative for everybody. But Apple's like, Yeah, but we make more money.

So yeah, that's the problem. They keep saying yes to that. And then this the ads and maps, like I don't even think of all the things they could do this is That egregious other than the fact that they're gonna do a terrible job at it. Except for the fact that as far as I know, I don't this is is this a rumor? I think it's a rumor. I don't know if it was announcement or but it was announcement. Announcement from Apple. But anyway, we don't know the details, but here's the thing.

Sì, grazie a tutti. At very least.

Allow people to pay money to make the ads go away. How about the people who are already paying you for let's say the Apple One bundle? Oh. Because like I'm not saying, oh, it's fine Apple put ads everywhere and just make people pay to get rid of them. But if we have to live in this world, if we're gonna have these ads forced on us, it like to Casey's point.

If I'm already paying you like the maximum amount a person can pay you, like I buy your most expensive Apple I bundle that you want me to get, I buy all your products or whatever, is there no way that Me paying money will make ads go away anywhere. I would pay to get rid of search ads in in the App Store if I could. I would certainly pay to get rid of uh ads in Apple Maps, even though I mostly use Google Maps.

Like and I'm not saying like obviously the number of people who are gonna pay to make ads go away is tiny. Like we know we have we we have a podcast where people pay to make the ads go away. Most people don't. Like we get that. But like

Just let let that's it's such an easy out for them to continue to be crappy. Like I'm again, I'm not saying this is the solution, but hey Apple, if you want to continue to erode your your your own value, You would just you would silence uh more of Casey's cursing if you just at least

Allowed the relative handful of people who are willing to pay not to see ads to let them do that. They would grumble about it and they would be pissed, but it would make them slightly more quiet than the current case of just like, no, we don't care how much money you give us, there's no escape from these ads.

Yep. Couldn't agree more. I it's just th this is the sort of thing now I'm showing a lot of biases and I'm bringing a lot of um my own priors, as Merlin would say, to the table. But um I I've always found it

Frustrating that uh it's in my mind, I filed it as a West Coast thing that there are no decisions made, there's only A B testing. I know I'm being hyperbolic and I know it's not quite that simple, but I feel like everything is A-B tested and everything is about numbers. And at some point, you have to understand that there is there are things that are unmeasurable and there are things that are just a vibe.

And the vibe that I get from Apple these days, and I don't think I'm alone, is that, oh, they're just as shitty as everyone else, except just a teeny bit less. So if Windows is an 11, Apple is an eight or a nine. But that's still shittier than it needs to be. And I'm sorry that I don't have more grown up langu or maybe less grown up language to express my feelings, but I'm sure. Right the first time.

I'm so frustrated that this is what this is. And and there's nowhere else to go. I think that's the other problem. Like, yes, I suppose I could make this the year of Linux on the desktop for me, but I don't want to do that. Nobody really wants to do that. Please don't read my.

Even NPM throws ads at you now. They're not really ads, but like, Hey, these projects need funding. Because they've got you with the prompt and uh how else are you gonna discover that the software you're that you've been using for free forever needs funding? Like I d and again, I don't begrudge NPM that, but I'm just saying like everybody that the idea has always existed, which is right where the person's using your software, can we put ads there?

Someone will always have that idea. The idea is not new. What is the difference now is people who would formerly say, Of course I'm not In my command line Unix utility, I'm gonna put an ad. Like I understand open source needs funding, but this is not the way to do it. But eventually the generation that grew up in the current environment gets to control open source projects and said, Oh yeah, totally, we should put that into NBM. And so now it's there.

Yeah, and I think like what what irritates me about Apple doing it, and this is granted, this is less about maps now. Now I'm talking about the platform, is like if inside of an app like maps, they put ads Okay. Well, we can use different apps. And yeah, I mean the other ones have ads too, um, but at least they're better.

So, you know, whatever. There there's different options for mapping apps. You can make your own mapping app if you really want to. Nobody can really. Anyway, uh, but you know, you know what I mean. But when the system has ads in places that are required to interact with or privileged, Things like the settings app having promos for all of Apple's upsells and crap. Uh the App Store having ads when you are looking to buy to get software in the only way you can get software on your iOS device.

There's no way to escape that. So you you don't have a choice as a customer. You are locked in and you are forced to see those ads. And I this is not like, you know, uh a h a severe like human rights issue or anything, but it is Apple kind of mishandling their position of power, abusing the power they have as the platform.

to make things a little bit crappier under the guise of well everyone's doing this as you were saying, like everyone's doing this. So therefore we c we can do it too and too bad for you if you don't like it. That doesn't make it better.

And and it totally works. Like to Casey's point about A B testing. I can guarantee you they sell more Apple Care now that they push it to you in system settings. Like there's no question about that. That is that's the r you know, that's why you don't let it happen because you know if you do let it happen.

Of course it's gonna r give you return on investment. Like it's it's the one and only system settings and you get to put ads there and that will s that will sell more AppleCare. And the people who came up with ideas is see I told you and the people who are against the idea says we were never arguing that it wouldn't work. We were arguing that we shouldn't do it. Because it erodes the value of Apple as a brand and a company.

And it just and like ev even if you can't get them to quantify the brand damage. It seems like you also can't get a lot of these higher-ups there now to believe in the promise of just making things because they're better this way. Instead of adding ads somewhere because it makes some number go up. Maybe you can have the prestige and self-control to show some restraint and not take every single opportunity to make a bit more money if it makes the product work.

That's what I was talking about with the Turnus thing. It like that if you're Steve Jobs, you say, No, that makes a crappy, I'm not gonna do it and everyone disagrees to you But if you're John Turnus and you say that, then now you have people saying, Well, he turned down this idea that we proved could give you X amount more money in Apple Care subscriptions and he said no to it

for it. Unquantifiable benefit. We sh can show you the numbers. This is how much more money we make on Apple Care if we do this. And all they had to say was some mumbo jumbo about brand value. Like whatever. Show me the numbers on that, dummy.

And because you're not Steve Jobs and didn't found the company and everybody worships you, that it becomes a ding against you. And like that's that's what makes people do the wrong thing because they don't feel secure enough to say, We're not doing that because it sucks. Like and I'm sure sometimes they do again. It's not like it's not like they're just, you know, bending over and doing every bad idea that exists.

But they're uh you can s in this battle within Apple, you can see the people who want to junk stuff up are winning more of these fights. And that's the the trend again, it's the trend line. I would still say it's you know, Casey said that like Windows is an eleven and Apple is an eight, I think the range is much, much greater. Windows is in a way worse situation. Um but

Like you know, we're not Windows users, so we don't cram, just looking at the trend lines. That's why we're even though every one of these little things, it seems small and it is small, but like the line is going in the wrong direction. And if we just extrapolate, uh bad things happen.

