562: Do You Have a Dragon?

In short

Accidental Tech Podcast Episode 562: Do You Have a Dragon?

Episode Overview In this episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, titled "Do You Have a Dragon," the hosts dive into a multitude of topics, including recent tech news, product discussions, and listener queries. The episode covers significant events surrounding OpenAI, keyboard wear, and the challenges of emerging technologies including the Humane AI Pin.

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Key Topics Discussed

Pre-show Announcements
ATP Holiday Store:
Final chance to purchase holiday merchandise.
New long-sleeve and Ute sizes added.
Members receive a 15% discount during limited sales.

Follow-Up Discussions
Keyboard Wear:
Discussion around keyboard materials:
ABS Plastic vs. PBT Plastic
ABS is softer and prone to wear.
PBT is more durable and does not shine.

Chip Packaging Innovations:
Mention of interviews related to advancements in chip packaging and the implications for future tech developments.

OpenAI CEO Controversy:
Sam Altman was abruptly fired, leading to chaos within OpenAI.
The board's confidence in Altman dwindled due to his alleged lack of candor.
Microsoft’s involvement with Altman raises questions about the future of OpenAI.

Listener Questions (#askatp)
ECC RAM in Apple Silicon:
Discussion around whether ECC RAM is relevant for Apple’s new architecture.
John explains ECC RAM and its importance for server reliability.

Photographing Kid's Art:
Listener shares their strategy for documenting child artwork.
Recommendations include using a good camera and lighting setup.

Technology Use in Lives:
Jamie West questions if technology improves lives or serves as a hobby.
Discussion about the balance between tinkering with technology and achieving practical benefits in daily life.
Emphasis on individual experiences with technology, from hobbyists to casual users.

Humane AI Pin Product Discussion
Product Introduction:
Discussing the newly unveiled Humane AI Pin, an innovative tech device.
Features voice interaction and a laser projection display.

Critique of Product Viability:
Concerns over physical practicality, including visibility and usability in various conditions.
Skepticism about the product's ability to replace smartphones.
The importance of deep integration with existing smartphone ecosystems for success.

Comparison to Existing Technology:
Humorously compared to a hot air balloon replacing a car.
The importance of direct competition with established devices like smartphones and smartwatches.

Final Thoughts and Predictions
The future of the Humane AI Pin is uncertain, with potential failure anticipated due to the challenges outlined.
Discussion on how the current tech ecosystem limits innovation and integration, particularly for startups.
Acknowledgment of the ongoing struggle between technological ambition and practical application in everyday life.

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Key Takeaways

OpenAI's Turbulence: The recent upheaval at OpenAI demonstrates the fragile nature of tech leadership amidst rapid advancements and market pressures.
Keyboard Construction: Understanding the materials used in keyboards can enhance user experience and longevity.
Technology and Life Balance: The hosts reflect on how technology is perceived as both a tool and a hobby, leading to different values and priorities in its use.
Humane AI Pin Concerns: While innovative in concept, the practical application and integration of the Humane AI Pin face significant technological and market hurdles.

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Conclusion This episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast provides insights on the current state of technology, innovative products, and the underlying dynamics that influence success in the tech industry. The discussion serves as a reminder of the balance between ambition and practicality in technological advancements.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00if you want to like really screw anything up big time, Like, really, if you want to just really make some of the biggest public mistakes of your life, now is the time to do it because at least we're not the OpenAI board. You're jumping ahead, my friend. Jumping ahead. What a mess. Oh, my God. Like, this, wow. I mean, you know, you talk about people having bad weeks. Like, sometimes, oh, yeah, they're having a bad week. Boy, are they having a bad week. At least it's relatively low stakes. I feel like it's fun because it's only like whatever,$80 billion on the line. But it's, you know, in the end, it's people with computers and stuff and things.

0:38And it's not like life or death. And most of the people involved, you feel okay laughing at them a little bit because they're such big distant figures. They don't seem like real people to you. But rest assured, they are. And that's probably why they're in this mess. Final warning. this is the moment where you, a dear beloved listener who has not yet put in your order, you sit or stand there and you think, I've got this. No worries. I'm going to take care of that as soon as I get to the office or I'll take care of it as soon as I get home. And then you, dear beloved listener, you forget. And then what happens?

1:18Then the rules state you have to go tweeting, even though I won't see it, or tooting at me saying, I'm the one. I'm that person this time. Don't be that person. Don't do that to yourself. Go to ATP.FM. This is your final warning. This is all we got. This is it. The sale ends this weekend, Sunday, November 26th. That's it. That's all the time you get. So, go now. Don't hesitate. Pull over the car. Use a signal. Because you're an adult and courteous, use a signal. if you're walking do what you need to do to indicate to those behind you you will be pulling to the side of the sidewalk if you're biking god help you but what do what you got to do with a bike as a bikest as marco would say to get to the side of the road and not get run over by a car that makes people so mad by the way i know it does i'm just they don't get that it's a joke like they it makes them so mad i know we know what we know that a bikest is not a thing anyways All kidding aside, go to atp.fm slash store.

2:18Check out our merch. Check out our wares. And remember, if you are a member, you get 15 % off the ATP store during this time-limited sale and all other time-limited sales. Now is the time. I know we kind of glossed over it last week. But, John, would you mind just doing a brief overview of everything? Just one last time to really sell it, just nail it, and send it home. Let's get a few more sales, John. What do we have on offer? I'm not going to go through all the merch again. They know what's there. People know. All right, I'll go through all the merch. Why got to be such a party pooper? All right, here we go.

2:51I'll do a speed run. We've got ATP Pixels. We've got ATP Space Black. We've got the M3 shirt, the M3 Pro shirt, the M3 Max shirt. We've got ATP Six Colors, which is six colors of fabric. Actually, more than six colors of fabric, but the text is always white. Really should have workshopped that name, but here we are. ATP Logo shirt, the OG. We've got the ATP Hoodie. ATP Polo. Don't let me down, Polo ponies, Polo people. Don't let me down. This is my jam. Get an ATP polo, please, and thank you. We've also got the ATP mug in now, white and a bluey-purply sort of thing. John will correct the actual count.

3:24It's cobalt, please, Casey, cobalt. Thank you. Of course, I said that. It's definitely cobalt, definitely not a bluey-purply thing. It's recycled cobalt, don't worry. Uh-huh, sure. And the ATP pint glass. So go now, atp.fm slash store. And remember, if you're a member, go to your member page landing strip, whatever you call it, thing, and go get your bespoke discount code for 15 % off, atp.fm slash store. This is it, people. The 26, that's all you got. Yeah, the only thing I'll add is remember that a lot of the products come in long sleeve T-shirt versions and sweatshirt versions. I think this is kind of the first time we've done those in a lot of these products.

4:01So check, even though a lot of times it will show a picture of a T-shirt. If you watch long enough, the picture will rotate and you'll see some long sleeve varieties. And it's, you know, the cold winter months and uh and in our parts anyway so think about those long sleeve options if you're interested um and this sale does span black friday we did this intentionally so it ends on the 26th black friday is a couple days before that you're going to be thinking about shopping for the holidays probably or you'll be bombarded by messages about shopping for the holidays uh don't forget this is your last chance i know we do the sale kind of early but we're trying as best we can to have a chance of getting these things to you in time for the holidays.

4:41So, you know, nerdy gifts for yourself or for others. Don't forget when Black Friday arrives, that's another reminder for you to hear Casey's voice in your head is saying, oh, wait, was I supposed to buy some nerd thing? Yes. ATP.FM slash store. Indeed. There's also Ute sizes as well, which we added a little bit late. Apologies about that. So you can check out for your kids. You can get them stuff for friends, kids, you know, whatever you want to do. ATP.FM slash store. I'm telling you, this is good stuff You should definitely check it out. And time's running out, my friends. Time is running out.

5:12I feel like that's something else I wanted to add, but I forgot what it was. So that's all right. We'll just make me sound smart in post, right, Marco? Right, right, right? Okay, good. Garbage in, garbage out. Oh, brutal. Brutal. Well played, but very mean. Keyboard wear. Let's talk about... God, you really derailed me with that. Keyboard wear. Let's talk about what happens to keyboards because of your damn dirty fingers. Ryan Holmes writes, Casey, I think what you're seeing as finger grease is likely what keyboard enthusiasts call quote unquote shine that happens to ABS plastic. It's relatively soft plastic that is susceptible to finger oils and heat.

5:47To John's point, some people's finger oils shine them more than others. When you use a magic eraser to remove the shine, you are literally abrading off a layer of plastic. Okay, so interrupting briefly, I don't debate that that's very possibly true, but I'm not like sawing the keyboard with a magic eraser. like just a just a quick glance with it is more than enough and i only do this a handful of times a year like i but like that that is true though like that is how the abrasive and a magic eraser works you are taking a layer off it's just a very small layer because it's a very fine abrasive but you're also leaving bits of the magic eraser on your keyboard and going down into the i just i'm still against the magic eraser yeah it's it's not a great option to have to use ideally you don't need it that like because because you're right there is some risk of like you know getting little dots of it stuck in there and jamming up the keys.

6:34Obviously, now that we have a little more robust keyboards than we used to, that risk is lower, but it is still a risk. So yeah, you are better off not doing that if you can help it. That's fair. Continuing back to what Ryan Holmes was writing, ABS is nice for keycaps because they are easy to double shot, meaning the letters can be embedded into the key and won't wear off. It's a separate layer of plastic molded inside. This also enables any color combo. A more durable option is PBT, polybutylene tera... Oh my gosh, that's not a constant. It's all at once. Teraphithalate, which takes much higher temperatures to deform.

7:07It does not quote-unquote shine. It often has a deeper sound and can be double-shot, but double-shotting it is not common and can involve a blend with ABS. The more common way to print legends on PBT is dye sublimation, which involves heat and dye. The dye embeds into the top layer of the key, so the legends will essentially never wear off. There is so much lingo here. My word. I know every interest and profession has their own vocabulary, but my gosh. Anyways, it's difficult to get them as crisp as double shot, however, and they will not let LEDs glow through. PPD is also difficult for light legends on dark caps since the whole cap will need to be dyed except the legend, which is masked out.

7:45This amount of dyeing involves longer exposure of the plastic to heat and often deforms larger keys, most notably space bars. Cheaper OEM keyboards use other kinds of surface printing that wears off relatively easily. so that was way more information than certainly i needed or wanted to know about keyboards some background on apple's keyboards like so apple's using abs which is the softer plastic uh apple has used pbt in the past on older laptops uh you before your time but back in the day the power bricks used to come with keyboards that it was kind of hilarious they look kind of like uh i mean you've all seen the apple extended too right even if you've never actually touched one yeah but those keycaps look like imagine those but imagine you took them into a 3d program and you squished them so they're not as high right and that's what they made the powerbook keys keycaps look like from the top it looked like oh that's just a regular key but then you look from the side and you'd see they were squished down like they had the same kind of like slanted edges but just much much smaller i'm pretty sure the back in those days the keycaps were pbt of course they weren't backlit so that's the whole big thing i think all of apple's keyboards now on their laptops are backlit you can't backlit light the pbt because it doesn't light through it that's why they were talking about having abs mixed in because you could let the light go through the abs part like just the letter that's on them or whatever.

8:55But anyway, Apple's keycaps on all their modern keyboards all appear to be the much softer ABS. Anonymous writes, the backlit keyboard keycaps on Apple laptops are injection molded in clear plastic. They are painted with white paint, then black paint. The glyphs are then laser etched using a method that removes the black paint, but not the white paint. Lastly, a protective clear coat is applied. Andrew writes, your conversation about wear on keyboards reminded me of a recent article by a British cycling journalist. Would that be a bikest, Marco? Is that correct? A bikest journalist. A bikelist.

9:28Oh my, we're going to get so much hate mail. On the recent demise of his 10-year-old MacBook, which had survived an impressive amount of abuse. You might like to see how worn his most used keys were. We will put a link in the show notes and maybe Marco will make this chapter art. Maybe, maybe. Let me tell you, actually, you know what? I would not advise you to make this chapter art because this keyboard is freaking horrifying. not only is this the ridiculous tetris key return key which i know the british people love leaving that monstrosity aside this is an abomination look this is disgusting this thing it's it's it's i can't handle it i need to scroll down because this is one of many photos that we got this is the worst one obviously but it's one of many many many photos that we got uh most of which were not 10 years old to be clear most of which were much younger laptops uh and if you know to visualize what this picture looks like picture an apple keyboard with all of its black keycaps and then have little circles worn through them at various places seeing the mechanism beneath because as the earlier uh feedback item said apple's keys are made from clear plastic and then they have black paint and white paint over them and so this this imagine the keys with with the black and white paint rubbed off just showing you the clear plastic it's like there's little window panes of various sizes and you can see where they wore through the black first and then the white second right and you see you see kind of like a terrace pattern where it's like black then there's a white ring and then there's a clear spot and you can tell where this person hit the space bar like they hit one very specific spot all the time um yeah tons of people had this and you know again the the leading theory is uh ph levels are either more acidic or more basic uh you know sweat from their fingers or whatever essentially wearing through the paint because these are painted uh clear plastic and if they were pbt where it was the the color of the plastic instead of being painted this wouldn't happen but then you couldn't have the backlights unless you double shot them but then there's the you know there's something like to put the die on the entire key or something a long key like the space bar might warp so i would say like as we mentioned in the last show um keyboard durability on laptops uh aesthetic uh durability not like you know making the keys continue to work still seems like an area where apple could use some improvement there i think what they have now is a reasonable ish compromise because they're lightweight they they're fairly sturdy they hold up pretty well most of the time but if you're one of those people who wears away keycaps it's a bummer for you because you're going to have a worse experience with this keyboard.

