I'm Paul Ford and I'm Rich Ciyotti and this is the Abord podcast sponsored by Abord.com. Abord.com. Rich, what is Abord? Abord is a wickedly powerful link saving data management tool that uses AI. Blah, blah. Terrible words. It's a great way to collect, organize and collaborate on work you're doing on the web or on your phone. Mobile's coming real soon. It's a way to save links, but when it saves the links, it studies the links and turns the links into data, which is very cool.
I don't know why anyone would listen to people talk about a board on a podcast when they go to Abord.com. Perfect. Sign up, it's free. So I was on Wikipedia the other day. We all were. Yeah, I love Wikipedia. Just love it. It's a gift. So I'm on Wikipedia and I found a glorious page on Wikipedia and it reminded me of something a friend said, so I'll tell you the page is called list of obsolete technology. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Come the old men talking about this is tech. This is not old men.
This is the bathing machine. No, but that was okay, you never had this experience in neither did I, but you used to like go to the ocean and get into a little box that could take you out into the ocean for modesty purposes. We are old, not that old. Not 240 years. Yeah, it comes and goes. You know another one, the hourglass. Because you know, and there are still hourglass makers out there.
I mean, it's a trinket, but there must have been a day where the hourglass people went, come on, no one's going to buy it. Look, it's got all those gears. Yeah, yeah. Mine, I put sand in a thing and you turn it over. It does everything you need. Why the hell are you telling me about watches? Totally. And so quill pens, sundial, you know, the sundial and the hourglass people, you can just imagine a private equity firm like buying all the sunglasses and the hourglasses. We're going to sunset this.
Yeah. And just like, we're going, guys, you need to get me 30% more per year. Yeah. We can. It's just sand. The clocks are kicking our ass. So I was looking at this because I was thinking about obsolete technology because a friend of mine just reached out sent me a message and he said he had a picture of all the textbooks of the programming language that he used in his day to day job. It's called R. He's a mathematician statistician. R is a well-known stats centric. It's a great language.
Data stats centric programming language, yes. Exactly. Okay. So he's a rock star. But like everyone, he's moving more into machine learning and AI. So his life is more about the programming language Python, which is, which he doesn't love. And he asked in the, and it was a rhetorical question. He wasn't saying, make me a podcast. How do you know when you're done with the technology? Well, that's a great question. I think there's two ways to answer that question. One is you may be done.
You've just tired of it. You've hit the edges. You want to learn something new and you made this, you've decided I'm kind of done with this and I'm going to move on to something else. Then there is the world telling you. It's over. It's over. Or it's not that it's over. It's more like we need more of this unless of that and that expertise and that is a, that's a, that's a sad moment because there's something really beautiful about becoming well-versed in something, making friends.
That's a thing. In that community, sharing approaches to it. It's a really nice. I mean, it's, people think it's just a skill, but in programming, you know, there are communities that form around these things. It's not just programming. It's all community.
Have you ever been, I remember once I was walking in Midtown Manhattan around the public library and an absolutely massive group of relatively beefy, rough looking men were walking there and no women, no, it was the Carpenters Union going to the library. Well, they were having a little protest. Not at the, it was convenient to the library and they were using the stuff. It wasn't about the library. I see, I see.
But yeah, there was hundreds and hundreds of people who get together, drink, know each other and there's the idea of the trade union of craft being something that connects people. Sure. And I've seen this around, I mean, I don't know if you, you will remember this, but when we started our agency many years ago, there were many programming languages that we were working with and eventually people were like only JavaScript.
Yeah. You know, the whole world doesn't just run on JavaScript and they looked at us and they went only JavaScript. Yeah. Yeah. They're kind of like religions in a way. They come in and out of fashion. They can actually become hostile to the legacy tools that are around. They look at them as not just outdated, but almost like sub quality. They're just not respected. There's a lot of, look, maybe this is everything.
Maybe this is like, you know, the young kid saying that the thing that dad does is dumb and boring and outdated and not fun anymore. There was a period where it wasn't like, okay, there's a better way to do this than Jake Wiery. It was like, Jake Wiery's horrible. Yes. Like, really viewed as a terrible, terrible thing to do to anyone. People in certain trades and crafts will say, this is a war crime.
Yeah. And for those that don't know, Jake Wiery was this kind of like strike a lightning that happened at this moment, whereas like it became really easy to programmatically do things on a web browser. And it was like fun and smart. And it was this guy wrote it up and just put it out there. It objectively, it was this little tool. You put it into a web page and it let you treat the web page in a very like expressive way.
