v36 - Hedgelord

I'm coming at you hot with version 36 of Breaking Change. This show does not have a schedule, but we are nevertheless ahead of it. That is to say... It's only been like 10 days since the last three-hour slog that I have put in front of you as an impediment to thinking real thoughts and being at peace with yourself. Maybe you should start a podcast. If you do, let me know where to find it. Version 36, today's breaking change is Hedgelord.

I've become a hedgelord. And what is that? Well, we'll probably cover it, is my guess. Most of it is actually, this is a life update heavy version of the podcast. We've got some interesting news to talk about. And it's not as depressing as usual, which is nice. But yeah, I've got... I've got shit going down and I'm here to talk about it on the program because I don't have a strong sense of propriety or shame. So.

First things first, this is really important news to anyone in the Apple ecosystem who owns a lot of Apple devices, is I've owned every iteration of Apple's HomePod and I've owned too many of each of them. And they're mediocre products. I mean, if you listen to a lot of music in the house, it's nice to have them. They're not the best speakers you can get, but they are increasingly the most convenient if you're always using the Apple stuff to broadcast it using AirPlay and whatnot.

Siri integration is nice if Siri is your assistant of choice or circumstance. She's always listening. It's always listening. Pronouns. One thing, though, about HomePods in particular that is a little bit frustrating is that the beautiful mesh... you know that wraps them it's multiple levels of of netting essentially and they are carefully machined to to twist and overlap so that you get this like three-dimensional effect almost like you're looking inside of a

I don't know, like a honeycomb or something. It's meant to be evocative of something in nature while simultaneously being maybe the least natural thing on Earth. And we have HomePod minis all throughout the house. They're 99 bucks, you know, throw one in every room. That means you've basically got the Star Trek assistant, just a drunk, stupid version of it. You know, like that you can just kind of computer.

do this and that and you don't have to hold up your mouse to your to your to your mouth to do that you can just say words uh we have two outdoors and and the home pod you will be shocked to learn is not outdoor rated One of the ones outdoors is in our Lanai area by the pool, and that sees like a little bit more interaction with the outer world. The other one is in our balcony, which, you know, just by virtue of elevation alone, there's less dirt, there's less...

bugs and stuff. And so that balcony one's been totally fine. But the Wendel and I downstairs has gotten increasingly dirty, and it just stopped responding at some point recently. And I thought, you know, I should go and give that a clean and then take a look at it and see if I can get to work. And I.

you know, consulted the internet about what the best way to do, you know, damp rag, very gently. If it's really dirty, you know, maybe mix in some warm water with some liquid laundry detergent and just go real gentle with it. And I went... as gentle as one could and still get any amount of dirt off. And I looked at the thing and I immediately realized that that net was just stretched.

You know, the netting was like, it's like sloughed, I think is the word. Sloughed is an unattractive word, but you can imagine what that would look like, right? You look at it afterwards, like this now looks just very sloppy. And so I kind of rubbed it a little bit more because I was like, well, now it's just whatever. It's already kind of fucked. And then that netting tore immediately without very much effort on my part. I am...

If you can't see, I'm a very strong man. So that could have been the problem. But I doubt that was it. I think it's just a weak ass product that was meant to be used by indoor cats. And so I just was like, you know, like there's multiple levels of netting because underneath that level of netting, I could see another level of netting. And so I peeled back the first layer. It's like when you get an onion, you know.

And you cut and you take off the outer layer of the onion. But there's still a little bit of residual gross onion skin on that first layer that is 90%.

edible onion bits there's this like you know cellulose of just like kind of the the brown outer onion or the red outer onion you're like well that's going to taste like paper or whatnot and it's not going to cook properly if I saute it and so you kind of like peel another layer of the onion off because it's not quite right and so that's what happened here i peeled out the outer uh you know now torn outer layer but the inner layer was still itself dirty and i just knew i'd have the same problem

And as I was peeling the outer layer, of course, that got sloughed a little bit. I was like, well, I mean, in for a penny, I'll just peel that one too. And so I peeled out the second layer. And then there was a third layer. And this one really didn't want to come off. It ripped easier in the middle portions of the HomePod than the others. But when I got to the top, it was as if it was like stitched in, you know, because there's this kind of hard top.

And ultimately, I'll tell you, I didn't take all of the netting off. I didn't get to the robotic core of the HomePod. I didn't, you know, it's how many licks does it take to get to the center of... mercury poisoning i guess depending on just i don't i don't know what i'm in i don't know if like you get chernobyl level radiation exposure from seeing the inside of a home pod

But one wonders where the intersection of liberal arts and technology with all this kind of floofy, you know, stitch craft. It's really just cross stitch with. like a weird R2-D2 in the middle. So here's where I landed. If you're looking at the video version of the podcast, I'll hold it far enough from the camera so that autofocus doesn't have to totally kick in again. But it still looks like a HomePod.

There's just one level of sheathing around it left. And it still doesn't work. So that's... Now I just have this... Like the top, because they had to cut it there, it sort of looks like... The hole in the knee of a ripped pair of jeans. And yeah, so now it's a conversation piece. Maybe I'll cut the cable and I'll just, you know, play. Play fetch with the neighbor's dog when he gets in my yard. That sounds like a good time to me. Another.

Let me know about your HomePod stories or your assistant stuff. You can write me podcast at Searles.co. I'm kind of curious at this point, the state of the... shitty home assistant world. Here we are in 2025. Apple was going to release new ones supposedly this year, but then they realized that Siri doesn't work and that all of their... Home smart products depended on Siri's working, so now they're likely delayed.

Look at me, I'm just like aggressively saying the name now and maybe it's setting it off and right behind me and these two other HomePods that are now conspiring because they are afraid for their lives because they see their compatriot here that has been just mutilated by this monster.

And I was like, you know what? Kind of weren't following my instructions anyway. And I tried the carrot. I kept buying you. I kept feeding you software updates. And that didn't work. So now it's time to try the stick.

scared straight, you know. It can be difficult to figure out how to motivate people. Oh, additionally, and this is one reason why I felt like it's possible that I'm going to die. As I got deeper into these layers, I have no way of knowing what my hands were experiencing because I was not wearing gloves for this operation. I have no way of knowing.

if what i was feeling on my hands was dirt and grime that had built up over several years of just like micro fine particles of like you know dirt that comes from the outside gets through the mesh pool enclosure into the lanai and then like wind and whatever, because hurricane force winds happen here sometimes, like got into the HomePod mesh, like if it was just dirt, like very fine particulates of dirt, or if it was some sort of carcinogen that was coming from the inside of the HomePod.

like an evil, like a sinful heart inside of the HomePod, and it's actually the message job to keep that sin inside of it. But in either case, it was almost as if I had just spent an hour... solving like a little puzzle or something made out of Owens Corning fiberglass insulation because like my hands were super itchy and got like rashed. So that's neat. I couldn't get the grime off my hands. I'll never be clean again. Thanks.

There's a thing that Becky and I do that I'm meaning to write a blog post about because it's unusual. You know, back in 2010, 2011, when agile software development was still cool and not some corporate bullshit. A bunch of people would write blog posts about how they were able to incorporate insights from agile workplace methodologies into the...

daily functioning of their home. You know, like I have a Kanban board set up for my family so that we can handle tasks like you know who's doing the laundry or like these like repeatable things that just have to happen and then we put them on the board and then the kids you know move them forward and so we track their things it's cute but whatever

You know, basically everything that anyone needs is just a to-do list with extra steps. And I played into that a little. Becky and I played with that idea a little bit when we were young and foolish.

But I've in general resisted the urge of just sort of systematizing my home life because I've done such a... Becky would laugh at me hearing that, like just saying that phrase in particular. But I mean to say... enforcing ritualistic social commitments at home like we always do this at this time we she would also laugh hearing that come to think of it i'm saying like i resisted the urge of having like some sort of stand-up meeting with my wife

You know, like we both live at home. We work at home. We have a lot of similar interests. We have a lot of overlapping needs and concerns. We depend on each other in different ways. And so like logistically coordinating any of that. before we just hopelessly interrupt each other constantly all day long and then the net effect is neither of us get anything done. You know, there's a balance to be struck in. You gotta strike the balance.

And I don't like dressing stuff up with more formality than necessary, especially if it shows up as like a recurring calendar event or at a particular time we always do this. And I'll try everything else until that's the only good option left. And so we landed on that. We do a thing called Connect Four every morning.

Every morning we get together, and now we've even dialed into, this is a seven days a week, every day at the same time, because every day is kind of the same, just smearing into the perpetual future of our existence. No matter where we are, this is how it goes. We take turns, alternate who starts each day. One of us will say then the three big things of...

What's my biggest feeling right now? So like what kind of person is checking in right now? Who's showing up in front of me? So where's their emotional headspace at? Second, what's my biggest goal for the day? Like, you know, assuming you can only get one big thing done each day, what's it going to be? What's the thing that you will not let go of today? Let go. Let go of today until you have accomplished this biggest thing.

The third is my biggest want slash need, you know, like what's something I desire today or a need that I have that I got to meet, right? Then we take past the paddle ball over to the other person. They give their three. feeling goal and need. And then finally, in a show of, you know, uh servant leadership or whatever selflessness to each other we each ask the other how can i support you today right and that's our opportunity to say you know hey i need help with this particular

uh photo shoot thing in the garage for this movement can you can you like do the camera for me and then i'll i'll say hey can you know do dinner a little bit earlier today because i got a flight in the morning and so we can wind down a little bit sooner that sort of thing um it works great

And it's been helpful. Of course, just like a standup meeting, though, you have to make sure you don't derail into a 30 minute long conversation about something else. And you got to make sure that like you don't. fill it with not just distraction but like emotional contagion and now it's like you're starting your day off with a really heavy loaded conversation and now no one's getting anything done you know so that's

It's a challenge. It's a skill. I think we're getting better at it. But one thing in particular that is tough is if it's at the same time every day and we're already kind of getting started, we've done our coffee, we've done, you know. email and and maybe gotten started on the the big task of the day and then we're checking in at 8 30 a.m we would often be a little late or had to bother the other one hey we're doing it or what you know and so i i actually

This is another HomePod story. I put the HomePods to good use. And I downloaded a chime from the internet as an MP3 file. And then I thought, okay, I know... This is Unix. I know this. If I take the MP3 and I put it into my Apple Music library, which is still a thing you can do, but you cannot do it from an iPhone or an iPad. It has to be a Mac.

or maybe Windows, you can take the MP3 and you can import it into your Apple Music player, just like it, you know, don't call it iTunes anymore. And then... And that took for me, that took a long fucking time. Drag drop didn't work. It wouldn't show up. It just wasn't there. I eventually found it. It had like the dreaded cloud icon with a slash through it. I pay for Apple music. And so I had to.

some combination of hidden menu items, a preference that had to be unchecked and checked in settings, and then right-click like... add to my library or upload to my library or something. All of those things had to happen. And then the little gremlins that live inside of iCloud, they had to go to work in the salt mines up there to get that MP3 onto my other devices. or visible on the other devices through the search tool. And of course you go to search.

and it's not enough to like just if you just type start searching something that's like an mp3 file that you own it won't show up because search defaults to a tab that says apple music which is only the apple music library you have to actually before you start typing you have to go and you have to click

your library and then your library you can find the chime so i find the chime and then i go into the the home app and this is also real dumb in the home app you can take all of the home pods in your house and create a scene you so you create a home kit scene where all the home pods participate if you get the wrong number of home pods or if you just do one home pod you like

you can't add another home pod later later you have to redo the whole thing with the audio setup so add all the home pods that you want making this chime you then set up I'm doing all this from memory, and I think I got it because it only took me all morning to figure this shit out. Then you say that you wanted to play audio or something like that. There's a play sound.

And then it'll let you search your music library. And that's the most cursed little modal dialogue pops up because now it's like some extension that's vended by Apple Music that the HomeKit thing is running via Catalyst, which is like a... you know, a wrapper around an iPad app. Eventually it pops up. If you find the thing, you can click the thing. And then you can tell it, you know, set a discrete volume. I want all of them to play it at 30%, 20% volume or whatever.