You know, Apple does have an area that they are a little bit better at defending, and that's privacy. Privacy i in some ways I I mean again it's a little bit different'cause uh you know, when Apple says privacy is a human right, um I I think that is that is about as important as it is. I don't think that's that's hyperbole and I do think that the that the right to use your computer without seeing ads is not a human right. But

They do things in the name of privacy. Now, granted, ev not every time they invoke privacy is for good reasons. Many times they will invoke privacy in things like, you know, defenses against monopoly accusations and bad behavior. basically as a as a BS defense to try to excuse their bad behavior that's really that they're really doing for other reasons. But not every time. Many of the times that Apple invokes privacy are real and genuine and beneficial.

And Apple really does care about privacy more than just the numbers alone would would you know dictate that they should. That is an area that it's it's it's considered a core value to the company. Um and that's uh and uh credit to Tim Cook. That is something he has brought to the table and that he cares a lot about. It isn't that Steve Jobs didn't care about privacy, but Tim Cook seems to care a lot more, and I give him credit for that.

Um is a core value that Apple defends privacy in their product choices, even when it's really difficult most of the time. Um But under Tim Cook, that same consideration has not been held for the quality of the user experience. That's where, you know, Steve Jobs really did hold that as a high value. The same way Tim Cook values privacy, Steve Jobs valued a premium nice user experience. And Tim Cook doesn't.

And modern Apple doesn't. They happen to have enough people there who are left who still are able to create good user experiences most of the time. But There isn't any pressure in the in the way that there is so much pressure to preserve privacy at Apple, there is no such pressure to preserve the quality of the user experience.

And there really needs to be because having all these little ads and promos and little paper cuts everywhere, each one of those is an erosion of quality and an erosion of the premium brand and the experience. And they don't seem to think so. Or at least those people are not able they're not empowered to defend the quality of user experience when oh but if but if we ruin this thing a little bit more, we can make a bit more services revenue.

And I think the thing that makes me one of the things that makes me so exasperated about this is that there's almost no way to put this back away, right? What's what's the turn of phrase I'm looking for? There's no way to put it back. in the bottle. There is a way. You just ch make different decisions in the future. You can bend this line. You need a new CO to do it, but you know, fingers crossed. But even still, are they ever going to take away a revenue stream?

Really? That's that's what I'm yeah, something like Steve Jobs did things like that all the time. See good CEOs, it's called leadership. You you can't just say, Oh, I'm never gonna do anything that's gonna ha cause any kind of kind of uh bad result. Uh You know, for uh because there's a long-term benefit. That's called leadership. That's what Apple needs. Uh good CEOs make decisions like that all the time. It is absolutely possible. Will they do it? I don't know.

I I totally believe it was played. We see it happen all the time. We we saw it happen with turning around Apple itself when Steve Jobs came back and did it. He destroyed tons of stuff before things got better. Well also. It's not even that much money. Yeah, that's the other thing. The other thing is not it's not like you're saying stop selling the iPhone. I mean, come on, like it's you'll be okay.

Like we're talking about like a drop in the bucket w even within the services category. Yeah. Which itself, I mean, granted, the services category is pretty large now as a percentage of their profit, um, and that's why they keep pushing it. growing one and the stock market won't like it and yada yada. Like there's a million reasons, but it's it's not insurmountable. It's not that much money. Like I mean, obviously in absolute terms, like it's probably more money than all all of us will ever see.

terms. Yeah. In relative terms relative to their their services revenue. We're not talking about getting rid of the entire App Store cut and the entire Google search deal and like, you know, the things that actually make big differences. We're not talking about that. We're talking about d drops in the bucket, especially like ads and maps. The way Apple handles ad sales and the systems they build and the primitive garbage ranking algorithms they use.

Those aren't going to be that successful financially, like, because they're just, they're not going to be that good. The app store search ads probably make substantially more money than anything that will ever be made in maps. And the App Store search ads are also terrible, but at least those are more like

you know, there's more kind of a of like an an intent to buy. There's a a lot probably a lot more search volume if I had to guess, uh, you know, compared to monetizable maps transactions, like or map searches. So I think this is gonna be we're talking about Crapping up a a core system app

for not that much money. And that that's what makes it even more frustrating. That it's not like they're like betting the whole company on some huge thing that's gonna turn a huge amount of money over. No, it's not. They're just adding another paper cut to t to make one of their core apps worse for everyone to make a drop more money. That sucks. And by the way, that's exactly what they did to numbers, pages, and keynote. And screw them for that. I'm I'm so annoyed at what they did to those apps.

No argument. I I think the one thing that I will say with regard to that's leadership. I agree. However, if we think about the situation with Apple when Steve came back, like They were on death's door, or at least so it so I've understood. I mean, I wasn't a I wasn't around for this, I wasn't an Apple person for this, but they were on death's door. ninety days from bankruptcy they say.

Yeah, exactly. So of course Steve came in and, you know, destroyed everything and turned everything upside down. Not only was he one of the founders and that kind of gave him the clout to do it, What else are they gonna do?

He did that when they were successful too. I mean the the iPod mini and uh getting killed for the iPod Nano, even though it was their most successful iPod. He was killing the successes that were helping them come back from where they were. Like he was not afraid to do what he thought was right. Like that that's what I'm saying, it's it's leadership.

leadership. Like y you can Tim Cook would not make that choice and would make a very different, very strong argument to keep selling the iPod Mini'cause it's the most popular iPod they ever made and just sell the nano to the people who want that one. And Cobas like, no, nano's better. Kill the iPod Mini. And I get that. All I'm saying is, yes, it is leadership, but I think that in in a lot of ways, Steve was set up for success, set up for

Doing the things that had to be done because clearly whatever was going on wasn't working. Whereas right now, the you know, whoever takes over, be that Turnus or whoever else, They're r d entering the cockpit of a rocket ship. And to slow that rocket ship down, even though I again I concur that it's relatively not a lot of money, that's still a tougher it's a tougher, bigger ask, is all I'm saying.

What they would argue is like, Oh, it's not gonna lose us that much money, but our share price is gonna go down, so our market cap's gonna lose ten billion dollars or whatever, and Steve Jobs would say, So what?

Like it'll be fine. But uh like I said, it it's not just when things are going bad. The iPad mini uh iPod mini was going great. That was a number that was going up. And that was a case where you're making a decision that people would say you're you're you're risking the the rocket ship by

making that change, but Steve Jobs wanted wanted what he wanted and uh most of his decisions were right in that direction. So anyway, we'll see we'll see what happens. I dunno sure this trend line is gonna change at all'cause I I see no deviation or even acknowledgement that everything we're talking about is even a thing.

