543: 100 Million Tire-Kickers

36:15Like I would want to follow them on Instagram. Right. You keep following them on Instagram and you unfollow them on threads. You're like, now I won't have to see that discussion about Disney stuff that I'm not interested in threads. But I think that's not true. I think threads would still show them to you. I misunderstood your point. I'm with you now. And yes, actually, that's one of the things that is thank you so much because that's one of the things that has driven me nuts about threads is that I'm seeing, like I feel like it used to be this way on Twitter like 10 plus years ago. I'm seeing all these conversations between people that maybe I follow one of them.

36:42And I guess this is just algorithmic timeline, like coming to get me. Maybe you follow none of them, which is much more likely. That also happens. Yeah. And like that. And to be clear, Twitter, when used through a third party client, was never like this. Exactly. And that's where the way I'm used to seeing Twitter. And so I can understand from like a bootstrap perspective, especially if I'm only following like one or two people at the beginning. OK, yeah, sure. Show me all of these other conversations. But I really do not care for what I feel like. It feels kind of like eavesdropping to me, which it isn't because these are all public conversations, blah, blah, blah.

37:15But it just kind of feels that way. And I really don't care for it, especially since a lot of the times this is content that isn't particularly relevant to me. And again, some of this is my own fault. I can unfollow, again, to pick on this example, these Disney accounts on threads. But I just don't love that. And that has not made me very happy. all in all but I do think I have a positive view of threads in the broad scheme of things but it hasn't it hasn't captured my attention the way that Mastodon has I think because I'm a nerd I think because my nerd friends are all on Mastodon and because Mastodon feels most directly similar to the pieces of Twitter that I care for I'm not saying it's most directly similar to Twitter, because I think that's probably threads, but it's the most directly similar to the Twitter that I enjoy.

38:07Third-party apps, chronological timeline, blocking, filtering with regular expressions, all these sorts of things that I'm not seeing in threads yet. If there's no immediate responses to anything I just said, then Marco, please tell me what your broad thoughts are on threads, and then we'll start picking apart the individual stuff. Well, you know, I think, so first of all I haven't used it a ton simply because as Casey said there's no Mac story right now and they also went through the trouble of opting out of the compatibility for M1 powered Macs for this app to run I think you two are weirdos within weirdos because it is boggling my mind that your main interface over the years with Twitter has been on the Mac well this is where I am most of the day I guess I mean I read on the Mac too but the vast majority of my reading of Twitter like things has always been on the phone like obviously I have the Mac app I run it all day I use it but like to be majority Mac that's you are a minority of a minority yeah and also the majority of my posting is on the Mac as well because a lot of times I'm posting like as part of something I'm doing whether it's announcing the show going live or posting new episode notifications or posting questions about something I'm working on code wise so or posting a screenshot like there's so much I'm doing on the Mac like that's why when Mastodon was first taking off, before we had Ivory on the Mac, I really wasn't getting that much into it because it was very difficult for me to work it into my flow and my life.

39:39And Blue Sky actually worked on the Mac because they didn't opt out of that compatibility. And so their iPhone app worked just fine. And I'm talking about Blue Sky in the past tense. You used the same cruddy app in both places. Yes. And it worked terribly on the Mac because when iPhone-only apps run on the Mac, they don't run in a flexible window, and they don't even run at the largest iPhone size. He would think, okay, if you're going to run an iPhone app on the Mac and it's going to be non-resizable, run it at the size of the iPhone Pro Max. Nope, doesn't do that. It runs at some fixed small size, and you can't resize it.

40:18So it's tough. It's not a good experience, but at least it's something. and so that's how i was using blue sky for a while and i'm talking about blue sky in the past tense because honestly i've forgotten to continue to use it um and and i think we're gonna i'm gonna get that in a second here but um for honestly now that threads is out i don't see a strong future for blue sky but anyway um these social networks like this you know everyone is like in in gamer terms it's like everyone keeps starting new minecraft worlds and like starting every let's start everything from scratch and it's super fun for for a little while as everyone's like you know finding other people and refollowing for whoever they were following in other places before and then someone comes in and wrecks everything yeah and and the problem is take over yeah that's the problem like eventually it becomes night and it becomes all nazis and like and like what part of the reason why i i didn't really get long-term engaged into blue sky is that every time i would go to blue sky all of the conversations going on would be about nazi issues whether even if it wasn't the nazis themselves everybody was just talking about what to do about nazis they're wringing their hands about how nice we should be to them not even that just like everybody was basically everybody was mad all the time and while i appreciate the reasons they were mad that wasn't a fun place for me to keep going back to although i have to say that this uh this uh this genre of discussion, taking the form of, I went to social network X and everyone was talking about Y, has always bothered me because it's always done in a way that uses that observation to characterize the service.

42:03And sometimes there's some truth to it. If lots of people have a similar experience, that's why the discussion happens. But with services that are Twitter-like, it is mostly a function of who you follow with caveats about threads that we'll get to in a second and so saying whenever i go to x people are always talking about y it's like no the people you follow are always talking about y or enough of the people you follow are talking about it and it annoys you enough that you makes you feel like that's all they're talking about because those things stand out and all the people posting pictures of their cats fade into the background because the things that annoy you stand out more with algorithmic ones it's it's different but like but i have to say like and and and the way the opposite of that is like hey well what if everybody says it and what you just said is totally true when people are just coming on to a new service it is natural that most of the people who are talking are talking about the new service because hey like it's the new minecraft world hey everybody here we are where are we going to build i'm going to build over here what do you think of this did you find out where even i did it like i came onto threads and i was like how do you find out the list of people that someone else follows like it was hidden in the ui somewhere right when you see enough people saying that it make sense but i have to say that for services that have settled down to the point where there's not a gigantic influx of millions of people every millions of new people every single day if you continue to not see the discussions you want and if you are not subjected to a non-optional algorithm timeline you can adjust what you see by changing who you follow and that was true on twitter with third-party clients only and it's true of mastodon is not so true of threads unfortunately which we'll get to in a little bit and in blue sky it's mostly true because blue sky did have a timeline that will show you only stuff from the people you follow so this is this is to suggest to people that if your experience of a service that gives you control over your experience is not to your liking and if that service is not in its you know september or whatever like where all the new students come in or whatever you can do something about it and you should do something about even casey like oh i don't want to see all these dizzy people like immediately unfollow i mean again now that it's going to save you on threads but yeah ruthlessly unfollow i know people don't like to do it because it feels like they're doing mean things to their friends or whatever but that's how you can hammer these services into a shape that is more pleasing to you and that's how eventually you see someone complaining for year number 17 on twitter that they hate seeing people discuss whatever topic i can't stand any more discussions about sports i just can't stand it stop following people talk about sports and it will solve your problem and they're gonna say yeah but he's a first party client i'm gonna be like oh there's your problem anyway yeah and and there and with all these services look you've been hearing me say a similar thing for a year that like like the service is who you follow that and your perception if you're lucky right and you're not your perception of the service is usually for most services historically who you follow but yeah the problem is that's not the case for these new ones that are very algorithmic and trying to promote things and you know from other people or they're so small that you kind of have to go fishing in the pond of random tweets just to like find people so you know or in the case you know and also these services tend to allow drive-by replies so even if you are not talking about something someone else can can reply to you or mention you to get you to talk about something or to ask you why you're not talking about something and so it it there are some holes in in the um in in the seal of like i just want to talk about xyz like in practice well that's that's where actual that's where the actual population comes in for example if you allow nazis to be part of the population it's not a solution to say well don't worry you can block them because who wants to spend their day blocking nazis right like that's like and it's like well we can't solve that problem like yes you can don't let them be there it's like it's like you know going to your favorite restaurant and it's like yeah the the clowns come in with seltzer bottles and squirt everybody but you know just if any individual clown does that to you just block them and we'll make sure they can't squirt you anymore yeah and then a succession of clowns squirts you with seltzer and you're like well i blocked every single one of them but i'm still soaking wet and i don't like this restaurant anymore can't you just not let the clowns in yeah also you're only blocking the bottles not the clowns they can just go buy a new bottle and bring it right in and just squirt you again and they would say well can't you just not let the clowns in and they'd be like well but it's a free country we gotta let the clowns in right it's like it's a restaurant anyway continue yeah so so back to threads so i've had a hard time using it because it you know in standard zuckerberg fashion it really tries to clone a lot of the twitter app experience problem is as previously mentioned i never had the twitter app experience i have the tweet bot and ivory experience which is so much nicer and the actual like first party Twitter app.

46:45I never used that. So, you know, I went to Blue Sky first and they ripped off the Twitter experience. Now I'm on Threads. They ripped off the Twitter experience. Everyone's cloning something I hate, it turns out. I mean, but they kind of have to, though. Agree. I mean, we're a bunch of weirdos here talking about our particular thing because we're giving our opinion on it. But just to be clear, we do understand why Twitter is like this, why Instagram is like this, why Threads is like this. because if you and maybe people listening to this podcast don't know because they're more similar to us but if you don't have an established network of people who you want to follow and discuss things with but you just land in this app just like you know show me something right i'm just a regular person i want to be entertained it's not as simple as tiktok where you just start swiping and it'll figure you out right but people don't have huge followings people who are going to answer their questions when some if you're not marco and you post a question about ios and you don't have you don't follow anybody from the ios developing computer and nobody follows you you're going to say hey i couldn't figure out this thing with whatever no one's going to answer you no one's going to even see that you have to have something that lets people sort of bootstrap the social engagement and so that's where these algorithms come and they say we know you don't have a lot of followers we know you don't even know who you're supposed to follow so let's chuck a bunch of stuff in your face that we think you might find interesting interesting and you have to do that to be a mass market social network.