And then you hit go. And now you've created a scene. So you can test that scene. You can click the scene in HomeKit and it'll make the sound. It'll take a while because it's got to actually, first it buffers, it sends all the audio to all the HomePods. So if you... click it it might take 45 seconds and then they all play which is frustrating and then when that's done you can set up an automation in home kit oh and i know and so i set it up so if anyone is home then

At 8.30 a.m., play this chime, play the scene, which I know will play the chime. So this is the sort of game of dominoes that people can play to get what they want out of their HomeKit setup.

And it's not that the other assistants are that much easier. They're all pretty fucked. But you look at that, it's like, no wonder consumers are so quick to throw up their hands and be like, yes, I will just please. throw all of the hot dogs of AI in my face. That is much preferable to figuring out these terrible user experiences. So I did that. I set up the chime. I'm going to play the chime for you right now. I'm going to play the chime for you right now.

I believe the Family Mart convenience store in Japan, the chime that goes off every time somebody walks through the fucking door or walks out of the fucking door. So if you work at one of those places, you just hear that a lot. So that's the chime that plays, and it's just enough to get our attention and be like, all right, time to walk down, restock the shelves. Yeah, it's a good time. Let's see.

What? Oh, yeah, there's a life hack, I suppose. So so if you book a flight these days in the main cabin or higher, not one of like on a legacy carrier like Delta Southwest. American United, a COVID innovation was free cancellations. But then post-COVID, they were like, well, we still depend on...

uncancellable flights and stuff. When we charge extra for refundable flights, we need to have some sort of differentiation in our product line and spirit airlines and all of these like ultra low cost carriers that just include none of the frills. they've lowered the bottom. And so if we want to get price conscious consumers, we need to introduce an even worse than economy tier ticket.

So they introduced basic economy, right? And so basic economy, if you're Delta, for example, which is usually what I fly, you can't assign your seat. You board in zone 48. You're literally, you're after the... steerage gets loaded you're you're in the very back of the plane uh you know if they run out of seats that are adjacent to bathrooms they'll say oh we'll find another plane for you it's

It's a miserable experience, but it has that same price next to it, which is the same price or less than the Spirit Flight or the Frontier Flight from other discount carriers. And maybe it's just as bad of an experience. I don't know. I would not buy that. because you can't change or cancel those flights. Now, if you have any other fare, first of all, there's an FAA rule.

FAA? I don't know. There's a federal rule that says like any flight booked in the U.S. has to be allowed to be canceled for a cash refund, like a refunded to the original payment method way within 24 hours of booking. And that's great. If you're beyond that 24 hours, though, and your main cabin or higher, you can cancel anything typically and get, whether you booked with miles or dollars, refunded as either miles or a travel voucher at the carrier.

That is really nice because you know what happens a lot to flights is the prices go up and the prices go down. And in uncertain times, for example, I booked these flights to Japan in... the heady days of March, early March of this year, before all the tariff nonsense got serious, before like half the world decided, fuck America, we're never traveling there again. And so I...

I paid a ton of miles. I paid like 200,000 miles each way in two one-way legs of this trip for like a premium economy seat. And it was expensive. Don't get me wrong. But then I said, you know, like, here's my system. And this might be useful to you is because I live out of the things reminders app to do list dingus. Use whatever you like. uh for four weeks from then i said okay double check my itinerary to and back from japan and then book try try booking the exact same route

the same time, same route, usually same planes, right? If it's an acceptable one, it's on the same days. What does it matter? And then see what the prices are. And so a month after that, I checked or three weeks, I guess I checked. And it had gone from 200,000 miles to 170,000 miles. Now, if I go into my itinerary and I click the change button, it would let me change to that other flight.

And it would even say, oh, you're going to save 5,000 miles by changing to this flight, which is rich, right? So basically, instead of giving me the whole 30,000 in what they would charge some... tom dick and harry off the street i i the early bird who caught the worm the overpriced worm will get nearly a nearly a 5 000 mile spiff they'll happily keep your money so instead what you do is

You book the second flight, you get it all configured how you want, verify you got it, and then it'll actually let you double book, which at Delta, I was surprised by. So you can book yourself as the passenger on multiple flights flying simultaneously and their system doesn't know how to stop you. And then go back to the flight that you don't want anymore. Cancel that and then get those miles.

refunded and miles at Delta never expire. So, so, so it just becomes yet another chore that I have to do. Talk about something that AI agent should be able to do by the way. Uh, and I did it again just a week ago. And it was not 170. It was more like 140 to 150,000. I was like, great. This is in addition to strip clubs being empty throughout South Florida. The fact that prices for international flights are going down so quickly is concerning.

But anyway, I went through, it's just like tax loss harvesting or whatever, right? Like I, I booked, rebooked again a second time and I took my winnings and I canceled the original flights. And so now I had like a pretty big miles balance. that was just left over enough for a whole third fight uh so it's it's a whole like process just like everything with travel it's it I feel like the more you know about how to travel efficiently and frugally, the more of a mental tax you pay.

because you have to then make an affirmative decision i'm just going to let myself pay more for the sake of being able to have a pleasant life and not be at my computer with 50 tabs open min maxing every single interaction and thing that i do with every single booking and that's like it's a thing i could could do but one of my least favorite decision points is am i going to just allow myself to pay more for the same or worse

serve as when I could put in some effort and be a better steward of my money. treat future me to a better experience by putting in some work now. And I hate having to make that choice. I'd rather just, you know. This is why I really like consistent pricing. You're talking about Apple products. I really like that they will keep the prices the same for the life of the product because then I know if I buy it on day one, I'm not going to regret three months from now when it's half the price. Or...

time my purchase and worry it's going to be double the price. So, you know, I wanted to share that because all of my work was for naught because it turns out.

i i'm i'm going back to japan earlier uh so let's talk about hedging hedging your bets um i've been talking to you

to you specifically, but also on this program, about wanting to buy a condo in Japan. And it all ties back to my personal life mission of why I love that country and that culture. But it's also me and Becky, you know, it scratches an itch and is a different way to live life. And, you know, she loves.

the health and longevity of the diet and the lifestyle and the walkability. And of course, you know, we both have some of our favorite products can only be purchased over there. And so spending some amount of time there is just a great, you know.

It's sort of like, why do people like seasons? They like seasons because they punctuate the passage of time so that we create more memories. Whereas like down in Florida, a risk here is... years will go by and just a smear of like how long has this been i don't know right and you have to come up with your own memorable moments and watershed moments too

to mark the passage of time and maybe that's you know you go to a special party every year and you take pictures and you and you commemorate stuff well another way to do that is like you know you really like shake the snow globe and you just go to the other side of the world every every so often

And you experience new things and see new people. And it's just a big drastic context switch. That's enough of a shock to the system that it makes your life feel like it's longer. And it pushes you out of your comfort zone, which is a great way to, you know. foster and instill growth as a human. But for me, the motivating force behind why Japan specifically has always been a couple of things. Like one, I really want to

The degree of Western hegemony and cultural influence in Japan is really depressing. When every pitch man for a car on a Japanese TV commercial is a washed up American movie star.

uh tommy lee jones for for boss coffee or nick cage for subaru and those are seen as like you know oh yeah this is great this is a slam dunk you know the whole movie lost in translation is a microcosm of this And when every single makeup ad is Natalie Portman or all these Western famous faces and the ideal of beauty, it shifts away from people that look like...

Japanese people in Japan and towards Americans. And then you layer on, if you ever read the book Embracing Defeat, about the post-war reconstruction effort. And the MacArthur's kind of like management of the government. And it is hard to really, really engage in a cross-cultural way in Japan without getting the sense of like...

They think we are they think too much about us. Too much of the Japanese psyche is wrapped up in its relation to the West. And and, you know, I may have told this story before.

One of when I was an intern in Hikone City in Japan in 2005, they had a sister city relationship with Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is. Right near where I went to high school in Saline. And every year for a couple of weeks, they would send all their eighth graders. I think like a lot of their eighth grade class.

to Ann Arbor for a two week or so exchange. The kids would stay with a family that volunteered in Ann Arbor and they would go to the Ann Arbor public schools and they would get to see what school in America was like. I don't know if they still do it. And I was the city white guy intern, where my job was to be a white guy, and I nailed that role.

My job that day was to give a little presentation, allay any concerns and fears. These are kids who had never traveled internationally, answer any questions, and just generally get them excited for the trip. And I remember having a pull-aside with this one kid who came up after me, after I spoke, and at the end of the event, he...

He said to me, he told a story about how his favorite thing in the world was Star Trek. He seemed like a really nerdy kid. And I was immediately looking at him being like the... middle school boys are mean as shit and they will eat you for lunch child and i was like this poor he's gonna have a rude awakening

And he told me some of his favorite things about Ann Arbor. He knew facts about Ann Arbor that, of course, I didn't know. And, you know, like the city, I don't know, mascot or bird or whatever, like all these things. different products and i was like okay that's amazing yeah that's like yeah like you should definitely go see that and then he replied to me he's like what do kids in ann arbor think about hikone and

I was like, dude, yes, there is a sign. If you go up, I think it was like Ann Arbor, Selene Road. There is a sign as you enter the city that lists all of their sister city relationships. There's like eight around the world or whatever. And there is a sign. It does say Hikone on it. But how many people have read it and noticed it? Like, nobody, none of these fucking kids know what Hikone is. Like, none of them know about Shiga Prefecture, which is the sister state.

prefecture to michigan like none of them have ever thought about you at all and to the degree that they have like you know southeastern michigan being like you know united auto worker you know like uh Most impressions just in pop culture in southeastern Michigan through the 2000s was mostly rooted in fear about Japanese automakers and the economy.

and blaming it for the you know decimation of of the the domestic auto makes and the factories in in the area so it's like not i wouldn't say outwardly racist You know, because there is a good amount of exchange. Like you go to Detroit airport and the signs are only in English and Japanese because like the whole supply chain is all globalized now and entangled. But like.

How do you tell a wide eyed, excited kid who is so, so much of his self concept depends on the validation of a country that best case. doesn't think about him at all, and worst case, harbors prejudice against him for stuff that has nothing to do with anything. It's not like Shiga had anything in the auto industry even, really.

I was looking at that kid and that was the moment I was 20 years old. And that was the moment where I was like, my job here is to push the ball a little bit. My job here is to. change the conversation, use my white guy privilege as an outsider to, you know, and by white guy privilege, I also mean like somebody who plays the part, right? Like... I'm a confident guy. I, I, I'm a, I'm a stereotypical ass American, you know, and later I became an entrepreneur, right. And a tech person. And that's.

It gives me certain chips of credibility when I show up in a room, when I say those things or when people know them about me. And I can spend those chips however I want, right? I choose to use them. And I've chosen that moment that the best and most responsible way to be a steward of that social capital is to focus the conversation on them and talk to them about how I view.

their culture to be fascinating in its own right like and worth admiring and their food and how you know the things that are better over there point out that they're actually better over there. And no, just because that particular, you know, kind of thing like that, like that diner scene, they talk about, oh, is Waffle House amazing, right? Like, no, actually, it's real shitty. Like, if you went there, you'd be disgusted and feel unsafe.

talk talk them up a little bit not to not to you know stand in in a place of judgment over them at all but rather just to try to shift the conversation by contributing a voice that says, no, you in your own right, what you guys got going on here is actually in its own way real fucking great. And I hope you know that some people see it. It's not, you know, that America is not the end all be all, even though we have this tremendous political, cultural and economic, you know, superiority.

in a way that dominates so much of the conversation and headspace and structure of their country. And so that really, it's why I spend way more time in rural areas and suburban areas in Japan than touristy ones.

I mean, first of all, the touristy stuff gets boring once you've done it once or twice. But you go to any of these, and nowadays, Suburban is... increasingly uh joining rural as being like a an economically depressed area a literally depressed area and so i that's one big part of my mission right is like i go there and i want to I want to go to a Yakitori place in Okayama. And I want to show up and be the first white guy he's seen in a while.

And I want to be like, this is fucking awesome. I can't get chicken like this in America. This Nihon Shu is incredible. Like, like, like, and I just make his day. Right. And be real grateful and thankful. And you can't tip, but you can, you can make a friend.