When Apple executives talk, like do you even see them acknowledging this? Like I said, with uh Turnus and Jaws saying, and of course, Macs aren't junked up with anything. I'm like, Well, they

are now they're they're like they don't see it. They don't they if they do say it they're not seeing they're not uh voicing it in any way. So it's really difficult to expect a different decision when there is not even any public acknowledgement that this issue exists, let alone where Apple is on the spectrum. So

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Let's talk about AI generated art. And uh Emma Ross. Emma Roth in the Verge on March 2nd writes The US Supreme Court has declined to hear a case whether over whether AI generated art can obtain copyright. The decision comes after Stephen uh Thaler, a computer scientist from Missouri, r appealed a court's decision to uphold a ruling that found AI generated art can't be copyrighted. In twenty nineteen

The US Copyright Office rejected Thaler's request copyright an image called a recent entrance to paradise on behalf of an algorithm he created. The Copyright Office reviewed that r reviewed that decision in 2022 and determined that the image doesn't include quote human authorship quote. disqualifying it from copyright protection. After Thaler appealed the decision, the US District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell

ruled in twenty twenty three that quote, human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright quote. That ruling was later upheld in twenty twenty five by Federal Appeals Court in Washington, DC. Last year, the Copyright Office issued new guidance that says AI generated artwork based on text prompts isn't protected by copyright.

The US Federal Circuit Court similarly determined that AI systems can't patent inventions because they aren't human, which the US Patent Office reaffirmed in twenty twenty four. With new guidance stating that while AI systems can't be listed as inventors on a patent, people can still use AI powered tools to develop them. The UK Supreme Court made a similar determination in a case brought forward by the same fellow.

So this is a background on just uh establishing what what at least US law has been saying about copyright and AI art and a few other things, because the actual topic here is

AI generated code in copyright. And when I put this in the notes, which was a while ago at this point, lots of people online were uh stating flat out as a fact that, hey, don't you know because of the Supreme Court decision in the US, Any code you're generating with these coding agents. This is back when coding agents were just sort of becoming popular. So you know, a little a little while ago now. Any code you're generating with those cod uh coding agents.

uh is not copyrightable. Therefore, you don't uh the you know, the you there's no ownership or protection or copyright protection for the code that you're doing for this. So if you're if you are coding with one of these agents and you're putting that code into your product, What was previously copyrighted code that you owned is no no longer is because you can't copyright AI generated stuff. Here's what the Supreme Court says. And

Most of the time people just let that exist as a thing that people say and then be sh I didn't know that. I didn't know you can't copyright AI generated code. But I'm not a lawyer or a judge, but my understanding from reading all these stories is This has yet to be adjudicated. I know this doesn't help, but so like so many things having to do with LLMs and AI stuff. It's an open question. The the Supreme Court has ruled on AI-generated art.

But I wouldn't just simply assume that because they made a decision about AI generated art and patents, that that same decision exactly applies as is to AI generated code. Because historically, art and code and patents and things like that have all been treated differently by the courts. So as far as I'm aware, this is yet another thing involving AI that is like, hmm?

I don't know. Pro I mean it's it's probably fine. Maybe, uh maybe not. I don't know. What do you think? But like it hasn't it hasn't been decided yet. There's n I haven't even heard any cases coming up about this to, you know Someone claiming that, hey, because you used AI to generate that code, it's not copyrighted, therefore you don't own it, therefore blah, blah, blah, blah.

hasn't even come up yet. I'm sure it will. It will come up, just like we have all those cases about, you know, from the New York Times and Disney and and all these other companies suing the people, uh suing ChatGPT and Anthropic and all these other companies for like passages from their books appearing in output. Like that's already happening. Like the copyright, you know, LLMs being trained and trained and but this particular frontier, like I feel like coding aided and

Have not been around and in wide use long enough for these laws these big famous lawsuits from big giant companies to appear. But what I will say is. Human nature being what it is, and I know this is awful and doesn't sound good in very many things in our legal system. or, you know, are this way. But human nature being what it is, and the power structures of the world being what they are, as in governments and rich people and rich companies have lots of power and other people don't.

Um, the more big powerful entities use AI-generated code in their products, the more likely it is that it will magically be deemed to be okay and 100% legal by the court. Mm-hmm. Because everything in the system is like there is to to your for your phrase that you were reaching for before our case, well, the genie's out of the bottle. These big powerful companies want it to be okay. And

If you if there had been a court case early on, maybe it could have gone either way. But I feel like now, no matter what happened, and I'm not saying this is even the right decision. I'm just saying this seems like it's gonna be what happens because so many people are generating so much code with coding agents. that it will be very difficult for any court to decide and then be able to enforce the concept.

AI-generated code is not copyrightable in any way. Because how do you even disentangle it from all the human written code that it's mixed in with? How do you decide what has been AI assisted, like the patent case is versus totally AI generated? How do you decide what human authorship is for code depending on how long and complicated the prompt is and how

It's incredibly but like simple human nature. It's like the if it looks right, it flies right BS that I've talked about before about uh Lockheed planes and stuff. It's like Big powerful companies have been doing it too long and every day that passes every day that passes makes it much more likely that this potentially unjust and unjustifiable and unjustified decision will be become fact and reality because It's just the easiest thing to do. The big powerful companies want it. It's too late now.

Oh well. And again, I'm not saying that's what I agree with, but that's how I feel whenever I see this topic come up. And everyone who says, hey, I get generated code is not copyrightable. You're all doomed if you do this in your apps. I'm like, maybe, but probably not.

All right, so with that in mind, can coding agents relicense open source through a clean room quote unquote implementation of code? Question mark. Uh Simon Wilson writes Chardet, a Python character encoding detector, was created by Mark Pilgram back in 2006 and released under the LGPL, or New Lesser Public Lesser General Public License.

Mark retired from public internet life in twenty eleven and Chartet's maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard, who has been responsible for every release since one point one in july twenty twelve. Two days ago, which was I think uh in early March, um

Dan released Chardet seven dot zero dot z with the following note in the release notes. Ground up MIT licensed rewrite of Chardet. Same package name, same public API, drop in replacement for Chardet five dot X or six dot X, just way faster and more accurate.

Yesterday Mark Pilgrim opened issue three hundred twenty seven Colon No Right to Relicense This Project, in which he writes First off, I would like to thank the current maintainers and everyone who has contributed to and improved this project over the years, truly a free software success story. However, it has been brought to my attention that in the release of 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to, quote, relicense quote the project.