48:09You have to give that, and it's not just a way for people to get started and to get going. Some people stay that way the whole time. They don't want to follow 500 people. They're never going to get 1 ,000 people to follow them. They just want to show me some interesting things, and they'll pick out people they follow, and they'll find some people they find interesting and maybe interact or whatever, but they need sort of that foundation of the app will figure out what it thinks you want to see to make it a pleasurable experience for you. uh and you know twitter did that with the algorithm timeline and threads does it like crazy you probably want to see what other people want to see which is celebrities or whatever and presumably if you have a do a good job of the algorithm like tiktok seems to they'll figure out what you like based on you know creepily watching what you spend more time lingering on the scroll view or whatever the hell they do right but that's that's their job and that that is not our three experiences of twitter but apps like this have to do that if they want to be mass market i mean so blue sky is still invite only and it was like 50 000 people mastodon is like 2 million with like 1 million active uh as of monday july 11th uh threads which came out uh like last week is at 100 million people that's what the point i wanted to make with the the threads v1 it's like well of course there aren't 100 million there they leveraged the instagram social graph yeah the original version of threads also leveraged the instagram social graph something else must have changed and we all know what has changed number one twitter bought by a maniac thrown in the dumpster right number two this trend of hey let's try different social networks blue sky mastodon all these things like there's blood in the water right previously if if facebook's instagram whatever meta had launched this when twitter was at the top of its strength and everyone was on it and the president was posting on it and it was just like the place where everything was happening this app would have died instantly no one would have cared it did die in 2019 it wasn't the same app obviously but like it's not just like oh we're facebook we automatically win no but when there's blood in the water people want a new comforting thing that you launch the app if you have an instagram app even if you don't even use instagram it knows that you have one because you launched it on your front or whatever it's like puts a button boom and what do you have to do nothing there's that thing do you want to follow the instagram people yes no it doesn't matter what you answer because whatever you answer it's going to throw a bunch of crap in your face and you're going to look at it and that is a mass market friendly 100 million people in a week 100 million signups is it sustainable this growth but doesn't matter like they are now the big i mean twitter itself only has they have in the hundreds of millions right at their hate the top the height of twitter's power with hundreds of millions of people this has a single hundred million people after a week that's how much people are are dissatisfied with twitter so that i mean that's one of the main reasons we're talking about it and you know the fact that it doesn't do what we want to do yet is kind of a bummer for us but it shows how if you want to win the social networking game of twitter like things uh the bar was substantially lowered by elon musk we are sponsored this week by memberful monetize your passion and diversify your revenue streams with Memberful.

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53:09i think if any of these twitter replacements are going to have a chance of being mass market threads is the one period it's at 100 million people i would say it's already mass market well again if they can sustain that but all those people could leave next week but we'll see yes it's at 100 million tire kickers but these these things tend to have massive drop off for like a lot of people we'll try it out and then see who's still there in a month i mean it happened with mastodon even mastodon again up to like multiple millions and then kind of went down to like the you know the one and a half million who are actually willing to stay and it's creeping back up again but yeah but still like you know even if they lose 80 of their people they're still 20 times the size of mastodon so you know i think this is going to be the replacement for twitter for most people if if facebook doesn't screw it up because there's still plenty of room for facebook to screw up not not i was gonna say not intentionally like elon but not as incompetently as elon screwed up twitter because it would be hard to compete with that that's really probably like one for the ages like how can you do everything possible wrong over and over again but it's not as easy as you think it is twitter had the advantage of being the first one to do anything like this so he defined everything about it and twitter was fairly incompetent and stupid too but it was literally the only game in town and invented this entire thing so it got a lot of grace and we were talking about this in slack channel like do you think threads is going to be like twitter even if threads ends up being 10 times bigger than twitter it will never be like twitter because it's not singular right there's already other things out there like mastodon you know and blue sky and nostor and like it's a different world where we you know when twitter was just twitter it's kind of like google is now like there was a bunch search engines and then there was google and we still really haven't entered the post google age despite bing and duck duck go existing and everything um we are in clearly in the post twitter age where there was a singular thing twitter and it will we will never be in a time it's like you know going to like a streaming video versus cable tv versus you know antenna tv there will never be another time where we're all watching the same show on tv all the time like we were back when there were limited choices and there will never be a time when there's a singular focus of this kind of network social networking like there was in the twitter days even if threads becomes 10 times bigger but you know keep in mind too like with threads you know a huge part of the the hundred million people who are there now were not twitter users they were instagram users we'll see how much this i do think it's going to stick but i think it's going to be different uh in terms of who's using it how and for how long um and we'll see i i am optimistic about its future which and i say this in terms of like i think it has good chances of sticking around um not in terms of like i'm super happy about this because i still am not a fan of this company at all and so i don't love the fact that they are the ones owning this that being said i also think that mastodon will be fine there's enough people now on mastodon that seem to have built a life there and built patterns there and built an audience and have apps configured and all set up the way they like and everything.

56:20The people who have been using Mastodon to date, most of them will continue to use it. I think we, you know, our nerd circles, we formed a community there, and all the people who were there before, like, they have these communities there, and they're fine. Well, there is a possibility of a backdoor Next-style takeover, you know, where Apple bought Next, but essentially the people who were part of Next ended up taking over Apple. Facebook doesn't want this to happen, but depending on how well the two sides of this play it, it could work out very much not in Facebook's favor and very much in our favor as the people who like Mastodon.

56:56So in theory, Threads is supposed to be an activity pub app that is in theory, according to Facebook, going to federate with the other activity pub things like Mastodon. If that actually happens, and Facebook said it will, if that actually happens and if that happens in a way that makes sense what it means is that weird people like us who are on mastodon who like to use the mastodon apps in the what i would say the vibrant third-party ecosystem of apps that can read mastodon which does not exist anywhere else for threads or for blue sky or anything like that will be able to follow people on threads and people on threads will be able to follow us and we can sit here and use our app and they can sit there and use the threads app and see tons of stuff that's just algorithmically chucked in their face and everyone can have what they want while still communicating together in a decentralized federated universe that we call the Fediverse.

57:44And if that happens, if people are on threads and those people who are dissatisfied with the threads app, with the threads algorithm, with threads moderating choices, with threads anything, they would then have the option to say, you know what? Things are not going the way I want over here in Facebook land. Is there somewhere else I can go while still following all the same people but getting my choice of applications and using a better app and not having ads in my face and having fewer Nazis or whatever, they can go to another instance that they like better, right? That's the promise of decentralized social networking.

58:16And if that happens, I have to think that people, if this in a friction-free market, which of course all these, you know, the people at these big companies, we love market forces and capitalism and friction-free movement of capital and people. Yeah, they don't want friction-free. They want all the friction, keeping everybody on their thing as prisoners. They want to build a moat. there's a reason that phrase exists and it's not because they want friction-free movement among choices right they do not want competition they want to lock you in they want to you know right but if they actually federate people will be able to go elsewhere and there will be a sort of an activation energy that is required because first you have to know that you can do it and second it's a pain and technical and blah blah blah right but when everyone was dissatisfied with twitter we would have killed for some kind of way to take us and all our social network elsewhere to a place to an instance that had different moderating decisions and different applications and different business bottles or whatever.

59:08But we couldn't, that didn't exist. We had to start from zero and we tried with app.net and it didn't work. And then Mastodon tried and it didn't pull people away. It took Twitter going in the toilet to give us enough activation energy to build up our new Minecraft world over in Mastodon. And now if threads come out and it is the mass market thing, if they actually federate and if they do it in a way where they don't take over control of everything and do the embrace, extend, extinguish thing, if they don't successfully pull off that maneuver, we could be in a much better situation like i would be much more down on threads if they weren't even pretending to do that but the fact that they feel like not pretending but like i'm sure the people there who want to do the right thing but they work for facebook so i don't know how well that's going to work out um but it gives me some hope that this could be like a terrible mistake by facebook to enter into this like why they could have just done threads and not have it done activity pop and not promise to federate and they would be just successful at this point one week after launch but the fact that they did that and promised that means that we have an in we have an ability to slowly but sure kind of the way linux slowly but surely displaced all the proprietary unixes when linux first came out when some college student made some little toy operating system that ran on sbc nobody at ibm at sun at hp were like uh you know in 20 years we're going to be out of we're not going to be making unix anymore everyone's going to run linux they would have laughed and laughed and laughed linux is nothing linux is like the mastodon not even the mastodon there was used by a hundred people right and linux came through and swept through the entire world there are different market forces at play there but it's the same type of thing where the small open thing that gives people users more freedom uh is able to disrupt the worlds of like proprietary unix where everything was super expensive and everything was locked down and you couldn't get the source code unless you paid a lot of money it was just you know i think social networking is also ripe for that kind of disruption i think that's what massden is doing and i think threads is walking into that trap if they do everything they say they're going to do in the nicest possible way which you know you can decide what you think the odds of that are um i don't think like margot was saying i don't think if threads does this all the super evil stuff they can do i don't think they'll be able to reach out and destroy mastodon because that's the nature of decentralization threads can do whatever it wants but they can't literally reach out and shut down mastodon instances only the people who run it and the people who use it can you know make that happen either by not funding it enough or giving up on developing software or whatever but facebook doesn't control anything having to do with mastodon so i i am cautiously optimistic and if i had to root something if i had to root for something if i had to root for blue sky or nostr or threads i find myself in the awkward position of kind of rooting for threads because it's the only one that even claims to be built on ActivityPub.

1:01:51And ActivityPub is what runs the server that I like, which is Mastodon. My worry with the federation thing, I mean, so I have two worries with threads federating. One, of course, is that they just won't do it, or they'll do it and then undo it. Let's set that aside. Let's assume they actually follow through with their word. They can do it in terrible ways, too. There's a third option. Yes. And I think, and by the way, whatever their word is worth, it seems like the Instagram leadership seems to be better people than the Facebook leadership. so maybe this little subdivision of this company may maybe they're they are more trustworthy than mark zuckerberg who and by the way if i had to advise them i would say mark you're still going to get like 90 of the population just let the other 10 be happy you know what i mean yeah like it's not like oh mastodon's gonna take over like i just gave the example of linux taking over but again there were different market forces there but like it's like you'll get most of the users anyway you can actually be nice but we'll see how it works out mark zuckerberg has had many opportunities in his life to do the right thing and has seemingly taken none of them he's thought a lot of he's not really hard about a lot of them though in the end he's decided he can't he can't bring himself to make the right decision yeah like zuck zuck has proven himself to be really a horrible person and so anything that gets to his level i don't trust to be done in in a good way But the Instagram people do seem like they have better heads on their shoulders than he does.

1:03:21So hopefully, you know, this goes the right way. The other ways this could go poorly are if they federate, but it doesn't really do anything because the reality of following people from threads on Mastodon or other activity pub sources is something no one ever does. or it's so clunky that you can't get any audience out of threads that way. Or threads, it does such a good job of promoting its own accounts that you're better off having only a threads account and then telling Macedon people, you know what, I'm going to abandon my Macedon account, follow me over there because it's 10 times bigger.