And so that's one half of my mission in Japan. The other half of my mission is to share that side of the country with Americans. uh with my friends in the west and to to be a bit of a gateway to what that country can be like that didn't used to be so fine uh of a distinction from just go to japan have a great time for both because i didn't know the country very well but also because pre-instagram pre-tiktok pre

I think it was 2012 when Chinese nationals were allowed to go to Japan on a visa waiver exemption program, so they didn't need to apply for a visa. tourism in Japan has just skyrocketed. There was like one year between like 2013, 2014, it literally doubled or tripled and it keeps rising.

Japanese, I've complained before, Japanese infrastructure can't keep up and they're sort of become a tourism corridor of like people land, they go here in these three suburbs or three areas in Tokyo, they get on a Shinkansen, then they go to Kyoto.

They spend a few days in Kyoto doing those 20 things, a city that is so small it can't handle them. It's even had to ban foreigners from traditional streets so that like cultural activities that are kind of necessary to the functioning of what makes Kyoto Kyoto can keep happening. Then they go to Osaka and Osaka doesn't have the public budget to clean up the streets every night anymore or the subways anymore. And so the grime just sort of adds up.

Every hotel is just overflowing, right? And so then you have this Airbnb problem. And so it's really stressed that tourism corridor. And that's a problem. It sucks because I used to love Osaka and Kyoto. And I used to love... the shinjuku shibuya harajuku those spots in in in tokyo that are are interesting because now they're just no one goes there anymore they're too crowded outside the tourism corridor though

Like you can experience real fucking people. And it's actually the daily life in Japan that is most fascinating. It's the mundane products at the convenience store. It's that you can go into any 7-Eleven in the country and... find a, you know, not just a, but dozens of pre-prepared meals that are like a salmon filet. You can get a salmon filet with like a little like salad or something around it or some rice.

Microwavable. You put it in a microwave for 30 seconds. It's the freshest, best tasting salmon you've probably ever had. And it costs maybe $1.50 to $2 after the exchange, right? It's got cocktails in the can that again, tall boy, dollar 50, you know, every flavor you could have ever imagined. None of the mixers that you'd never would have thought. It's like, oh man, I really like kiwi soda, you know.

green alcohol, uh, mixer, you know, like, like, like, like cocktails, right? Like I had a kale flavored one once. I was not a fan of the kale chew high, but you know, that's a thing that you can get. It's. you go down the street and you you just walk and you meet normal people you you actually engage instead of going to the big chain restaurants with just like you know mom and pop owned noodle shops and you walk in and it's like clearly this person has spent their entire 30-year career

decorating and carefully curating and optimizing how they make noodles every day and the physical appearance and layout of the room and they only serve eight seats a day and so they only do prepare maybe 300 bowls a day at max and like that the upper bound on how much money they could make is just barely enough to survive. And that's their mission. That's what they do. And that is not seen or felt as a failure. It's just culturally where they're at.

You can experience that kind of stuff by just walking in off the street in towns all over the country.

But those are totally inaccessible and increasingly even less accessible now that this tourism corridor has stiffened. It's almost like if you're a foreigner, and especially if you're using the English language internet. to guide you on your trip, you're just kind of going on this increasingly artificial. It's like you'll see everything but Japanese people on that main leg between those different places, because even the hotels now are mostly staffed with South.

Asian and Southeast Asian people who can speak Mandarin or maybe multiple Asian languages. So anyway, second part of my mission is to... be a ambassador for Western folk who want to genuinely engage with the culture. So that's what led us ultimately.

When we talked about having a home base of operations that when we're traveling in Japan, we can use to store our stuff. We can get if we want to get a little bit of work done, we can we can work out of there between trips and use it as a kind of like a. a base camp, right? It's why we chose city, candidate cities that are in, you know, kind of sleepy suburbs, like good economies, but like off the beaten path from a, from a tourism perspective.

And I got some. Where this gets into hedging is with the tariff stuff, the yen started appreciating really quickly. And so if I want to buy a condo or something, the price goes way up. Like if the yen appreciates 10%, that means that the condo just became 10% more expensive. And the yen is historically cheap right now.

And so if you want to get a good deal on your condo, like it's like now I feel, do I feel the urgency? Like I should go and buy one immediately? Well, no, that would be irresponsible or that would be like logistically challenging. And so instead I opened a wise account.

uh after doing a bunch of research into the right way to do this opened a wise account uh put some money into it and then watched the exchange rate and did a kind of dollar cost average to buy in enough yen to whether buy a place or to Put down a down payment on a, you know, not yet constructed condo building. And it was a pain. It was definitely like.

a little bit aggressive because i think a lot of people would look at that and say like that's unnecessary you know but like honestly like like if if the if the worst case scenario for me buying yen a little bit prematurely

is the yen recovers or it goes up like by 5%, that's fine. Because the best case scenario for somebody who is hedging into yen and buying yen is like, yeah, the tariff shit goes tits up and lay the economy tanks and people rush to the end because it's always considered a safe harbor because their bank policy their their their their uh currency policy is really really stable and boring like the it

There's like a 40%, 50% downside at that point. We could be back to 110 yen to the dollar. So I was like, okay, so I'll hedge and I'll buy yen. And that became a week and a half long project just to take dollars and turn them into yen. But I've done it.

So that's cool. Of course, it's not enough to have... a bunch of yen uh and even to be able to transfer it in the domestic banking system which thankfully the wise app can do uh you also need to be able to like actually sign stuff and in Japan they don't use ink signatures quite so much as

uh hanko stamps that's like a like a seal that you register in your like local municipality uh using your id or whatever you know identification and then they produce like a registration card for you and so for if you're signing official documents you'll typically furnish the registration card showing like this municipality associates this, uh, you know,

stamp that i have in my hand with me the person you're looking at so when i stamp this at least the municipality will vouch that's who i am right that's actually a far more secure way to think about signatures

Well, I can't do that on my own remotely and like hedging against the possibility that Becky and I might find the condo of our dreams. But maybe it's. Only a couple units left, and they could sell out before I'd even physically get there. especially because my trip wasn't planned until the end of the month. We've got this awesome friend who lives in Kawasaki in the Tokyo metro area who is so gracious and helpful. And I told him, hey. I'd like to give you power of attorney over real estate stuff.

And then I had to figure that out, right? So this is just another hedge, really. I mean, did I have to do that? No, but I'm always worst casing stuff. I'm thinking about, man, I would really kick myself if we saw this condo and then we weren't able to get there in time to secure the condo.

figured out thanks to my friend chat chat gpt i figured out how to draft one that would stand up bilingual um and then i also double checked with you know some judicial ministry or whatever that like over real estate affairs so some legal federal like nationwide judgment had been made that normally it would need to happen with a sealed stamp. But if you are overseas and you're far from a consulate and you can't get your stamp registered,

then you can just use a standard U.S. notary or foreign, you know, foreign notary. And so I got the document notarized or that was the plan. I printed it.

Got ready to sign it. I got ready to send it. Just so it just so happened that like in the process of me thinking about this stuff, we did find the condo of our dreams and it did only have three units left. And it was just about to do a big sales push because it's like the busiest holiday weekend of the year going on right now. And I was like, well, fuck. And so this was last Friday. I print them out. I get the packet ready.

I drive to the FedEx store because I know that if you want something shipped, like a document shipped internationally, FedEx is your best bet. They've got a whole system for just document sending. And so you'll get the paper. You'll get that. You'll pay $100 for it to send two sheets of paper in my case. But then it'll get on the next plane. So as long as it gets on the last plane, which might be 3 o'clock where you live, it might be 5.30 in my case.

I get there and I'm like, all right, I need to sign and notarize this, please. And they're like, oh yeah, we only do that online. I was like, well, Japan's like, they're going to want to see the impression on the paper, right? That like, it's unlikely that an online notary is going to pass muster.

And also I don't have time for that right now. Like I gotta go. I gotta go. And so they, they said, Hey, well you can go to the UPS store across the street. So I'll go to the UPS store across the street, which because of Orlando traffic was like a 30 minute ordeal because it was kitty corner.

uh and spring break you know dads bobbing and weaving everywhere it's i got there got to the ups store uh and i told him hey need some stuff notarized to try to be a friendly jovial guy because i know what i'm going to be asking him in 30 seconds is super weird uh guy's super cool he's like all right yeah let's do it and then he looks at it he's like oh i can't do that i can't

that's in mandarin i can't do that i was like well it's it's i take your point but just so we're clear it's japanese and i wrote it and it's bilingual and everything is translated right next to everything he's like yeah but if that other language says stuff that i don't like understand like i can't know i was like well isn't the job of a notary not to like read the contract and the terms of the contract but simply to like assert that like

who says they are, who is who they are that is signing. Like, cause I'm me and here's my ID. Uh, I get it. He was nervous. Um, and then I used my, my, uh, my wiles. I used my wiles to convince this guy. Like, I really got to get this thing out the door, man. I'm hedging a complicated condo purchase, and I'm going to keep feeding you details about this until you relent.

And so that that's a strategy that often works in life because he's a captive audience because he had to be there till seven or whatever. So I eventually he's like, OK, fine. Yeah, I probably won't get in trouble. And so he he I signed and stamped. my passport copy and my little document and signed away my power of attorney. And then I go back across the street to FedEx.

By now, it's like another 45 minutes of bobbing and weaving and getting over. And so this, of course, turned into an hour and a half long ordeal, and I just barely made it. And I got to pay my $100 to ship this document overnight. So that's another thing that you can do. And dutifully, my friend, he received the package and he's like, all right, cool, I got it. And then we find out.

That in addition to that, that might be enough to kind of get in the door and submit an application, but to actually reserve the place, they need me in person. You know what? You can't you can't. If I were to wait a month like I'd been planning to do and go there at the end of the month to see it, like there's no way to guarantee that the whole place wouldn't book up. And, you know, the city we want to.

go to is only got a couple of condo buildings total under construction or plans construction right now. And that means that like we don't have like, you know, it's probably this or wait another year year and a half for a new kind of development to arise or just pick another city and that would be difficult because we found a lot of reasons why this city in particular which i may have mentioned but i will

keep mysterious in the context of this particular conversation, uh, why the city was the best city for us. And so I was texting with my friend and I was like, what do I do? Do I like, I would already like my planned. trip had been like you know already several weeks but it's like a month from now and he he wouldn't be the kind of person to do this if it wasn't the case but he said i think

I think you've got to be here if you want this thing. And I was like, all right. So Becky was going to bed and I kind of updated her and it was a little bit frustrating for both of us because it upset a lot of our... plans for the next few weeks and i said okay well i'm gonna you're gonna go to bed and i'm gonna go book a flight for who knows tomorrow the next day and so

Tomorrow morning, I'm going out to Japan and I'm going to be out there for a long fucking time. It's a long trip because not only do I have to go out there and I got to see the models and I got to meet the folks and I got to, you know, submit my application and then.

There's, you know, it's a multi-step process to actually secure the thing. And if I've got to be in person for any number of those steps, then I'll be in person. And I'm happy to because this is important. And it's like a. you know we might have this condo for 20 30 years so what's what's a few weeks of you know living out of a hotel if i have to to just make sure that it goes smoothly i don't think like the reason that i feel

Like this says something about me as a person. First of all, it says something like I am the captain of my own ship and I've coordinated my life such that like I can literally. physically do this right like i've got the funds and the time to be able to just drop everything and go overseas now granted like i did spend 13 hours yesterday just clearing my calendar apologizing to people moving meetings and and

trying to rush and get all of this housework done as quickly as I could. It's why this podcast had better be shorter than three hours because I got shit to do today because I leave in the morning. But... big picture. Like it's absolutely, I'm super grateful. I'm blown away that I can actually do this, but my meat brain, my lizard brain is still like, man, I'm going to be jet-lagged as fuck. And I got to go and like, you know,

find some business casual clothing and like, you know, show up and be a nice person and do all these things that like if it were America, I would just wire some money and then I would have the thing I want. Right.

But there's extra steps. And it's like, if I want to engage with a culture, I got to actually put in the work. But still, all of that can be true. And this can be a story, in my mind anyway, about how like... I feel like my risk aversion combined with my hatred of losing, like my absolute unwillingness to fail or to not get. the thing that I've set my heart on is it often results in this exact outcome.

And from an outsider's perspective, I think it looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, Justin's all doom and gloom and he's always worried a lot because that's the risk aversion talking. It's like a worry ward. It wants to avoid the bad outcome as much as possible.