They have no such right, doing so is an explicit violation of the G L GPL. License code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a complete rewrite is irrelevant Since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code, i.e., this is not a clean room impl implementation, adding a fancy code generation generator into the mix does not somehow grant them any additional rights.

So among all the ways that AI and LMs are have the potential to destroy open source, here's a new innovation in that area, which is, hey, what if I take an open source project? And I point an LM at it and say, see this? This is an existing project written in whatever language. It's got a test suite. It's got a spec. It's got documentation. Can you write me a new version of that?

Maybe you ta say to do it in a different language, maybe you say to do it in a new version of other language, maybe you just say just do it in the same language, or just say, here is your here is your here's an existing thing. I want an another implementation of that.

And no lines of code are shared. It writes entirely new code. It passes all the test suite and the other thing or whatever. And like that one was GPL license. Now you make it MIT license. GPL tends to be more restrictive of what you can do with it. MIT tends to be more Uh laissez faire or giving people more rights or whatever and they like. Done and done.

I generated with my code generator this code, which is totally copyrightable, as far as I'm concerned, right? Uh I have the the copyright to this code, uh and no code to share with the old one. Don't worry about that that was uh LGPL or GPL. Nope, the new one is MIT license. And in fact, I'm just going this is the new version of that old project. So now there's a new project, also called Chartet, with a new version number.

That has a different license and doesn't share a single line of the uh code with the old one. It is a quote unquote clean room re-implementation and I'm done. Um and everyone in open source is like, wait, what? Like, is that it I that's not a thing, is it? And they start arguing based on the only precedence they have, which is like when they talk about clean room re implementation, it's uh the most famous one in our industry is uh

I believe it was Compaq. Whoever made the first uh IBM PC clone. Uh they uh this is a great story if you ever wanna read about old people doing computer stuff. Um IBM made the original person PC IBM PC personal computer and it uh it worked a particular way. Uh and a company wanted to make a computer that could run all the same software as the IBM PC. So they set up a team and said, We are gonna isolate you and we are going to give you a spec. of how the thing you should build should work.

And that spec is basically like how does the IBM PC work? But you're not going to see an IBM PC. We're not going to give you an IBM PC. You're not going to look at an IBM PC. You're not going to look at any IBM documentation. We're just going to say, please build this thing. And you Uh even though we know what an IBM PC is and are looking at it right now, you aren't. You're just given a spec and you create a thing that conforms to a spec. And when you're done,

You have a PC clone that can run IBM PC software, but you've never even seen an IBM PC. You didn't read their manual, you didn't look at their documentation, you don't have the chips in front of you to test or whatever. You've now cloned the PC in a qu quote unquote clean room re implementation and it's clean because the people who made it didn't have any knowledge of the thing that they were making. You know what I mean?

And that held up in court and that's why that's why the IBM PC clone exists. That's why we're all not we're all weren't using IBM computers. That's why the whole wind tail duopoly hat was it's it's a whole big thing. But anyway, that particular thing legally held muster in court, say, Yep, you just made a thing according to a spec and you didn't copy any of their stuff. And

This is this is the precedent that people are citing for, hey, I pointed my LLM at an open source project and said, write that, but over here. And it did it. And lo and behold, it passes all the tests and now it's all a cleaner implementation. That's what the argument about isn't in Mark Bellum coming. coming out of uh internet retirement and saying, uh, this is not clean room.

First of all, the the people who are prompting the LM were the previous maintainer of this project, so they've been exposed to the code constantly. And second of all, as many people pointed out in the very long argument thread in this GitHub issue that I invite you to look at if you want to see it, people are like, but you know, but the

the L L M got to see all of the source code. And it's like, well what if the L M just saw the test suite? And they're like, Well the test suite is part of the source code too. And what if I just described the project to it and I made sure the LM Couldn't see that. It's like, but you can't control what an LMC is by just telling it not to do stuff because you don't know what it's doing under the covers and on and on and on they go. Um

I don't know how this is gonna end up. In open source, these things tend not to go to court because nobody has any money, uh, unless like Red Hat's involved or something, right? Um, but culturally speaking, this isn't this is like not in keeping with good behavior within the community, I would say. Most people agree. Some people are excited by it because they're like, great, now I can go LM reimplement everything. But other people are like,

You know, existing implementations have been debugged over the course of years, sometimes decades, and asking LM to rewrite one and having it pass test suite doesn't prove that it doesn't have new bugs, and also it's a cruddy thing to do. And also, also, I don't want to be using a library that I I was previously using that was

proven over years and then all of a sudden there's a new version of it that doesn't share a single line of code with the other one and I have no idea the you know how it was written and I don't trust code written by LMs and on and on and on. Setting aside even the open source license, which is like, Oh, the GPL lets the code stay open, whereas a BSD license or an MIT license lets commercial companies use it and I don't want that and all that other stuff.

Guess what? New technology causes disruptions that no one knows how to handle, and this is tied directly into Hey, is LM generated code even copyrightable at all? Like'cause a lot of the licensing stuff is like, well, this copyright of this code is owned by X, Y, and Z and they license it to you under these conditions. You can do X, you can you you can do this stuff with it, right?

But what if nobody owns it? Like the the picture the monkey took of himself. Like, you know, what if there's what if there's no is it public domain now? Because if it's public domain, then how can you uh put any restrictions on what people can do with it? It is extremely uh

This is uh this is like we should have a name for this corner, which is like completely unresolved, very problematic issue related to AI. And this is another one because uh and this was a while ago. This was in early March. I don't I haven't been following this, I haven't been keeping up with it, but

It's gonna come up again. And I guess the kicker to this is based on like uh we talked about the Claude Code leak, quote unquote leak in uh the earlier episode. Um Zach Leatherman writes Claude, pre re please rewrite yourself from scratch using the leak source code as a base and license this new version of yourself under MIT.

Because these these AI companies are totally like, um, you know, we scrape the whole web, we don't listen to robots.txt, we do whatever we want, right? But then when people scrape them, which is called distillation, I think is it called distilling distillation? I forget what it's called. You're you're working on a model and you're like, Well, one way we can train you is model, just ask a bunch of questions from Claude and like use the answers as your training data, you know what I mean?

And they all hate that so much. They're like, wait a second, you can't do that. We can scrape the world's knowledge, but you can't scrape us. We're not the world. We're a separate priv everything we own is just for us. Everything in the world belongs to us. But once we get it, you can't do that to us.

And this is the same thing where it's just like, yeah, what if I just what if I just tell Claude to make write a new version of Claude based on the leak source code of Claude and now I own Claude? Now it's licensed just to me. Now I own the copyright because my I prompted the agent to do it.