12:04It'll be nice if the keys still work. And I guess as long as you remember what those letters were before you wore them off with your fingers, you're fine. So functionality is job one, but aesthetics should be somewhere in the top five. And the current keyboards are failing that for some subset of Apple's customers. This next section is John tries to make Casey feel bad about liking 14-inch laptops. So I'm just gonna... It's not just John. I mean, if only one of us would have said last episode, you know with this amount of power draw so much increase from the m1 generation maybe the 14 inch might be a bad idea if you get the max chip because it seems like that's a lot of heat for the 14 inch to quietly and gracefully get rid of compared to the 16 inch so john what happened i mean to be clear this was true of the m2 and m1 generations as well which is why marco gave that advice um but anyway uh we'll put a link in the show notes to a youtube video where they tested the uh the m3 max 14 inch versus 16 inch uh and i think i said in the last show that like well you know maybe the the cooling should be roughly equivalent and the thing that is stuck on top of the m3 max like the little whatever heat spreader thing that's pulling the heat off yeah that part's the same every other part of it is not the same though first of all the heat pipe itself that's leading away from the soc that heat pipe is wider on the 16 inch so right away there's a difference in the cooling system but the big difference is the fans in the 16 inch are so much bigger fans in the 14 inch like they're really using that extra space to good effect uh it is a dramatic difference in the size of the fans and obviously the amount of air they can move then the fans are blowing that air over uh you know these little fin things that are attached to the heat pipe and there's more of them uh anyway in the testing uh two big things came out first that 14 inch is going to run the fans at much higher rpm so they did like a cinebench benchmark and the the 14 inch was running the fans at 72 7200 rpm the 16 inch at 3800 so it was like double the fan speed and obviously if the fans are running faster they're going to be noisier and since the 14 inch fans are smaller they're going to be a little bit more annoying too because they're higher pitched that's not great they stabilize fan speed i love when they uh fancy up their benchmarks here so the average speed in the city bench 2024 gpu test was 7200 rpms for the 14 inch 1700 rpm for the 16 inch that's a big difference that's that's as in like you can hear the fan screaming the entire time um in the 14 inch and on 16 you probably wouldn't hear anything and now casey may be saying i don't care about that i don't run 3d benchmarks i don't i don't about the average fan speed over a 10-minute run of some type of thing.

14:48Then they did an Xcode test, and that's really, really hitting Casey where it hurts because that's the thing that he does do. And this is not about the fan speed or about temperatures or anything like that. This is the fact that all those things with the fan being higher on the 14-inch translate to the 14-inch being in more thermal distress, and thermal distress means thermal throttling. And so this is where the rubber meets the road. the 14 inch is a little bit slower than the 16 inch because it thermal throttles when doing xcode compiles now this is probably a big xcode compile maybe it's bigger than any of casey's apps maybe it doesn't affect him or whatever and the difference isn't huge yeah because this is it took like almost a minute and a half to do this compile so like if you're if you're doing a very long sustained cpu or gpu uh drain you're gonna you're gonna hit throttling on the 14 inch no question like that's what this is clearly showing like if you are pegging the cpu or gpu for you know a minute or more you are almost certainly going to see throttling on the 14 inch that is not present on the 16 inch yeah and the xcode benchmark was 82 seconds on the 14 inch and 72 on the 16 inch so not a huge difference not like the fan speed difference i feel like the big quality of life difference is the fan speeds like i mean that's like an m2 to m3 difference in performance though like but again like this is a this is a long sustained one like you know if you know my build takes 11 seconds like it's probably in in that span i probably wouldn't see the difference between a 14 and 16 but if you're doing builds that take a minute you probably will yeah so i mean that's the case with these all these laptops right they it's just a question of how how much the the cooling system can fight off the inevitable inevitable heat saturation due to long-range jobs it's a rare it's rare that a laptop a very high-powered top-of-the-line stuff to the gills laptop can sustain its full power for a very long period of time because the cooling systems usually aren't adequate to get all that heat out of there to keep up with it especially if you if you have some contrived like cpu maxed out at the same time as gpu maxed out the same time as neural engine maxed out the same time as a video encoder matched out like they're not going to be able to deal with that but almost no real job is like that that's why the gpu benchmark is so brutal here because this was just a benchmark of the gpu and the fan speeds were 7000 rpm versus 1700 that's not even close that's just they don't just even just stressing the gpu is enough to really really see a difference and that's relevant people playing games if you're going to play games on your laptop you're like i want to you know one of these m series laptops i don't need to hear the the fan screaming when i play games get a 16 inch uh you'll you have a fighting chance of making that real because if you you know if you want to find something that's really stress the gpu yeah playing a game for a long period of time will do it um i don't think this means that a case you should get a 16 inch i think the 16 inch is too big as well i think the whole point of being portable is to have something small but if you are concerned about sustained performance a don't get a laptop uh but b hey the 16 inch sustains it just fine but for the well no but if you the 16 inch eventually heat soaks as well especially if you do a cpu plus gpu combo these these benchmarks are a little bit shorter um yeah and also the other thing that we're measuring which isn't any of these graphs in the show notes here is clock speed like they're just seeing like what is what are they hitting their rated top clock speed and both of these laptops occasionally depending on the benchmark would never actually achieve their their rated top benchmark top clock speed or would do it very briefly in the beginning of the test and then never see it again right so there's always room for improvement right 16 inches versus 14 doesn't mean the 16 inch never thermal thralls it just means it does it less than the 14 which is why it's coming out ahead in these tests well i would say these tests prove my my hunch last week that um if you're going for the max chip maybe don't get the 14 inch like if you're getting the 14 inch for like a all-around balance of portability and size and maybe you're going for the m3 pro chip that's a different story it can probably handle that a lot better but if you're getting the m3 max and you intend to push it at all which you probably are if you're getting the max um you should be aware of this like this might not change your mind but this is something that you should really be aware of that the the m3 max seems to be substantially crushing the 14 inches thermal system more than the m1 generation did the m2 was probably somewhere in the middle because its power was probably was it was between the two um but you know they they've ramped up the the peak power draw of these chips compared to previous generations the m1 draws more draws less power than the m2 the m2 draws less power than the m3 max in all those cases and so be aware of that that they have they have raised the power envelope without increasing the the thermal you know dissipation capacity significantly so if you're coming from a 14 inch m1 max and you and you're thinking well it the it handled my m1 max just fine in the 14 the same can't necessarily apply to the m3 max like you have to reevaluate because they're not drop-in replacements in terms of power and thermals the The M3 Max uses substantially more power and makes substantially more heat under load than the M1 Max did.

19:50So that might change your calculus of whether you want a 14 or a 16. I think the cooling system has upgraded a tiny bit in the M3 generation versus the M2. I think the heat spreader thingy on the SoC is a little bit larger in this generation. And I'm not sure about the fans if they are exactly the same. um but i i don't i don't think it's entirely true they just use exactly the same cooling system otherwise it would never be able to do it because the the power difference and the 16 inch comparing the m2 16 inch versus m3 max 16 inch it's pretty big difference the m3 max is pushing like 50 watts and the m2 max was only ever getting like 36 or so so there's a lot of extra heat yeah and the m1 generation i think was in the 20s like it's it's substantially more power and heat here and also that that also results in a larger difference between the two models in battery life than there used to be there was always a decent difference because the 16 inch battery is just much bigger and yeah the screen uses more power than the 14 it's bigger but not that much more power so the 16 is still the battery monster but in this case like you know keep in mind again you're the cpu is drawing more power than the previous generations at the same you know marketing name level and also uh i don't know how much of a fact this is but if those fans are spinning faster fans also use power so the result after after these tests the result in the in this um video the 14 inch battery was substantially more drained than the 16 inch it was not a small difference um so again just don't make assumptions based on whatever worked for you in the m1 generation don't assume the same thing will work for you in the m3 generation because the power levels are very different.

21:30I understand everything that you guys are saying, but I don't feel like I'm bumping into thermal throttling issues anytime other than when I'm doing transcosals with FMPEG, at which case, okay, yeah, I'm reaping what I sowed or whatever the turn of phrase is, you know what I'm trying to say. Okay, that's fine. The other thing is I didn't want to go down from 64 gigs of memory. I probably could have and been fine, but I didn't want to. And in order to do that, in this generation, you have to have an M3 Max. Like, that's the end of the meeting. So, in fact, you not only need an M3 Max, you need the baller M3 Max.

22:05That's the only, I'm looking at the configurator right now, it's the only option in the 14. So, if I want 64 gigs, well, guess what? I'm getting an M3 Max. In fact, the Pro appears to top out at 36 gigs, which, even for me, is probably fine. But I didn't want that. I wanted 64. And honestly, I have zero regrets about this machine. I've been using it at home. I've been using it away from home. I freaking love this computer. And I mean, I freaking love my M1 Max as well. Don't get me wrong, but this computer is great. I haven't heard the fans except one time when I was doing a transcode. I have no reason to believe battery life is suffering compared to the last one.

22:41It's been flawless so far. I don't argue any of what you guys are saying. I'm not trying to say that you're wrong or lying or anything like that. It's just in real world use, I am not personally noticing, not to say it's not affecting me, but I'm not noticing the results of any of these problems in the 14. And for me, and I totally understand, Marco, why you reached a different conclusion, but for me, I don't want a frigging aircraft carrier in my backpack. And I travel with this machine often enough that that matters to me. And so I made the choice I made, and I think it's the right one for me.

23:12You made the choice you made. I think it's the right one for you. And everyone's happy. Why won't you just let me be happy? No, look, and I think it's important to point out, like if the 14 inch still worked for you that's great but people who are buying it should know this ahead of time that like it's going to have these trade-offs that the m the m1 generation of it had fewer trade-offs compared to the m3 generation and if what you are seeking is the highest performing laptop in the m1 generation you could say well these are basically the same now you can't really say that now the 16 inches is noticeably higher performing with a lot of workloads so that it is worth knowing also again like if stuff like fan noise is really critical to you then again that's something that's worth knowing ahead of time so that's that's why like and and for many people they're going to still get the 14 inch like you and be totally happy with and that's great but again you got to know going into it the assumptions that you might have made from previous generations of the m series laptops are a little bit different now i do wonder if there's not a uh low-tech solution to this with remember we talked about a little rgb fan cooler thing on the back of your phone that to get sustained frame rates just get some giant plate yeah like i know they make laptop cooler type things but i do wonder they're really quiet and elegant yeah right but i do wonder if you say you get a 14 inch and you want to use it in desktop mode and you don't want to thermal throttle just how much extra cooling would it take probably not that much like and probably could be applied externally i don't you know again caveats about condensation and don't destroy your computer and blah blah blah whatever but like based on how well it works on the little phone thing to sort of sustain frame rates when the phone could not do it without the cooler i do wonder if just a little bit of extra help on a 14 inch would help it uh not thermal throttle at all because it's you know it's the fans are almost doing the job because you have the fan speed difference is huge those fans are working overtime right but the benchmark difference is not that big so it's just it's like the 14 inches uh cooling system is overmatched but just by a little bit so i wonder if you just gave it a little bit of help um which is unlike lots of other computer things like oh i didn't get enough cores well there's not really anything you can do to add more cores to your computer.

25:15But if thermal throttling is your problem, pointing a fan at the back of your laptop when it's like sitting upright, you know, like in a bookshelf type thing, might be enough. One potential limitation there is, remember we learned this from people who wrote in like a couple of years ago, this came up where we were talking about like the MacBook Air thermal design without any fan, that like there are certain standards that different, you know, governments and things set about how hot the outside of a laptop can get for safety reasons. And so the way these are designed, usually the processor is not like heat piped directly to the exterior case.

25:55Like there's usually some kind of air gap there so that the processor is intentionally not transferring its heat much to the metal case. And because of that, it actually makes it difficult to make external coolers that are very effective because you're not getting all that heat away from the chip through the case very much it's mostly dumping it into the air so it's it's a little bit harder so you couldn't for instance just stick like a peltier element cooler on the back of a laptop and have it be pretty good you just you just need you just need a a temperature differential and one exists i mean feel the bottom of a laptop when it's hard working like i know what you're saying like not all the heat is being dumped out there but there's still a temperature differential like that's that's a test that someone should try like just consider that i guess the reverse of it is like uh if you doing some sustained workload with your laptop don't throw it on your bed on top of your comforter like don't don't you know what i mean like you see how kids treat laptops they have no idea that these are like living breathing things right it's a little empathy for the machine here don't take your laptop and just put it on a big soft pillow surrounded by blankets like it needs you need to get it with the lid closed of course right naturally give it give it a fighting chance yeah i and just as a final note because i'd like to move on i i feel like there's a lot of fud going around right now these i i really don't subscribe i don't have any anecdata that indicates that this problem is any worse with this generation than it was with my two-year-old laptop like yes again i'm not trying to argue that it that the facts that you're presenting to me are wrong all i'm trying to say is that in day-to-day use i straight up do not hear the fans so yes in the occasion that I can hear the fans, yes, they probably are faster.

27:36They probably are more annoying. They're probably louder. I don't debate that, but I feel like we're making a problem out of nothing here. This machine is phenomenal. If you want a desktop replacement that you occasionally move, 100 % get the 16, no argument. But if you want a computer that you move occasionally and you favor the ease of moving it over anything else, which is where I am, get the 14 don't don't let these two knuckleheads try to convince you otherwise it's a perfectly good computer there's no need to there's no try to convince i also agree i think the 16 is too big for a laptop and really you should just get desktop anyway oh my god it's so good it's so good the 16 is so good there's basically no trade-off except it is large like that but like again like when you look at i mean we are so spoiled now the 16 inch macbook pro is lighter than the than most 15 inches of most of our computing using careers and it is 16 only because they made the bezel smaller like the so the footprint is roughly 15 inch class that we've had forever the weight is similar or lighter than most 15 inch glass objects we've ever used like it is glorious i'm not going to argue that the 14 inch isn't noticeably smaller and lighter it is like it is noticeably smaller and lighter um i would maybe argue that if you're if that's really your top priority maybe consider the air um but the the 16 inch again it's all relative yes it is larger and heavier than yours but compared to anything ever in the in the history of computing these are all very thin and light and it's fine and even like again like when you're looking at you know if you're suppose you're putting it in a backpack and bringing it to wherever like the weight of your backpack empty is probably a few pounds like it depends on what kind of bag you have the weight of like your total carry of what what most people bring around in their backpacks every day maybe 10 or 15 pounds and so the difference in laptop weight of like a one pound difference between two things that's fair is not really that significant it feels significant when it's in your hand but like however you are carrying it generally speaking for most people the difference between a 50 a 16 inch macbook pro and a 14 macbook pro being like a pound or whatever is not a massive difference in whatever they're carrying it in total um so again if it matters to you and if you really still want to minimize it great i get that please do but these are trade-offs that you should be aware of despite what you said casey they weren't as severe of trade-offs in the in the m1 generation because the total power usage of the m1 chips was way lower like like rather the peak power usage like under load the peak power usage was way lower on the m1 generation than it is in the m3 generation so that is a difference that is worth noting and uh and and before again like before with the 14 or with the m1 generation you could say these computers are basically the exact same computer, just bigger and smaller.