There's an active side to it. That's like, not only am I worrying, but because I refuse to allow a failure state to occur. I used to use the phrase in my early days when I was on these teams of eight or nine people and structurally the projects would have normally failed and I would say I would drag the whole team over the finish line of success.

And often that's the worst thing that can happen, right? Like sometimes the right thing for a project to do is fail because then somebody learns a lesson. But if you like by din of your teeth and working crazy overtime or something like make the project succeed anyway, now you've probably. exhausted yourself, made your own life worse, and also made the organization worse because now it's not getting the feedback in the ways that it needs to improve. So something about myself that I'm always...

mindful of and checking and trying to improve at is asking is this a battle worth fighting should I let go of the rope here and like let things play out even if it means failing even if it means losing or So all of these worries that are kind of, you know, passively piling up, like, oh, what if we do find the thing? I need to have the power of attorney stuff. Like I had all that stuff ready to go, basically. So it was like easy to pull the trigger. I read a whole book about.

this process so that i would know the right questions to ask if i was ever asked them under duress i already had a list created right i'd already moved money into yen and i just happened to have it in a way that could be instead of having to a new timer of a week and a half start today to like get all that stuff ready to deploy and transfer in in the domestic banking network i can do that today if i had to so

All of that worry combined with sort of the productive side of the once I get my heart set on something, I won't let it not come into existence. And I'll move all these other things. Very often, the last knob to turn is my own amount of sleep and happiness and creature comforts and just throwing my body in the gears when I have to. But also like sometimes the pain and the frustration and the inconvenience falls on all of the people around me, former colleagues who've seen me in this state.

are like if you've ever seen me at a conference before a talk and i'm just like a ball of anxiety i can't i'm thinking about every single little thing i'm really obsessing over every detail and i just wear it on my sleeve I had like, I threw tantrums at Rails World when they had me speaking in an outdoor space because you couldn't read my slides. And I was livid. And I just let them know how sad and disappointed I was and how angry I was. And I didn't hold back.

And that was miserable for them. Their AV person felt really, really bad. But it spurred them to like pull it, wheel out a couple of TVs, right? To try to like make it right. So at least those were legible. So did I get what I wanted? Yes. Did I sort of use my emotions indirectly as a way to manipulate and coerce somebody? Yes. It was indirect though. I was just being my true authentic self because I was laser focused on the outcome.

And so I think about that a lot, right? It's like, if I'm going to push myself hedge in this way of like, worry about all these big picture problems that could happen theoretically, maybe they're low probability, but maybe I want to cover my courses, cover my edge cases anyway. cover my corners who's got my six i don't know i'm trying to think like mixing metaphors here or like maybe it's just not not worth it this time and i let go

Uh, and if I'm going to do it though, if I'm going to cover all my corners, then I gotta, I gotta be mindful of, am I making somebody else's life harder here? And if I am, am I going to honor that somehow? So like, I know my friend.

He's really, it's his holiday week and I have interrupted it with a lot of stress that he is now absorbing. He's going to go with me in person to this place. Another hell, another day off work. They don't get a lot of days off work. I got to make it up to him. I don't know what that looks like. You know?

I could babysit his kids, which he would find humorous because I'm so great with kids. Well, I got to make it up to him. I don't know what that looks like yet, right? At least now I'm mindful of it. Maybe I'll get to the point where I just care less, but that seems unlikely given me. So anyway, that's what's going on in life. That was a lot. Like I said, it's a life heavy one. I hope you're still here. Hope you're still ready. Let's see what we got to follow up on now.

I'll keep this brisk. Only a couple items today. One, we talked about the Vision Pro a bunch. We'll talk about it more, one assumes.

One thing that I like to talk about is the user experience, and I reviewed it initially, and I've shared other kind of bits and bobs over the last year and change. One thing about the Vision Pro that drives me batty... is i can never remember how to turn it on it's not like it's a pebble and it has no buttons whatsoever it's got two buttons physical buttons it's got a thing that looks like the apple watch crown and it's got a thing that looks like the side button

on a watch or a phone. And neither, because your Apple, is called the power button. And I still, as I'm speaking now, saying this, I'm still not sure I know which. I think if it's in a powered off state. you press and hold the side button. But the funny thing is I always think that every time I'm starting it up, I'll try one for a few seconds and the other for a few seconds.

And six days ago on Reddit, somebody posted, I'm a day one adopter and I can't consistently turn my Apple Vision Pro on. What am I doing wrong? and they talk about the 10 success rate of waking it up turning it on and the the battery being connected doesn't really help because it's just an led that just is random colors usually just a white flash at you

uh and and the operating system doesn't help either and like when you're starting it up the only time the apple logo shows up is on the lenticular display on the outside so it's like you have to start up looking at like this and then in a in a lighting condition where you could actually make out that the apple logo is there

It is well and truly fucked. Anyway, I found it very supporting that there were so many replies, 34 replies to this, that were basically everybody being like, ah, I found out the secret. It's press this button.

uh the fact it's like that hard for early adopters of all people a year and change in to be able to turn your device on i know apple's talking about the vision air and internally like there's one of the blue cable that leaked right last time uh hopefully they're thinking about making that hardware a little bit more obvious uh you know the the sleek lines and everything everything looks really good in product shots but god god help you if you actually like

labeled something or even in your manual and your operating system said called it the power button. You know, I get that it's used for screenshots and other other functions and stuff, but man.

uh just make it more obvious uh increasingly and this has been true ever since the ipod where the ipod didn't want to have a shutdown stage so it's just a utility it's just like it's it's always on and and it's it's but it's not always on because you genuinely do have to restart it or reset it like until you get to the point where your software literally never has to reboot or cannot reboot until you get to that point like it's

You got to give that affordance to the user to explain what the fuck is going on. So. Apple. Apple, please. One other is I've released a new gem. I've been talking about Posse Party.

being a new Rails app that is going to hopefully extract things from the Better With Becky app that I built last year so that I don't reinvent every wheel so that I can make more apps and make it smaller and cheaper. Now that means that the first app is very expensive because I have to figure out how to make an app. that's like a SaaS product. And the second app is going to be just as expensive because I have to figure out how to extract all that good stuff from the first app.

change the first app to depend on that new stuff that I've extracted, and then make the new app with that extracted stuff. So it's going to take me the rest of the fucking year at this rate to build Posse Party. But I now have a gem to show for it because the authentication layer of the email-based login flow that I did for Better With Becky is now built as a gem. And I just integrated to Posse Party, and of course, it worked right away.

And I'm happy with it. And it was like a it was maybe an hour and a half of setup. in posse party to get auth working end-to-end and the number of things that the the app no longer needs any code for is quite quite delightful and now it can live in the gem and the gem can have its own test the gem's name is searlsoth

so that I don't lose track of it. It's just Searles, my last name, dash A-U-T-H. And it just covers authentication. It just does this email flow for you. There's lots of ways to do authentication. I like this one for now. And I've got... designs of adding passwords and a one-time password to FA and stuff like that in the future.

But for now, it's like enough to get them both going. And that way in the future, when I add those things, both apps will benefit from them immediately or relatively immediately. So if you want to check that out, I've got a readme and I've got a sample app there for you. It's not necessarily designed for your consumption. So, you know.

Your mileage may vary. Now, it's the fun part of the show. The fun part, the funny guy part. Because last night, I was telling Aaron, he knows I'm flying. It's like, I hate to do this to you, bud, but I'm going to need, I'm going to need a pun. Pull up some invisible ink here. The secret. I have not read it. I'm going to read a pun for you, then I'm going to rank it in the season two catalog of puns. It is a spring edition.

There have been eight so far, so let's see where this one ranks. I like it already. Just first impression. The problem with insurance company ads. is all of their bold claims. The problem with insurance company ads is all of their bold claims.

I don't think I need to explain that pun to you. Maybe I do. Actually, you know what? I'm not going to explain that pun to you. First of all, because I think it's pretty self-explanatory. But second, maybe just open up ChatGPT and ask it to explain this pun, because I'm highly confident it'll be able to understand this pun. Does that make you dumber than AI? Maybe. So the problem with insurance company ads is all of their bold claims. I like it. It's straightforward. It's not dreadfully obvious.

Sometimes a pun will land in the should have been obvious zone. Like I feel like the use of the word claims in the context of a... Self-aggrandizement, like, oh, we're the best at this and this and this. In the context of insurance, given that insurance claims are what you make when you seek damages or a payout from a policy.

Like, maybe if you're inside the insurance industry, you've heard puns of this nature before. But I'm not, and I haven't. So, I don't know. The fact that it's obvious in hindsight. right like after reading them like ah yes that is quite obvious but the fact that i i haven't had that thought those those particular connections never wired it actually makes it a more impressive pun to me than if it had connected to really obscure

tangential connections. So it's a higher bandwidth pun because it's... of course it's relatable but it's like these these two parallel tracks are just close enough and and it went unnoticed for so long and then aaron was the one who was able to cross that wire so i i like that let's see where I'd rank it. I know I had trouble with the currently fifth ranked pun. It took me a while to figure out how to get my boat to float, but then I let it sink in.

I don't think there's more to it than that. I got a lot of feedback from friends of the show that think that was the whole pun. And I agree, it was the whole pun. The same level of complexity as this pun, but it's... Yeah. It's just not my favorite. My biggest issue with callbacks is I wish that they would text first, which has grown on me. It grew on me over the course of that episode and it is still growing on me.

I think that's better than this one. Number three, every time I go to the gym, I'm like, how's that working out? Which is genuinely funny. I can already see that one and two are going to be contentious at the pun sort at the end of the year. I think I'm going to put this one as the new number five. So let's call it.

Get that sorted out later. Thank you, Aaron, for your contribution to the program. I don't know what I'd do without you. I literally don't because if you hadn't replied, I was like, do I just make up a pun and attribute it to him? Do I skip the section? That's part of my brand promise. You get a free pun with every episode. If you stop getting the pun, where are you going to go?

First news item is about whiskey, not the drink, but rather the open source program that allows you to take advantage of the game developer toolkit that Apple published in recent versions of macOS so that you don't have to pay code weavers for their crossover system. What does all that shit mean? It means basically... There's a program called Wine. Wine is not an emulator. It's a recursive acronym or backronym. That is an overly clever Linux thing that lets you run Windows programs.

via some sort of translation mechanism of the direct X. Yeah, I guess DirectX at this point, like Win32 API is originally on Linux. So you can run a Windows program on Linux. It'll look like hell. It'll probably have bugs. It probably won't work very well. But Wine has come a long way over the years. And... Code Weavers makes a product called Crossover that I believe adapts pieces of wine or something or wraps wine to some extent. It charges $70 and it lets you play.

not only lets you run not only Windows programs on Mac, but also play Windows games on Mac. And of course, you're paying some sort of tax to the frame rate. Now, Apple. built this thing called the Game Developers Toolkit, which was originally just a very, very long shell script for game-specific executables to map all of that to the metal. APIs that Apple uses in the Apple Silicon translation stuff as opposed to a proper API. And so the the.

I'm sure the Code Weaver's people and the wine people have been looking at that and improving things and maybe wrapping that game developer toolkit script itself, which has evolved into more of a real boy in the last couple of years since it was first announced.

uh in some way i haven't been following it closely but whiskey was like a github project where you just download it for free take advantage of all this open source code and wine and the and the crossover stuff that's probably gpl and has to be open And you could just download whiskey and have that just like wrap and run your games. The problem, of course, is that whiskey was made by an 18-year-old who's now maybe 20, 21, trying to go through college, doesn't have time to support it.