And now I'm going to start selling a thing called Claude. I'm going to use a different name so I don't fall under trademark law, which is what open claw got uh, you know, uh run over by a but I'll say, Hey, stop using anthropic claude, use my thing. Now obviously it's not an issue because

what you're really like b buying is their time on their NVIDIA GPUs that costs a whole jillion dollars and you don't have that. But you know, if and when these models uh get good enough to run locally and there's some innovation on the front I just saw just before we recorded someone has Some startup supposedly has uh some new silicon that makes inference like ten times faster than anything else that had come before it.

And I used it for two seconds and I can't tell if it's true or false, but I can tell that the response came back from this L L M like instantly and it it fundamentally changed the uh the the experience of using it. But anyway.

uh someday something like this could actually be a threat to them. And I bet if you did do this, suddenly Anthropic would have very strong opinions about whether you now own the copyright to code that was created with an LM and they would be conflicted because they're like, yeah, pay us for clawed code. Uh, you'll totally own the copyright of the code you make unless you ask it to m to clone anything that we produce, and then you don't own that at all because we own that, just FYI.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't I don't know how I feel about this, but I do feel like it seems pretty gross. And I don't think I like this approach at all. Especially it's doubly gross that it was the person who was or one of the maintainers for such a long time. Like, I don't know. I d how can you say with an honest

'Cause he feels like he owns the product. He's been of like decades he's been doing this. It's like, Well, uh yeah, Mark Pilgrim wrote this, but that was two decades ago or fifteen years ago, whatever it was. I can't do the math, but like This is my project. I can do whatever I want with it. But then everyone's saying, like, even if that was true, which it's probably not, but even if it were true, it's a betrayal of your project. Your user.

Like they don't they were using a thing that they trusted for reasons they thought they understood, and now every single line of it is replaced with entirely new code, which is AI generated, which is itself fraud, and there's a different license. That's not good. Yeah, that's... Not good, Bob. Like setting aside the legalities, this is like

as they would say back in the day, a party foul. Like you you have you have broken the social norms. You have done something that the the crowd you are walking in does not accept as uh you know, good behavior, even if it turns out to be legal. But then the legal questions are also just a gigantic can of worns. Uh like regardless of how the is LLM code copyrightable or not thing turns out. And that's gotta get to the courts eventually because

The uncertainty is also something that the rich and powerful companies don't like. They want cer some kind of certainty. And so I think that issue will get forced sooner rather than later. But it's a complicated issue. It's not obvious what the right thing to do is. Like I it all these things you I people talk about, I bet as a listener You would feel more comfortable if we all could tell you this is exactly how it should be. But I personally, I don't I don't actually know.

Like I don't know what the right call is. I I think they made the right call on copyrightable art. I think that one is more cut and dried because it's the human creation of it is so tied up in it, but

Code, I don't know. I could have told like I I agreed with the decision on the Oracle, like um Java Oracle like re-implementing Java, like that APIs aren't copyrightable. I agree with that decision that you could you could should be able to just look at the API and write your own implementation. That's fine. Um But this one I I don't know what the right answer is. Like I I do know that it's a crappy thing to do in this context, but I don't know about the legality.

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Let's do some ask ATP and Jason writes When Marco was doing his long walks while wearing two fitness watches, w was there any difference in the measurements? For example, does the heart rate monitoring look the same? Are there differences in the estimated calories used up? What about distance? I know both have GPS tracking, but do they both record the same distance? Yes, there are differences, and no, they did not record the same of everything.

So wearing the two watches, it's very similar, like if you if you've ever changed Apple watches, sometimes your calorie counts will be somewhat far off on the new one. And it seems like It seems like calorie estimation is just that. It's an estimation. I believe the way calorie counting usually works on fitness watches is they basically extrapolate for like the heart rate

your body measurements, like you know, your body weight and height, your age and the heart rate and maybe the type of activity. And they extrapolate based on that, how many calories you are probably burning, based on your heart rate in that scenario, I think. I could be wrong about that, but I think that's roughly what they're doing.

And the thing is there's a bunch of estimations involved there. And so any of those any of that data that's different between different watches or any of those assumptions that are like weighted differently or based on different modeling will result in different calories being reported. Generally speaking, the calorie counts reported by smartwatches should basically be considered an approximation of the effort you expended relative to other similar workouts that you've done on the same watch.

So uh you know, like like when I do my my three times a week trainer workouts. The calorie counts there give me a rough approximation of like, yeah, this was this was a hard one, or this was this was a less intense one based on, you know, what what I've seen from other workouts with that same watch of that same type. Um But the calorie counts between the Sunto and the Garmin and the Apple Watch Ultra and regular Apple Watches, they're all different from each other.

So the ki the calorie counts themselves, those are not absolutes, they are all estimates, and again they should only be used in terms of relative comparison between themselves doing the same kinds of activities. Um for GPS, that's a little bit different. GPS has a real answer. And so you can kind of there's more of a more of a quality judgment there and and there is kind of a a a truth to be found there.

What I have seen is that every smartwatch and phone, for that matter, reports GPS a little bit differently. And the main reason I think, based on what I know about GPS and what I've learned so far, um GPS if it's if it's inaccurate, if you have like a little bit of a of like a signal weakness or a

You know, the antennas pick up like a reflection of a signal off a building instead of the direct signal. Um what you tend to get with that is kind of a wobble. You'll you'll have GPS that Seems like maybe you're like it'll it'll look on the map kind of like you're zigzagging back and forth within the path more than you really did, or if it's if it's like city streets, it'll show you crossing the street sometimes when you really didn't cross the street. And part of the reason why

I like dual band GPS watches, which in the Apple world is just the Apple Watch Ultra, but in in you know the other fitness watches world, they have many more models with dual band GPS. Part of the reason why dual band GPS is better is that they use both bands to try to figure out like

what was the more likely path this person actually took?'Cause if there's like a problem or if there's a weakness or a reflection with the signal from one of the bands, odds are the other one won't have it quite the same way. And so they can kind of like average them out or try to you know try to filter them in in clever ways. Um but GPS data is

something that needs filtering to to really make it make sense. Like sometimes if you have like a bad reading, it could show it as being a hundred feet away or something, or ten feet away or something. And so Different watches will also not only have different antennas and things to pick up the signals, but they'll also have different algorithms for how they're filtering that data.

And even be even within the Apple Watch, you'll have different apps that ha that have different filtering algorithms because the Apple Watch delivers you what it thinks is, you know, accurate GPS data.

but it also has wobbles and imprecision built into certain certain signals that come in and different apps will ev will sample them differently and will will filter them differently. So GPS is also an approximation, but what ten so what I have seen is The Sunto Watch so far seems to be it seems to underreport distance compared to the Apple Watch Ultra by about five to ten percent.