You could suddenly, at that point, there was a point where everything kind of started to light up when your mouse wouldn't go over it. Yeah. Jake Wiery made that possible. Made it very easy. You didn't have to drag libraries in and really code as much. It was made, it made cool, cool capabilities much more accessible to people. I think there's a cycle that happens here. I think what happens is this.
I think what happens is a new tech gets introduced as an innovation or as actually a lowering of the barrier because it's more efficient and it's like, look, why are we doing all this hard work? Why don't we package it up into something abstract the way all the complexity and make it easy? And then what it and then it takes. Yes. Because all of a sudden people who didn't know they could do a thing are empowered to do a thing. And it's faster or it's faster or easier. And then this happens.
Those same people who are welcomed into the club, right? Put up a giant fence and say, we will defend this and we will actually create expertise in it. The way professionals express their love for a skill is to create expertise around it. They create a language around it. They throw acronyms out there that no one else understands. They like to coin terms and they call it terms. They create certifications.
I gave a talk two days ago about AI and I was sort of the layman's perspective and there was this other panelist that was much more technical about it. And he kept saying hallucination, right? Because that word has been appropriated in the AI community. Sure. And he said it so casually. Meanwhile, the room was not technical people. And he just kept saying hallucination and he sounded like a drug dealer to be perfectly honest. This is another interesting moment.
There's a point I used to work a lot with people who also worked at the New York Times. And when you talk to Times people, often they will use the first names of people you've never heard of. And casually. They'll just be like, Dean says and you'll go, who's Dean? Yeah. And they look at you like, you animal. Yeah. So if you look at the progression of it, there's the like, okay, is this a club worth advocating for? I will join it. When they join it, they create expertise around it.
What is expertise? First off, it makes them feel good, right? It's a shorthand. But it also excludes others who haven't invested in joining the club. And so you see a young programmer trying to wait into like a forum of a very specific library and a very specific, it's a, it's a, it's a scary. It's like you're trying to get approval from the club. And then if you follow the story arc, at some point, something new shows up in all of a sudden, you're not the cool kid at the lunchroom.
You're not the cool table. It's real. And that happens. And it happens constantly because technology just keeps going. It's all human dynamics because what happens as the engineers of all kinds, the tradespeople of all kinds get older and older. Yeah. They turn to you when you ask them a question about which language is better or how should I remodel my kitchen and or whatever? And they go, it depends. Yeah. It is the higher up you go, the more it depends, the more experience you have.
But there is because I also think at that point, you've stopped looking for community in your skills. It's, it's, it's a little sad and it's a little scary. The moment you realize that the club you're in isn't cool anymore. That the technology you're using seems to have not kept up and there are new things coming out because it is not about the tech being obsolete. It is about, it is about you being obsolete. It is. You have invested in that. You've decided to carry that passport.
You are that citizen for the nation of angular or the nation of a reactor. The like, react was like, it was like the Roman Empire for a while. It was just was trouncing everything in the world of front end and frankly all the way down the stack. And it became very intimidating to even say that you are into some other more fringe platform and whatnot.
And the thing is these are communities and you do want to, you do want to get hired, you want to get promoted and, and so we tend to gravitate towards where the energy is. So it can be sad. It's like, man, I got great at angular. Where is everybody? I'm going to propose something that is bananas. I love bananas. Pine potassium. So first of all, if you are in, it is bananas are great. What a wonderful fruit. You know, you know, it's amazing about them.
They, they have a creamy quality to them that if you like, you have like a banana muffin, it feels like a miracle. It's just that they're heavy in a good way. They're wonderful. And just this podcast is sponsored by aboard.com and bananas and Chiquita. The rich transitioning off of a technology or from one skill to another, it's a big deal. It's not as big a deal as people make it out to be. You can learn another programming language, you're a smart person, et cetera.
And my friend, if he's going to be an AI, he can't really advocate for his old language. He's got to learn the new stuff and just go with it. I'll learn the new stuff and then, and yeah, go ahead. But I think that, and I don't, I mean this only semi-seriously, but semi-seriously. You actually have to allow yourself to grieve and say goodbye to the old technology. And to a little bit of yourself. That's right.