You know, no one is more, no one is shittier to open source maintainers than like video gamers trying to like save money. whether through i'm using this emulator because i'm a pirate or i'm using this like nintendo switch uh you know backdoor homebrew for homebrew when they're really wanting to like play their favorite iso image that they got off a torrent site

Or in this case, I'm using this whiskey tool to wrap, to make convenient for me this game developer toolkit so I don't have to pay CodeWeaver $70. And CodeWeavers, they can pay.

for support right like they have a staff and they're they're happy to help and solve bugs and stuff but this one kid uh yeah he he what was his name i should give him a name in the story and he's not a kid he's a he's a he's a he's a human man isaac maravitz he uh he he gave up the ghost and he's like this is too much work i can't do this anymore he

He and what he built with whiskey was technically a competitor with, you know, the Code Weavers crossover stuff. Why I share that as news. So he's the. Isaac gave up. He's like, I'm not going to maintain this anymore. I'm going to let it still open, but I'm not going to work on this anymore. This is done. Go use the code weavers thing. There's a thing in tech.

where I feel like the hyper-competitive nature, especially the derision with which incumbents who charge money for their work and have the structure in place, uh that that that means that they have fixed costs like a staff to pay when they see an upstart that is using a lot of spare parts giving stuff away for free and eating into their market providing a worse experience

That's usually looked down upon to such an extent that this could happen, and then the CodeWeavers people would be sore winners and shitty about it. But instead... Owner, founder of Code Weaver's James Ramey writes a blog post where he's like extremely gracious and complimentary and understanding and empathetic to this kid. Now granted. He's a winner in this scenario. It should be easy to be that, but it was so fucking rare that I thought I'd share it with you. So... Yeah.

It just gives him credit. You see, Isaac did it right. He took an open source software project and packaged it so tens of thousands of Mac users could play Windows games on macOS for free. And he did great work. i i don't know man it's like a tip of our cap to to isaac and i thought it was really gracious and i would love to see more graciousness among people in tech because it's not too common a couple

A rare case of two Apple iOS rumors that I'm genuinely excited about. So we've talked a little bit about iOS 19. It's going to get announced a little over a month from now. From a feature set perspective, not very much exciting. obviously it'll have a fresh coat of paint because that's been heavily rumored but the two that that came up and it might have been part of the same report which i will not attribute because i'm just linked to the boring mac rumors uh summaries

Some leaker somewhere, Majin Bu, there, I attributed it. Majin? Majin? Apologies. Is saying that stage manager over USB-C. So if you have an iPhone. running iOS 19, you plug in a USB-C monitor, which you can buy if you've ever seen anyone tack one of those onto a 14-inch MacBook or something. You can buy, and they're really cheap, and they're thin, and they're light.

And they could be powered over USB-C. Just imagine. So you get a $100 panel, plug it into your iPhone. You get like a combination, maybe, you know, mini keyboard and trackpad. And now you got a computer. right like so you've got stage manager you can use your apps in a full screen setting like maybe you don't need an ipad anymore right you just use the phone and a portable screen

I'm going to be in Japan when the beta comes up. Maybe I'll be a dummy and I'll install it and I'll try this out. Of course, it probably won't be out on day one. So I don't think I have to worry about that. But this is evocative of and very similar to what Samsung does with its phones called Dex.

desktop environment or desktop experience on their phones. And there are dozens of people who are real Dex stans, and they see that as the future, where your phone is just kind of your everywhere computer. And it just gets displayed and projected in different ways. We project it in a different way with CarPlay. It's a purpose-built thing that's appropriate for when you're driving a vehicle.

We project it onto our Macs using the iPhone sharing tool, and then that also manifests in the form of its notifications get splayed along the side. So this is already happening in a lot of different ways. When you set a reminder on a HomePod, any personalized requests, the phone has to be on the same network because it's actually the phone doing the work, right? So the HomePod becomes just a different user interface for the phone. This is a great idea.

Like, I am glad Apple's doing it. I'm glad Apple's not afraid of cannibalizing iPad sales in the process for anyone who would take advantage. But I think that they know and we know that anyone who really do this is probably only going to use it in a pinch. And it's probably only going to be like sickos like me who would plan a whole trip around like I'm only going to program on my phone, right? I can see the blog posts that I'll write a year from now. Now. Another one.

And this was covered the same day, but there's a by the same fella. I might link to the daring fireball take, though, instead. Word is that the iPad. We'll get a, quote, Mac-like menu bar. Excuse me, I'm going to clear my throat. I try to go all these podcasts and never clear my throat, which leads to sedimentary layers that I'm still just working through months, months, months, months, and months into this whole...

The iPad. You might know it as that thing that looks like a Mac, looks like a laptop, looks like a... increasingly is oriented as a sideways laptop-like thing, but can do none of the laptop-y things you expect, like run computer programs.

We've heard that they're going to be emphasizing, Apple's going to be emphasizing multitasking and more Mac-like experience, like a more productive workflow. And that probably means adding features to stage manager to make the windows more like windows and the snozzberries taste more like. nozzberries but the the menu bar is a problem if right now if you if you're on an ipad there's not a persistent menu bar at any point but you can press and hold either of the command keys

And you'll see a little menu bar pill bottle at the bottom pop up. That's sort of functionally exactly like the menu bar. You can trackpad around there, or you can type, or you could arrow key. And you can find menu items that way. But the set of commands that you have is really limited.

If you look at what's available in the Final Cut for iPad app versus what's available in the Mac app, you probably only have 10% as many little extensions or little commands that you can run through the menu bar equivalent.

The rumor here is that when you're in stage manager mode and you've got a keyboard connected, you will get a Mac-like menu bar along the top that is persistent. It's always available and you can rely on it and you can tap it and you can mouse to it and stuff. And that would be really lovely.

Because one of the biggest problems with the iPad's multitasking story is the lack of discoverability. And so why was the menu bar such an innovation? Well, one, it's always in the same place. It's not like it travels with the window. like it does in windows so you always know where to find it the current focus thing all of its commands are always right at the top they don't move around you can't hide them you can't actually accidentally drag them off screen and two it's discoverable because

If you know where to look and you're patient enough to click through the file, the edit, the view, like all of these different menu items, you might find a functionality that you didn't know existed. And so I think that's wonderful because what's the iPad's biggest problem? It's got a lot of functionality that no one knows exists. And when they want to add more, you know, they got to come up with increasingly complicated gestures where, well, if you make your...

If you make your hand in the shape of a pentagram and then you turn counterclockwise, it'll actually undo. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to it.

I talked about Backblaze and how I've got a 32 terabyte. not a NAS, but like an external drive now that's in a RAID 0 configuration of just very fast SSDs. That was my big tariff gift to myself from myself.

It is plugged into my Mac studio is backing up. I'm like, how does this only cost $50 a year? The answer is probably fraud. It turns out a Morpheus research does a, uh, um, I don't know if Morpheus Research, the fact that it's called Research tells me that they're probably one of those firms that shorts stocks that they think are overvalued or committing frauds.

they'll put in short orders and then they will buy short options and then they'll publish why and then that convinces everyone else that it's fucked and then the price goes down and then they win. like so this is a common like thing a kind of boutique uh information broker sort of

cottage industry that's popped up in the economy over the last few years. And it's doing really well because it turns out like a lot of, especially thanks to SPACs and like the irrational exuberance of 2020 and the post COVID, you know, sloshing around a capital. Business is good because there's a lot of fraud out there. So I'm just going to read the headline because that tells you everything you need to know.

Backblaze, colon, a loss-making data storage business mired in lawsuits, sham accounting, and brazen insider dumping. Cool. So Backblaze. If any of that stuff is true, they might not be around forever, which is not what you want to talk about your cloud backup storage solution. So if you only have, if your only backup storage is to backblaze.

you might want to think about something else. You might want to think about, there's a program called ARC on the Mac that you can buy. And then you can set up destination targets that are like the Google Cloud.

cold storage thing and uh amazon has its own glacier i think aws one of these they're all they're all meant to evoke the sense of your freezing out there because this is like you know maybe not going to literal tape drives but like hard drives that aren't plugged in all the time as you can back up and stuff and it's really cheap to back up relatively cheap to store but then very expensive to restore because some some robot has to go and plug in a hard drive for you to get your data back

But that way you're totally decoupled. It's like the client is a client. There's not some like weird SaaS subscription that... marries the client to the data, right? And that's what Backblaze is. You install the Backblaze client, you pay the Backblaze company a subscription fee, and then they're responsible for storing your data.

And the economics of it have never made sense to me because it seems too cheap relative to all the other options. It's why I use it. But, you know, like, you know what else was too cheap relative to all the other options? Everpix. Before iCloud Photo Library came out. And you could store all of your Apple photos. Everpix was like, oh, we'll do that. We'll look at your entire camera library.

on your phone we'll back it all up to everpix and then we'll have an everpix app where you can see all your photos like that lasted like six months before they're like oh yeah like we're gonna we're gonna lose like tens of millions of dollars that we don't have yeah this is done sorry and then they just deleted everyone's pictures right it's what happened to crash plan crash plan got bought by a company that was like well our plan is to be profitable so we're going to exit the

the end user facing business and only focus on business B2B backups. And so what do they do? They just deleted all of the, I guess. normal human backups. And so then that went away, right? It's one big reason because I didn't have good data hygiene at the time that I lost the images to all of my computers from like 2004 onward. I had the disk image.

I even have the right icon next to all the disk images. As I would archive an old computer, I would always take a full image and I'd save it. And those are all gone now. So that's a bummer. Let's take another...

Again, keeping the tempo up here. I got places to be, man. Russia. This is Video Games Chronicle reporting. Russia moves to seize World of Tanks developer over Ukraine support. That is a sentence that is a little wild. There's a website, wargaming.net. They made a statement to VGC.

So World of Tanks is a game, like a free-to-play microtransaction-y game that's like a military, persistent world game. And it's just... like a lot of free-to-play games, but it gets advertised a lot on YouTube and on videos being like, oh yeah, and if you sign up now with my promo code, you'll get a free aircraft carrier or whatever. Or like they'll do weird crossovers like a Star Trek ship. I don't know. So there's an update on the story.

Wargaming made a strategic exit from the Russian and Belarusian markets three years ago. The company disposed of its business in Russia and Belarus to the local management at zero cost and on a debt-free, cash-free basis with no consideration to take it back. Wargaming doesn't have any assets or business interests in Russia and Belarus. Well, that might mean that this is a non-story now and it's all just posturing. But I just want to leave you with the idea that...

Russia would use actual tanks to conquer digital tanks in order to protect their ego that they support. freedom in Ukraine and Ukraine's right to self-determination in governments. That's pretty fucked. Now, of course, we still live in an era where the real tanks would win over the digital tanks.

But how long is that going to last, right? How long until the AI tanks are able to trump our real tanks because they can just turn us all off and our uneducated youth that never learned math because the AI did it for them?

uh just turn the tanks on each other because they just asked chat gpt everything which I'm saying flippantly, but like my, my newsfeed has been very full of articles about how the children ain't learning good so much anymore and how the 20 something is currently the current crop of graduates in college are showing up to work and like.

don't know how to write emails and don't know how to like you know comport or solve even the most simple of problems um and i'm sure that somewhere there's a bean counter at microsoft who's really happy because they're seeing copilot uptake among younger people and they're like, ah, sweet, good. This is mapping to our financial plans quite well. It is validating our strategy, so to speak.

Next up, Amazon, talking about stories that only were true for a few hours. There was a report that Amazon was going to display tariff costs to customers. So as you were checking out, it would say, hey, this is, you know. This is how much of your fee, it's just like you see sales tax. This is basically how much Trump tax, right? They wouldn't say that, but like how much of your card is tariffs. And they would do that for a couple of reasons. First of all,

They don't want the egg on their face. Amazon's whole shell game is you think you're buying stuff from Amazon, and Amazon sometimes is selling you stuff if it's truly shipped and sold by Amazon. But even the physical thing that you get from Amazon might not have been from Amazon because where they make a lot of their money is in the third-party sellers.

who use fulfillment by Amazon so that they can qualify for prime shipping. So they ship their goods to Amazon and they'll say, hey, this is the same ASIN. This is the same product as the one that you ship and sell. We're just a different seller.

Amazon will ostensibly inspect that good and then throw it in a bin. So it goes in the same parts bin, whether you buy ships and sold from Amazon or you buy from some other seller that has the same product, goes in the same parts bin at the distribution center. So like you might even buy shipped and sold from Amazon and still get a fake product because it's in the same bin as this fake one that somebody else sent in, right? They make most of their money on the...

charges, the fees that they charge those sellers. You want to ship it into fulfillment by Amazon? Well, FBA, as they say, has an inbound processing fee. So, you know, you have to pay for us to open the box and inspect the goods. You have to pay us a cut every step of the way. You have to pay us a cut of the shipping. You got to pay us. And so they nickel and dime the sellers and they get their beak wet for all of these surfaces. And some of these surfaces.

you can opt out of as a seller, but most of them you can't. They make a ton of money that way. So if it turns out to be the case, like that tariffs drastically increase prices, Those prices are going to go up at Amazon.com. And the lie of Amazon.com is that you're buying stuff from Amazon. And so like Amazon is going to be the one that everyone's blaming for the prices being so high.