1:04:02We were just discussing this in Slack too and everyone has been assuming and I also assume that you won't be able to use Ivory as a threads client. Right, I'm assuming the exact same thing. Yeah, the best we could hope for is that, hey, you'll be able to use the Mastodon client of your choice and you'll be able to follow people on threads and threads people will be able to follow you. But you will not be able to use Mastodon to read threads. You will not be able to use Mastodon client to see the threads algorithmic timeline because they can't serve you ads or whatever. So that's the best case scenario that we're describing, by the way.

1:04:33Yes. The worst case one is what you're talking about, where it's like they make it so technically clunky to have any kind of interaction that the fact that they're federated is like academic and pointless. like practically they might as well not be federated right or or the situation of like you know whatever yeah all their algorithmic stuff is going to make sure that mastodon and other activity pub sources posts are not promoted at all and they like the people will just never see your posts downgrade them or like imagine if you tried to follow someone on threads but rather than seeing the posts of the person you followed on threads when you hit the api endpoint it would say here's some stuff we suggest for you like the endpoint would be like show me the latest post by person x and it would be like i know you want to see the post of person x but how about these instead yeah exactly that's another way they oh we're federating it's just that we have a different idea of what it means to see the post by a single person we think you should also see a bunch of other crap like there's so many ways they could do this badly but the possibility of them not doing it badly right now as of monday july 11th exists this remains to be seen with the federation angle um so i'm going to set that aside for the moment and then just go back to threads the service i stand by what i said last week in the after show when we had had like two seconds to look at it um i trust facebook to actually do a better job of both technical scaling and of content moderation than either twitter or most mass on instances and that's not to say they do a good job they don't uh but again it's it's i i think it's worth the perspective that like i don't think it's possible to do a great job of content moderation if you have a very large social service because by having a very large service you're going to have a whole bunch of crappy people trying to do crappy things and you know it's it's very difficult to make policies that are consistent and enforceable and around that and you know a lot of stuff is going to submit the cracks no matter what so that being said my fear of mastodon as i said last week and and you know last fall when it was getting big my fear of mastodon has always been i don't think this can scale both technically or content moderation wise to a lot of a lot of users fortunately i don't think master is going to have to scale that way i think uh i think threads is going to be doing the scaling job for everyone else uh but twitter is a mess in that area they they've been okay at technical stuff although they were better before the acquisition of the technical stuff um but you know like before the acquisition twitter at scale ran surprisingly well for like the last decade like they were the scale they operate at or operated at at twitter uh is so impressive and how responsive and reliable everything was at twitter was actually very impressive for their scale facebook also manages that like instagram is pretty solid it's not perfect but it's pretty solid like technical technically and so far threads you know it obviously had a rough first day with all the notifications and post load failures and everything but it seems like i mean look they just got a hundred million users in less than a week and it's still up that says a lot yeah i don't know of anyone else who could have done that yeah google probably i no i don't think so well that's actually a good contrast by the way speaking of social networks uh someone pointed out i forgot who it was on probably on mastodon uh you know what other service had 25 million people within its first week google plus you know if you leverage an existing social graph or an existing audience you can get lots of people real fast but you gotta you gotta keep them i mean obviously threads is already ahead of that uh by a substantial amount um but we'll see what the retention is like marco what you were saying about the moderation it's interesting to contrast twitter with facebook uh because the thing that twitter and facebook both have obviously the mass and it doesn't is millions of dollars and tons of employees um but both of them pre-elon pre-elon twitter and facebook both of those services were brought up in an environment where this phrase that we're now hearing now because of elon where they they work diligently towards brand safety most of the things that facebook did related to moderation were not out of the goodness of their heart because if you want to run advertisements from coca-cola you can't have child porn next to it right you have you like there's some and yes child porn is illegal too like you can't have as many nazis as you might want to have because this is as intellectually honest for you to allow them to post what they want right and so there they were companies run by adults again pre-elon their companies run by adults that knew that their bread was buttered by doing advertising so they did what it took to try to keep the advertising happy in the typical way that yes of course people who you know people still yell them about their decisions but they were trying to sort of thread that needle like you know we need to satisfy our uh you know uh billionaire right-wing ceo but also we need to make coca-cola happy and we don't want too many people yelling at us so how can we figure that out you know should we really ban people who say you know uh you're being tracked by 5g with the covid vaccine or should we just let them say it and it's probably fine nothing bad could possibly come of that oh i don't know we get enough pushback we'll change the rules but that's that's the type of company it's like run by somebody who first and foremost wants to make money and understands they need advertisers but also has some pseudo-intellectual stuff about like letting everybody post whatever the hell they want and they would try to walk that line right post elon twitter doesn't care about that line right and it's just like whatever i'm just gonna make random decisions about my whim but that's the advantage that facebook has now with threads is already some popular accounts that are popular on twitter and are accustomed now in the post elon world accustomed to be able to say whatever they want on twitter we're getting dinged and getting stuff pulled down on threads because threads starts off with the facebook slash instagram ethos of no you can't be super terrible and in fact we have tons of employees whose job it is to make sure you're not super terrible you're not on twitter anymore not to say that facebook are the the amazing good guys and they're going to make everything clean up this town or whatever but there is a baseline level of non-nazism that even facebook over decades has established this is the nazi line for facebook and it's not where we'll want the line to be but a line exists at least whereas twitter it's like i don't know how does elon feel today who freaking cares it's not they have stopped being a they've stopped being a company and stopped being just like you know the the disembodied id of one very not well person so that is an advantage because like you said they have the scale to do it and they have a bunch of existing rules that make it a pleasant enough place for you know regular people to be the same thing with facebook why is everybody on facebook they facebook tries to be pleasant enough yes there are all sorts of dark corners of facebook where people are just you know doing and saying terrible things but in general i believe that still the majority of this country although you wouldn't uh you wouldn't know it by looking at presidential votes but that's a second issue the majority of this country don't want a bunch of nazis yelling at them constantly and facebook makes sure that it's friendly enough for the majority of the people in this country to say oh facebook whatever it's there it's fine or whatever if they can do that with threads they're already way ahead of twitter and like you said they're probably also ahead of mastodon not because mastodon doesn't want to do those right things depending on your instance or whatever but because most mass on instances are not equipped to manifest the desires of the people who run them as efficiently as facebook is i would say that the good instances have better desires that they would like to manifest but it's difficult to bring that to reality and i keep coming back to it mass on and hasn't even figured out a a financial model a sustainable financial model like you know doing it through donations of people who are on the servers you want it's working so far for some instances in some cases but i feel like that needs to be worked out uh facebook has figured out a financial model they don't they don't have to worry about that they got that covered right the financial models they're going to show you ads um so it's it's kind of weird where twitter has pulled itself out of the game by being ridiculous mastodon is trying to do all the right things depending on your instance and trying to provide a choice choice of third-party apps choice of instances choice of experience choice of finance model choice of moderation choice choice choice choice choice and hope we're hoping that that will all work out great over there because there's lots of choices and if one of them doesn't work out we're not dead and then threads is like we are baseline competent facebook level of nazi removal and we're trying to make a fun instance and if you like instagram maybe you'll like this and it may sound like damning with faint praise but that makes thread like threads like head and shoulders above everybody else for the average person and you know therefore 100 million people in a week.

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1:14:30Let's do some Ask ATP. And let's start tonight with a technology topic. Then we're going to do a little bit of ask neutral. Actually, we're going to start with Wes Chamness who writes on the Mac. One of the main reasons I continue to use one password is that it's where I've been storing my software license keys. I do the same by the way, if I am forced to move on from one password, do y 'all have any recommendations for a place to keep these or does John just have them all saved in a text file somewhere? Yeah, I feel this pain. I don't want to get on a rant again. about this, but I, a couple of months ago, it was very recently, I downgraded, well, I changed the version of 1Password I had installed from version 8 to version 7, and suddenly the 8 trillion paper cuts that 1Password 8 was giving me all went away.

1:15:22But there's hints and indications that 1Password 7 is not long for this world, so I have a feeling that right now, you know, they're taking the carrot approach, but soon they're going to be taking the stick approach and saying, no, you've got to upgrade if you want to continue to have a usable product. At which point, especially now that we've got some sharing coming in the, what is it, iCloud keychain or whatever it's called, and pass, what is the new thing that Ricky's done? Pass keys. Pass key, thank you. I kept wanting to say passcode and I knew that wasn't right. Anyways, between pass keys and the shared stuff in iOS and macOS, that's probably where where I'm going to end up, but what do I do about my software licenses?

1:16:02So Wes and Casey would like to know, John, what should we do? I don't have them in a big text file. I'm not my parents. Although my parents don't pay for software. Who am I kidding? Also fair. They do have big text files full of things to remember. So my suggestion is maybe not what you want to do, but it's what I do. I use a product from Barebone Software, makers of BBEdit. uh my favorite text editor for these 30 some years uh it's called yojimbo it was originally called sidekick but that name was taken i don't know if it was taken by the same company you two might know from the pc days did you know sidekick for like i think for dos even no i knew like the the little texting phone yeah exactly okay it was before your time anyway there have been software products called sidekick i forget why they couldn't use the name sidekick but anyway they renamed it yojimbo uh yojimbo is uh what is the name for it kind of like a uh lunchbox app what are they called like an app where you just chuck a bunch of shoebox shoebox app yeah um you can save text files there you can save uh you know downloaded versions of web pages uh notes with and without passwords and they have a separate item for saving serial numbers for software because hey they make software and back in the day before the the app stores were pervasive you bought software and you got a license code for it i have a lot of license codes and they're all in yojimbo every time i get a new software product that has license code i add a new serial number they call it uh because they use the old style language i added in ujimbo ujimbo syncs with icloud um i just use it on my mac i don't remember if there's an ios version they used to have a version that would sync it to the web and stuff like it's it's had a long history and it's i don't think one of their more popular apps certainly not as popular as bbedit but it 100 does the job and if it ever goes down the tubes i'm not sure what i'll do i guess i'll just dump and export all of them and honestly maybe i will put them in a text file but uh barebones is great about software support i I kind of can't believe they've supported Yojimbo over so many years, but they continue to do so.

1:17:55So if you are a Malesmith fan, I feel bad because Bare Rones did can that one. But if you're a Yojimbo fan, it's still out there for you to get. Try it. I like it. So I would do a simpler solution. My solution to this, it is 1Password right now, but before 1Password managed this for me, I just had an email folder called Software Registrations. and every time I get an email confirmation that included the registration number, which usually happens with purchase, I would just move it to that folder. I have since moved to 1Password, but in the intervening years, I've kept that folder going in the email.