Because the community that you were part of and the community might be weirdly, well, you know, the term everybody loves is parasocial. You read the blogs and you knew the people and you, you followed the Twitter accounts. Sure. And, and so the news about that world was important to you. You'd wake up and you, you'd check in. You would help people. Correct. And you would seem to get past this one issue with this library and then you help them. And then you feel good and then they help you.
And it's, it's, it's a supportive place. And people seem to be leaving. It's, it's like college. Like, like you're moving on, you're graduating. Is a healthy way to look at it. And so there are ceremonies at the end. Your parents come or not and you get, you wear a robe and then give you a sticker. Yeah. Like there is none of that for a lot of this world. I think the sadness isn't that, oh my gosh, I moved on from one skill set to another.
I think the sadness is, you know, this makes me think of, there's this well-known photographer. If you searched abandoned malls, you'll find this photograph. He just went to malls around the country in the United States and just, they're just sitting there. Right. And like weird plants are growing in between the escalators at these malls. And I think what is sad about those photos, they're strangely beautiful.
But I think what's sad about them is that you can't help but look at them and say, well, at one point during the holiday season, there were kids running around and people were hanging out. Teenagers used to hang out here and look at cassettes because they couldn't go to bars. Right. Yeah, exactly. And so I think the fact that it was once a vibrant community in a vibrant town square and now it's not, it's sad, right?
It's going to a town that used to be a hub, a train stop and then nobody needs trains anymore right? And so it's a little sad. The way that we talk about these things culturally though is, you're done with that throw it away. Yeah. I think what you can do past the morning period is actually find nostalgia and good memories in it, honestly. Like I love looking at old computer magazines. Like I think it's like bite and and and PC world.
Like there was a bizarre and weird and at that time everybody was kind of making up half of the things they were saying and them. They were kind of throwing stuff out, right? And so I do think there is a charm and there's good memories that can come of it. But yeah, you kind of have to keep going. These are high skilled professions.
I am a retired quote unquote lawyer, but I don't have it in me to unsubscribe from the continuing education emails, which I'm supposed to go attend because laws change. You're supposed to go get training to get recertified. And I don't have to because I don't practice. But I still get the emails. I like getting them. They're like, hey, big news in the evidence world of New York state. Look at this. Some law they got passed, right? And it's it's I'll make a point.
I don't think it's about the laws themselves because objectively, you could not look at that for two years. Go get caught up in about two weeks with what's changed. That's true. And on where you go, it's about understanding how the community is moving back and forth. And it's, look, it's the community of lawyers. Like that's that's adjacent to politics. There's a lot to learn. I mean, these, what you'll find is a lot of your friends also moved over to the new community.
You'll re real run into people again. Yes. Like that's a real thing. And that's a positive thing. I think I do think I don't think it needs. I do hate it when everybody kind of shits on the old tech. It's just I think it's it's silly and mean. And you know, a lot of the new tech wouldn't exist without the old tech. It's all kind of built on itself. That's humans expressing their chim play nature, right?
You can still do wonderful things with R. And the reality is lots of people like in the climate community. It's not out of fashion. There you go. Right? Yeah. But it is out of fashion and machine learning and and artificial intelligence is one of those things that I think will require a lot of reskilling. Like sure. It changes a lot about knowledge work. Like I've been using it to program recently and I'm like, this is fundamentally different.
I would learn how to be a programmer in a different way. If you're young and you want to learn. Absolutely. But so, you know, the upshot of this is yes. You know it's time to move on when you hear that when you feel it. You feel it. You know, you're like, are you going to be able to get a job with this in the future? I think it's job. I think it's I think it's also you feeling like you're continuing to grow professionally. I think that's part. I think it's looking.
Do you want to admire the people that hold on? There is a cold fusion expert out there that is just flexing constantly, right? Do you want to know the true line for when it's time to move on? Yes. I do. When you are thinking less about the tool itself and more that you will be betraying the community and the values of the community. If you move to a new technology, these are tools. They are not humans. They are not people. They're not religious figures. Exactly.
When you move on, they're not monuments to worship on, right? But you can feel really guilty about abandoning the Python community to move towards JavaScript because you're doing more fun and work. Those are real feelings. We tend not to validate them because they're a little bit ridiculous. Yeah. But you went to that conference. You saw the people. You read all the blogs. You kind of feel that you know them. You might feel that you're kind of cheating on them when you go over to the new thing.