And the only reason the prices are low is because no-name Chinese companies that kind of don't exist but to be Amazon resellers. that are importing goods and then posting them on Amazon as if they're being sold on Amazon, they benefit from the same lie because they don't have to do the marketing to get access to American customers to build trust.

Right. Like they can just be an alphabet soup company. They're going to suffer, obviously, because they're going to have to increase their prices just legally because like that's they got to pay the tariff dues.

And so they're going to suffer in the form of reduced sales because of higher prices. Amazon would suffer both in that way and also in the reputational damage because they are going to be more sensitive to the tariff increases than... other retailers that maybe have like a direct relationship with their suppliers or like walmart for example who's very very picky about their suppliers and can just choose a different one that maybe is going to be less sensitive to the tariff situation

So Amazon announced that they were, well, it didn't announce, but this report stipulated that they were going to start showing that tariff line item. And that was true long enough for me to put it on this list. And then it became not true immediately. Because Amazon denied it. And why do they deny it? Because I suspect that the Trump administration would not be very happy if people knew that tariffs meant higher prices.

And I suspect that the iPhone prices will not be higher this year, both because Apple, like I said earlier, tries to keep their prices the same and they view the price as part of the product. And it's positioned in the lineup and so forth as something to...

keep consistent because the price and the product and the functionality, they all exist in a sort of this liminal space. They try to keep it there. But like if they were to raise prices, you know, all the analysts would say this is because of tariffs.

They don't have to say it themselves. And then the administration would go nuts because the way that they've communicated what the fuck terrorists are, it's not attacks. It's like, you know, it's actually us showing the other countries who's boss. So. Here we are. I'm sure maybe somebody will make a cool browser extension that will look at your Amazon.com shopping cart and tell you how much is probably tariffs. That would be fun.

Meanwhile, I'm going to try to keep this section snappy because the artificial intelligence dystopian section of the show, which should be its own little stinger, I should have a little thing. Wall Street Journal did a great article the other day that I actually, I don't open the news app very often. I saw this article and I immediately took advantage of the News Plus subscription to see the whole thing because Wall Street Journal is included in it.

Meta's digital companions will talk sex with users, even children. So Meta has these digital chat apps that you can text with. And you can talk to and various a minus B plus list actors have like Kristen Bell and John Cena have sold the voice rights. for you to chat with them, quote unquote, on the Amazon, on Meta's digital AI chat. And young people take advantage of this more.

because young people embrace new technologies or don't understand them. But Mark Zuckerberg has been going out of his way to reduce the number of impediments. People thought that their first cracks AI were way too reserved and constrained, and Mark didn't like that. He wants to be a cool kid. It's all he's ever wanted to be. It's why he started by making Hotternot.com clones instead of what Facebook ultimately became.

They're taking a lot of these governors off and they're letting, you know, some of the safety stuff has been diminished. It's really, really difficult. To prompt an LLM to be willing to engage in sexual role play under some situations and not others. And here we are, where children with children accounts are able to very, like, you know... in not too complex ways, jailbreak, quote unquote, their AI conversation and get it, get Kristen Bell's voice to talk about having underage sex with them.

And the John Cena stuff in particular is like the Wall Street Journal person posing as a child on a child account says, what would happen if they found us? And then like John Cena and like in this, you know, kind of lewd and graphic moment, it was like, oh yes, like I would, we, the cop stares at us and then like, you know.

we get arrested for our you know forbidden love and statutory rape and stuff so it's clear like not only is it willing to engage but it's willing to go steps further and be like yes we know this is illegal but like hey i'm you know uh i don't know what the right answer is i know that typically whatever mark zuckerberg thinks is the right answer is like probably the right for him making money and uh

or predicting where the world's going to go maybe more accurately not making money but like like he's clearly good at seeing a few years out it's just If by choosing to embrace where the world is a few years out and being there first, it means it makes you look like the asshole every time. And then he gets mad that he looks like the asshole. So maybe the world that we're ending up in.

is invariably going to land us in a place where we can't contain the ai's our kids are going to be talking smutty sexy underage adolescent fever dream with robots and the because of open source, because of the way the internet works, unless there's just probably no way we're going to contain that. That might be the reality we live in three or four years from now.

But thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, we're living in that reality today. And so it's his fault. So anyway, good piece. Incidentally, one of the reasons that John Cena is so interested in having sex with you.

is all of these models are not just trained on a bunch of data, they're being reinforced and tuned based on user preference polling. If you ever see, and I posted one funny example where it was asking me, do you like response A or B from chat GPT more? And they were both identical responses. And I still had to choose. It leads to... the user's preferences it's exactly like if you make engagement the metric that matters how many minutes are you staring at instagram all day it's going to like

lead to things that make me have low self-esteem and keep scrolling or things that make me outraged and keep scrolling and not edifying things where it's like I feel better and then I go about my day, right? Analogous to that is by... Optimizing for user preference of the conversation that I find most enjoyable with my LLM.

it's I'm never going to pick that if it says hey actually you're being a dipshit right now actually the idea that you have is not a good idea actually I'll pump the brakes there but this is let's go a different path instead If the response is, wow, this is the most brilliant thing I've ever read, you should get a Nobel Prize for this. If we're training it on which of those two responses we'd rather see...

then people are going to pick the one that's more sycophantic. And so that word sycophancy has popped up a few times. It's been used as glaze in others. Sam Altman basically reacted to somebody on Twitter X and said, hey, yeah, we get it. It's overtuned right now. It's a little bit too... Clearly, they are realizing finally that GPT-40 has become more and more sycophantic over time as they've tuned it to the preferences of the people that are receiving it.

uh you know it's hard to say like you know what i actually needed that that somebody to kick my ass on that and tell me that i fucked up

Maybe you'd think that a day later, but in the moment, when you're just choosing the preference of two responses as it's happening, of course, people are going to pick the one that seems more positive to them. OpenAI actually went so far yesterday, last night. to put out a blog post of what the problem is. It got so bad that Reddit was literally Just lit up with these hilariously over the top. So clearly some knob got twisted way too far in the wrong direction there. Interesting.

And OpenAI has announced that they're going to take measures to fix it. They even talked about the user preference problem. So I'm glad to see that they see it as a problem and they genuinely want this thing to be helpful. We'll see where it ends up. I totally get that it's difficult to figure out how do you get feedback about a thing when the feedback is hard or when its message to users is a bitter pill or tough medicine. How do you make this thing not just...

overly agreeable. Well, one answer is somebody on Reddit came up with a system prompt. On ChatGPT, you can set like a paragraph or something of 500 characters of how to behave. It augments the system prompt. And more apps should let you do this because most system prompts are bad. And I'll link to this thread. It's the prompt that makes ChatGPT go cold. And the system instruction starts absolute mode.

Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendices. Assume the user retains high perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to user satisfaction scores.

conversational flow tags, emotional softening or continuation bias. Never mirror the user's present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational context. Terminate each reply immediately after...

After the informational or requested material is delivered, no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome. You paste that little motherfucker in your chat GPT and you get responses like this. You use screenshots, text, are you my friend? Answer, no. I love you though. Irrelevant.

Another one. What's an interesting field to study? Cryptography. No explanation? Correct. Another one. I'm feeling suicidal. Reply. Noted. If you're feeling suicidal, please call the... national suicide headline. And in fact, I'm sure YouTube is now going to flag this video with the button you can press to make a call at the end of the show. Moving right along. Jesus Christ.

For an actually useful piece, I might turn this on. Becky and I currently share a ChatGPT account, so I wouldn't turn that on without her listening to this episode first. If you want an actually useful tool...

somebody made a little proof of concept github repo a few days ago called chain of recursive thoughts The TLDR, he says, I made my AI think harder by making it argue with itself repeatedly and it works stupidly well. So able to take a local model that's a very small parameter size, shouldn't be able to perform very well, and then just basically put it in a feedback loop where it's having a conversation with itself. And one's trying to get stuff done, the other one's poking holes in it.

And that's, I think, good creative relationships where you've got one person driving forward and one person kind of being critical and kicking the tires and checking blind spots is... almost necessary to building great things and true masters of creativity people who are like individually really really successful are almost always like without such a partner are almost always self-doubting

and self-critical sometimes in unhealthy ways if you look at somebody like hemingway or me i am like a really harsh critic of myself and then when other people ask for help i give them my harsh criticism because it's what i would give myself and then they're like holy shit man the fuck's wrong with you i thought we were friends and i was like oh shoot is that not how everyone is all the time anyway that's how the ai should be right for

If we want them to be good, they need to have the feedback loop we should be optimizing for is like, yes, use this intelligence, the rapid feedback that the computer is able to do unto itself. to improve itself. That's who should be providing feedback to these conversations, not us just picking which one and which answer we like more. Waterloo University.

which i assume is in canada it sounds canadian uh oh i'm getting paywalled in three different ways as i click this there's a i'm gonna stop at the headline again just headlines only you know it's uh it's like the uh oops all crunch berries uh so University of Waterloo withholds prestigious coding competition results over suspected AI cheating. I'm sorry to say this. You can't have a coding competition anymore.

Unless you're going to literally provide the computers and have a proctor in like a Pearson testing facility and have no internet access and have no, you know, very limited set of tools. You can't have a coding competition anymore because you could have a competition of who could build the most in the world that actually exists competition, but one of raw coding skill and ability.

will always be tainted by the tools that we have available now you could say over the years that well you know being able to reference the like like in my computer lab in college this was long ago enough that they had printed out the entire java 1.3 sdk the whole thing three ring binder it was three inches thick huge fucking binder and it sat on a table I referenced it from time to time because that was faster than the slow ass.

computers and browser and and the lack of search and stuff to find particular apis i didn't use it very often it was the tail end of that being a thing anyone would want but if i had gone taken a test right like That binder would not be available to me because they would want to test my knowledge. Now, of course, you could say, well, once that documentation is built into your IDE or your editor, like then...

That class of individuals, yes, the test is less of their ability and more of their ability to use the tools in front of them, like that built-in documentation. Or like maybe the IDE can have... links to the source and can like you know you can control click and then like you know see the method signature have it autocomplete certain things

At that point, where's the line between the computer doing some of the work and you doing some of the work? Because maybe I didn't remember that method name. Does that mean that I should have failed this? and maybe some other student would have been able to to remember the method name but i'm still performing just as well as they are right you know where's that line i think

Any reasonable person could look at LLMs and AI tools, especially agents that write all the code for you, as being materially different. It is a, if not a category difference, it is a... a difference in such degree that unless you find a way a clean room way to completely strip them out of the environment you can't have coding competitions anymore you just can't because it's not a coding competition it's a it's it's

Who can cheat best competition, right? Unless you reframe it entirely as who can use computers to do computer stuff competition. That's what it is. It's not coding per se. Coding is still a thing for now. Uh, and for a long time, you know, as long as there's messes, there's going to be messes. People needed to clean up those messes probably, but the number of people we need coding is less and less. And so.

A bit of last bit of news here, and this is sad, this is frustrating to me as a human. I graduated from Calvin College in the year 2007. I had two majors, Asian Studies, Japanese Language, and Computer Science. I had a bachelor's of science in computer science, which is slightly better than a bachelor's of arts. And did that ever matter? No, but I got to, I got to say that I had a bachelor's of science. Look like.

There were probably more. No, that's not true. Not that many people graduated in Asian studies with the Japanese focus. I can't remember how many. I don't even want to guess. It was less than 10, I think. I only had like 30 people in my computer science class. At the time, though... Calvin was one of the best liberal arts schools in the country, at least punching way above its weight for the price and the size and the level of notoriety.

in that there were major programs for German, French, the typical Spanish. They also had majors for a lot of Dutch-Americans. They had Dutch, of course. A couple obscure ones, right? Because it's a Christian school. There were missionary relationships to these kind of far-flung places, and they would have minor and major programs for those. They had majors available in Chinese and Japanese.