1:18:31So I would leave it there. I would still have the folder there in my email as a backup, but my primary would become a secure note in notes. So you are keeping them in a text file. Well, what's the difference between 1Password and a secure note locked by face ID. Are there that many differences? Well, they're not all in one text document and they have to search for the document. By the way, it's worth noting that the keychain allows you to make secure notes within it as well. So you can go to keychain access and do a new secure note. It doesn't have a dedicated item for serial numbers, but you can add these things individually to keychain.

1:19:05The difference between the big text file and the individual ones is, are you opening up a single document and searching within it versus are you looking at a collection of things and filtering them based on some criteria? That's the only real difference. Yeah, but anyway, I think whenever anybody's looking for alternatives to 1Password, for some of the things that are not just passwords, like for passwords, if you're in the Apple ecosystem, probably just using the Apple built-in password management stuff is probably fine for a lot of that stuff. For anything that is not supported by that system, honestly, a secured note, like a locked note in Apple Notes, locked by Face ID, that's probably a more secure and more realistically usable solution than what a lot of people out there would recommend or would try.

1:19:46so that i think would be totally fine i'm still afraid of some of some sinking disaster nuking all my stuff and notes i have nightmares about it now i don't i really wish i wish that they would let you export everything it's like a big or something but they still don't i mean just like don't worry you don't need to export it i mean it's been fine nothing bad has happened but that's why people put things in text files because a text file like it is it is easier to be sure that you have it as secure as you think you have it uh it'll be all and all my backups on my time machine backups on the hard drives of computers that are in my attic like it's a text file and i'll always be able to read it versus notes where if there's a syncing disaster it's like okay well so where are all your backups of notes can you pull out an old mac and see them no because it'll sink and it'll destroy everything can you get at it any other way is it backed up in your time machine backups well maybe kind of could i dig it out of there like it's different and i know your jimbo seems like it's the same way but it has a local database file that is backed up so if your jimbo syncing goes haywire you can't actually restore for backup all right now let's do some ask neutral steve stutz writes how do you feel about just about every car company that wants to make an ev even rivian now adopting tesla's charging standard this is the north american charging standard as compared to what is what does ccs stand for i forget shoot it doesn't really matter but anyway when this was written it was just rivian in like ford and gm i think at the time that was that had pledged to switch to nacs uh but now it's for gm volvo rivian polestar mercedes and potentially more you don't know by the time you hear this episode yeah that's probably true um my initial reaction to this particularly when ford i think was the first shoe to drop when ford said it i was angry and the reason i was angry was because look Look, we had everyone on the same page except petulant Tesla, who wouldn't just get in line like everyone else.

1:21:40And I was really upset because it seems silly to me to continue to allow Tesla. Well, I shouldn't say allow, but you know what I mean. To continue to have Tesla doing their own thing because we're better than you, because we're Tesla. And then everyone else is all in CCS land, all consistent. Now it seems like everyone's going to be all in NACS land and all consistent. And truth be told, I have not used either of these connectors. I've driven cars with both of them. I've not used the connectors. And everything I've understood is that the NACS connector is pretty much universally considered to be a better connector than CCS.

1:22:17So I don't actually mind where this has ended up. There was the uncanny valley, if you will, where some of the companies have committed. And I guess we're still strictly speaking there, but I think the writing's on the wall. uh there was the uncanny valley when you know some of the companies had committed but very few of them have had and i thought oh gosh here we go again they're gonna have two standards forever but it seems pretty pretty clear that we're gonna end up on nacs here in north america and that's just gonna be the end of it you keep saying nacs like it's a thing by the way like this is one of the the best magic tricks remember when this first announcement was made it was like oh ford's gonna use tesla's connector it's like oh they must have done a deal they get access superchargers you know whatever uh and then they said yeah ford's going to use the north american charging standard connector and i said what what the hell is the north american charging standard brilliant marketing right there's the tesla connector and there's ccs which is a like an international standard and there was chad demo whatever which is chad used right right um but like what the hell is nacs and i was like is this some you know because people were putting it writing about it as if this is a thing i'm like that's that's not a thing you can't it's like saying you know you can declare whatever you want to be to be the standard but like standards are a thing you can't just declare yourself to be the standard well it turns out that a they did just go to the standard but b tesla submitted their you know gave their connector design the thing that plugs into your car to charge it to sae international it's the what is sae it's a society of automated engineers we'll put a link in the show notes so this is june 27th they did this so tesla no longer controls this standard it has been given to an international standards body and then they called it north american charging standard which now that it's owned by a standards body and let's be honest in north america the most best chargers have that connector so i think yeah that's the north american charging standard because tesla just and that's why that's why all the other companies are lined up behind it because they're like they're not going to adopt a connector that tesla controls Tesla is a competitor.

1:24:22They would rather, you know, set themselves on fire than do that. But now that the connector is not under the control of Tesla and they want access to Tesla's charging network, now they'll sign themselves up to do it. So it's not just like some magic renaming they did. Tesla had to give up some control of this and give it over to a standards body. The second thing, Casey was talking about being angry about this. I don't know if you've never seen or used any of these connectors. You may think this is just like six of one, half a dozen of the other. i don't care i just want to know that i can charge my thing uh but the tesla connector is a better connector it's just better so ccs i don't know if this is true but it looks like a connector that was originally designed i think this actually is true originally designed to be a connector and then they said oh and by the way uh you designed that so long ago that you didn't know about dc fast charging so we want to do that can you do that with your existing connector and they were like oh damn no we can't but when i have a solution what if we put basically another connector like two inches below the existing connector and that will be the one you use for dc fast charging so it made a connector that was basically like two connectors stacked vertically and not particularly compactly it's huge yeah it's huge it's ugly it's weird that's exactly what happened by the way it was like the j1722 or whatever connector first and yeah it's huge ugly and weird to insert and the tesla one because it was designed from the start to work with DC fast charging is small, simple, delicate, doesn't take up a lot of room.

1:25:50And here's the thing about Tesla. I know you're like, oh, but Tesla, they don't know how to design anything. Elon's a nut job. He's, you know, destroyed. This connector has been around long enough that if there were some fatal flaw with it, we would have found it by now. Yeah. Like, so I think this connector has shown that it does not blow up, does not melt, seems mostly idiot proof. Like there's enough Tesla sold that we could say this is the better connector. And it sucks that we were so close to having a standard even though it was a crappy standard but if there's going to be one standard and i get to pick which one it's going to be i want it to be the good connector so i'm kind of glad that the quote-unquote tesla connector which we can now call the north american charger standard is winning because the other connector sucks so bad yeah it's it's very similar so first of all i have owned both of these connectors and i've used both of these connectors so because we have tiffs i3 that has the ccs plug and we had of course my my two teslas over the years that had the tesla plug and so i have a lot of experience with the tesla plug and a little bit of experience with the ccs plug first of all it's as john said like the ccs connector it's basically the car version of the usb 3.0 b connector i think it's worse than that well yeah because it's like it's like 20 times bigger but it's like the b connector stacked on top of an a connector no the USB 3.0 B connector looks like the USB B plug.

1:27:11The B is like the one that you see on printers, like on the printer end. So it's like the 3.0 version of that has the same like, you know, little trapezoid or whatever, but then like it has like a little secondary group of stuff above it. It's so it looks actually comically similar to a tiny version of the CCS plug. Anyway, the Tesla plug, like John said, if you're going to have one of these two plugs, that's the one you want. You want the Tesla one. It is just nicer in use. There are a few advantages and disadvantages between the two in terms of capabilities or little implementation details. But overall, they're both fine and usable.

1:27:47But if you're going to pick one, the Tesla one is nicer to use in practice for a lot of reasons. So in terms of standardization, look, I'm no fan of Elon Musk. I don't really care who invented this plug. If it's the better plug, it deserves to win. and standards-wise, look, we only had, we've had a number of years here now having electric cars be mainstream and widespread in large part thanks to Tesla and for a long time, Teslas were the best electric cars in the market. They've earned a lot of their success and they've earned a lot of accolade and to some degree gratitude from the industry and from people because they really did achieve advancing electric cars in a huge way.

1:28:30They really did achieve that mission and they deserve a lot of credit for that. That being said, as we've had all these new entrants into the market that are gaining ground and I think have promising futures, we had this annoying format war going on in North American charging between CCS and the Tesla connector. The uncomfortable reality of the situation is that while most cars, like most models of car in the market used CCS, by volume, there were a ton of Teslas, I think more Teslas than all the other ones combined, at least for the first few years of these other competitors existing. I don't know if that's still the case today, but it at least was the case, and it might still be.

1:29:12Tesla just sells a whole bunch of cars. So there's more Teslas on the road for a long time, if not still. And then also way more Tesla superchargers compared to comparable DC fast charge stations that had CCS. Now, you can go onto PlugShare or ChargePoint or whatever, all these apps. You can say, oh, look, no, that's not true. Look how many more CCS stations there. Look how many more, you know, level one or level two charging stations there are for this other one. And you look, it's like, yeah, that's like, you know, a dryer outlet kind of voltage there. But if you want DC fast charging, the options for CCS were usually not more numerous than the Tesla Supercharger Network.

1:29:53And then you actually go to them and they'd be broken half the time. That was part of the motivation of these companies, by the way, you know, being willing to go to it was that they they're selling electric cars now. And I think they probably have overwhelmed the combined all the Model 3s, although it might be close. But anyway, they would sell these cars and all of them had some kind of way to try to make chart. You know, they didn't have supercharger notes, but they had some kind of deal with somebody. It's a deal with Electrify America or Ford had a thing where you it would have it would, you know, do the searching for you across multiple vendors of charging stuff or whatever and try to find the best charging for you.

1:30:26and their customers were having poor experiences for that specific reason that they could find chargers but either they were slow because you know they're not all superchargers they're not all level three or they'd get to them and they would either not work at all or they would only work at the slower speed which is not a good experience and that reflects poorly on ford or general motors or whatever and it could motivate someone to buy a tesla so these people are changing to the better connector which they don't want to do but practically speaking will make their cars better and more desirable and also and this is the part where elon does win a little bit gaining access to the tesla supercharger network tesla still does control they don't control the connector anymore that's an sae but those supercharger stations are still 100 owned by tesla and so deals are made for these people who don't have their own charging networks to get access to the good charging network with the good chargers and there therein lies most of the complications of this story because marco surely knows that if you go to a supercharger it's made to charge a tesla and it was like well i just got done saying they're all going to use the connector so no problem right no there's still a problem the problem is even if you're not casey listen don't back into every single spot those cords on those tesla superchargers are not very long you know how long they are they're long enough to reach a tesla because teslas all have the outlets in the same exact spot and it's near the back of the car and they make the cords if If you've seen the design of the superchargers, they have the place where the cord rests.