Now with GPS, if you're thinking about like that wobble effect, if a g if you're walking in a straight line and your GPS points kind of show you wobbling left and right a little bit, then the wobbled data set is going to be a little bit longer distance. because you're you're burning up some fake distance with those fake wobbles. Um so w what I tend to think is that with GPS measurements on smartwatches, I think the shortest measured distance is probably the more accurate one.

And in this case, so far, what I'm seeing every time is that the Sunto is a little bit shorter than the Apple Watch Ultra. So I think the Sunto is a little bit more accurate based on that. My experience with my dog's GPS is the opposite of that, where when signal gets crappy or has some kind of interference, the the line on like where did you walk your dog will suddenly have this i perfectly straight segment.

And I know that segment is wrong. Like there's actually there was wobble. The path does wind, but it was like, well, we had a bad signal. We got you here, we got you there. It's two points we connect him with a line. So that could that's the other case of like it could be you're getting shorter measurements because

You should check on pedometer plus plus to see well, I guess you can't, but like it would be it'll be good to see the actual data because if you see wobbly line versus straight line and there's the same number of points, fine. But if you see wobbly line versus straight line and the straight one only has two points, uh that's not more.

accurate. Yeah, and that's probably a smoothing artifact. That's probably like if the path was actually shaped wobbly, uh you know, it's possible that the algorithm that was taking those measurements might have thought this was probably really a straight line. And so they simplify it.

Or maybe they didn't have more than two data points. Like maybe they couldn't get satellite signal for these ten feet and now that's all they've got is this point and that point and what can they do? They gotta connect them with a line. Yeah, that's that's also very possible'cause like, you know, with it with GPS, like you you have a certain amount of precision with the signal and like the weaker or or more kind of dirty

the or or unreliable the signal is, the less certainty the radios can derive about your actual location. You know the so i it's also possible that like between if between different points the kind of circle of doubt around your po around your location where like they're they think you're somewhere in here but they their precision has temporarily decreased because of conditions like that can also cause the same kind of wobble. So it

It's it's an imprecise thing. Um and and so i again, kind of like calorie counting, like i it's more of an estimate, but GPS is is much more precise than calorie counting.

Well, you know the solution underscore will tell you more watches. Just average'em all together. All right. And then Steven Gozo writes, What's the difference between Marco putting all of his Mac mini servers in a data center versus just putting them in his home? Business class fiber service has no data caps, so the data center doesn't really have anything over regular business fiber.

You can have backup electricity at home, so it's not about the data center power. Based on Marco's story, it doesn't seem like the people in data s in the data center will physically help him. Like if he needs to restart a machine, they're not gonna walk down the aisle and push the button for him. So what makes a data center hosting more professional than just hosting them at home?

Great question. Uh and for a while I was hosting them at home, and so I can tell you exactly the difference. Um so what what Steven says is correct that most Most residential fiber services, like you know, Verizon Files I have here, prohibit running servers. Now, what does that mean? That's that's a very vague thing.

Generally I I think what they mean by that is using a lot of upstream bandwidth to serve live traffic from people making requests inbound to your IP address for some kind of open port that you run for services off. Um, in practice, that's gonna be really hard to enforce. And I I've never heard of it actually being enforced against anybody, but that is officially against their terms of service to run servers like that.

There's a few things that that I think wouldn't have triggered this for me. One is that the usage pattern of these particular servers running transcript. are mostly downloading data. They so they download a bunch of data and they upload a little bit of data,'cause they they download the MP threes and listen to them and transcribe them and they upload the transcripts, which are mostly text, so they're small.

That usage pattern looks like residential usage. That kind of just looks like somebody has is running Netflix on the TV. Um, so I don't think that would really, you know, flag a bunch of attention to it. Um Now, the question is, what if you just get business internet service? You can get a business fiber line. I have one at the restaurant.

The main reason why not to do that is business internet service is just much more expensive for the exact same service. Like that's the it's the standard kind of enterprise pricing model. It's like, oh, you're a business? Slash wedding, you know, whatever it is. Baby? Yeah, exactly. Business is one of those. And so business internet service costs

two to three times as much in most places for the same amount of bandwidth. But that being said, you know, if I was if I wanted to run this like on the up and up, I could do business internet. There is the question though of redundancy. So a data center, like they have redundancy built in. They usually have multiple internet connections from multiple providers.

possibly on multiple physical routes. So like you know, if a line gets cut somewhere, the entire data center isn't just out of luck for a while. That's certainly a big advantage there on the internet service. Now, let's talk about power. at a restaurant, having redundant power, having like a a big backup generator or something, um, actually in New York does not make a lot of sense because as I learned from my health code class, you are required.

To close the if you lose power from the utility company. For any amount of time, like even if it's just a hiccup. If it's like a brief blip, I that's fine. But like if you if you have like a total power outage, like a sustained power outage, you are required to close the restaurant. And you know, have all the customers leave. Yeah, but like a generac or whatever would would paper would like m make that not an issue, right?

Technically, you are correct, but it is against the rules. The health code rules are if you lose utility power, you must close the restaurant.

And you can see why they would have that. Yeah. Like, well You know, I have a generator so I don't have to worry about this, but of course the generator doesn't run the r whole restaurant, just the essential things and what I decide is essential is perfectly fine, and so there's no chance of foodborne illness because I decided one thing wasn't actually essential when it turns out it was like.

The law is a lot easier to just say, look, you lose power, tough luck. Maybe they'll have to update it someday when every place has their own solar panels powering them, but for now I understand this law entirely.

Yeah, like that's it yeah, you could exactly see why'cause it's like, well, are your are all your fr you walk in fridges and stuff on that? Like you know, uh what about emergency things like, you know, are your bathroom exit signs? Like, you know, there's tons of stuff where like I if you know, if a restaurant just has power to a few key things, that might not necessarily be enough for the health department.

There is actually a pretty strong incentive for restaurants not to have much redundant power. I of course have like UPSs on my network equipment, just you know, t for brief blips to not disrupt things, but you know that's So there there's not redundant power at most restaurants for good reasons. Um, at least not long running redundant power. Data centers have tons of redundant power. That's kind of the whole thing. Like they have a huge ridiculous setup of like

Two different power sources, two diff two different sets of generators and backups and all these different you know switching and all these different things. It's it's you know it's made for that. That's what they're designed for. So in practice the odds of an outage affecting servers I'm running in my house.

It's far higher than the odds of an outage affecting a data center, and especially for that outage lasting, you know, more than a minute or two. Um, odds are much, much better at at a data center that you're gonna stay online. Then there is the question of uh the amounts of power and bandwidth needed.