30:38And now that's a little harder to say. There's a much bigger asterisk on that now. So let's talk about chip packaging. Johnny Sruji had an interview in July with his alma mater, who is a college that's, the name is escaping me, it was somewhere in Israel. And he went back there and did an interview with somebody there and talked a bit about chip packaging. John, do you want to either intro this or read it to me or tell me how you want to handle this? yeah so this is the interview that i referenced on a past show where uh i forget what we're talking about we're talking about three nanometer processes or stuff like that but anyway i've said that apple executives won't reveal anything about future products obviously but anytime one of them talks they'll usually say something that lets you know some vague uh future direction and in the interview johnny surgi said that he thought that packaging was uh a potential area of innovation and i wanted to follow up on that today to first provide the excerpt from the interview uh because the whole blah blah is interesting is i think that was like tim cook saying the wrist is interesting or some bs like that and whatever the uh the quote was from jobs when he was talking about cell phones was similar that's how we all know apple was making a phone uh and so i just wanted to get the actual words that he said about packaging because there was also recently uh an interview uh of uh intel ceo pat gelsinger with uh ben thompson of uh stratechery or stratechery however you want to pronounce it um where uh yeah where the intel ceo talked about you guessed it packaging and how important it is to intel and for the future and so i feel like this is a a confluence of events that's worth digging into deeper even if this as we said in past episode of this generation it just looks like the m3 is going to be m3 ultra is just going to be two m3 Max is stuck together just like it was before, which is fine and great and will be awesome, but keep your eye on the future for packaging stuff.

32:28So yeah, Casey, you just want to go through the interview segment. Sure. So how about I'll play the role of the interviewer and you can play the role of Johnny Serugia. Sure, give me the longer one. Yeah, well, all right, fine. You know what? I'll take one. I don't know if we can play acted. I'm going to get Marco mixed in. He can be the announcer. Oh, gosh. All right, so you be the interviewer. I will be Johnny. Let's do it that way. You don't need two people to read them. You can just be one person. Play with me in the space, John. Come on. Are you really just going to leave me hanging like this?

32:53Jesus Christ. Is it my line? Yes, it's you. Line? Line? We're actually doing this? Yes. Yes, you are the interviewer, John. All right, this is the interviewer. What are the next challenges in the design and architecture of processors that Apple should tackle to get to the real next generation of processing? This is where the interviewer starts asking questions like they shouldn't ask if they know that I'm going to get the answer. What's the next challenge? You know, what should they tackle to get to the real next generation? I'm not asking questions about the future, but I totally am. Anyway, here's what Johnny Srujit said.

33:22It is getting more and more challenging. Those of you who follow CMOS technology, whether it's 5 nanometer or beyond, that's getting harder and harder, which I think is great, by the way, because if it gets harder, that means Apple will try better and better. So that's good. I'm not going to describe our future roadmap, but there are many challenges. For example, when you take CMOS technology, I think one of the things that is going to be important is packaging without getting into details. so the way you package the chip is going to be important or maybe you architect the chip in a different way and i know you think like that's saying nothing what are you talking about this was the quote yeah they don't say a lot but the fact that they say anything about anything oh packaging just just that word packaging what does that mean i mean again apple already does interesting things with packaging the silicon interposer is an interesting thing done with packaging and we've talked a lot about packaging technology in the past but this is the tiny tidbit they left you know maybe you architect your chip a different way packaging is interesting i do like these typical apple bravado where they said oh you know the the silicon the world of silicon is it's getting more and more difficult and that's great for apple because when things get hard like we will excel like that'll make us try harder because we're the best and basically bring it on because the harder it gets the more you'll see that apple is the best which is great for him to say we'll see if it actually turns out to be true how those cell modems going johnny um i i thought that was uh some top tier uh apple executive uh bragging in this interview but anyway that's that's what he said about packaging he just dropped the word packaging so now here is a in the intel ceo pat gelsinger also talking about packaging so i will be i will be playing the role of pat gelsinger in this one since that's the longer one okay uh gelsinger says this idea of chiplets, I think, is the new way that all chips get designed.

35:09The idea of advanced packaging multiple chips into the advanced package, and whether that's an MCP or multi-chip packaging, whether that's a two and a half or 3D construction, I do think that becomes the standard. And this is Ben Thompson. The interviewer was saying, why is advanced packaging the future? You can see you can ask Intel questions about the future. I know this has been a big focus for Intel. It's something that you want to talk about. And from everything I know, your technology is leading the way. Why is that so important in addition to the traditional Moore's law? why do we need to start stacking these chiplets give me the top reasons so this you know ben is asking a good question here which is like of all the things the problems intel has and you can read the full interview you know he's interviewed uh the new intel ceo a few times intel's got some problems they fell behind they're you know getting beat in the fab business by tsmc why in the world does intel care anything about packaging and more importantly why is that intel putting tons of money into innovations in packaging and so he's asking like you know what's the deal give me the top reasons for the whole focus on packaging.

36:06One is now you're able to take the performance sensitive transistors and move them to the leading edge node, but leverage some other technologies for other things. So you get to mix and match technologies more efficiently, effectively this way. John, would you like to jump in and explain what I, Pat Gelsinger, just said? Yeah. So this is part of Intel's problem is they, you know, their fabs fell behind. They couldn't get off of whatever, or were they stuck on 14 nanometer for ages, right and tsmc went ahead of them and has been ahead since then and so they're like look we we know at intel that we have some fab problems in fact intel is paying tsmc to fab a bunch of its stuff they're saying one of the things we can do by breaking the chips up into smaller individual pieces is get the most important parts to be fabbed by tsmc not by us on a bet on like the good process node and then use other lesser fabs like intel's fabs to fab the parts of the chip where it doesn't matter as much so if you're intel you don't want to pay tsmc to an intel you can read all about it in ben's coverage but intel is trying to split where they're like we're going to have a fabbing part of the company and then we're going to have the chip design part of the company and we're going to pretend like they're separate so the fabbing part is way behind and needs to catch up but the part that owns like x86 and makes the chips we think that's good so you know they're they're using tsmc but they don't want to have us tsmc for everything that would get very expensive intel's big advantages they fab their own chips and they design their own chips they're you know vertical integration everything so like this is why in one reason why packaging is important intel can pay the minimum amount required to the company with the good fabs to make the part of the chip where it's most important for it to be on the top process level and then they can use cheaper stuff for the other parts.

37:50Second, we can actually compose the chiplets to more appropriate die sizes to maximize defect density as well. If you have a monster server die, you're going to be dictated to be n-2, n-3, just because of the monster die size. I get to carve up that server chip. I get to move the advanced nodes per computing more rapidly and not be subject to some of the issues. Defect density early in the life of a new process technology. So this is about intel you know setting aside socs where it's a whole bunch of stuff on a big giant is a system on the chip um they're giant server chips like the huge like 56 core zeon things are just just a single gigantic chip and you have to fab that in a single it's fabbed in a single die and if some part of that screws up like the more area you start covering on the silicon wafer the more stuff you put there the more chances there's going to be some error and you might have to throw out the whole chip and so this is another advantage to packaging is like if you just if you just make it at a smaller parts a if it's bad you're only throwing away like a smaller area of your wafer you don't have to throw away this huge square you throw out the little square and b uh your defect density can be lower he says maximizing defect density but whatever he meant minimizing that you'll get more more of those littler things that you fab will come offline and be completely error-free whereas trying to just get a single error-free humongous zeon is difficult s rams in particular, SRAM scaling will become a bigger and bigger issue going forward.

39:13So I actually don't get benefit by moving a lot of my cache to the next generation node like I do for logic, power, and performance. I actually want to have a 3D construct where I have lots of cache and a base die and put the advanced computing on top of it into a 3D sandwich. And now you get the best of a cache architecture and the best of the next generation of Moore's Law. So it actually creates a much more effective architectural model in the future. Additionally, generally, you're struggling with the power performance and speed of light between chips yes this whole uh technique this is a particular technology that intel has advanced with which lets them take power and feed it through the layers of the sandwich in a more efficient way to get to precisely where they want it i think that's what they're referring to here the sandwiching isn't just because of that but intel has it has an innovative way to send power up to the bottom of the chip instead of sending through the top because when you send it through the top you got to weave it through around a bunch of obstacles or you send it through the bottom there's nothing in the way because you make these layered sandwiches or whatever that's what that's talking about and and you know s ram is like look the you know the s ram is what we were talking about before with the uh the gpu ram that was be it was being shared better with dynamic caching that's it's faster than the ram that's out under ram chips like your main memory but it's not the same as registers it's kind of in between there it's like very expensive ram or each little bit of ram takes a large number of transistors but it's much faster than regular ram and it's in the cpu and i say i'm like you don't get any benefit of doing that on three nanometers.

40:34So not only do you not want to waste money doing it because it would be more expensive, you don't get benefit from doing it anyway. So keep that on a different lower process and then sandwich it all together. Any other questions for me, Ben? Yeah, I'm Ben again. All right, so how do you solve that with chiplets when they're no longer on the same die? In the chiplet construct, we're going to be able to put tens of thousands of bond connections between different chiplets inside of an advanced package. So you're going to be able to have very high bandwidth, low latency, low power consumption interfaces between chiplets.

41:01It also becomes very economical for design cycles. Hey, I can design a chiplet with this IO and use it for multiple generations. And you can see how all the stuff that I described would be appealing to Apple. Apple's already making SOCs, which are essentially single dies, system-on-the-chips that have a bunch of stuff in them. And they're getting pretty big. That's part of the reason the Ultras have been two maxes weaved together with the silicon interposer rather than just being a single large chip the size of an Ultra. Because that would be even more expensive to manufacturers but also probably part of the reason we didn't have the quad right so apple would love the idea that you could take subunits of this like the thing that does io or whatever uh and reuse that between generations because between generations like oh it's you know what whatever we're on now thunderbolt 3 thunderbolt 4 that lasts a couple generations i think both the m2 and the m3 had the same speed thunderbolt interface so if that was in a separate chiplet you could just reuse that one from before on the future ship and make you don't even have you that That could still be seven nanometer, for example.

42:04I don't know if this is the right part of the chip to be reused, but you can design it once and reuse that little sub-chiplet in future generations as long as you can do an interconnect between all of these that has all the attributes that they subscribe, low latency, blah, blah, blah. So far, Apple's packaging innovation has been the Interposer, which is technically impressive and it makes the Ultra possible. But this is more like a more general purpose thing of like lots of different little, you know, a city of chips, lots of different little islands on your chip to even to just make what Apple does currently in a single SOC.

42:32And that can make things less expensive and improve your yields as well. And then you want to tell me about the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express. Is that a train, John? UCI and then lowercase e. So this is one of these multi-company consortiums to do exactly what we were just describing. So this is a press release from March 2nd, 2022. says intel along with advanced semiconductor engineering amd arm google cloud meta microsoft qualcomm samsung and tsmc have announced the establishment of an industry consortium to promote an open die-to-die interconnect standard called universal chiplet interconnect express or ucie the chiplet ecosystem created by ucie is a critical step in the creation of a unified standard for interoperable chiplets which will ultimately allow for next generation of technological innovations apple's not on that list but tsmc is and apple has a good relationship with them so if we're looking towards a future where it becomes untenable to continue making larger and larger dies uh you know with everything on them and these socs a good industry standard system for making chiplets at whatever the most economical and useful size is and weaving them together to essentially form an soc out of it seems like a good idea doing it all in one die probably still has advantages but price may not be one of those advantages and again intel is super interested because they essentially can't do that without having tsmc do all their fabbing for them if they want the top tier uh technology apple doesn't currently have that problem but the fact johnny surugi mentioned stuff about packaging and the fact that this whole chiplets thing like other companies are already doing this amd has been big into the chiplets thing for a while intel is putting a lot of money and research into this and their their chips they're going to be coming out with use some of this technology i think it's unavoidable that apple will start using it too why am i interested in all this you know why it's the keep the dream alive of a mac pro ship that is that is not the same as one you can get in a mac studio and what's going to make that possible apparently with the approach they use for the past two generations not economically feasible if it's ever going to be economically feasible we need a change this change in packaging could bring that about stay tuned i don't know 20 27 who knows oh my all right john in in keeping with the idea of keeping the dream alive tell me about error network network change this is a nightmare it's not a dream uh touché error network change continues uh a few some more research from the internet about this so here is a stack overflow question uh this person asks whenever my iphone and mac os are on the same wi-fi chrome and mac os often reports the error network changed i found that whenever my iphone and mac os on the same wi-fi a record will often often appear in the routing table in mac os and disappear after a few seconds when this route record appears my chrome will most likely have an error network changed error i turned off the iphone's wi-fi of the routing and the record in mac os disappeared and chrome no longer had the error so this is everyone is always looking for like what causes this and so they start looking at anything like what changes my network what is what is it about my network that has changed and they'll spot something and they'll find a thing to attribute it to and they'll stop that thing by saying it looks like it's happening because my phone is here and if i turn off my wi-fi i fix the problem every single one of these that has been reported i have experimented with and it doesn't actually eliminate the problem it just moves it around because the problem is the network changed and chrome flips out about it is the problem that the network is changing is the problem that's chrome's flipping out about it is it both either way if you stop the thing that changes in your network doesn't mean that something else won't also change your network and cause the error but i'm glad that somebody found something that helps them uh this next one is about tail scale gil penderson says the tail scale vpn used to trigger this but they fixed it with and there's a link to a patch so this is tail scale patching their own code to avoid this error because they were seeing this error happening and they were saying hey this thing that we're doing uh mac os is flipping out about it so you know basically it says ios slash mac os so it's apparently not just a mac thing will reconfigure their routing anytime anything minor changes in the net map and so they're changing their code to not do that because they don't want to anger ios slash mac os this is a change that committed in 2020 so is our ios and mac os you know changing their routing more is there something that was part of the operating system that's causing it lots of theories about this one that's not even in the notes here is about um if you have a dev device like if you have an iphone that is configured as a dev device there's apparently a new way that max communicate to the phones for purposes of development that also uses a you know network connection that's brought up and torn down and apparently causes network to be changed as far as chrome concerned and it flips out so anyway here's an anonymous bit that's getting us closer to the root of the problem and this is an explanation of it from the perspective of uh chrome chromium whatever because again this is not just a mac or ios problem this happens to be called linux uh this is a part of the problem is clearly with the chrome chromium browser engine uh but the operating systems participate in it as well because they're the ones that control the network that is changing anyway anonymous writes the network layer from chromium is available as a standalone cross-platform library called cronet which is open source and used in other non-Google applications.