1:31:49So it rests like inside the little U shape of the thing. Yeah, it's it's something like six feet or eight feet long. It's not long. It's like when you buy an Apple Proc and it comes with a cord that's way too short. Right. It's exactly the right length for a Tesla. But pull up there in some stupid gigantic GM thing where that where the charging port is like 17 feet up because it's a huge vehicle or it's like a Rivian or whatever. And it's not at the very front or the very back of the vehicle. And now you have to park like a jerk to even be able to get the cord to reach. and you're stretching it and it doesn't quite reach and the connector won't stay in and this is before you get into the real technical problem which presumably tesla will address but it's still a big deal tesla was not super early in the market because the ccs charger was like before dc fast charging existed they were the first dc fast charger so they're ahead of the game they have a technically better connector it supports cc fast charging out of the gate but since the advent of tesla the fancy fancy electric cars have been going to an 800 or 900 volt architect i don't which allows them to charge faster allows them to put less current through the wire allows them to use less wire which uses less copper which uses less current anyway there's lots of reasons to go to 800 volt superchargers do not do 800 volt at all right now so if you if one of these car companies has an 800 volt architecture car and they get the tesla supercharger thing they can't charge at the rates that their car is supposed to charge at it will be slower to charge an 800 volt architecture car on a Tesla supercharger than a 400 volt one.

1:33:14So something needs to be done there because the number of people doing 800 volt architectures is just increasing over time. I'm presumably Tesla will switch to that eventually too. So I think we don't know what the deal is in the back rooms involving this, but this is something that needs to be addressed because if this is going to be the North American charging standard, and if you're going to buy a Porsche Taycan with 800 volt architecture with a Tesla connector, they're not going to sell that until there literally is someplace you can plug it in and charge at the rate it's supposed to be able to charge at because who wants to buy a you know a porsche ev that can only charge at speeds of like you know yesteryear like slower than 400 volts so i think the cord length and the 800 volt thing need to be addressed and could be things that are lurking out there for the very first people who get the very first ford gm volvo or whatever with these connectors i don't know if I think maybe Polestar does a hundred volt.

1:34:06I don't know if any of these people do a hundred volt, but either way, they're going to pull into one of these things. They're going to reach for the cord. They're going to go, right. Wait, and they're going to have to repark and reposition. And it's not going to be pretty. And that's part of being a standard. Like the, the, the cords of gas stations are made to fit most vehicles that are going to pull up in front of the pump. They're not as short as Tesla super. If a gas station knew that only like Fords would ever pull in there. Right. Or, you know, Even just the side things are on, like on Hondas, the gas thing is always on the driver's side, but in other cars, it's sometimes on the passenger side.

1:34:40Gas stations have to account for all of that. And up until right now, supercharger stations didn't. So they will have to be retrofit and they'll have to figure something out. And I think overall, though, that's probably the best case outcome here. Because the reason why we are generally, like we being electric car owners here in the U.S., I think most of us are happy to see this change and to see Tesla's connector take over because the Tesla supercharger network is the best charging infrastructure out there right now. It is, it is the most, first of all, it's, it has all the best locations cause it was there first.

1:35:14Like the, the CCS, CCS chargers are like kind of in weird spots. It's like, Oh, you got to get off the highway and drive a few miles to this mall and go in the, the very outside edge of their parking lot. The superchargers have the best locations for rich people. Let's be honest though, because Tesla was an early adopter, rich person, car and so they have the best locations and the rich person locations but ccs has the best location they have like rest stops and on highways and stuff like it matters you know well that counts it you know interstates can't people rich people travel interstate too but i feel like the there is the the perception that tesla has all the best real estate is based on like the best real estate as being the most expensive highest trafficked real estate but that is not the best real estate if you live someplace rural well that yeah that's but for the most part you need the you need supercharging on highways and and on high traffic highways and so tesla is everywhere with their stations and the supercharger stations tend to be very well maintained they tend to work you you will drive up to it and not only will there be enough bays that i personally i mean i know it's probably different on the west coast i've never pulled up to a supercharger and had it be full ever get ready for that to change i well yep that's the problem it's not a problem it's just this nature of like sometimes the gas station is busy too yeah but like i i've never i've never had there not be capacity i've never put up to a supercharger or had it be broken ever i've done a lot of miles in teslas i've done a lot of supercharging i've never had a supercharger not work for me and by the way that's not just like oh because tesla is so much better tesla is motivated to make sure their chargers work because they own them and it's part of the value proposition of the car and you'll be like well aren't the other charging station people also motivated the answer is no they're not so if one of the big ones electrify america is owned by volkswagen and there was because of the dieselgate scam where they committed fraud to try to make the emissions of their vehicles look better they were required by court order to invest two billion dollars into like ev infrastructure or whatever so you know electrify america is essentially a compliance network we are complying with the settlement of some kind of criminal case or lawsuit they're not particularly motivated to make that awesome the second thing is there are other companies that are out there for you know trying to do a good job at charging or whatever but their competition are other their competition is not tesla because if you if you have a car with ccs you can't go to tesla superchargers unless you have a weird adapter or whatever that's changed very recently but anyway historically that hasn't been the case so they're just competing amongst each other and the level it's like grading on a curve it's like well you've got you got electrify america where volkswagen's not particularly motivated to do a good job and you have these other people who are like i don't know we're kind of on the verge of bankruptcy and we don't have a lot of money to put into this and so on right now this is another reason these car companies did this ford and gm and everything are doing this because what they're basically saying to all the non supercharger networks networks is guess what now you are competing with superchargers because the people who used to go to you can make a different choice and go to the supercharger so if you don't want to immediately go out of business because you suck you better start competing and so the incentives have suddenly changed now will they get better or will they go out of business but honestly either one of them is better than it was before which is like they can continue to suck and there's no repercussions yeah and so anyway so going back you know so i'm really happy that that the format war in the u.s for charging plugs is going to clearly have a resolution within a few years everyone's gonna is gonna be on any cs slash tesla and that'll be it like ccs will be around for a while as the vehicles that's that are that are made with it now slowly age out it'll be around for a while but you're gonna have your ccs vehicles charging via adapters probably at superchargers they need to work out the 800 volt thing though because there are there are enough 800 volt cars sold in the u.s that tesla needs to have at least have a plan for that because you can't get rid of ccs until they know well people will they will but the point is like a format war is worse than whatever choice you might make for the for the connector so the only way to end this format war really because like you can think you know why didn't tesla just adopt ccs and that's a good question and the answer is they had no motivation to do it because of everything we've just said they already had infrastructure in place like it's not like tesla came out with their own thing after ccs existed tesla had to make their own connector because there wasn't a good one they had they made their own and then later ccs came along well it wasn't there the j the j1 7 thing didn't that predate tesla's thing it might have but that connector sucked yeah no i agree they needed to come up with some good dc fast charging like that's the problem like these these connectors might have existed in their non-dc fast charging form but that's not what they wanted so they made their own connector yeah so basically the only outcomes here were either everyone switched a tesla connector which seemed unlikely and impossible you know two months ago or we continue to format war you know which sucks or tesla somehow switched to ccs and the and what motivation would they have had to do that and think of like when you know if you just look at raw numbers like how many teslas are on the road in north america and i know teslas have ccs in europe i know that but just talking north america how many teslas are already on the road how many superchargers are already out there the idea that they would that they would somehow out of the goodness of their heart give up their better connector and switch to ccs which every tesla owner would see as a downgrade next time they got a new car i i don't see i just i didn't see that happening and so i thought we were just going to live with this format war forever and so to see it to see the format war have a pretty clear likely end in the near future even though elon has to win this one fine he earned it with this one like as much of a jerk as he is you know he he's he's made a lot of really good cars for a long time and he made a really good connector and he has a really good charging network he didn't make that connector let's be clear people who worked for him made that connector that might have existed before he bought the company whatever yeah whatever however it happened tesla deserves the success of that connector and it sucks that we have to give this jerk a win but in this case he did legitimately win and the alternative was worse but it's a win for us because we get to use the better connector and it's owned by a standards body which means that he can't do something jerky and pull the rug out from under the other car makers because he doesn't control the connector anymore exactly and where we will where we will end up with this after you know again there's going to be a transition period here we're going to have ccs kind of lingering around for the next 10 years probably but you know but where we will end up in the long run is one standard with a lot of charging networks that are really good and a lot of charging stations that are really good that support this standard that you can pull off lots of different highway exits when you're on a long trip and charge up really fast you can be pretty sure it'll work and almost every car in the road will have the same connector that is a really good place to land and for electric vehicles to continue to grow and to reach more places in the market that's necessary we can't you can't have a format war and expect this market to keep expanding and maturing because that even even the the pain and the buttery of the format war turn a lot of people off or the questions about the format or turn a lot of people off or if you buy a ccs car and you realize you can't charge it anywhere good that's going to turn you off so we're going to be in a better place in in the long run with this decision and i and i think you know we can set aside all the personalities involved and just say you know what all right i'm at one standard is better than two no matter what the standard is and of the two they had to pick from here this actually is better in a lot of ways so i'm happy with it i bet an alien is listening to this conversation and saying you guys can't all agree what side of the road to drive on and you're like oh now we have one charging standard that's the thing about automotive stuff like not only can we not agree on standards for anything we can't even agree what side of the road to travel on like where the steering wheel should be in the car but we have worked out that there are these bubbles of agreement and we they tend not to touch by roads that much so like yeah it would be kind of ridiculous if the if the side of the road change in every country in europe right but the uk could have made a different choice you know and like anyway it's it's it's kind of silly you know obviously this is nacs north america if you go to south america forget it if you go to europe forget it if you're in china i think a couple people live in china they're totally different there who knows what they're doing in china with their connector australia they could have their own connector you can't drive off australia it's fine you know so we're obviously this is an america-centric podcast we recognize the rest of the world what the rest of the world wants to do like i would suggest they they adopt the north american charging standard because it's a really good connector and it's owned by a standards body so well but no i mean like the reality is like most other countries ccs is the norm and that's it and tesla uses it in other places too because they have to sometimes by law like like i think in the eu but ccs sucks though it does suck but again but one standard is better than two so it like if if you already had tesla on board with ccs in your continent good leave it that way one standard is better than two and we just got the better one sorry it's not it's like one standard it's one standard for each little fiefdom of driving rules and car design like it is kind of i mean get blame the british empire i guess but it is kind of amazing that we didn't we haven't agreed on the side of the road but we're almost there isn't that side of the road isn't there like a vast majority i don't know what the world if you want by population what side of the road is uh is in the lead but that that seems like not a minor thing when it comes to driving because you can't really connect those roads no i mean it's a lot it's a lot easier to use an adapter to charge your dc fast charge car than it is to switch the side of the side of the car you're driving from yeah if you want to live in the the republican slave-owning utopia of united states every state would be able to make that decision differently oh my god when you cross the border you'd switch over god i don't even want to think about it oh god it's worth noting before moving on that uh is it alec is that right over at Technology Connections did like a 45-minute reaction video to when, I think it was after GM said they were going to adopt NACS, something like that.