When you feel that, it's time to move over to the new thing. Can we can I? Yes. I think that's good advice. I want to share one other piece of advice. Okay. Learn Python. Python's great. Well, it's not that it's great. Do you know what it is? It seems to they never put a lock on the door and there's always a house party going on. It shows up everywhere. Well, it doesn't have an opinion about the interfaces into it, right? And so it's like, yeah, we don't...
Okay. Fine. Maybe we should have stuck with semicolons. Here we are. But come on in. Every other language, every other system. Yeah, it is like we're going to be better. We're going to do it. And then Python just keeps showing up. Well, it doesn't want to be better. Yeah. It just wants to make... I was out. You're doing that? Come on. They're here. Wrap this up. Here's some wrapping paper. Come on in.
Everybody's welcomed into it versus it being orthodox about how you have to behave within its ecosystem. It conquered the world of machine learning. It conquered AI. It didn't though. It just said it just let the world in. True. It is. Python's core code library is just saying... Sure. The funnier is... Sure. Why not? You look interesting. Come on in. All of the actual code that's really, really difficult and complicated that drives AI, not written in Python. Sure. Exactly.
Python glues it together and is like, would you like to make it easy? Exactly. Can I be a friend? Exactly. And so I think there's a... And this is the pull quote for this podcast. I think. I look at me saying that while I'm co-hosting with Paul Ford. Python succeeds because it has no ego as a programming language. It is one of the lowest... No one said, well, why wouldn't you just use... No one has that opinion about it. It's almost like ridiculous at this point. I feel like... Lean in.
It's good advice. Go ahead and grieve the technologies and communities if you have to move on. Rich, what do you feel about the telegraph? Don't use it. What about vinyl? You know, we were talking earlier about nostalgia. And vinyl, to me, is nostalgia. I mean, I'm not going to get into the debate. I'm not going to fall into the trap. It's a warmer sound. I'm like, let's leave it alone. It's a sound that feels... People associate the feelings of the vinyl crackle with the warmth.
Yeah. So I think technically, vinyl records can hit the high frequencies just scientifically. Sure. And so, therefore, it is warmer. It's because it's not piercing your ear with digital zeros and ones. But it's a nice piece of furniture. Record... Like, records in sleeves and beautiful covers are cool. Is there a technology... Technology you wish would come back. That's a great question. The classic Wilco joystick. Mmm. Yeah, go look those up. Yeah. I mean, it was expensive. It was more tactile.
I think Wilco started... Is it Wico or Wilco? I'm not sure. It might be Wico. Wilco is a band. It might be Wico. I think it's Wico. Wilco is a band. Wilco is a band. Wilco is still around, in fact. And they make joysticks. And they make joysticks. Wico, I think, they made upright cabinets like joysticks. And then they moved to home. And I remember I spent, like, it was a big deal for me to spend twice as much for a Wico joy. But it was very satisfying. It was really good.
I think it spoke to the simplicity of games back then too. Now it's like, you know, 80 commands to play. You know what's sad for me is, pneumatic tubes went away. You weren't around for those. But the whole... The whole city ran on pneumatic tubes. You could get like a piece of mail from Brooklyn to Manhattan in minutes. Is that true? Paris too. Is that true? Yeah, like the tube would go across Manhattan. That's ridiculous. Yeah, I'm glad that's not a... Nah, it's some good stuff.
Yeah, I mean, what about with like, where do you stand on like sandwich marks where you just go and hit a code and you get a sandwich? Automats. Automats, thank you. Deeply awesome to learn about. Honestly, a whole mother podcast object. I'm obsessed with the automatic. Okay. Door dashes essentially in automatic. The automatic was the meeting place for all of New York City. Yeah. You can't have like Vaudeville in theater without it. Because everyone would go to the automatic.
Move forward positively. Yeah. Be... Look back on... Like some people don't like to tell you that they used to code an ember. Listen, shame to it. Put that aside. Be happy with what you learned. You're always building on what you learned in the past and keep going. You know who built sort of like, automatic light interface where you can just go look at beautiful things and touch them and then meet your friends. We did? Yes, we actually did. Check out aboard.com.
We have a hard time explaining aboard because it can do so many different things. You can shop with it. You can organize your contacts with it. You can bring in files into it as an beautiful web parser though that not only takes a link in, but actually studies it. Pulls the data out so you can make use of it. It's really, really cool. Check it out. aboard.com if you want to say hi to us. Hello at aboard.com and we look forward to hearing from you. Have a lovely day. Bye. Bye Paul. Hi Rich.