48:03I work at Google on a major Android app that uses Cronet extensively, so I've got experience with their network changed. This issue appears to be with QUIC-QUIC, which is the UDP-based web protocol thing. We'll put a link to the Wikipedia page. You can read about it. And or HTTP3, which is a new version of HTTP, which is sensitive to changing networks. Whenever the networks on the device change, the connection needs to be reset. This isn't exactly a bug. It's a necessary step. Not doing this would mean connections wouldn't work properly. Unfortunately, this causes error network change when the device's network change.

48:34As previously mentioned, this can be for non-obvious reasons such as Docker desktop customizing the networks repeatedly, VPN apps misbehaving, cell signal dropping in and out, etc. There are ways in which this can be fixed. First, not using HTTP slash quick is the easiest. Safari and other Apple stuff doesn't use this yet, so isn't currently experiencing these issues. However, this will likely change as Apple rolls out HTTP 3 support. Apart from this issue, it's a much better technology particularly for mobile devices so this is the first offered explanation of hey why doesn't safari have this problem the theory is oh safari doesn't use quick or http 3 and so it's not going to see any of these errors difficult to test because as far as i was able to determine in conversing with this person there is no way to disable http 3 and quick in chrome to disable it entirely there's some flags in chrome flags where you can turn some things off but i think you can't turn it off entirely so it's hard to do an apples to apples comparison but you pin your hopes on the smallest thing if apple does plan on rolling out hdb3 or quick their browser is going to break like chrome is and hopefully they'll be like oh geez this browser has become useless because half of my hdb connections fail let's see if we can fix this as opposed to now where apparently no one is doing anything next possible fix os's and networking apps will need to be more careful about network changes apple will probably fix this in a sonoma point release other platforms i've seen uh this on are working on fixes i wish i wish i had this person's optimism uh will it be fixing a sonoma point release does apple even know about this i i haven't bothered reporting this because they're just going to say it's a chrome error and i'm not sure they're wrong like i honestly don't know how much of the blame to apportion to chrome versus mac one is anecdotal evidence is that this is way worse in sonoma and there are a bunch of new network related demons for various things that people have assigned blame to oh it's because of the uton thing it's because of talking to a developer iphone device you know it's because of docker it's because of a vpn uh you know it's it's because whenever your iphone and your mac are on the same wi-fi network it happens like i don't know but i i don't i don't know how to to communicate this to anybody involved other than to say chrome no longer works on mac in a reliable way like in a fundamental no longer useful as a browser kind of way because you know some large percentage of your requests just fail and it's not great finally the last thing there is an experimentation going on in cronet to improve things by migrating connections across network interfaces this is the migrate sessions on network change v2 flag or feature or whatever we'll put a link to the thing in the show notes this isn't just a bug fix though it has trade-offs so it likely needs to be done in combination with improvements from os's and networking app so the idea behind this thing is hey if there's some connection in this cronet networking library and the network changes and we have to you know not use that connection anymore because it won't work whatever was using that connection why don't we smoothly migrate it over to the new working connection and then the application that is using cronet which would be the chromium browser engine doesn't need to worry that that happened it will just continue to work that would be great but it's not just like it's not just a bug fix because their performance implications of that migrating it is not free it takes time um and it's not the same as just not having the network change so i don't know what the solution here is here but uh it's extremely frustrating we did not have an error network change shirt as part of this sale but i'm seriously thinking about it for future ones it continues to happen uh and then the final bet this is really the icing on the cake this is this is uh not seemingly related to error network change but kind of is.

52:12This was a toot by someone named Thomas who said, I just learned what the user interface in the SpaceX capsules run. The capsules that provide life support for people traveling into space and have to be absolutely reliable. The user interface that controls an explosion. It runs a home compiled version of Chromium and the UI is written in JavaScript. And this person wrote this to say, can you believe they're using web technologies and a thing that has to be reliable? But that's not the thing that sticks out. The thing that sticks out is the word Chromium. do you think if they have air network changed in a spacex rocket that might be a problem and who's responsible for fixing that book i'm sure it's running linux or whatever but again people running chrome on linux or chromium based things on linux are also experiencing this problem sometimes i feel like i'm the only person with this problem but every time i talk about on the show people send me toots on mastodon here i am i'm getting it i'm getting a network changed i got People on Linux, people on Macs, so far no one in iOS because maybe those errors are hidden from you on most iOS apps.

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53:11But I mean, I still think my window dragging bug is more important because I could just use Safari. But for the people in the SpaceX capsules that have a UI that's running Chromium, maybe talk to your bosses about this. We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out, or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything, from your products to your content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms.

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55:26as we record this it is monday what's say the 20th is that yes monday the 20th in the last three days there have been approximately carry the seven uh 7304 different ceos for for open ai um somehow still only one board right yeah well we've been recording for a while so yeah it's also fair so i i don't really have too much to say about this but But I guess... Just read the headlines in the notes. All right. So these are the headlines, and we'll link these in the show notes. I think this is like 48 hours span, 24, 48. Yeah, it's been almost no time. So these are the headlines as per The Verge. Sam Altman fired a CEO of OpenAI.

56:08That was on the 17th. And by the way, out of nowhere. Yeah, so let's get through the headlines. Yeah, I think it's worth unpacking all this. then next twitch co-founder emmett sheer is the new ceo of open ai that was apparently today micro microsoft hires former open ai ceo sam altman also today hundreds of open ai employees starting to resign and join microsoft today is sam altman joining microsoft tell it doesn't seem to know i think there's hours between those how can you have like it yes it's a comedy of errors but then every time there's a headline it's like this is a thing that happened it's like but has it yeah right i skip the ones where it's like oh he was fired but there are negotiations for him to come back but no he's not coming back but yes he is coming back but they're talking about coming back but now he's at microsoft but has he been hired by microsoft and this is not just like oh we're wondering what's going on this is that's why the headline says is sam altman joining microsoft satya nadella who by the way as the CEO of Microsoft, doesn't seem to know.

57:10Satya Nitala announced, hey, Sam Altman's coming to Microsoft. But then when asked about it like hours later, it was like, well, not really sure. I don't check back in a few hours. Boy. Yeah. So let me try to give the quick executive summary of this. Now, I'm surely going to get a little bit wrong, but the general gist of it is, I think it was late Friday, Eastern time. There was a blog post from the OpenAI board, basically, that said that Sam Altman, who was the former CEO, maybe by the time you're listening to this, might be the CEO again, who knows. But former CEO had basically not, what was the phrase they used?

57:50Not been, forthcoming wasn't the word they used, but it was something along those lines. It was pretty severe. It was vague, but normally when a CEO is fired, this is the privilege of being in the executive ranks. Because when a regular person is fired, you just get fired. But if you're a CEO, no matter how terrible whatever you did was, no matter how badly you screwed up, you're always like, you know, moving on to spend more time with your family or want to pursue other interests. Or like they have some euphemism about how you're – it's not like we're firing him. It's a mutual decision we've all come to and he's decided to leave and he's, you know, pursuing his passions in this other realm and we thank him for all his blah, blah, blah.

58:34And this wasn't like that. This is as close as you're ever going to get to saying we fired him because we don't like him. Yeah, it was. That's how I remember being with Forstall. It was basically like it was clear that he got fired, but everyone put on the happy face. We would like Scott to spend more time with his family. Yes, I would like to spend more time with my family. And usually and usual in those type of statements, there's something from the person who was fired. Like, quote, you know, whatever quotes from them. Right. They'll say, like, I'm happy that I spent all my time with this company.

59:05i'm glad to be moving on blah blah blah like it's a participatory process but what happened with sam altman uh the story i heard on a podcast i was listening to is that he was on stage doing something like in his official capacity as ceo and he said okay well you know thanks everybody i have to go i have a meeting in that meeting he he got on he got on a call this is i was listening to the verges podcast about this he got into the call using google meet and one of the people on the show said even for 10 billion dollars no one will use teams uh because microsoft invested 10 billion dollars or whatever in open ai so anyway he goes to his meeting he sits down and it's it's you know an online meeting right and all they did in the online meeting was read him the blog post you just referred to casey they just put it like that's what you do in these meetings you have a script you stick to it so you don't get sued you just read the words so if you're wondering like oh they must have had an extensive meeting in which he they explained to him why he was fired when we say this came out of nowhere didn't come out of nowhere like to us on the outside because what do we know came out of nowhere to sam altman who just got done doing a ceo thing and said oh i got to go to a meeting and they just read him a thing said yeah you're fired and by the way the thing he was doing like having their whole their whole developer conference was widely lauded by the industry as like an amazing thing everyone thought he did an amazing job this is a great path and beyond everyone's excited everyone's super yeah everyone's super side of an open AI and him.

1:00:22Like it was, that's why when this news dropped that the board fired him, everyone in the entire tech business was like, what? Are you serious? Is this a joke? Like what happened? Yeah. So here's from the blog post. I was able to dig it up while you guys were talking. This is the blog post from the open AI board. Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberate review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading open ai which by the way like that's a really serious accusation like that that is like potentially misleading the board is in many cases a crime like it that is a really serious accusation that's why like this isn't just oh we had creative differences we you know we don't like him anymore that that's a that's a very serious thing to throw around what they threw around and by the way as far as i understand it the board doesn't have to have a reason like they they have complete control there's no like power struggle or whatever this the structure of this company is such that the board can decide oh we don't want you to be ceo for i think for pretty much any reason like he needs to do anything wrongly it just happens all the time the board's like we want a different ceo we want to go in a different direction that happens all the time they don't need to explain which is why you can do the oh they're going to spend more time with the family or whatever whatever the real reason is it's not like they need to make something up like we can't fire him unless we say that he lied to us they could have just said later but they threw that in there to say oh and we have reasons we think he has not been quote-unquote consistently candid like they didn't have to put that in there for any reason other than to just i mean i don't know you know maybe this will give us cover because it's vague enough people can imagine some terrible thing happened but bottom line is uh apparently a majority we don't even know how much because it's not like it's not a public company so it's not like they have public records to say was this a unanimous vote did everybody vote to kick him out or whatever but um a majority of the people on the board decided they don't want him to be co anymore and they made this decision without consulting sam altman at all i mean maybe they've had press conversations about it maybe he should have known it's coming because they said in their last meeting if you if you do really well in that dev conference you're fired i don't know what they might have said to him so the impression i get in in i i don't have a lot of nobody has facts here at the moment.

1:02:43But the impression I got, based on the coverage that I've read, is that there were two different factions or tribes, I think Sam had called them at one point or another, two different tribes within OpenAI. OpenAI was originally founded in 2014, 2015, thereabouts, as a non-profit. And their theory was we want to make basically artificial general intelligence. We want to make AI. But we understand that with this great power comes great responsibility. And we want to do this great power. right so that's how it was founded well at some point you know altman swoops in i don't recall exactly when it was in the timeline but it's clear that sam altman is very silicon valley vc which i personally find to be a very ugly stereotype like i just don't care for that whole like grow grow grow take over the world mindset and he is the embodiment of that stereotype used to be with y combinator which is also kind of a poster child for that type of vc yeah and and he he's not the guy who had the day phone night phone he's the guy who wore the multiple polo shirts at the same time yeah it's hard to keep track exactly now and i'm trying to make plain my to quote merlin my priors on this like i find that whole silicon valley mindset to be very off-putting you know grow it grow no matter what we don't care who we run over in the process grow grow grow you know let's make money make money and that's all that matters is making money nothing else matters grow and make money grow and make money or sometimes you don't even have to make money you just grow Well, so anyway, so consider that when I give one of my, you know, lip turns up as I tell you this story.

1:04:33But nevertheless, so Sam comes in and he's grow, grow, grow, money, money, money. And everything, I guess everyone was kind of coexisting okay. And even though they disagreed internally, everything was mostly all right. Well, then they released ChatGPT, what, about a year ago. And it makes a tremendous splash. I think a lot of people are saying it's the quickest adopted consumer product ever because, you know, they had something like 100 million signups in the span of like four minutes. Not literally, but you know what I mean. And so now money is becoming a thing, like for real. And suddenly we have to pay the piper on this division between money, money, money, and let's do this for the good of all people.

1:05:15and their chief scientist, Ilya something or other, I don't have the name in front of me, I guess was more on the, let's play it safe, let's be deliberate, let's do this for the good of humanity and Sam was very much money, money, money and at some point, it appears something gave and the rumblings that I heard, not from sources or anything, just based on the reporting I read, was that Ilya had convinced the board of which I think he is a part of the board, let's give her to Sam. And then all hell broke loose. And now as we record on Monday night, we don't really know what the latest and greatest is.

1:05:54But I understand both sides of this. Like on the one side, if the board really did establish, or if OpenAI really was established as a nonprofit, which I think is factual, I don't think that's up for grabs, it is within reason for them to say, well, hold on, suddenly we've taken a turn and pivoted to money, money, money. We don't like that. And Sam seems to, by most metrics, have pivoted them in that direction. So if we don't like this pivot to money, money, money, then we probably don't like Sam anymore. So on the surface, I don't have a problem with that. And again, my priors tell me, yeah, screw that Silicon Valley nut job.

1:06:29Let's do this for the good of people rather than the good of the almighty dollar. Well, wait till you hear about the other side of that, because I think they're both nut jobs. Well, that's fair, too. That's fair, too. But I'm just trying to make plain, this is my biases coming to light. That being said, unquestionably, ChatGPT and the work of OpenAI and DALI and all this AI stuff, whether or not you think it's cool, whether or not you think it's good, I think unquestionably it's important. And it's been making a big damn splash. And I think that there's a lot of interesting things here. and unlike blockchain i think there's a lot of fascinating threads that we can pull and i think that there's a lot there's a lot there and because of that i i also have sympathy for the let's grow this product and see what the what the world can do with it and let's just let's not slow down let's not you know be deliberate about it screw it let's just figure it out as we go which is when silicon valley is at its best so i i have very mixed feelings about this.