1:45:12It is long, as all his videos tend to be, but I was fascinated by it, as I typically am by his videos, and so we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. No spoilers. I'm still on the Fridge video. Oh, yeah. I skipped the Fridge video, but I have a feeling I'm going to eventually go back and watch it. It's good. And did we mention, by the way, speaking of Kentucky, that they mandated tesla as the or the the nacs as the charging plug well yeah they did the the wise thing in the ways the government exert power in private industry which is that if you want to be part of this government program that subsidizes charging stations whatever you must support tesla's connector yeah which makes sense because that's going to be the new default so yeah if you're getting government funds for what's supposed to be a universal network it should support the universal connector or at least both of them and that's another example like what's going to change the incentives of these not so good charging companies things have to change their incentives and one of them is government mandates i mean it explains why tesla uses ccs in other countries because the governments they're required them to if you want to sell cars in our country this is what you got to do so i'm glad to see some states forcing that as well quote unquote forcing it they're not forcing it but hey if you want our money uh you got to do what we say yeah uh so yeah the only thing that that bums me out about this because again i was briefly not happy about it but now that it seems like pretty much everywhere is going to land on any see any i'm sorry pretty much all the manufacturers here in the states are going to land on nacs uh i'm happy with this like marco particularly was saying you know the one one standard is much better than two and hopefully we'll all end up on nacs here in the states the only thing is though it kind of bums me out for the next year or two you know because i think although i'm i don't expect to buy a car in the next year or two i think it's possible that i would and i think it is extremely likely i would get an electric car if i were to replace my volkswagen and at this point i don't want a ccs car like i'd rather not and i'm not buying a tesla so that means i'm going to have to wait for uh you know a couple of years it would be like getting an intel mac just before they're in place with apple silicon yeah it's just not not not the best choice don't want to buy a car with a ccs especially an expensive car with the ccs connector that's rough you know yeah uh so anyway so we'll we'll see how this turns out we'll see how quickly it happens but uh yeah and the the car makers are doing this like 2024 models is the early as you should expect expect this because things move slow in the auto industry so i do wonder i mean i guess most normal people don't know about this but i was wondering if there would be like a dip in ev sales for the people who do know to say maybe i'll wait a little bit like i don't know if people can wait a full year but yeah i'll tell you what like i'm not feeling good about my review and pre-order right now because it's yeah exactly exactly it's too late for you mark you literally already ordered the car just take your car but with you are by the time that the the the tesla connector is pervasive you will be on two you'll be two cars from that so like that is also true although your testers did last a long time but i feel like you'll be rotating through cars a little bit fast on that oh some some real-time feedback from the chat room um they first is the map of right hand uh drive versus not right hand drive because that's confusing and a right hand drive is where the steering wheels on the right but anyway people who drive on the right side of the road which is also the correct side of the road versus everyone else and it is you know it's the british empire like i said uh and the map is heavily in favor of driving on the right side of the road and apparently france and the netherlands switched in the 60s can you imagine that 60s was a tumultuous time just one day i'm sure there's a story about this but like one day in the 60s they said everybody everybody switch no there is there was a 99 pi about this i don't i i'll try to find a link for the show notes i doubt i'll be able to come up with it but it was fascinating and they talked about on this podcast episode about how there was like this big you know PR push to get everyone ready for it and so on and so forth.

1:48:48It was very, very interesting. Yeah. And countries with functional governance where they can rally the people to all do a change that will be beneficial for them in the long term. Can you imagine that? Just think about it. That would be amazing. A functional government. Wow. That would be cool. All right. And then finally, wrapping up our Ask Neutral, Yodological writes, what are some unexpected things, good and bad, about using an electric vehicle? Well, one of the things is you don't get a transmission. That's sad. But Marco, I think that you are obviously the most well-qualified to answer this question.

1:49:18There's still a transmission. Not in anything but a Porsche. There's really not. Yes, there is. A transmission is just a series of gears that change ratios that connect to your wheels. That's what a transmission is. All right. Thank you for well-actuallying us. Thank you so much. She's not. People think it's the cars run by magic. I mean, the only car where you could say you don't have one of those ones that have the motors and the hubs. Have you seen those? I think Saab, whoever owns the, whoever Chinese company currently owns the remains of Saab, made an EV with hub motors. So the motors are literally in the wheels.

1:49:48So there really is no transmission there. But that's a terrible idea. But the unsprung weight is just horrendous. Anyway, go on. Okay. So anyway, besides there being no gears, John. There are gears. Yeah, I know. Besides not having to shift gear in any way or have the car try to shift for you, the best thing about driving electric is it just feels better in every possible way. Like the drive train itself feels great because it is direct. Driving a gas car, there's a whole bunch of hacks going on to make that happen. There's a lot of mechanical complexity, a lot of like abstractions and hacks and weird balancing acts that are being done between gear shifting options.

1:50:34And of course, like how the torque curve is all weird and tipped up the top and everything. it's driving a gas car it's a very irregular and and oftentimes disconnected experience from the reality of what's going on electric drive trains are mechanically so much simpler you feel that simplicity everything is immediate and direct so it it just it feels better to drive now some of the unexpected things i i i could talk forever on this and i won't right now i'll name two right now number one dog mode yeah this is a setting on electric so electric cars because you're not running a gasoline engine to make the climate control happen it is safe to run the climate control remotely no matter where the car is parked if it's parked inside a sealed garage doesn't matter you're not going to cause carbon monoxide problems and so they all have or no many electric vehicles including all teslas and all rivians they they have options to remotely like from their phone app turn on the climate control and you can just leave it running for hours if you need to and they all have a tesla and rivian at least have this wonderful feature called dog mode where suppose you're on a road trip with a pet in the car and you want to go into a rest stop to go to the bathroom or you're going to have some lunch inside a restaurant or whatever you need to leave the car somewhere where you can't bring the dog inside you can leave the car with the ac or heat running at regular temperature kind of indefinitely like as long as your battery maintains and usually the like teslas will stop at 20 if you have if your battery dips below 20 it'll stop this feature but on a regular road trip you can leave this on for hours and it's fine and we many times i i got used to this feature many times i've done this where like we'll be on a road trip i want to go inside for you know for a meal with the family or whatever we'll have to leave the dog in the car for half hour 40 minutes whatever it is my current gas monstrosity has sort of a feature like this except you can only launch it from the app which doesn't work all the time especially if the car doesn't doesn't have cellular coverage for its internal like radio thing it's unreliable from the app it takes a long time to launch and it caps its length at 30 minutes.

1:52:51And if you happen to take longer than 30 minutes, too bad. You can't restart it until you go out and physically restart the car once. Oh, bummer. Similarly, my gas monstrosity does not allow the remote climate control feature or remote start feature to run if the car has not been turned on for more than three days. With a Tesla, I know I can just open the phone app, even if the car has been turned off and sitting there for a month. And before I get there, i can turn on the air conditioning so when i get to my car it's not a thousand degrees inside i can't do that with my gas monstrosity so that the whole like the remote climate control being so flexible and being able to be triggered either from the app or two buttons before you leave the car if you're parked somewhere that's fantastic and i've never seen anything as good as that on on a gas car i know tesla does those things i think rivian does most or all those things i about everybody else.

1:53:44Second thing, this is more of kind of an everyday convenience thing that you don't realize what you have until it's gone. When you are driving a gas car, you have to, on some kind of regular interval, stop your everyday life to go fill it up with gas. Now, this is not a long process, maybe 10 minutes, but it is an annoyance that you have to, at some point in your regular everyday life, maybe it's once a week, maybe it's every two weeks, whatever, however often you get gas, you have to like stop what you're doing and go get gas. And by the way, gas stations are stinky and gross. With electric cars, if you are not taking long road trips very often, if you're just doing your everyday driving, everyday life, and you're charging at a reasonable rate at home, you never have to stop and get gas.

1:54:26That's really important. Every time you leave your house, you have, quote, a full tank. So in your regular errands and your regular commute and everything you never have to stop to get gas you only ever have to think about charging if you assuming you have a place that you can park it at home where you can charge it you know like a garage or whatever but you only ever have to worry about charging when you're on a long trip people think like oh when you go electric it's so much less convenient you got to worry about you know range and yes you do have to worry about range on long trips but for the entire rest of your everyday life, it's way more convenient because you're never having to stop and get gas ever, ever, ever.