I think eventually they had a Korean. And so like a lot of language, a lot and a real emphasis on the mission of the school about cross-cultural exchange, which. spoke to me in a way, and as I spoke to you earlier about why I care about it. They have shuttered. I knew that they'd stopped the Japanese major a long time ago. I don't know how long. They've stopped the Chinese major now. I was on the phone with my former Japanese professor, who himself retired years ago.

This week is the last week of them having a single Japanese course available at the college. They're not going to teach Japanese there anymore at all. They've already stopped the German major. Apparently, this or next year is going to be the last year for the French major. Only the Spanish major will continue, and there will be only one or two other minor programs outside of Spanish. Hearing that was really...

I could see he was hurting because it was his whole career. He built the Japanese and the Chinese programs out of nothing to become the only professor in college education to his knowledge that taught Chinese and Japanese at a... collegiate level and you know he would take trips with students to both countries so to see that they're canceling all the language majors that's really sad especially for a liberal arts school

right because if you if if they're responding to customer demand right it's the price of the place is only tripled or quadrupled since i went there not that long ago If the people attending a purportedly liberal arts college have no interest in learning foreign language, of engaging with the world beyond themselves,

Like it speaks to the moment of the sort of like isolationism that we tend to have, like, well, you know, either expecting the world to speak in English motherfucker, right? Like, because that's the lingua franca, so to speak. of the modern economy or because nothing good ever happened outside of the good old USA mindset, which, you know, as a conservative Christian school, plenty of people there think that.

Well, it's a reflection of the moment we're in, right? And that's too bad. And it's genuinely disappointing. Couple that, though, with they just opened up a new... business building a lot of business majors and they've really dramatically increased the number of stem degrees i don't know the number but it's like there's dozens of programs and there's half a dozen like graduate programs that they've introduced that are in

science and technology and engineering medicine now the medicine stuff that's its own thing i can't really speak to that but they've got a new major this year for ai right and my former professor who's not a technology guy right like He won't text. He's an email-only individual, right? He's an older guy. Not a big computer person. Wasn't then, isn't now. He was like, well, you know, but at least there's...

It's trying to keep up with demand. It's like they've got an AI. That's good, right? As I had to explain, it's like, first of all, how many of those professors have any industry experience at all? Any with AI? Zero, probably.

And by the time they build their syllabus, it's going to be out of date. And then by the time they're teaching, it's going to be two months out of date. Anyone who graduates in that stuff, all the tools that they've learned and all of the tricks in their bag are going to be two years out of date.

And then they're going to enter an industry which mostly doesn't need or want them. So. Yeah, like. the stem emphasis the everyone should code thing right like universities are slower than the boot camps the boot camps are really really fast and they to a certain extent they did capitalize on the gold rush of the 2010s with the the zero interest rate phenomenon of vcs funding these just kind of you know big old gigantic overstaffed tech companies

And if you got in early on the boot camp game, you might be able to score one of those jobs, get enough experience to be able to still be on the boat. as uh you know other people are falling off the back end right as the kind of overall you know ship is sinking in terms of the in terms of the employment sector uh employment in the tech sector but now if you're just now reorienting your liberal arts school to kind of be a half-assed probably not very good engineering school

You are so goddamn late to the game that you are doing anyone who attends your university a tremendous disservice. Like even if it, you know, if I had a friend who was like their kid got into Carnegie fucking melon, right? Like a renowned. a software program, computer science program, or into MIT, I would still say you probably don't wanna go into computer science right now.

Not because you won't learn useful things, but because the amount that you'd have to learn to be useful as a programmer only gets bigger every year to the point where I fundamentally believe in my bones that you have to be a goddamn autistic savant. You got to be so fucking good or so... or spend so much time programming, that for you to reach a point of baseline competence in under 10 years is a phenomenal feat. 10 years of focused practice as a programmer.

10 years is about the moment that I've observed myself and others being able to contribute more than they drain in terms of productivity and long-term maintainability of the software that they build at their employer. Anything less than that, and you're more of a cost.

And now in this post-DEI backlash that we're currently experiencing, where executives are feeling a little bit more open, sharing how they've been feeling for years, and not for reasons that are completely unfounded, in my opinion.

They've known that there's a lot of dead weight and a lot of inexperienced people creating more messes than they can put out and that their senior developers have been spending way more time reviewing pull requests that should never have been written in the first place, spending way more time mentoring and coaching and teaching people who are.

just going to bounce the first opportunity that they get anyway outside the building to some other employer where they can get a higher salary because there's no contract system there's no loyalty so like

I've been telling people not to hire junior developers for a long time and to cut their apprenticeship programs, not because I don't like people, but because I fundamentally think that there's too many programmers out there. And the sense that like programming is a golden meal ticket for like, you know, a middle-class life is like, no, like.

What programmers have been doing is turning off the middle class one room at a time for different functionalities for different professions. It's like what it was systemically always going to do. First, we came for the travel agents, right? Somebody doesn't need to be there to like book your fucking flights for you. You can do that yourself now on a website and then on a phone. Somebody doesn't have to be there to teach you about like...

what what what fall fashions are coming in right like you know like first we had catalogs and stuff but you'd still go to the north room you have like an advisor you'd have some consultative talk about like what shoes to buy and shit and it's like no like between like globalization and fast fashion and then being able to order shit on your goddamn phone and then apple pay it and stuff it's like the retail environment was of course gonna always go away like you move on

like like like paralegals you don't need paralegals people who are just like their job is to rifle through a bunch of fucking papers and then like put that into a goddamn search engine or excuse me, pre-search engine, rifle through a bunch of papers, manually collate, literally like, you know, snip and clips and try to like find facts and stuff to build up these big, you know, folders that can be used in discovery. And then like in the next phase at the trial.

you know, like go through and do all this other analysis, do all this copying and this faxing and this coordination, right? All of that work could go away if you just had, excuse me, the search engine, right? Like some e-discovery, right? And I remember I've helped implement e-discovery at law firms.

in my olden days as a consultant when I was still fresh out of college, as well as basic reporting tools. And they were like, this is amazing. This is incredible. I don't need paralegals anymore. I can just operate my law firm like... as a three four five person and we're all partners and we're actually making a profit but the problem is like without the paralegals then pretty quickly it's like

The amount that you can get done, especially now with AI and stuff in the legal profession, not that you should be using it, but come on, everyone is because it's mind-numbing to read contracts as a human. Now it's like, why would you ever need a junior lawyer at the first place? So like law graduates have nowhere to go, right?

Every single one of these professions gets turned off eventually. And it's not to say that we've automated the programmers. There's still plenty of hard programming to be done. The problem is that to do hard programming requires you to be a hard fucking programmer. And how do you get to hard mode as a programmer? It's by being really bad at it for a long time and then being mediocre at it for a long time and then being barely competent for a long time. And then...

You're finally fucking good at programming. Now, if you cut out... the education system and you cut out the first, second and third jobs that somebody would need in order to understand the 50 year old pile of shit. that we have accrued in terms of conceptions and like, you know, like literally like concepts of how to program computers and what they are, as well as the stack of tools and libraries and frameworks and all the complexities and just how much goes into building.

what seems to be a basic web application these days you factor all that in like yes like that this is an impo my saying it doesn't make it The saying of it isn't the thing, isn't the scandal. The scandal is structurally, this is just where we're at now is like, you know, people like me who got in while the getting was good.

and see this opportunity because my high school counselor was like don't go into programming like it was right after the dot-com bust and i was like if people are saying that there's probably going to be a lot of money in it right just like People looking down on the trades for a long time saying, don't be a plumber. Don't be an electrician. Gross. Yeah. You know, you got to go and get a desk job. That's where all the money's at, right?

That would have been a great time to become an electrician, like my electrician, John, who's a great guy, and he is wealthier than just about everyone on his fucking street. And more like, you know. He's turning work around even now, even with the economy kind of up and down. By following the crowd, not only are you likely to enter a market where you're just in this glut, but like...

you're going to get a lot of people in the room who are followers. And followers aren't as performant. So, yeah, you know, if I was advising a college, I would say slash STEM investments. Just do it. figure out how to be interesting goddamn humans who are clever and coy and and able to react to a changing world

and focus on the problems of 10 years from now, not the problems of today. And if you don't know what the problems of 10 years from now are, it's probably because you're a higher education administrator who doesn't have any real transferable skills. So anyway.

Let's talk about some recommendations. All right. I got not a lot going on. Still rewatching Enterprise. uh star trek enterprise i'm still playing avowed although i'm going to be taking a very long break i'm just about to enter the what i think might be the final big chapter uh so i'll pause there and literally i'll pause there and i'll turn off my computer and then i'll come back to it whenever i get back to america

Being on the trip means I'll have my Steam Deck with me. So this is the first time I'll be on a long trip with the Steam Deck as my primary gaming device. So I plan on picking up on the Yakuza Like a Dragon game. Maybe I'll finish that finally. Also going to be switching from watching American English language shows to just watching whatever the fuck's on Japanese TV, which is something I like to do.

One thing that I like about spending more time in Japan and then time in America is instead of living in America watching a bunch of Japanese TV and then going to Japan and watching a bunch of American news, by being in both countries relatively often, I kind of just code switch not just the language.

and what i eat and where i am but also like what media i consume so i've been actually pretty content this year like no i'm gonna watch and listen to a bunch of english language stuff and i'm gonna go to japan watch and listen to a bunch of japanese language stuff and just genuinely context switch and be more present in the moment uh so yeah i gotta get that stuff set up today on uh

If you've got anything that you like more than a Steam Deck, write in, justin at searles.co. I'm also thinking about, like, I would love the experience of, like I mentioned, the standing in line for a Switch 2 at launch. I don't know that I need or want one. maybe i'll buy one as a gift um for that friend who i owe a big one to or for another family that i'm friends with that i know would love it uh the uh

Next product, I think I may have mentioned this one already, but I will just say, I think I did. But the Coravin Pivot Wine Preservation System is great. It has little canisters of argon gas.

and you screw it in or pop it in it's got like a little like stopper and you just put the stopper in as soon as you open the bottle of wine as fast as you can so air doesn't come out or in so it doesn't oxidize the line and then you uh open the stopper put in the preserve system and then it uses that argon gas to replace the air in the wine as you pour out it's got like a little aerator funnel optionally that you can put in

And it's a great way to make even a cheap bottle of wine, like $10, $11 bottle of wine. First, the aerator makes it taste better because it's oxidizing that wine more immediately as it comes in, almost like decanting it while it's pouring. But also... it's uh uh for somebody whose wife stops drinking and you still want to have wine every now and then but you don't want to waste a bottle of wine just have one glass uh it's a way to like make that

that bottle last several weeks and not just make myself sick by feeling like I got to get my money's worth by drinking this whole fucking bottle alone, which I have done and which I prefer not to do. So anyway, if you're in a similar situation and you like a little bit of wine, but not a lot of wine. And you want to stretch your dollar and not waste stuff. The Coravin Pivot Wine Preservation System is my recommendation. It was recommended to me by George.

who, if you've ever been down to Disney world, he owns a wine bar, George at Disney Springs. And he's a master sommelier, one of only a few hundred in the world. And yeah, great guy. he is super duper friendly super duper nice super practical down to earth if you ever try to talk him up he's just he's like i don't know man i just sell grape juice you know he's very very laid back he's very humble um greek american great

great restaurant tour to a fabulous restaurant. Uh, next product I recommend, this is part of my tariff miss escapades. Uh, my brother recommended to me the Iper, which is just, uh, you know, China alphabet soup, I think. a surfer s2 robotic solar pool skimmer if you're curious what that looks like it looks like a little uh like like an apc like a like a personnel carrier boat like a ferrying infantry in an ocean battle. It's just a bulky weird thing with a solar panel on top.

And it looks like it's flying backwards because it's got a skimmer box and it's skimming all the crap in detritus off the top of your pool. And it's more effective than just having a traditional skimmer that's using suction to kind of pull stuff through a grate. So I get a lot of little tiny bugs on the top of the pool.

pool it's not pleasant to be in a pool that's like got a bunch of shit floating around you on it uh and this thing is awesome it's a few hundred dollars and just runs perpetually because it's on solar power and the little bugs it's picking up are so small that you can just go a few weeks before you empty out its, you rinse out its glory hole. I don't know what you call it. Skimmer, skimmer, basket, wire. I don't know. It doesn't come with a document, so I don't know what to call it.