1:07:32And I mean, as someone who likes drama more than I should, because I'm a grown ass man, I really shouldn't enjoy drama this much. But oh, this is delicious drama. And I am here for the drama of it. But I honestly don't know who's right, who's wrong. I'm not sure any of us do. I don't know what to make of this, but it is a mess. And it's been a mess every other hour since late Friday evening. Yeah. By the time you hear this episode, who knows what will have happened i think this is actually i mean a lot of this is the most the most silicon valley thing about this is that a lot of the companies that you know from my youth that sort of came out of silicon valley they were at the forefront of some technology that they were the right place at the right time right they decided to make personal computers and personal computers are just becoming possible right you know you get your apples your intel right you know, microships, memory, you know, CPUs, x86, Microsoft with the software, like they're on, they're riding a wave of something.

1:08:30And those particular companies, especially, you know, we know a lot of the names of the founders, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, a lot of them were younger people. And pretty much none of them went into it thinking, I'm going to found what's going to become what we know today as tech giants. because that's not what you know who who's if you told if you tried to tell uh young steve jobs and steve wozniak what apple look like today they'd be like yeah right no one thinks that's going to happen so what happens with these companies that are incredibly successful is they're made up of people the founders but also usually they bring in other people to help them run the company and especially for companies that experience explosive growth the people who are responsible for running that company they're just people sometimes they're people who've never done anything like this before and so if you're wondering how can this company that's been so financially successful and apparently has such amazing technology not have their governance straightened out and basically you know conduct the the the their business in this ridiculous way with this whipsawing of the ceo being fired and asking him to come back and regretting telling him to leave and all those stuff it's because they're a young tech company riding the wave of a new technology run by a pinch of people who are bad at doing this and that's i mean look steve jobs was fired from apple by a bunch of people that were brought on to run the company that was probably the wrong decision for them to do at that time they if they had you know nurtured his town perhaps they would have had a more successful 90s but you can also understand why they fired him because you know read the history like a lot of these companies in their early days at least run up to the edge of being you know doing something terrible but being run in a way that is not i'm not gonna say not sane but that is that is not what you the way you expect a very wealthy company to run that's even with google they have the two founders that may have we have to bring in the adults to help run things and you know it's you can go it can go badly in so many different ways it's very rare that you get a company that manages to get through this sort of awkward adolescence and sustain its success into something that continues and becomes like a a company that that you know that is more reliable and steady and does not have weird boardroom drama like this so i'm not saying that this is unique to open ai at all in fact like i said i think this is the most silicon value thing that they've done that said the people in these two camps here the sam altman and and the open ai people are a little bit weird they're they're both sides are a little bit weird So we didn't talk about the Microsoft stuff, but like OpenAI is this nonprofit.

1:11:11Microsoft wanted to do a thing with them. So here's the thing with OpenAI. Their goal is to make artificial general intelligence, which is like hell 9000 or whatever that doesn't kill you. It's a big asterisk there. Yeah. They haven't done that, to be clear. That's like their aspirational goal. It's like their mission statement. But what they did do was make ChatGPT. And it turns out that ChatGPT is a useful thing that people can do stuff with. And everyone's interested in it. and Microsoft was interested in it. And they said, hey, we would like to do stuff with your technology too. The problem OpenAI has is they want to make artificial general intelligence, but it turns out doing anything, even approaching that, costs tons and tons of money.

1:11:49And so OpenAI's idea was like, we'll just, we'll raise money somehow and people will give us money because they know we're doing the good work to make Hell 9000 not kill us. And they, the amount of money they were able to raise was a fraction of the amount that they would need. Microsoft came and said, we kind of like that things you're doing over there how about we let you use our massive computing resources and our data centers uh to the tune of billions of dollars worth of free credits like little token chucky cheese tokens now you can run your stuff in azure because open ai open ai can't do anything without large amounts of computers which takes large amounts of money and they're a non-profit and their idea was like we'll raise that money people will give us money to pursue this they just did not get as much money as they would need but chat gbt microsoft's like hmm kind of like that so they did this deal where microsoft is like giving them 10 billion dollars most of which is in the form of credits to run stuff in their azure you know cloud computing stuff and but how can they how can they do that well if you look at the org chart it's like there's a non-profit and the non-profit controls this other for-profit thing that gets money from microsoft but the for-profit part it's not it's not i think it's like what profit capped or something like that anyway it's entirely controlled by the non-profit but still microsoft has this financial interest and by the way as part of this deal microsoft gets all the rights to the the open ai ip like their intellectual property whatever i don't know what their intellectual property is but presumably whatever it is they use to make chat gpt microsoft now has the rights to that i think forever as part of this 10 billion dollar deal the only thing microsoft doesn't have the rights to this is another one of those great deals kind of like a microsoft uh doing the internet explorer thing and saying oh don't worry we'll give you x percent of all of our internet explorer sales and then giving it an internet explorer away for free to everybody and so that person got nothing anyway um the company that got nothing from that open ai is like okay we'll do this 10 billion dollar deal we'll get access to your computing resources which we kind of need to like literally do anything because we don't have enough money to do this ai stuff we don't have enough money to pay for the computers to do it but what we won't give you and we'll license you our current technology but what we won't give you is uh anything having to do with artificial general intelligence so if we invent how 9000 microsoft you don't get it and microsoft's like okay i guess and you know and microsoft's actually thinking they're never going to do that it doesn't matter right so they retain the right to the fantasy thing that they want to make but gave microsoft the rights to all the other stuff and so microsoft's you know doing all this stuff with uh their you know co-pilot chat gpt but like all that stuff that you know chat gpt the fact that it does useful things that is a product that can make money microsoft can incorporate that technology into its own products microsoft office github everything and use that to make money that's that's what everyone's doing meanwhile the non-profits over there going what are they doing making products and making money for don't they understand we're trying to make hell 9000 and we're trying to make sure hell 9000 doesn't kill us and so there's already a disconnect and so on the one side of it is like you have a technology that people will pay money to use i forget what their numbers are but like if they got 100 million users they're making some huge amount of revenue too because they charge for access to this stuff and of course microsoft to the extent that microsoft incorporates any of this technology into their products that helps them sell more of their products which of course they make money on so it's you know it's a product business hey we have a thing we came up with where it was google search or you know whatever and we can use it to make money and that's what sam altman's out there doing using a product to make money and then the open ai people who are like ai is going to kill us we need to create it in a first we need to create it but we need to create it the right way so it doesn't kill us and everyone else is like yeah but you haven't created it but we've got this thing over here called chat tpt that people want to pay for it it's not ai even though everyone calls it that but it is a product that people want to use so can we have a developer day and make an api and charge people for api access and do deals with microsoft and it's like okay i guess but eventually like no we're making hell 9 000 we don't like that other stuff stop it and so now you have this disconnect and if you think about what open ai is it's it's this mission statement it's a bunch of employees that implement this mission statement uh and then it is the output that knowledge and the output of those employees and so sam altman apparently uh it was popular within the company so when he left and went to microsoft or did he uh of the 700 or so employees at open ai about 500 signed a letter that said hey if you don't bring him back or if you don't all quit or whatever we're all going to go to microsoft because microsoft said we have an open standing offer to go work for them instead so if microsoft gets sam altman and 500 of the 700 employees what is the non-profit left with microsoft already has the rights to all the ip of everything they actually made because they didn't make how 9 000 so they've got they got the rights to that and if all their employees also go over there and they have the former ceo an open ai has a mission statement and 200 loyal employees left and really uh i guess those people can regroup and use their 10 billion dollars of azure bucks to figure out how to make hell 9000 any day now uh meanwhile sam altman and microsoft are over there continuing to sell access to chat gpt to autocomplete stuff when you type reminders in or whatever the hell they're doing to make money the reason i think both camps are a little bit weird is because sam altman's in the as case alluded to before the grow grow grow boil the ocean kill all the poor people so we can make another another buck because in the end uh what really matters are the people are going to live a trillion years from now lots of interesting philosophical exclusives to be a jerk today but really it's it's for the future anyway money money money and then the flip side the people think it's going to come and kill us all and they need to be really careful about how they create it and you're like what what's going to kill us all they're like oh the thing no one's been able to invent yet but when they do it's gonna be really bad it's like yeah uh dragons can kill us all too but uh there aren't any dragons like but there could be you're right there could be someone could genetically engineer a dragon but do you have a dragon no i think i know how to make one all right well get back to me about the dragon thing yeah so it's kind of like self-driving cars like any day now it'll come it's like well no one's ever done it but all these companies sprung up about about the promise you know like based on the promise of like well you know in five years they'll be self-driving cars so we need to build business around that reality and that reality has not happened and so a lot of those companies are having problems so open ai is trying to pursue how 9000 but i don't think they know how like everyone else who has tried before them but unlike lots of other companies they've made a useful thing that is a marketable consumer product in the course of trying to do that research and it seems that that useful consumer product is not compatible with their mission statement because that's not what they wanted to do.

1:18:35Oh, that's cool and all. That's a step along the way. But let's not get distracted by trying to make a multi-billion dollar business out of this useful thing that we've made. And by the way, OpenAI is not the only company that's done this. Lots of other companies have similar things. So it is kind of a cut through a business. OpenAI seems to be the leader in this field, which is why Microsoft is interested in them and why they did that deal. But it's not like this is unknown elsewhere. what is unknown everywhere is hale 9000 that doesn't exist don't and so if you're scared of it existing okay it would be scary if it did exist but it doesn't and i'll be more interested once you think you have a road to making it like can you go from chat gpt to hale 9000 maybe maybe this is step one of five maybe step one to 5000 or maybe you're just barking up the wrong tree and this approach isn't going to work anymore the planes that flap their wings we'll see but uh yeah that's that's kind of the state of the world and these two camps at least the the uh the sam altman thing you're like okay i've got this guy's number i've seen people like this before i know what he's doing he's making products he's selling them it makes sense and the opening eye of people are more like very confused sort of monks who have noble if misguided goals and great ambitions but what they increasingly don't have are people and money to accomplish that and it's all through their own kind of i'm going to say mismanagement but through their own apparent misreading of the situation which is what did you think you actually have oh we control the company we can fire him but if all the employees log to him and he goes to microsoft and all your employees leave you've really got nothing left so i feel kind of bad for open ai because i admire the nobility of their mission, even if I think their reasoning or predictions are a little bit silly.

1:20:23I don't particularly admire the nobility or lack thereof of Sam Altman's ambitions, but at least it's a devil that I know. Yeah, and I think what they created is so incredibly commercially valuable and commercializable that I don't think there was any chance of this going any other way. like the the idealists in open ai who wanted to keep it really non-profit for the good of everybody that that is a noble goal it's an interesting idea but there was no way that's going to happen i mean the only way it would have worked if these the all the employees agreed if they said we're in we are open ai employees because we believe in the mission of doing this not-for-profit because if that was true they got 10 billion dollars from microsoft to run all their stuff and they've got 700 loyal employees who want it to be non-profit and they got one obnoxious ceo who wants to make a product out of it but that wasn't the situation turns out they had 500 employees who wanted to do what the ceo did and that is a big miscalculation like maybe the open ai board thought this is going to work all our employees believe in our mission that's why that's why even you do those net promoter score surveys at work marco doesn't know about these no yeah i'm saying like do you are that's that's for our clients but anyway for internally like do you believe in the mission of open ai people like oh yes totally but when push comes to shove they believe in making money and getting rich yeah and even and again like even the reality is just when you have that many employees a lot of them are going to be paid in stock or some kind of stock-based thing where like you know the company if the company does well commercially you make more money um that's really hard for any for all those employees to say no to that's the thing like whatever their ambitions are or were about being a non-profit and everything, again, that is laudable.

1:22:07And the world needs more of that. But the cards were stacked so hard against them to achieve that here because what they were sitting on is such a goldmine that it's just impossible to sustain that in the environment around them. And once they got in with Microsoft, I think that pretty much was sealing the deal. Okay, this is the direction you're going to go now. I mean, but they think they needed to do that. like they can't they couldn't pursue their goal of trying to make hell 9000 without tons and tons of money and they were not able to raise it on their own they couldn't get people to say like you know what i mean like it's not like a type of thing where you can just do like one quiet person alone at their personal computer is going to have this amazing breakthrough like the current approach to solving this problem requires massive amounts of computing which requires massive amounts of money and you're really going to be stymied in the attempt to achieve your goal if you just don't have enough i think they raised like 130 million dollars or something and microsoft gave them 10 billion it's they weren't even close yeah like that there there was no way that the the you know non-profit side of of their leadership like that side was inevitably going to lose and the only question now is how and when and i think they just did frankly um and i think it's only a very short matter of time possibly tonight but it's a very short matter of time uh before that entire part of the company including the board is cleared out and replaced yeah and i also it's not even clear to me i know that open ai is viewed as the leader in this area but they're not the only company doing large large language models like everyone everybody's got one facebook's got one apple reportedly has one google's got one like you know like everyone is working on this technology it is not like a secret sauce that only open ai has maybe they're the best at it maybe they were there first maybe they have advancements we don't know about but it is it's a type of thing that you know it's kind of like you know so the the iphone is the best phone but android phones exist it's not like apple is the only company in the world to have a touchscreen smartphone it is a thing that exists in the industry and that's a hard choice because it's a platform type thing but like anything like ssds everybody's got ssds it's not one company that says oh apple's laptops are better because they don't have spinning hard drives and everyone else does no everybody has ssds just who has the best ssds like these large language models are so useful and so widespread spread and the fact that open ai in especially in the beginning of their their non-profit existence uh shared all their technology with the world they shared their discoveries like that was part of their charter and their mission statement everyone's more or less on the same page with these things they're useful technology everyone is thinking of new ways that they can use them in their existing products and make new products that they hadn't weren't able to make before with this new technology whatever happens to open ai that's going to happen right which is the other absurd thing about the the the board saying we want to keep this purity of non-profit like even if all of your employees and sam alpin agree with you the whole rest of the industry is taking this ball and running with it because it's a useful technology that you can make money with and so they're sticking it in everything will it go beyond that will it like you know the future of these type of things will they just get better and better until they're practically hell 9 000 we'll see right now they're not but they're useful they're useful right now and so everyone wants to have access to them and if open ai disappeared from existence the rest of the industry would continue forward with you know making fancy code autocomplete in xcode 16 for example that's going to happen with a red open ai but uh how 9000 i don't i don't know if there are any other companies with anything close to access to the resources that open ai has that are attempting to do that part of the fear of the open ai board is it's just going to happen accidentally and so we better do it deliberately so we can do it right i don't think it's going to happen accidentally any more than self-driving cars are going to happen accidentally, but we'll see.