1:55:09But now every time you get out of your car, you got to plug it in. Not every time. I mean, I would plug in the Tesla whenever it dropped below 50%, which was... It's just a new habit. It's a good trade-off. It's a net win for sure, but there is it is only a net win. It's not like there's no negatives. The negative is there's a new thing you have to do at home that you didn't have to do before. It takes two seconds if you have it set up, although I will say that the sort of suburban privilege of the expectation of course i have a place where i can park the car and plug it into my house electricity is not true for a lot of the population or urban situations like again the rest of the world has this more figured out than we do good cities would provide places along street parking where you can plug in your electric car through some sort of system where either you pay for it or the government pays for it or whatever somehow like that's is it it is to the advantage of cities to figure out how to do that and i hope they do someday somewhere in the u.s probably in california but in the meantime if you do have a place where you can plug into your house that is a new habit you have to adopt and the the return for it is worth that investment which is like you said you always you wake up in the morning and your car is full yeah it's and and agreed like you know we do need this infrastructure it is a big challenge the good thing is if you're doing overnight charging and you don't need to charge a car from zero percent it can even be like in fact technology connections did a video on this uh like two years ago it can even be a regular 110 volt plug it doesn't even you don't even need high power for that because if your car only charges you know 10 every night well if you if you can charge it every time you park in front of your house you're probably not using that many miles per day where you where that where you wouldn't be able to keep up that way so you know any kind of you know they call it destination charging whether it's like you know at your workplace whatever you know if you go to the mall for the afternoon you can plug in there like that's going to become more and more common it already becoming more and more common because you don't need like massive high amperage high voltage charging if there's more charging everywhere people go that's another point we didn't make in the in the tesla connector thing is that i don't know if this is true of the ccs connectors well it seems like it might be because they have the double connector thing but in practice the wires for ccs chargers are thicker and heavier they're also longer because that's another like tesla didn't make their thing short just for no reason the shorter the cord is the less it weighs and tesla's cable by the way is hefty like so and there's we're talking about two different cables the cable that you have in your house the like that's not a dc fast charge cable that is that is a 50 amp at most cable and those cables they're a little thinner and lighter than garden hoses whereas the ones at superchargers that are doing dc fast charging those are heavy inflexible thick cables that's and and i believe they're liquid cooled the tesla ones are yeah when you're pumping that much current in like through through a wire cooling of that wire becomes fairly important uh and and somewhat challenging so i believe i know one of them is i think like i think teslas are liquid cooled but anyway the ccs ones are even worse the ccs cables are even thicker and even heavier and because they're also longer they're heavier still to the point where people will have difficulty maneuvering and if you've ever seen anyone struggle at a gas station maneuvering the comparatively incredibly lightweight rubber hoses that the gasoline goes through it is a much more significant challenge to wrangle a full length full wattage ccs connector the tesla ones are comparatively easier to maneuver both because they're shorter but also because i think they're actually thinner as well so that's another challenge we'll have to face but for the home ones yeah like you can go from business i mean i've seen people do it in the neighborhood i don't recommend this but people take what looks like you really hope is an indoor outdoor extension cord and just run it from like a wall outlet in their garage snaking down their driveway to the thing and plugging into their little you know charging like right all the way up to fancy people like marco who get like the actual proper you know charger and connector or whatever right and this is this is an example of infrastructure and we can make infrastructure that makes all this easier for all of us and i hope we do but in the meantime you can get by with the existing district most homes in america have at least one what we call a dryer outlet that is the higher voltage you know higher power thing to power or an electric dryer that will charge your car faster but even if you don't have that as long as you're not taking really long commutes a plain old outlet with a reasonable good extension cord that can reach your car will work yeah those are fine or like you know if you happen to have like a table saw outlet in your garage or something like some people have that or you know any kind of 220 volt outlet is way better than a 110 for this purpose so if you have a 220 volt outlet in your garage even if it's only like 20 amps or 15 amps that's great that's all you will need and and yeah and if you want to have a regular like 110 volt 15 amp circuit you can do it on that it's it's slow you know i think charging a full tesla from empty on 110 i think takes something like a week uh but you're never usually charging it from empty at your house like you're just topping it off from your daily usage and so unless you have a very long commute even a 110 outlet keeps up with most people's needs just fine and then again any 220 outlet if you have a dryer outlet or a circular saw outlet or if you you know go nuts and install an rv outlet in your garage like i did the nema 1450 outlet for the really good chargers like you can like you're set like any any of those options you're you're you're totally fine anyway so that's that's a short list of the unexpected things good and bad about using electric vehicle the bad thing honestly i think the only bad thing i can really say is um they tend to be heavy uh you know they're expensive of course and then that's that's a problem as well that's slowly getting better i mean that's how they're just heavy um but they're so fast and responsive in their throttle and drivetrain that it makes up for it and and the weight being all down low in the battery pack also really helps a lot uh with like handling and stuff but it slaughters your braking though like the the the weight really so there's multiple downsides to the weight well if you're doing a lot of braking you're doing it wrong but you know what i mean like the like in an emergency when you want to bring this car to a stop if they put the brake if you know especially early ev makers who are not quite sure how to do this if you put brakes on it that seem correctly sized for the equivalent gas car it's gonna take longer to stop and every part of the car this is you know good ev makers know this and build into the cars but every part of the car takes more abuse from having more weight so the suspension has to be beefier although the wheels bearings and bushings have to be beefier because these things weigh a ton especially the quote-unquote good ones that have the big batteries in them they just weigh so much and it really requires scaling everything up and then the final thing that you can't really avoid is because they weigh so much it damages the road more like it's it's like a bunch of massive trucks if the entire world was filled with like 100 kilowatt hour uh battery packed evs now instead of all the regular cars we would be even in this country we'd be even worse off in our inability to find ways to funds our roads because no one wants to pay taxes um because they will destroy your roads having 6 000 pound cars driving over them damages your roads more than having 3 000 pound car that just makes perfect sense right and that goes to every every part of the car wears out faster it has to be beefed up and the road wears out faster and has to be redone more often and i think that Again, that is a net tradeoff that we should make in exchange to not choking ourselves and our planet with CO2 emissions.

2:02:33So thumbs up. But it is something to keep in mind. If you're used to a light, nimble car flitting around, changing direction quickly and stopping quickly with drum brakes in the rear, that's not going to happen with an EV. One other thing I think is worth mentioning is a lot of times when I talk to people about the idea of an electric car because even though I've not owned one you know I'm a car nerd nerd. car enthusiast. So people will often ask me, you know, what's my opinion about these sorts of things? And one thing, and this is not a unique idea that I have come up with, but one thing that I think is worth remembering is that, you know, for most people, most of their trips are five, 10 miles a day.

2:03:12Like that's not always true. And I'm sure there's plenty of cases where it isn't true, but for a lot of people, it is unusual to drive more than 10, 20, 30 miles in a day. and even tiff's ridiculous i3 well i mean what's the range on that like 30 40 miles on an electric charge is that right it's like 150 oh no it's way more okay i thought it was i thought it was considerably less than that so even better got the range extender yeah well the electric only range is something like 120 that seems optimistic for like no i've we've done it i'm telling that car i mean obviously if it's like freezing cold outside you're not going to get that but in in most conditions you can easily get over 100 it's i'm telling you the i3 the more we own that car and the more we've used it the more i've driven it the more i really appreciate how good of a car that that was it's really a shame they had they stopped making it and the market really went a different direction because it is so compact and nimble for being electric because if they have that whole carbon fiber frame like and the battery is not too huge so it's not that heavy you're you're getting it why they didn't sell them carbon fiber frame what yes it's it's a little expensive yes like a little bit expensive it is it is such a such an odd vehicle but it's really good and there's nothing on the market like it well a car and driver on the back page this month had like they have like hey so you're thinking of buying a used car here's what you should know about it and the one on uh on your car the i3 was this month and they said uh maybe ask the owner when the last time they changed the oil on the range extender was because people buy them and yeah it's got a range extender but like you never need to use it because as casey was saying you don't take a lot of long trips and this thing's got plenty of juice and you forget the gas engine is there and you kind of can't drive a car 15 years and not do anything to the gasoline engine because it gets super angry i can tell you it's gone through one gallon of gas in these three years of ownership that's not great for the engine either when's the last time you changed the oil on it never that's not good either marco but you can't forget the car is so every time you get into the car first of all if the engine hasn't run in a long time it'll it'll alert you on the display and then the moment you dip below 75 battery it'll run the engine for a little while just to run it i know i know but you have to change the oil on internal combustion engines even if you don't run them why you can't just leave it there for 15 years it's not good well it's only been three all right yeah you have a relatively new one this is is this a new one or do you buy because i know she had one i think it was like the second to last year they made them well anyway i feel like an oil change every three years is not uh you know excessive consider changing the oil on your range extender i don't even know where that would be you need to go and find that dipstick and take a picture of what it looks like in there there isn't a dipstick it's a bmw oh i couldn't even find the gas hole for a while like i don't need i god knows where the oil is.

2:06:01BMWs don't have they have a way to check the oil. I mean, I'm looking at all these 90s BMWs. My 2011 BMW did not have a dipstick. It had a place in the iDrive where you would go when the car was running and ask it, would you please tell me what the oil level is like? BMWs used to have dipsticks. I'm watching these old car rebuild channels where they're older BMWs. But anyway, I would love to see with the oil, if you want, drop the oil pan to pull out the plug. What does this oil look like after three years of sitting there in the car? What is it? Vantablack or something like that? Yeah, right.

2:06:30Exactly. It was just sludge. All right, we got to finish up. Let me finish my thought. Let me finish my thought, and then, Marco, you need to leave a message for the BMW dealer and ask them to change the oil on this thing. But anyways. You think they even know where it is? Like, how many of these did they really sell? Three. They know, and they'll charge you$400 to change it. Also true, actually. But anyways, the point I was trying to drive at, and then we got sidetracked, was, you know, if you're a suburban homeowner here in America, it is likely that you will, once or twice a year want to go get like a bunch of mulch to put around your landscaping at your house if you're a better homeowner than I am.

2:07:06And I feel like a lot of people get hung up on range and they say, well, we take a summer trip to the beach every year. What are we going to do then? Well, first of all, then I'll give Marco a chance to corroborate this, but I would argue that once you're past the age of 25, stopping for half an hour and getting out of the car, even on a four or five, six, seven, eight hour, eight hour road trip, that ain't so bad. That's actually kind of Nice, but... Marco doesn't have to drive very far to get to the beach, just FYI. Well, that's true. But nevertheless, the other thing is, I don't buy a car specifically for hauling mulch once a year.

2:07:40I don't buy a pickup truck just because I need to haul mulch occasionally. If I really need to do that sort of thing, I'll either make do with what I've got, or I'll rent a pickup for a day or something like that. If only we weren't broadcasting the show to Americans, Casey, because what is the best-selling vehicle in America? Yeah, I know. A pickup truck. Yeah, I know. And I don't get it. But that's neither here nor there. My point is just that, you know, again, I have these conversations often. And I had basically this exact conversation with a friend of mine. And he was saying, well, we go to the beach in South Carolina every year.