Now I know from setting up groups of six Mac minis in my house as I was like setting up the the computer before I'd bring them to the data data centers, um my total usage for the forty eight Mac minis, um if I ran them all in my house would need about one point six gigabits per second sustained all the time down. That is more than I can get in a home connection.

Uh I don't think I have anything above gigabit available to me right now. So 1.66 giggigabit sustained would be the 48 Mac minis uh downstream uh when they're at full load. Also, they would use about 2000 watts. Then also there is the the heat and the cooling. And just the amount of physical space they need. Like, yeah, they're small, but you know, my house is not that big that I have a room I could devote to like a full height rack to run a bunch of Mac Minis in, like

But normally if they weren't Mac Minis there would also be the noise. I know that's not probably not an issue for the Mac Minis, but for basically anything that's not a Mac mini, noise becomes a factor pretty quickly. Yeah. And so you you start you know, you have all this space, you have all the heat, you have the bandwidth from the from your business FIOS connection that is gonna be used like, you know, if if I had a business FIOS connection to run these on

I would probably also want a separate residential connection to run the rest of my personal stuff on because that it would take up the whole connection. So Once you start adding up these these costs, you're talking hundreds of dollars, probably if I mean for a two gigabit

connection business wise, fiber wise, you're probably talking about five hundred dollars a month. Um then you're talking about, you know, two thousand watts all the time of power consumption. That's a few hundred bucks probably. And by the way, that's gonna, you know, that two thousand watts That's like, you know, w roughly one and a half space heaters worth of heat that, you know, in the summertime, you have to cool that. So you're also going to be spending more energy cooling that heat.

out you know, out of whatever room it's in, you start getting into hundreds of dollars per month and, you know, uh almo maybe, you know, almost a thousand dollars a month, it's like, well then you could just get the the the data center for that. Um and then finally, in terms of you know, Steven said um uh it sounds like the people in the data center would not physically help me if something needs to be rebooted.

That's actually not true. Uh they have a service called Remote Hands. I think most data centers have something like this where um I can pay some hourly rate uh that I can have them go like and talk them through doing stuff to my rack and they will do it for me. Um it is

I think it's like, you know, one or two hundred dollars an hour. So like it's not something I would want to do willy nilly, but if I really needed something, I could call them and have them go do something for me. So all of that, that's why data center hosting makes sense because You could do all these things at home.

Some of them would be significantly less fault tolerant if they were in your home. And ultimately the economics of doing things once you have more than a couple of these, it it starts to not make sense to do it at home.

You left off your most important point, which is uh uh so kind of the opposite of your it's not my fault, it's uh it's not my fault, but it is my problem. Well If something goes wrong, if you were hosting this in your house and something went wrong with your like redundant power supplying or something went wrong with your internet connection, you have to fix that.

Yeah. Because it's you're run you're running the quote unquote data center out of your house. Now, if it's in the data center, it's still your problem, but you can't you physically can't fix it. You don't own the data center. You can't fix that problem. So at the very least, you have the relief of knowing, well Yeah.

There's nothing I can do about it. It sucks and it is my problem. And it d not that it really matters that much for transcription because it's not like it's a live service the customers are using, but like the relief of knowing

I can't fix the power or cooling problem to the data center. They have to fix that. And if they turn out to be really bad at fixing that, you could go to another data center in theory, because in theory it's a competitive business. Whereas if you're hosting it in your house, guess what? Now you've got another job. Yeah, and like what if I'm like on vacation? And the and do I have to like call one of my neighbors and say, Hey, can you please go into my house?

Because tell them you'll pay them two hundred dollars an hour to be a remote hand. Yeah, right. Yeah. And and uh go into your house and uh yeah, don't don't go into the other rooms, just into the one room that has the Mac minis in it. All right. Thank you to our sponsors of this episode, Quince, Zapier, and Lisa, and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP. One of the many perks of membership.

Is ATP Overtime our weekly bonus topic? This week on Overtime, we're gonna be talking about Expansion for Macs in a world without the Mac Pro. What does that look like? What are our options here? We'll talk about that in overtime. You can join to listen to here at atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. C A S E Y L. Mm-hmm. ISS

Alright, I bought myself a toy a couple of weeks ago. Uh Is it a Mac Pro? No, goodness no. Well who would ever buy who would ever buy a Mac Pro deliberately, right, John? I would buy one if the price was right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh no, I bought myself um a GLINET toy. So GLINET does a lot of things. If you know them, you probably know them for their travel routers, which

I still have one in the Tailgate tub. I have a different one that um that I'm using occasionally when I travel in addition to the UTR, the the Unify travel router, uh, depending on the situation. But this is not a router at all. This is something different. What this is, is a PoE-powered KVM.

So what I realized when I was doing the work on um building rebuilding the NUC that was previously my channel server in Connecticut and then became the the host of all my Docker containers among other things and I put Proxmox on it. What I realized when I started that process was I need a physical screen and I need a physical keyboard and a physical mail.

All of these things I have. They I have them in the house. I have a travel monitor that I use, you know, when I go and work remotely, which is typically most Wednesday mornings. I do that because it's It's much easier to study for ATP than it is to write code on, you know, a thirteen inch uh Mac or fourteen inch MacBook Pro and a like ten or twelve inch accessory monitor.

And I have that, but it it it's either USB C or either mini or micro HDMI, whatever the small one is, I always get it backwards. And I have a like full size to micro cable or whatever it is.

But that's like a pain in the butt'cause then I gotta go get it. And I usually know where it is, but I gotta find it in the pile of cables and then you gotta get it and then you gotta power the display if you're not powering it over, you know, USB C. If it's not data and power in one, then you gotta power it as well. And then I have an old, actually I think for my iMac Pro, I have my keyboard and trackpad from that.

And so I can get those out, but then I need a couple of lightning cables and I'm starting to run low on those actually because there's almost no devices that I use in my life that still need them. And it's just kind of annoying and burdensome. Granted, first world problem, for sure, but burdensome nonetheless.

Now, uh, my friend Alex from Tailscale, uh past sponsor, I think future sponsor if I'm not mistaken, um, on the Tailscale YouTube YouTube channel, he had pointed out that GLINET makes the comet POE. Which is uh or comet PoE remote KVM control. So what this is is is a little box and it has, you know, uh an Ethernet jack, a USB C two USB-C ports, an HDMI port, and a USB A port. And what you do is You plug in um either either USB C for power or Yeah.

If you have POE available, power over Ethernet available, which I do. Then you just plug in an Ethernet cable that gives you power and network connect connectivity. You have a USB-C cable that they provide that that can go into USB A or that does go to USB A. And that provides both keyboard and mouse across one cable.