1:25:52Let's do some Ask ATP. Tim Schmitz writes, What's the story with ECC RAM in the Apple Silicon era? I remember it being important to some folks on Intel, but I haven't heard much about it lately. Is it not applicable or relevant on Apple Silicon? If so, why? John, would you mind giving us a quick rehash as to what ECC RAM is and then answer Tim's question, please? ECC, that stands for Error Correcting Code. It's a technology used in RAM chips that will account for errors in the memory and be able to correct them if the errors are small enough so uh ram chips they're not perfect they're tiny little analog electronic devices what you would hope is that you would write some bits to one location and when you read it later you get the exact same bits back that you wrote there that's how it's supposed to work but sometimes you'll read and one of those bits will be wrong or maybe two of the bits will be wrong and why well you know electrical issues with the manufacturing the chips cosmic rays all sorts of things can go wrong and you would think who cares if one bit is flipped here or there but as ram sizes have increased uh the odds of finding one of those one or two bit errors has increased as well because if you find oh that's going to be one in a million how many bits do you think are there on ram back when you had eight kilobytes of ram there weren't as many bits as when you have 128 gigabytes of ram so how many errors are there more than you might think so as ram sizes have increased one of the technologies that was introduced on really important computers uh is ecc where they say okay we store some extra information which costs money because that you're storing more information and with that extra information we can tell when one of the bits is not what it's supposed to be and in fact sometimes we store enough information that we can tell what it was supposed to be and we can fix it and change it back and so your ram gives the correct results unlike casey's third-party ram and his imac and the kind of computers that would do that were expensive server computers that people would you know run important stuff on like financial things or banking transactions or basically server hardware server hardware would have ecc ram because it's really important that the contents of ram be correct the consequences of even a single bit being flipped could cause a security problem or a crash or something else that you don't want to happen because it's a hardware failure back in the day when the mac pro was a little bit more pro it came with ecc ram because intel xeon cpus were their sort of server class cpus and they supported ecc ram and apple would buy and you know the cpus from intel and they would get motherboard chipsets from intel and they would support ecc ram and they would put that on their mac pro motherboards these days we know what the situation with the mac pro is it is very much like a mac mini and a much much much much much much bigger case with some extra stuff thrown in there these days apple does not do as many things to differentiate the mac pro from the less expensive and vastly smaller computers as in they're not designing entirely different ram entirely different soc entirely different anything really for the mac pro except the big case and some pci express stuff the parallel story here is and i don't know the details on this but as ram has uh advanced over the years a lot of the new ram designs necessarily incorporated a technology much like ecc just to function correctly because they would have you know various arrangements of bits or speed enhancements or whatever that they would incorporate some kind of error correction within just the regular functioning of the ram and you wouldn't call it ecc ram you just call it ddr4 or whatever but if you were looked at like what's inside ddr4 ram you'd find some parts of the circuitry that are there to try to detect and or correct errors that leads us to the question of ecc ram in macs today is this something that apple should have in their mac pros and don't is it do all macs with the unified memory architecture where the arm chips have ecc ram i would say that much like the keyboards and everything having to do with the mac pro the situation is this apple could spend more money to essentially make ram that is more resilient to errors in the Mac Pro and only in the Mac Pro because that is the model that costs the most and it's where it's most important that you not have any bit flip errors.

1:30:09Apple does not do that. So could it benefit from it? Yes, it could. It would cost more money and it would be better. Would it be better in a way that anybody would care about? I'm not sure. Because again, I think the RAM that they do use, like what is the reliability of that RAM compared to the ECC RAM that was in the old Intel Mac Pros, like in absolute numbers, not in terms of like, well, back then ECC RAM was better than regular RAM. Today, again, more expensive RAM with more complicated error correcting would be better than RAM without it. But in absolute values, are bit flip errors in the M2 Ultra more of a problem than they were on a Xeon with ECC RAM?

1:30:50I don't know. So I would follow something of the category of, if they offered it, I would like it and think it's good And practically speaking, especially back in the old days, ECC RAM did provide better reliability than that same amount of RAM that was in ECC. So, you know, if you're wondering, why did my computer have some random crash sometime? Again, ask Casey about this. Was it because you had some kind of problem with the RAM? And would it have been prevented from ECC? Hard to say, but maybe. Like, there's a reason they sold it on all those server chips for a long time. And if you had a server that didn't have ECC and data center next to one that did, and you had enough of them, you could see the difference in the reliability of, you know, across hundreds and hundreds of servers of ECC versus non-ECC.

1:31:29Like, people weren't paying extra for that ECC RAM just for the hell of it. It actually did provide a benefit. So I think it is applicable. I think it is relevant to Apple Silicon. And I think we're never going to get it in the Mac Pro. So don't hold your breath. Chris Gleim writes, I've undertaken the task of photographing my son's art. he just turned five, to replace my previous strategy, which was throwing it in a cardboard box in the storage room and forgetting about it for years. Ideally, I will only keep a few of these items and toss the rest, and I'm planning to make a photo book for the grandparents for Christmas.

1:31:58Thankfully, I was able to borrow some lighting equipment from work, and I have a decent camera. I was wondering if you all had a strategy for this. My strategy is, generally speaking, throwing it in a cardboard box in the storage room and forgetting about it for years. So no, I have no good answers for this, unfortunately. Marco, do you have anything? No, I mean, for the most part, most of my kid's art that is really, you know, that was like when he was old enough to care and put time into it. Most of that has actually been in the digital realm. Like he's had an iPad for a while and my wife is really artistic and introduced him early on to Procreate, which is this iPad drawing app that everybody uses.

1:32:40And he does a lot in there. and so most of what he has like artistically is either like stuff on you know pieces of paper that are easy to store in different places not a lot of like three dimensional stuff or drawings in procreate on iOS which of course you know we back up and everything so I don't really have this problem as much as many parents do just because my kids art format is more easily storable. John? My strategy is to take photographs of art so I can get rid of it because we have the same situation just boxes and boxes of the stuff um for the most part i just take iphone pictures like it's really especially with just like rumbly kid artwork on construction paper with glue and the corners are curling like this not you know chris sent in a picture of like he had like a lighting setup and it's big i'm just like put it put it down on someplace with good sunlight on the floor and take pictures of it with my iphone because that's that's all i want like these are not great works of art that i need to preserve future generations just don't remember i'll remember that thing that he made and i look at the pictures to make sure they're clear and not blurry and i can see all the things and if there's one that i really really cared about i could square up the edges and put it in photoshop and you know try to fix the shadows of the curling corners and do all that stuff but i think the you know the main goal is kind of like uh you know scanning the digital photos or negatives get it out of the physical realm into the digital asap and then you just can't hold on to that stuff kids make a lot of drawings like you don't want to throw it away and never see it again.

1:34:08But just, you know, use your iPhone, take a picture and then get rid of it. That's also important to kind of distinguish like a lot of kid art that comes home from school. What, you know, depending on your kid, of course, you know, in my case, a lot of times it was very easy to see like, okay, the teacher told him to do this. And, you know, whatever came home was not really a work by him. It was a work by the teacher's lesson plan. And that's fine. There's a place for that. But it was very, obvious when he had made something that he really cared about rather than just follow the template the teacher set out for everybody.

1:34:43And so for the follow the template stuff, he didn't care about it, and so we didn't have to care about it. Our level of care would ramp up with his level of care and involvement. And so when he was doing something on his own, of his own accord, with his own direction, that stuff is significantly better and worth keeping, and there's way less of that as a kid goes through school compared to template stuff that you know everyone did yeah there's a hierarchy like the other thing you should do with them uh aside from taking a picture and throwing out take the really good ones and frame them we have a bunch of select things from various points in our kids lives that are in frames hanging on the wall that's another way to preserve them also take digital pictures of those by the way but uh you know you get rid of most of it you you take a little extra credit to take photos of the gems and then the really good ones put in frames put up around your house Jamie West writes do you think the use of technology actually makes your lives easier or if you do it because it's more of a hobby these days I try to have as little technology in my home as I can I have regular light switches that make the lights go on and off and I don't have any home automations of any kind I don't notice my life being appreciatively worse because of this in fact since reducing the use of technology my life has become consistently calmer and more stress free the same is true for my computer these days time was my menu bar would be filled with stats and custom functionality.

1:36:01Are we sure this wasn't John writing this? No, his menu bar never had stats in it. Along with custom icons in the Finder and automation scripts, all of which required ongoing maintenance and updating. Now I have a pretty vanilla installation of macOS. My second sideline career of being an author, I only really hit my stride productivity-wise when I got rid of all the complicated software and decided to just use a plain and simple text editor. Maybe I just like the simple life, and these days I only use as much technology as I need. but I'm interested to know where the trade-off lies for you with the added minor stresses that come with incorporating and maintaining technology in your home life do you only use technology which makes your life genuinely easier or better or is there a part of you that convinces yourself it's useful because tinkering with tech is a bit of a hobby and you find it fun to do I understand what Jamie's coming from here I think for me it's both I think unquestionably it's a hobby like one does not come up with a three raspberry pi solution to knowing whether or not your garage door is open if it isn't a hobby like that's just that is just straight up lunacy right but knowing when the garage door is open does indeed make my life better so it's a little of both i don't have a lot of automations in fact i just went on automators uh just a couple of i was probably a month ago now uh and talked about some of the automations i have um and i don't really have that much, but the ones I have, I genuinely do think make my life better.

1:37:27Would I be fine without them? Of course, I'd be just fine without them, but they do make my life a little bit better. And I like that. And, and again, so much of this though, is I like the certain kinds of tinkering. I like certain kinds of projects and stuff like that. And yeah, this is, this is certainly a hobby. And ultimately, when I come up with a solution for something, even if it's just an out-of-the-box solution, as I have been espousing for a little over a year now, and Marco is now starting to join me, one of us, one of us, when you have your Sonos playing the same music in an uninterrupted way and without any sort of latency across your entire house, including your backyard, that's pretty rad.

1:38:12And granted, that's not as much tinkering as it is spending a copious amount of money. But nevertheless, that does make my life better. That is tech that makes my life better. So I see it definitely as a lot of column A and a lot of column B. But that's where I come down on it. I don't know. Marco, where do you land? I think it depends a lot on the role of technology in your life. Are you an enthusiast about technology and you want to explore stuff like that? Or are you using it more as a tool to get your job done and your job might be something else or something that the technology is only playing an assistive role in.

1:38:50And this changes at different points in people's lives and for different reasons. You know, for me, when I was younger, especially, you know, my like high school and college days, I was much more of a tinkerer and I would spend a lot more of my time, especially on the software side, a lot more of my time like messing with my, you know, I didn't have a menu bar yet because i was on windows but you know messing with my windows setup and installing a bunch of different system utilities and doing a whole bunch of power user stuff like tweaking things and you know messing around with the registry and making my start button say marco and stuff like i all sorts of that kind of tinkering stuff that you do especially as a young person um because back then my priorities were well you know try to get a girlfriend but that wasn't going so well so instead i guess spend as much time on a computer as possible and so i i was using the computer back then for the sake of using the computer like that was the activity the activity i was spending most of my time on was messing around on my computer and actually to interrupt quickly because i was very much in the same boat it was a lot of the tinkering was finding an excuse and i think this is what you're driving at but finding an excuse to to to need more time on the computer like oh i don't really need my start button to say marco but But if I wanted to figure out how to do that, that's more time I can spend using this thing, which is both a toy and a hobby and everything to me.

1:40:13You know, like I probably speak for Marco and actually probably John as well in saying that the computer was like everything to me when I was young because there was just limitless opportunity to do anything there in a way that I think is both there today and is very, very different today. But finding all these things to tinker with was in no small part for me anyway giving me reasons to continue to sit at the computer. Yeah. Oh, totally. Me too. Like my activity for the day would be I'm going to sit at my computer and I'll find stuff to do. And largely today I actually still largely do that. I just have more things that I need to do that are at the computer, and I have more things in my life that break up those times so that I have less time at the computer than I used to.

1:41:05But as you go through life, your priorities change, your needs change, and for the most part, most people do some degree of specialization. You specialize in some part of your career or your hobby life or your family life or whatever, and that necessitates having less time spent messing around with stuff like this. And some people, they make the messing around their career. To some degree, we do that here by being on a tech podcast, although you mentioned Automators and other shows where there are people who go way more in-depth with that side of things than we ever do. and you know they've kind of made that a part of their career so in some ways for them it's both work and play um you know the same way like for us you know buying new macs is both work and play but you know for me personally as as i have you know gone through a career and adulthood and adult responsibilities and family responsibilities um my tolerance for tech that requires a lot of tinkering has gone down over time and that's that happens to a lot of people you know like oftentimes like you know you're oftentimes you find yourself trading money for time you know which is the opposite of you know when you're in college you have no money and tons of time um and you know as you get older a lot of times like you know what rather than figure out how to hack myself into not needing this extra terabyte of disk space i'm just gonna buy the one with a terabyte more of disk space, you know, because your trade-off is different at that point in your life.

1:42:43And for me, most of it, like for what I'm doing this part of my life, there are some areas that I'm still willing to do some degree of like technological tinkering. For instance, I mentioned a few episodes ago, I've been burning these, you know, Blu-ray, 100 gig mdisk things for archiving data i'm still doing that i've burned 26 of them so far i have my on my entire photo library tiff's entire photo library and now my entire music library all backed up on these really weird discs it took forever um so there are certain areas like that that i will try uh partly for show content to talk about here partly because i'm just interested in them but my tolerance for tech that doesn't work very well or that requires lots of messing with is down to almost zero so for instance smart home stuff is a great example that jamie brought up and this this is such a great example smart home stuff leaves you infinite potential for tinkering but most of it really doesn't work very well or it'll work for like a few weeks and then something will change or break and then you got to like redo everything to make it ever work again uh or you have to add these different like you know bridging and hacking projects or you know tricks to get this thing to talk to that thing and then involve this web service so that this thing can bounce things off the web service and send this thing and this other thing like that's where you lose me like once you once you get into that stuff that's where you lose me um because that doesn't make things better for me but for a lot of people they they are on a different part of that you know of that trade-off continuum of like do do you want to spend time tinkering or do you want to spend time you know just having stuff work for you and not messing with it so for everyone it's different but as i said for for me i'm i'm closer now to i just need things to work because i want because I need to make time for the parts of my computing life that are more important to me so that when I do get that precious time sitting in front of the computer where I don't have a different obligation that I must be doing at that moment, I'm able to do the things I really want to do, like work on Overcast, like deep programming work or really creative work.