2:08:09And that's like an eight-hour drive or something like that. And we go to Blacksburg, our mutual alma mater, every year. And that's a three-and-a-half-hour drive. And I get that. I really do. And I'm not the kind of person who generally rents cars for road trips so I don't put wear and tear on my own car. Like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. But if 98 % of your trips are 10 miles or less, or whatever the case may be, don't buy a car for two trips a year. Buy a car for the 98%. Don't buy it for the 1%. That's my final advice. People who think electric won't work for them because of their two trips a year they take, it will work just fine for them.

2:08:46like you will have to do a tiny amount of planning in the sense of look how long it is and if that's larger than the range of your car find a supercharger on the way that's and most of the cars will do this for you cars will do that for you like honestly just put in the destination it will tell you where to go yeah and if not like use any of a million different apps that will all do it for you as well like and i thought before i had an electric car i had the same range anxiety is it's gonna work for me i drive upstate a lot you know and it's fine like you think it's gonna to be this really big deal and in practice it just isn't it's fine it's really totally fine and then everything else about it is better thank you to our sponsors this week memberful rocket money and collide and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A.

2:10:29It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. One of your big SwiftUI challenges when making CallSheet, which by the way, I've been using Call Sheet a lot like we've been re-watching some tv finally and I keep seeing like oh it's that guy who's that like we we uh decided to re-watch the first season at Party Down we haven't seen it in a long time and they have a new ones I want to like catch up with the old one and I was looking and I didn't realize until I'm like where there's this like there's one guy in one episode playing some you know side character and I thought for sure like I'm never gonna find this but i looked up and i was pleased to see that call sheet not only has you know tv show info but it has per episode info on the people who were in each episode so i was able to say all right season one episode whatever and it was right there it was it was awesome oh thanks no that's that's that's the idea and uh yeah i'm uh i'm not gonna say out loud because i don't want to jinx anything but the plan for tomorrow morning is to send it to Apple as the sacrificial release.

2:11:45You know what I mean? I'm sure there will be an issue. Yeah, the one to reject. I'm sure they will have a problem. Yeah, the one to reject. You think you're just going to reject it for in-app purchase flow, or do you think there's something else? I have no idea, to be honest with you. Most likely in-app purchase. They look very closely at that, and almost no one gets it right the first time. It could be something as simple as like you have a privacy policy, but you don't have a terms of use. It's stuff like that. There's all these little requirements they have. By the way, you need a terms of use.

2:12:13I do have one. I didn't earlier, but I do have one now. You can just copy and paste. Everyone else does it. Yep, yep. I'm pretty sure I stole underscores and lightly edited it to make it more relevant to my particular use case. But anyways, so I hope to, no promises, but I hope to send to Apple tomorrow because the idea is I'm going to be traveling very soon and I don't want to be thinking about this while I'm gone. So in a perfect world, which won't happen, but at a perfect world, I do a release or two. You know, I go back and forth with Apple once or twice this week and then hopefully it is queued up and ready to go for after travel.

2:12:50Make sure you have it set not to be released as soon as it's approved. That's very true. easy to forget that setting and if you're on vacation is the wrong time yeah exactly uh inevitably what will end up happening is i won't get it done in through apple before i leave and it'll end up having to happen you know late this month uh this is the same situation as you because i'm about to go on vacation as well i was like you know what i really want to push out because i've been working my my sonoma release but i can't they won't accept builds made with sonoma xcode um i'm in the i'm in the weird situation that uh if you've watched the wdc sessions about uh the tools that swift has now for backporting apis well apple is using them so there there's a new api introduced in sonoma but they backported it to ventura so like this is awesome like you know people on ventura can have it too but guess what i can't submit that build until i can build on sonoma and submit it and they're not accepting stuff that's built on sonoma until sonoma gets closer to release so i have to go back to my mainline branch and i was like well i should just cut a release of this and just take out the sonoma sonoma specific features which aren't really Sonoma specific and will actually work on Ventura.

2:13:52But, you know, anyway. But then I said, no, don't put a release before you go on vacation. What are you thinking? Just let it ride. Don't worry about it. And you come back from vacation and you can address it. So that's what I'm doing. And I would advise you to do the same thing. You can submit it as a sacrificial one, but just like configure it not to get accepted, go on vacation, and don't worry about it until you get back. Yeah. I mean, most of that is the plan. The sacrificial release is part of the plan. And the question is, will I have the self-control, assuming that there's still back and forth between me and AppReview, will I have the self-control to really put it aside while I'm on vacation?

2:14:25We'll see. Don't actually write the code to address the issues while you're on vacation, please. Yeah, well, no promises. But hopefully, again, in a perfect world, which won't be the case, I will get it through App Store Review before I leave. And then I'll sit on releasing it until I'm back. Or maybe even once I'm back, if I do another, you know, submission or two to Apple, that's fine too. But at least I know I've gotten one through, you know what I mean? And my understanding from my own experience and from those like Marco that have done subscription stuff before is that the first release, they really do take a pretty fine tooth comb, which makes sense.

2:15:00I don't begrudge them that at all. and then after that it depends on who you get and what your luck is but um generally speaking it's not quite so ruinous after you get one through but getting that first one through can be ugly and this is my first rodeo when it comes to subscriptions i'm sure i've screwed something up i'm sure something's not right so i gotta i gotta try so we'll see if i do that tomorrow morning no promises um but that's the idea uh but we're we were going somewhere with this and i feel like that's totally sidetracked the reason i brought up so the reason i thought of you today is that, well, first of all, have you run the current build on iOS 17?

2:15:35Because you should, because I think you have a search box problem. Well, and that is something that Apple changed in this beta seed. And I need to give that a shot and start filing bug reports because a few people have brought it to my attention. But yeah, apparently you can't actually see the search box anymore as you're typing, which is super fun. Yeah, and this has been a theme of iOS 17 beta so far, there have been a decent amount of like keyboard placement bugs. like so they're obviously they're they're messing around in that area so i i would expect you know quick fixes here and future betas but the reason i thought of this is because today as i'm rebuilding my ui i finally got to the dot searchable modifier as i'm trying to figure out oh yeah oh yeah stuff together and man i really could use like the information of when the search field is active which you can get in ios 17 by the way yeah well you can get it in ios 16 but uh so So when it's active, you know, I wanted people to know that and I instantly, I found like a little modifier, you know, like text and then placeholder, placement and then, you know, the is active binding to the bool like as you'd expect or is presented, whatever it is.

2:16:43And then I, as soon as I hit enter on that, it said, you know, this requires iOS 17. You got to put an, put an, you know, available thing around it, which by the way is super clunky and Swift UI. Like that's, that is the worst to do in Swift UI. But I, I mean, it was like, oh wait a minute isn't this the problem you were facing like didn't you before 17 like didn't you have to jump through a million stupid hoops to try to get this i'm still jumping through because i'm releasing before 17 and this was in concert with a friend of the show gee rambo who did a lot of the heavy lifting on how do you snoop and spelunk within ui kit and expose that in a reasonably in a reasonably pretty way and so that's what we're doing and i can share that code with you, Marco, if you're interested.

2:17:23But anyways, it's a total pain in the butt in 16. And then, and actually what ended up happening was when I moved from the standard search interface with the searchable interface to the bottom mounted search interface, I actually just canned, I couldn't use searchable anymore. I forget why, but it's really not designed to be anywhere but where Apple wants it. And when I tried to put it in that bottom panel, it was just a mess. It was just... No, it pretty much has to be in a navigation bar. Exactly. And so I just gave up on it and I'm not using the system searchable or the system search affordance, which I would prefer to be able to use it, but it's just not possible where I have my search box right now.

2:18:02Yeah, that's true. Anyway, yeah. And I did think of you today. I'm like, wait a minute. I just fixed in like, you know, 20 minutes what you fought for a very long time on because So how did you fix it then? Through various, like, you know, Stack Overflow searching. I found that there is an environment variable that's set. It's called like is searching or something. What? It's weird because it only applies to sub-views, but I made a quick little wrapper. I'll send you the call. I'll post it just. Plumbing state information from where you have it to where you want it is a fun pastime in 51. Yes, it's 100%.

2:18:35That's exactly it. That is seriously so true. I'll send you a quick screenshot so you can see. Yeah, I'd be fascinated to see this because this is news to me, and again, I don't need it anymore, but I would have loved to have known about this. so it's the environment is searching is what you're looking for in that little utility view so I basically made a wrapper to do what John said plumb this value bind it from here to here now you have an is presented binding for iOS 16 as well wow that's very cool I really wish I had realized that I don't think I was aware of that because I don't have any recollection of this being a thing that I was like oh I would use that but I just don't think I even knew about it But, you know, it's too bad.

2:19:20This is going to sound like a rant, and I don't mean it to. The documentation that Apple's been putting out lately has actually been surprisingly good. I probably should put up a blog post saying, look, you know, I stand by everything. Did I already say this on the show? I might have. But I stand by everything I said a couple of years ago, maybe it was a year or two ago, about how their documentation was piss poor. And there are still a lot of areas where it is piss poor. But recently it has gotten way better, way, way, way better. And I genuinely so happy to see it. I am so here for it. But there are times that maybe it's maybe it's my own Google foo failing me.

2:19:59But like, I why did I not know that this existed? You know what I mean? Like I really wish in the commentary and documentation about searchable, it, this should have been called out more explicitly, or there should have been some sort of sample code that shows this and demonstrates this. It needs to be more findable. I find very often. I'm searching for stuff in SwiftUI. I'm searching for things that I know how to use, but I just want to double check something. And there's just too many hits because they're just all simple words. And it's like, well, no, narrow it down to SwiftUI, but I'll narrow it down to this.

2:20:27No, I don't want to see the ones for this. No, that's not what I want. Like, it's just, it was the advantage of the, you know, the old school, like, single big namespace NS whatever APIs. They had distinct names that you could search for. Yeah. But search for frame, man. I mean, search for, like, it's just, what? You know, search for anything that's common on multiple kinds of elements. And I'm like, I want to find the part that Casey's talking about where someone explains, oh, by the way, here's how the box model in CSS parlance works in SwiftUI. and i figured that would be somewhere adjacent to the thing where they're talking about how you can set frame and what it does and what the different alignments mean and blah blah blah nope that's that the documentation probably exists but it is not easy to find the way people most mostly find things which is let me type some words into the search box and that's kind of uh that's kind of frustrating with 50 y like i think that's the next level of what they have to do is if they have great documentation they need to find a way to and i know it's a hard problem but they need to find a way to let you find it like by typing in the string that you want to type in which is going to probably be a single very short word that is very common across 50 different apis