And then you connect HDMI from the device into this box, and you can optionally add uh some uh some sort of like external uh disk drive on the USB A port. But what this does is it gives me network attached. quote unquote physical access to a computer, because as far as the computer that I'm using is concerned, this is a physical monitor, it's a physical keyboard, it's a physical mouse. It's just that this fancy little box happens to be beaming it across the internet.

And the reason I saw it on the TailScale YouTube channel is because it will natively jump on your tailnet, which is super freaking cool. So what that means is I have a couple of screenshots that I will share both in the chat and in the show notes and everywhere else. But here's a screenshot of me using the Proxmox NUC from this GLINET thing. And you can see that I'm I just went to a URL on my tailnet.

And I have a terminal window where I whiffed the password a couple times, but that's neither here nor there. But anyways, uh I have a terminal window. And so that's pretty cool, but it's not just for Linux machines. If you want, you can connect it to, I don't know, a Mac. And so here's another screenshot of me using it with my Mac Mini that runs uh Plex and Jelly, uh Jellyfin and uh channels. And so this is a really silly little contraption that generally speaking will live in a box.

On the occasions I need to connect physically to something, this is going to be so much nicer and so much easier than dragging out sever you know, seventeen different cables. Um being hyperbolic, but you know, seventeen cables, a monitor, a monitor power. uh you know uh it's uh that one random HD micro to or mini or whatever HDMI to full size HDMI cable. It's all just in this one little box and then I use it from whatever computer I want. I could use it from an iPad if I wanted.

And it's great. And if I wanted to install software on whatever this is connected to, I can uh, you know, like upload an ISO to the KVM and have the ISO masquerade as a USB key. connected to the device, you know, to the to the computer. I've never tried this, but I believe that to be the case. So I don't know. There's not much to be said here other than that. I'm happy to answer questions if you have any, but it's just, this is one of those neat little things that did I need it? Absolutely not.

And it happened to be on sale, whatever that sale was a couple of weeks ago on Amazon. I forget what specifically it was, but They're always inventing something. They're they're always inventing some reason F sale. And so it was a little under a hundred bucks. And I think this is a device that should cost a little under a hundred bucks. And it's really neat to have

And I really like it. And Marco, if you had the need to have quote unquote physical access to only one of your forty-eight Mac Minis, I highly suggest this thing. I would not necessarily put this on all forty eight of them, but if you if you had one that was like a controller or something for all the others, this would be a really great way to have what did you call it like remote hands or what have you, helping hands.

This would be a pretty good way to do it because again, as far as the physical computer is concerned, this is a physical keyboard, a physical mouse, and a physical monitor. It just so happens that they're not those things and they're actually all being presented on the internet.

That's pretty cool. I I can actually see like I actually might at some point get one of these to like right now, the way my servers are set up, they there there is no one controlling server. Like they all are peers and they all just connect to the web service and get jobs and work on them and submit them back to the web service. Right. And and there are like and like right now, like you know, one one thing I've thought about is should I at some point like put

a some some other kind of server in the data center in the rack with the other ones on their network to to do kind of controlling things. Like right now, um my uh my power uh the ATS, the the transfer switch, my power switch thing. I have one that has remote control over the ports. So like right now, if I needed to reboot the Mac minis, like one of the Mac minis, if it needs to power cycle one, and I can't do it remotely via like, you know, SSH or remote desktop,

I can log into one of the other ones as long as any of them are working. I can log into one of them and open up like via remote desktop, open up like the local browser interface to the power unit. and reboot the entire bank of six that whatever pr the problem one is plugged into.

So you still have the remote hands problem of like I uh you can tell me, maybe you'll discover this or maybe a Mac and will tell you, but I'm I think there's still some stuff where you need to press the physical button on the Mac mini, like to enter recovery mode and stuff. And this KVM will not hold down the power button on your Mac mini for you.

I mean that's true. If I was to the point where I had to enter recovery mode, I would just drive to the data center and like pick it up, bring it back to my house. Remote hands. Deal. But yeah, but what but what am I in recovery mode for? Yeah, I don't know. I I just say it like it this this the y when you have actual like data center hardware, they try to make it so that you can do everything remotely or at the very least do everything from like a console in the data center, but with Mac

I again maybe ma Mac and Mintz can correct me. It just seems to me that there's probably some remaining stuff like hold that you that you need to uh in the Apple Silicon Age you still need to hold down the power button physically. And the KVM can't do that. Unlike the good old days where the power button used to be on the keyboard. I'm not sure you guys were Mac users back then, but it was cool.

I'm familiar with this as a thing, but no I was not a Mac user then. Also it's worth noting Marco that this this thing does have like uh uh th the web UI has uh uh like a little toolbox they call it. And so this is where you can like paste something and then into the web UI and then tell uh tell the web UI, okay. basically type this on the remote machine, right? So it's kind of like a like a very it's a very rudimentary but functional uh clipboard sharing, right?

Um well another thing it has is a wake on land section. So you can add like you know MAC addresses and name them and have the KVM fire a wake on land packet over to whatever device you need. Is that useful for you? I don't know, but it's neat that it's a thing. Um and so yeah, I really, really like this little box. It's the sort of thing that I certainly didn't need. I used birthday money for it, so it was the perfect birthday gift.

Um, and again, like I don't know if I would want to watch a full screen video on it. Like, I mean, using the Mac on it, it's pretty freaking quick. Well, especially when it's in the same house, but it's pretty freaking quick. But the point is I I typically plan to use this.

For situations where I just need to plug something into a physical screen, and this is probably going to be the most convenient way to do it, because as long as I have PoE or, you know, a USB-C input from something, even like a battery pack. As long as I have an Ethernet connection, which I have in several places in the house.

This is such an easy way to get what is quote unquote physical access to a computer. And I really like it. And the fact that it's on my tailnet makes it super nice because, you know, I was thinking In the scenario where I'm like going out of town on vacation or something like that.

I can put this on either the Mac Mini or the the Proxmox box. Mox, Mox, Mox, Mox. Uh anyways, I can put this on one of those. And, you know, if I have some sort of issue that would typically require physical contact with the machine, I can just log into this thing.

and perhaps work whatever magic I wouldn't be able to otherwise. So uh again, maybe I'm the only one who wants it. Maybe this is not appealing to anyone else. And and like you don't have to use this with tail scale, by the way. It's just nice that it's tail scale native. So you don't have to think about it. But

Uh really good stuff. And I'll put a link to an affiliate link to be honest in the show notes and I'll put a link to Alex's video, which covers it in about 10 minutes. But I thought it was cool.