1:45:04That's what I want to make time to do. and the more i have to mess with my technology the less time i have for those higher priority things john yeah so asking uh three uh programmers on a tech podcast is probably gonna give you a different answer than the rest of the population but yeah my for me tech has been my hobby obviously since early childhood it's also my an area of interest which i think is different than a hobby because when people hear hobby they're like oh it's a thing that you're doing uh it's an interest of mine as well kind of in the same way that like cars are like i don't i i spend all this time reading about cars that i'm never going to own a lot of them i'll never even see in person it's like is your hobby cars or like all these car rebuilding videos are you working on cars no i'm never doing any of that but i'm interested in it i find it interesting it is an interest of mine so a lot of the tech stuff that i'm into it's an interest even if i'm never gonna do it i'm I'm interested in it.

1:46:03I want to learn about it. I want to know about it. I find it interesting. So it is more than just a hobby. And then, of course, it was my profession as well. And not in the way that like you use a computer to help you do your job. Computers were the job. It's kind of like being a builder and you build a hospital. It's like, oh, you really super into hospitals? Like, no, I'm a builder. I build things. And then you build a fire station. Oh, I guess you really love fire stations? Like, no, I'm a builder. I'll build anything. I, you know, I like the task of building. Well, I was a computer programmer.

1:46:32And yes, I was a web dev. So it was more narrow than just being a builder. But like I built so many different things with web technology, depending on what company I was working for. So my job was wrangling the computers, right? The computers were a profession directly. Not that I'm using a computer to write a novel and I'm a novelist. I'm literally wrangling the computers for you. And it's my hobby and it's my interest. So as you can imagine, the balance in my life about trade-offs for technology was massively tilted towards the tech side. And the way that manifests in daily life and sort of home life is for somebody like me, and I imagine Marco Casey as well, the personal payoff of getting something set up the way you want it, finally got my Emacs set up the way I want it, you know the personal payoff of getting the three raspberry pi solution or whatever for people like us very often balances the amount of tinkering required to get there even marco says he doesn't want to deal with a lot of stuff he does deal with a lot of stuff even if it's just buying and returning products and getting them set up and seeing how they work there is some amount of tinkering and engaging in that hobby and the reward is when you come in and it's finally set up the way you want and the music plays the way you want and you use the voice command the lights go on and the automatic thermostat does all the things you get a level of satisfaction out of that and if you are in a house with people who are not exactly like you in that regard you have something to compare it to which is yeah they like it fine when like the lights work and you can watch stuff on the tv but you're over there going see did you see how well that worked like they didn't do any of the work to set it up and and this this amount of satisfaction they're getting out of this you know pristine 4k television signal going to your fancy tv that you research they're like oh i guess tv works right they didn't even have to do the work and they like their scales it takes so little to unbalance their scales that tv doesn't work one time this is garbage i hate everything that you've done here get rid of it right and we're willing to like put in hours and hours of like buying products and hooking them up and doing all the stuff or whatever if we want to get that satisfaction like now it's finally working the way i want even in marketplace case it finally works without me having to deal with it you put an effort to get to that goal no one else even though that no one else is asked to put in any of that effort so if there's any downside whatsoever they're like up scales unbalanced i don't like this right i just want the light switches to work it if the lights don't turn on one time even though they put in zero amount of effort to to make this home automation it's like nope you know every time lights do come on do you think they're getting some amazing satisfaction of knowing that the giant rube goldberg machine that you put together to make that happen nope nope they just want the lights to work and so everyone has to balance that differently and i think maybe the key to at least family happiness within the household is to realize that if it is your hobby your interest your profession or god forbid all three your satisfaction when when everything comes together is not experienced by other people.

1:49:38And so the second something doesn't work, they will give it a thumbs down. And when it does work, they will think nothing of it. And so keep that in mind when trying to balance, like, is it a benefit to your life or is it like a hindrance? You're not the only one, if you're living with other people, you're not the only one who's in play here. You have to think about how it's affecting everybody else's life. And by the way, as you know, if they're unhappy, you're probably also going to be so it's not as if you can say well i'm satisfied with it this trade-off or whatever if everyone else in the house hates it you will eventually not be satisfied with that trade-off so uh self-reflection is the right approach um including you know being true to yourself and knowing i do like this stuff i am interested in it i do for like casey's he wants to do it for the sake of doing it and it's fun and he feels a sense of accomplishment when he's done and he has to realize that's a him thing that is not arrested the house thing and let people have hobbies.

1:50:35Like let it enjoy your interest. That's what life is all about. You know, just like if you have hobbies and interests, engage in them in a constructive way and get as much enjoyment out of it as you can. And hopefully you enjoy your work and hopefully you're doing something in your profession that is also something that you enjoy or at least have some kind of interest in. But be aware that other people have different opinions about the thrill they get when it works and the feeling they get when it doesn't work. Thanks to our sponsor this week, Squarespace. and thanks to our members who support us directly.

1:51:04You can join us at atp.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. Accidental Who is accidental 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-D-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-S-Y-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.

1:52:13So did we order our IE pins yet? Yeah, totally. Can you order them? Are they accepting orders? Yes. So here's what happened. So a couple of episodes ago, like right before we recorded, the verge got the leak of most of the details about the humane ai pin that was about to be unveiled we did our episode we talked a little bit about our impressions of just seeing the verge leak and we were like well you know we don't want to judge it too too much because we don't know their side of the story yet let's see what happens when they when they officially unveil it then the next day they officially unveiled it uh with this really odd video uh and open up pre-orders and then what happened in the meantime is pre-orders opened up no one noticed and then all this stuff blew up with open ai uh a few days later and so it seemed to breeze by without much mention and i think if i had to guess i i think humane's chance in the press is already over um but i thought it might be interesting to just talk about a little more because we we did get more details about the humane ai pin product you know their their first product and this is you know it's it's kind of a it's a noteworthy thing but i think it's it's interesting the the era of technology that we are in all of this drama around open ai has gotten way more attention and is way more interesting to the tech press than a launch of a of a pretty hyped device that's a whole new device type from a whole bunch of ex-Apple people.

1:53:53Like that, you know, 10, 15 years ago, that would have been way more headline grabbing than it ends up, that it has been. And way more relevant, I think, to the modern tech world than it will probably end up being. So I think that's interesting by itself. But also just kind of looking at the Humane product, now that we know all the details about it, or at least whatever they have chosen to show so far, which seems like pretty much everything. What if anything is different now that they've unveiled it? Basically, everything the Verge said was correct, but now we just have more details about what some of its features are, how some of these features work.

1:54:36We see the laser thing that, you know, don't call it a screen, screen. We see how Humane is positioning it what they want it to be you know you have it has all these like you know basically it's like it's kind of like wearing an amazon echo on your chest that you know happens to have a few extra features um you know so i gotta say the the video and again the video was really weird um and and i'm just going to set that aside and just focus on the product because the video didn't do them any favors i don't think um but at least we see what they're going for We see here's this thing that you're going to wear as this, basically as this badge on your chest that you tap and ask it to do things.

1:55:21It can play music for you. It can answer questions for you, sometimes correctly. It can take pictures for you with a camera that faces front, like a body cam if you're a cop, like that kind of perspective. There's a whole bunch of interesting ideas here. Thank you. I don't think this is going to go well. um i would actually i would honestly kind of be surprised if they made it to their launch day they they they're taking pre-orders now and they say estimated delivery early 2024 um but i i would be surprised if they're getting any pre-orders um that aren't just from like gadget reviewers and even then i don't think it's gonna be that big of a number uh but anyway but But I think it's interesting, you know, when you look at this product, there are a lot of interesting ideas.

1:56:19It's definitely going to flop. And I think it's going to flop because they seem to have... How do I put it? They seem to have gone for an ideal physical environment that doesn't really exist for a lot of people. Based on tech features that really aren't ready yet. or in some cases they pulled off technology that is cool but but is not actually better than what they are trying to replace so for instance the physical challenges as discussed last time this is this is like a a pin that attaches to your clothing has magnetic backs to hold it on and charge it i mean okay what if i don't want this giant thing on the front of my shirt it's pretty big like it's pretty noticeable it's not like a little tiny like enamel pin it's it's a big you know badge sized pin it is not discreet at all like anyone would see this like and and anyone who doesn't know what this is would definitely ask you about it what the heck is that what it's on your shirt like so there's that angle of it um there's the reality that it weighs about as much as two double a batteries um which is not heavy but not light and imagine that just like flopping around in your chest all day like that would actually be noticeable and that be kind of annoying.

1:57:41If you're wearing any kind of lightweight clothing, that's going to be very noticeable. Suppose it's a season, and you want to go outside and put a jacket on, or a hoodie, or something. Do you have to not have the features of this thing during that time, or do you take it off your shirt and move it to your jacket? Every time you add or remove a layer of clothing, it's going to be a problem with this kind of device? Like, okay. But Marco, I don't understand why you would say that that would be an issue. I mean, first of all, how could they possibly know a company based in the greater San Francisco area?

1:58:14How could they possibly know anything about putting on and off layers? I mean, that's not something that happens in San Francisco ever. I know. It's like... Again, it's... Even just the whole concept of like, I hate my phone so much that I'm going to wear this thing and use it instead of a phone in many cases for things that really a phone would be better at. But... the environment they want to use this in, it's like, I don't want to be talking to something constantly out in the world. I barely even want to do it in my own house. Like the idea that it is a voice-first interface, I find optimistic, but not super compelling for most realities that most people live in.

1:59:01They also try to replace the screen. This is a screenless device, kind of. Um, but it does have that laser projecting thing that can project a screen onto your hand. And, you know, they don't call it a screen, but I got news for you. That's a screen. Like, that's just a really weird, crappy screen that is very limited and a little bit difficult to use. Excuse me. It is a laser ink display. Thank you very much. But yeah, like, and like, that's, again, that's kind of cool tech for something. Like, I'm sure there's good uses for that. But like when it showed it in the video, I was like, oh, you're just navigating a screen.

1:59:40It just happens to be projected onto your hand and you got to tilt your hand in weird ways to interact with it. But that's just a screen. It's just like, you know, what John always brings up. Like when I tried to have my magazine app that didn't have a setting screen and it ends up I just kind of had to shove settings everywhere. And it was a worse design and I ended up just having to make a setting screen. In this case, like navigating this device, what they were showing in the video, they're using a device with a screen. it's just a really unusual kind of screen but they they're still navigating it like a screen and using it like a screen and it turns out you need a screen for a lot of these things and if you're gonna have a screen just use your phone it's way better like that's so there's all that to contend with and so i i think they have a lot of physical challenges to this that like there is just just physically speaking i don't see any reason why this is better than a phone and a watch like for all of the like kind of ambient availability that they have on it it should be a watch because a watch is physically a much easier and more versatile thing that can work for more people in more conditions than this and even then it's like but i mean this is not that different from what a phone does and a phone is better at all these things and you already have a phone but i also think what's interesting is that the ecosystem realities of of the modern technological world is like even if this was a great idea that was very well executed and then everybody would want the reality is they're trying to have this replace your phone in a lot of key roles including things like it has its own phone number that p you know they want people to call this and to message this okay so you're gonna give people a whole new number just for your ai pin are you gonna are you gonna move your number to it and then not have that number on your phone are people gonna people supposed to text this and then it's just gonna read you a summary of your friend's text messages like hey you know what i don't actually want to read my friend's text messages just summarize them for me like there are so many parts about this that it makes for a cool two second demo but if you think about it for another two seconds you're like oh wait a minute though but what about this or wait wouldn't this fail in this one way or wouldn't this have this major shortcoming but i think it's interesting that like because of the ecosystem realities of you know our tech world today because this is trying to replace your phone it has no chance whatsoever because who is going to buy this replace their phone if it's not going to sync all this stuff back to their phone.

2:02:26Like, it's not going to sync with your, it's not going to have iMessage support, so you're going to become a green bubble friend, and it's going to sync to nothing. You're going to have, like, none of your messages that come to your AI pin are going to appear in your phone's messaging app, because it doesn't work that way. You have to have this different phone number for it. Maybe you could do some kind of forwarding tricks, but, like, who's going to do that? It's interesting that, like, the modern Apple and Google duopoly here there's actually not that much room for a startup like this to come in and make their own thing because it unless it works really really well and is very very integrated with either ios or android something like this is not going to get off the ground which is kind of a shame like honestly again i don't think they did i don't think this is a very compelling product honestly um but but suppose it was it still would fail because of that that massive hardware lock-in environment that we are in now with these modern platforms and that's kind of a shame uh but ultimately honestly i don't think i don't think this is what humane originally intended to launch the humane company and and the massive like talent drain they did from apple and and all the work they've been doing greatly predates the rise of of what we're calling ai today that the you know what we're calling ai today is a is a very recent thing humane's been in development for longer than that so i think what what probably happened is they were probably planning something else or or at least a very different focus for this product it wasn't working out so well they started running out of money maybe or running out of time and they kind of pivoted recently to be like hey you know let's let's make it really ai focused that way that's that'll get more attention it'll fit the current market better i mean maybe it'll help us raise more money or whatever um so i i i think there's a more complicated story here, but basically, this product doesn't even seem like what they originally set out to make, and also it doesn't seem like it's going to succeed at all.