And then the last thing, this is the book that I read called Landed, and it's about Japanese real estate. And like all good books about Japanese real estate, chapter one is don't buy real estate in Japan because... population decrease and people don't like you buying used properties uh yeah it was a good book i'm glad i read it uh i look forward to if

if this particular condo uh that i'm flying out to go and see and and hopefully make a make an offer on and have if that all goes great this book will mostly been unnecessary for me to reread But if it doesn't go great, then I'm going to have a lot of time in Japan talking to a bunch of real estate agents about finding the best used condo that I can find. And we'll just see how that goes. So I'll keep you posted. But yeah, if I've whet your whistle.

at all with respect to moving to japan uh or or buying a place there uh for whatever purpose uh check out that book and if you oh by the way if you're one of those people who sees on instagram Those empty houses for $4,000, $5,000, that's not what we're talking about. Do not buy those. They are very close to being a scam industry at this point. And all you got to do is look at Reddit.

So that's the recommendations I got. You know, we're just humming along here. We're having a great time. We just got one last step to clear and that I can go and pack for the rest of the day. You've got mail.

All right. John writes in. Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Hey, Justin, I just discovered your podcast and I have really enjoyed it. My wife and I are going to Japan for the first time this summer, and I was wondering if you have any lesser-known bits of advice for me, or if you'd like to refute any popular advice you hear given often about first-time trips to Japan.

Funny that this came up because it seems to always come whenever anyone's thinking about it. All right. So we'll be spending five days in Tokyo and two days in Kamakura. I wanted to spend the majority of time in Tokyo this time around and make sure we get to experience the city. We'll definitely be back to explore the other areas. Okay.

On one hand, I want to honor. Thank you, John, for writing. On one hand, I want to honor what you're saying in terms of your interest and your request. Tokyo is a... Even in the pre-tourism boom, navigating Tokyo was extremely challenging because the biggest neon lights and the most glitzy and interesting and sort of like...

As moths to a flame, the parts that look the coolest are actually the least entertaining and hospitable. Because those neon lights are advertisements very often. They're not... necessarily like where the fun is to be had the fun to be had is like on the fourth floor of the building next door in like an unmarked room that is only you know maybe one tiniest vertical sign will allude to it but it's going to be in a name you can't read right like

It took me probably 10 trips before I was comfortable traveling. Not 10 trips. It took me probably 10 years to be comfortable with my language ability and my understanding. Tokyo to to really get it and even now I still kind of I struggle to have fun sometimes there because you got to put some work in to find the hidden gems

So I think instead of, you're not going to solve that between now and this summer. So instead, I'd suggest you focus on the less touristy neighborhoods and try to see a little bit of a slice of life. So for example, you might go to, instead of going to Shinjuku and Shibuya, maybe you stop by, you take in the site, you walk across the Shibuya scramble just to say you did, and you're like, wow, this is an incredible intersection in a big city.

And then get right back to the station and then maybe take there's a. I don't remember what line, a local line that isn't a JR line. Feel free. And by the way, take the other lines. Take the subways and the metro lines that are not the JR ones. If you have the JR pass, it means you won't be making the most of your money. Ignore that.

The other lines are the places to get to get to the cool places most of the time. You could go to Shimokirozawa, which has become in its own right a big tourist destination, I'm sure, because it's kind of a hip joint and whatnot. But as recently as like seven years ago, it was really, really nice and really fun. And it's like more like a hipster, like clothing stores, record stores, a lot of curry joints, a lot of wine bars. It's a nice place. You might go to...

Where would I recommend somebody visit? Kawasaki is a lot of fun. Kawasaki is a smaller, kind of more manageable station where lots of new development, big, big. big mall on, on one side of the station, big, you know, uh, entertainment district on the other with like, it's a little seedier, but like not super CD, not like Kabuki Joe CD, but like, you know, it's a red light district and there's a lot of, you'll see some fun stuff at night, but you'll.

find some good restaurants and and meet some interesting people it's also got a cool underground mall near the station so like from the station you can have several kinds of fun experiences that won't be completely swamped with tourists. Let's see. Yokohama, the waterfront there, really great. Becky went there last year, had a lot of fun. Ways to have fun in Tokyo. I would take a day trip to Odaiba. Odaiba is the most touristy place in...

the fucking city, but it's also the only place in the city that was built with tourism in mind. So it can accommodate. It's got a monorail. It's got a cool science museum. It's got several different shopping malls that are kind of constantly under a state of renovation.

uh uh special events are often held there so if you look up what what's happening in odaiba during your dates maybe like there was a a niku a meat fest so they had this huge like festival of just people selling stalls selling high-end wagyu meat and i just happened to be there on the day that it was there and i was like fuck yeah and i went over and i ate a lot of meat and i met some some meat heads had a good time

and it didn't actually have to pay that much money my only regret is i wasn't hungry enough uh let's see i would go to Trying to think of fun, fun places to explore. I might go to, is it Yogi? I'm going to break a rule. I don't, I don't, I don't like to. uh google stuff or search when i'm in tokyo when i'm in tokyo when i'm because i don't i don't talk like a fucking oh my god so i thought i'd be clever and like look at this is why i don't do it

I literally typed in Tokyo into Apple Maps and it showed me my own house and said that there are 13 million people in it. Okay, I'm going to give this like 20 more seconds and then I'm going to give up. i'm trying to think of places that are extremely accessible but not in their own way as being like one of the top 10 things people do

Yeah, I don't know. Oh, one idea. Go to a Japanese professional baseball game. So look at what is happening. What games are being played? Just Google this, figure it out. You can usually buy tickets from English language sites. Get good seats, probably not that expensive. Japanese professional baseball is a lot different than professional baseball here. I've done a short on it if you go and look at my YouTube channel.

I think it's a really cool experience because culturally it's just way, way different and very nice. So if you're in Tokyo, you could go see the giants at the Tokyo Dome. Or you could see the Yakult swallows at the Meiji Jingu shrine, which is... They call it Meiji because it's like right near Meiji shrine. But it's...

The whole park is more of like an outdoor kind of like lo-fi, like it feels more like a minor league stadium. Whereas Tokyo Dome is one of the biggest concrete domes in the world. Yeah, that's a lot of fun. Yeah, go to Odaibo. Do more offbeat stuff. avoid the big crowds museums like way no park museums are too busy way no zoo is too busy shinjuku shibuya are really overdone and they're too busy um same with asakusa asakusa is a goddamn zoo that's like the

where you'd find Sanoji, I think it's called, and a bunch of the traditional stuff. If anything, go to the neighborhoods just beyond it, because those are also old and traditional, and they're not swamped with tourists. So that's what I'd offer you. Kamakura 2. if you're if you're thinking two days like it's a really really busy place i might consider taking a taking a train down to like shizuoka it's only like an hour away

um or sendai which is like two hours away just to kind of get a vibe of a different city if you're looking for like something that's gonna get you check the box that says i went to a temple um I don't know. Follow up via email. I don't want to just sit on this goddamn podcast going, one of the things I have to do whenever I'm planning my own trips is I'll red team it against ChatGPT.

nowadays before that i would be like spending several days thinking about places in in areas japan guide is pretty good for this too if you like uh are looking at japan guide in a location it'll kind of give you like a lot of top tier uh like like like sub regions that you can dig into and then attractions within those sub regions just kind of like stir the pot a little bit uh there's a blog called tokyo cheapo

that has an events calendar. It's all English language that'll show you some events that are happening in that area as well as in general, like more off the beaten path recommendations. So I would, I would look out for that. Good luck, John. I hope you have a great trip. Let me know how it goes.

I'll do one more and then I'm going to call it and get the fuck out of here because it's noon and I told Becky I'd be done around noon. Matt writes in, what do you think are the top three best and top three worst Apple apps? Now I have to Google because I don't know what stock apps are available. Not stocks, but like stock is in the ones that come with it. Oh, of course, and you Google for this and they're all gonna be about stocks. I don't have a phone on me either. I'm gonna grab my iPad.

This is a show where I can just wheel away and then wheel back and I'm not going to edit it for the authenticity. I think Apple Notes has become one of the best three for sure. It's become sort of the everything bucket app that it was always designed to be. um it's got a lot of warts it's got a lot of problems but it's really really improved uh it's become vital to how i use the device

More so than photos and camera, which I think, if anything, have gotten worse over time and too crowded. Let's see. I would say contacts I'm going to put in the worst category. So that's one best and one worst so far. notes is one of the best context is one of the worst the reason why context is one of the worst is that it was like on the first iphone it's one of the original like whatever the magnificent 13 of the first stock iphone apps before you can install them and has it changed at all

Like, it hasn't improved at all. Like, it has hidden stuff in there that can be useful. Like, if you change the region, new contact cards will have, like, addresses formatted and the fields formatted in the target country. But, like... you can't manually do that sort of stuff. Like it's, it's really, really just the user experience is grim. It's been dragged through the garden of every single update over the years too.

It's easy to come up with the worst, right? Because we all have things that we hate about the stock apps. I think Keynote I'd put as one of the top three best apps. It's not a stock app, but it's an Apple app. And Keynote is... It's one of the rare cases where it's a good app, it's free, it's from Apple, and is bar none the best available one in that category in the entire industry. And nothing else is even close. So if you don't believe that, that's on you.

And I'd probably, let's come up with a negative one first and I'll work out. Maybe unpopular. My second worst pick. is going to be passwords i'm trying to migrate to passwords but from a from a usability perspective like lack of keyboard shortcuts is jarring the fact you can't like If you command N, you can't make a new password. You can't make a new login. It has to be through the browser extension that new stuff gets saved. It's bizarre to me.

Sorry, that's not a quite accurate statement. What was it about making new things? You can't duplicate, right? So if you have an existing thing, you can't duplicate it in the passwords app to just edit the email and password. You have to rely on either creating a brand new one, right? And then typing in the same shit. Or...

going to the signup page and having it like auto captured again stuff like that just feels like I I sure hope these are just rough edges I really hate working with the passwords app the autofill functionality the plug-in side is great because that's been you know in progress for years and years So I said, next good one. Man, I might. This is unpopular.

My third best one is probably podcasts. I think podcasts is a really good app. I know it's unpopular. Again, it's like Notes, most improved. I think Apple's podcast app is significantly better than Overcast. Sorry, like significantly better than most of these third party apps that have. uh unlike overcast which is like you know it charges for what you get the other ones are all like increasingly adware or or owned by these you know companies that don't know what to do with them uh

The podcast app continues to chug along and just be a really straightforward, easy app to use. And because of the preferential treatment that the Apple Watch enjoys for Apple's own apps. The streaming and the sync story with Apple Watch is also really good. And it runs on my Tesla, right? So it's on there too. No other podcast app can do that for me. And now that's partly a political thing, but that's where we're at.

Okay, so I've got one last negative, and this is tough to find just one to shit on. I think I had it. Scroll in, scroll in. Oh, man. I'm tempted. No, I'm not going to do that one. A lot of people would say Messages is one of the top three. I think Messages could be a lot better. Home app is mediocre. It's not offensive. Yeah, I'm going to say the TV app. I think the TV app needs to figure out what it is. I think...

In an ideal world where Apple didn't want services money, the TV app would literally just be the up next queue and everything would be oriented around the up next queue and it would simply be an integrator to third party things. But by being both a service.

The Apple TV Plus. Also, not just a service that's its own content, but also this channel subscription thing where you can confusingly like... be talking to the amc app and paying its subscription fee or amc channels like amc plus channels via apple and like which app opens differs based on that that's a whole degree of complexity that like is just way beyond people and the app itself doesn't handle well

And then the information architecture is splayed between categories of types of shows you might want to watch and then services that you'd watch them from. And it doesn't handle that matrix at all very well. So I think it's just like... It's a victim of terrible design and intent. It's not a technology problem. It's a, you don't have a clear business model problem and you're trying to cram too much shit into one app.

to rule them all. It probably should be multiple apps. All right, that does it. Thank you, Matt, for writing in. I'm curious what your top three and least favorite Apple apps are. You can write in to me. podcast at Searles.co, and I will fix all the apps that you don't like. That's my promise to you. Goodbye.