2:04:29So, frankly, again, I would be surprised if it ships. I think the company might go under and get bought for aqua hire or whatever before this even ships. And if it does ship, I don't think it's going to last long. I talked about this for a while in the upcoming episode of Rectifs. uh so i won't repeat too much of what i said there if you want to hear me talk about it for a little bit longer with merlin um but yeah this thing it's kind of hard to tell uh when they talk about it whether they really believe this wrong-headed idea of replacing people's phones as in like any moment you spend on your phone is bad and so it's the degree that we can reduce that or replace it our product is good like this is a kind of value judgment this is that you know everything that we can help you do with your little badge that's a win because it's time you didn't spend on your phone and that's why it's good because phone is bad and this is good right i can't tell if they really believe that i kind of think maybe they do and that's what makes you think this is actually kind of the product they wanted to make which is essentially uh get off those screens kids and don't look at screens and just have a thing that's a badge and i think the ai stuff coming along was like wow this is a great boon for us because we were already going down this path of like screens bad project light onto your hand instead and talk to your badge and now we can do it even better right but it's hard for me to really like if they really did believe that it's like really did these smart people all really buy into that thing maybe they had a very charismatic uh you know leader who really believed in that or something the flip side of that is what you just alluded to and what i mostly spent all rectives talking about uh the platform problem a product like this essentially an amazon echo that you know a smarter amazon echo that you pin on your clothing that you can talk to and that has a camera that faces out or whatever great idea unfortunately you cannot make that product without deep integration with android or ios and the only companies that can have that kind of deep integration with android or ios are companies that are currently heavily entrenched in that either google because they make android or a very big Google phone maker like Samsung or whatever, or of course, Apple.

2:06:41Humane out here cannot have the integration they need with the iPhone and iOS to make a good version of their little badgy product because Apple doesn't allow it because their platform does not allow things like this to happen. And Rectus, the example I gave was Quicksilver. We ended up talking about like quick, you know, command space things that you type or whatever. mac os is a as a platform was able to and continues to be able to support things like this a system integrated extension that starts to become part of the way you use your computer that the person who made that computer and the operating system didn't foresee but that becomes like that is that is like deeply entrenched hitting command space i know spotlight exists but before spotlight exists there was things like quicksilver and launch bar and stuff like that right a what we would call a system extension the things that the ai pin would have to do would have to make it like a system extension it's the same reason we can't replace siri with something better the same reason we can't replace reminders it's like the the iphone ecosystem is too closed to support innovation like this unless it comes from apple that is that when you're saying this is a shame marco that is the biggest shame of it is that apple's control of this platform does not allow innovations like this to be successful the only company that could do a pin like that well is apple on the iphone and android it's a little bit better but not much because google really controls that platform very well and there's a small number of android phone makers that have the wherewithal to do their own software stacks and that kind of integration and by the way if you do something google doesn't like they're not going to let you in the play store and then you know it's these platforms are not as open as the personal computer and the Macs were, right?

2:08:17Because on there are so many things that we continue to do to this day, even as locked down as the Mac is today. There are so many things that you can, that a third party can do to enhance the way a Mac works at a system level that feels part of the system that allows innovation that yes, eventually the platform owner copies like, Oh, someone made a menu bar, a clock in the menu bar. Eventually Apple's going to put that into the operating system, but that's how things advance. And iOS, it's like, run your little apps in your little sandbox in your little world and get your little, you know, squircle, right?

2:08:45But don't you dare mess with any other part of the system. We control notifications, we control the status bar, we control the default, you know, the web browser, the AI agent that's installed, the default mapping thing. And like, to the degree that Apple slowly opens that stuff up, they're so far from allowing something like the humane pin to work. So I feel for the company. And that's why I think, did you make this because you think this is the best thing to do? or did you make it like this because you have no choice it has to have its own phone number it can't sync it can't use iMessage like it can't share like you have no choice but to do this you have no choice to at least try to be standalone because apple doesn't want you it won't let you integrate in the way that you want right you'd want to be able to just talk to it and have it do things on your phone when you talk to it and have a tight connection but apple can barely make a tight connection between their own watch and their phone for crying out loud let alone letting of third parties do it so i you know i again i can't tell if this company thinks this is actually a good idea and phones are evil or they just they had a you know they just see the reality that's like if we have no choice we have to pretend that we are replacing the phone we have to be as standalone as possible we have to get our own phone number we have to have our own world with our own contacts and our own messaging and you know it's just and that's that's never gonna fly even if you did everything great and it seems like they didn't and then there's the problems we talked about last week of like they're they're assembling a bunch of disparate parts into a hole that they hope is greater than the sum of that parts i don't think it is and i think a lot of that parts don't work right yet i i also vehemently agree that it's going to flop like i i will be flabbergasted if this really gets any traction whatsoever in fact i would be surprised if it gets as much traction as google glass got and yes i realize what i just said i hope it does get to the point where tech reviewers review it because i want to read those reviews yeah agreed but i do think there are some very clever and interesting ideas here.

2:10:38I just, I really am extremely put off by voice being the only real interaction model. Like, yes, there's the laser ink display or whatever, but effectively it's just voice. And I really don't like that at all. Like, I would much rather type than speak almost any time. And maybe that makes me an old, I don't know. I don't think that's unique to old people. But what would you type on? Well, no, no, I agree. Eventually they end up making a phone. And we know they can't. oh well maybe they just have an app on ios and then you get back to the integration problem okay so you've got a hardware device and you've got an app on ios how well do they integrate with each other is your app running all the time can they communicate easily all the time or is it just you have to fit within this little walls that apple makes so here's what apps are allowed to do and here's what accessory hardware accessories are allowed to do and here's when they're allowed to we talk to each other and how much and through what means and it's so terrible i agree with you but like as an example one of the things they demoed in their very funny video which by the way it's like 10 minutes and it is worth watching because it's so weird longer but it is so weird and imran or whatever his name is the the head i think for like the ted talk he did way back when he's like kind of i don't know if aloof is the word i'm looking for but he's kind of like chill i don't really care what's going on right now vibe i think that did work for the ted talk but for the product video it did not land well and it is worth spending the 10 minutes watching this thing because it's something else he looks a little sleepy not high energy i understand that's just his his vibe but like the whole video it's like there is no enthusiasm about this product being displayed whatsoever yep no it's it's very true so all that aside there are i genuinely think there's some very cool things in this.

2:12:22So like as an example, I forget exactly what the phrase was, but he talks about how, oh, if you've been not paying attention to your text messages for a couple hours, maybe you're at a dinner at a, you know, a kid's thing, you can say, catch me up. And it will use AI to hopefully do a good job of saying, you know, of the 907 text messages you've just received, the key takeaways are you got to go to dinner in half an hour with your wife at such and such a location and you know your kid wants to know if they can play more minecraft or whatever the case may be like that to me is cool or i think they've shown other examples of that would be cool if it worked but yes like with any of these things you're always like okay so what is the consequence if it doesn't quite work probably not that big for summarizing text messages but are you going to rely on like what if it's something about when someone needs to be picked up or dropped off or stop off at the store and get something or whatever and it either either tells you something like that that didn't exist or doesn't tell you about it when it does exist and you're getting back to the technology making your life better and you come home and your wife's like what did you forget to pick up timmy they're like oh i what do you mean it's like i texted you i said you need to pick him up at the school and i was like oh i well i asked my ai pin to catch me up and it didn't mention that how do you think that's gonna fly what are you supposed to do after it summarizes your messages?

2:13:43Do you just delete them or do you read them later? But I'm saying, is the summary useful? The summary is only useful to you if you believe it. And if you have any doubt, again, maybe you don't care. Maybe it's like, oh, I don't care. But I feel like it'll only take one of those things where you were supposed to pick up your kid and you didn't and you have to explain why by saying that you asked for a summary from your pin and your wife's going to say, well, never use that again because obviously it doesn't work every time. You know what I mean? and it's it's not like it's it's not life or death like oh the kids at school you know but like that type of thing it's when you get on to stuff like like interpersonal communication and ask me for a summary it looks great in a demo like look it's saving me time it's like having an executive assistant but if your executive assistant forgot to mention you have to pick up your kid you fire them like i mean or you'd have a talk with them at least it's like this is the job then the ai thing does it you have no one to blame but yourself because you believed it and it turns out that that was consequential enough that now the the your your hobby tinkering with this little thing versus how much benefit is it actually giving you in your life like you love it when it comes together and you feel like you're in the future when it summarized it but that one time you forget to pick up your kid you're never going to use that summary thing again or if you do you're going to use a summary and then take out your phone to confirm and read every message what's the point of that yeah and if anything like this i think this just shows like the the The leaps and bounds they had to jump through to avoid having a screen just shows how good screens are.

2:15:12All the different ways this doesn't work. All the different conditions this doesn't work in. There's somebody in the chat, David Shaw and RepoMan27 just posted the operating temperature range. It's only 41 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. So if you're in a really cold place, a really hot place, nope, won't work. really cold is lower than 41 i guess you you have to wear it inside your jacket if you live in any place that has winter right so you can't use it if you're when you're outside wearing a jacket really because it's going to be covered up anyway but even if you move to the outside of your jacket every time you put your jacket on it's pretty solid it's gonna yeah it's gonna freeze um on their own site is ai pin waterproof uh no basically it's the long answer the summary no it doesn't rain in california so you're fine right so you can't use it if it's raining uh like there there are all these different conditions like okay what if it was a screen in your pocket like a phone well it turns out those are really good and you can use a screen that lives in your pocket or purse or bag or whatever you can use that in so many more places and contexts and conditions than you can use something like this and that's that's why it has no chance like even if people hated their phones which they very much don't but even if for some reason you could buy into the narrative that there's lots of people who want to spend less time on their phones out there there aren't but again even if people hated their phones the versatility of screens that are handheld that fit in your pocket and that you can pick up and take out in a split second whenever you want to that versatility overpowers everything else here that's like you can't use the ai pin in the cold in the hot in the rain when wearing a jacket when wearing a light shirt when like when somewhere where it would be visibly obtrusive or draw too much attention to you.

2:17:03You can't use it in a place where you can't use your voice. Maybe you are somewhere where you have to be quiet in certain contexts where you have to be quiet. People have those all over their lives. Screens work in so many more places and contexts. And so while I understand, like again, I'm glad they're trying stuff. I'm glad people out there are making cool gadgets. It's fun. But don't bet against the smartphone. Especially so directly against the smartphone. You will lose every time. Screens are awesome. There's a reason we have them. And projecting a laser screen onto your hand that you have to tilt and gesture in weird ways to use, that's not better.

2:17:49When you see the laser screen, they blew it. Even on the Rumply demo hand, it's like i don't want to see something on my hand i can barely tell what anything is the hand's too wrinkly and rumbly yeah what if you just put a phone into that hand then it's so much more useful once you're looking at yeah the hardware problems like it could be solved if the company had a good enough product that they could iterate on the technology and so on but like it feels like the this entire product hinges on as i pointed out last show the thing that this company is not actually really making which is the the quote-unquote ai part of it and we all know that that part of it doesn't work as well as they would like imagine if this thing you'd buy this thing for the same price and pay the same monthly fee and every time you tapped it it was like amazon mechanical turk and there was a person there who is your own human personal assistant if you could get a human personal assistant to be on call 24 hours a day for 24 a month that would be a great deal and that is the dream of this and you'd say oh but the hardware is bad and it's not waterproof and it's this and it's that.

2:18:49It's like, no,$24 a month. And I tap this thing and I can literally ask it to do anything. And it does it for me. Summarize my text messages. And it tells me, and it, you know, it's a person. So it gets it right. You know what I mean? Like that would be a great product. And if they had that product, people would pay for it. And then the next version would be better. And the next version would be better. And you'd be like, I don't need to see anything on a screen. I just ask my little assistant and it tells me everything. Why do I need to see anything on a screen? Right. I can whisper real low if I'm in a library and they can hear me because of these amazing microphones.

2:19:15but they don't have a human at the other end of that thing they have you know whatever quote unquote ai thing they're using which is useful in lots of other contexts and may be useful in some of the contexts they want to use that but not useful enough to make up for all their other feelings so they're never going to get to the point where they can iterate on this hardware right and you know again they don't even make they don't even really make the ai part of that they're just piggybacking on a technology that other people are innovating so i wouldn't this company i wouldn't trust this company to continue to push to the forefront of making that part smarter and better because that's not their core competency their core competency is apparently this idea of you know let's not be on screens as much and let's use a badge type thing and the hardware that they've made and you know the software stack that it runs on and the the you know the hubris to believe that okay these the phone platforms that dominate our lives are so closed that we can't build the product we want so we're going to do it all ourselves and i admire that i admire the the attempt to do that it's one of the reasons i admire lucid because they did so much stuff themselves but lucid actually pulled it off and this company i think has not well because lucid was making so many people want yeah but they did choose to do so many things themselves like you're going to make your own drivetrain you're going to make your own like why would you do that we can do all the other ev companies did i mean it said you're not just going to buy parts from somebody else and assemble them like no we're going to build all this stuff ourselves it's like well it seems really hard uh it is and most companies can't do it but the ones that do it's very impressive and this company but you know ai was humane was forced to do this because they can't build on any of the platforms that is natural for them to build on so it's it's sad it really like as as much as i think this product is not you know gonna do anything in the market i wish that it was possible to make a good version of this product on any of the dominant platforms today that would be appropriate you know ipad os ios android right it but it's just not those companies don't if they don't want to make it they don't want to let you make it and that is that is the real shame of this yeah agreed and and again like i don't this is a bad idea for so many reasons like your lucid your lucid analogy it's it's like if lucid was like hey why don't you give up your car and switch to a hot air balloon like well okay i mean that's that's going to be a tough sell for most people yeah we would have made a car but but we're not allowed to be on the roads because the company that owns the roads won't let us but we think hot air balloons are actually better than cars yeah don't you hate your car how about something that's less capable and less convenient and you can operate in less conditions great how about a hot air balloon oh god anyway but yeah you know you're right and it's ultimately like the the inability for products like this to really have a fair a fair shot uh is a tragedy of the modern tech you know ecosystem and and that's there's there's no telling how much innovation out there we could have today and that could be making our lives better and could be making the world better if not for apple and google's massive platform lock-in on their modern platforms that basically make it impossible yeah if anything uh like a company that had this idea could fail much faster because they wouldn't have to build everything you know all the all the operating system and platform stuff they could just you know piggyback and build it you know you make an app on on your phone and build a little bit of the hardware and have them integrated and just do the part that you care about they can't do that because you can't get that kind of deep integration with ios but if they could boy they would save a lot of time and they would be able to come up with their product they would flop in the market because nobody wants on the ai system so you don't and it would save everybody a lot of money uh but they had they had to build so much stuff and you know go this whole route of like we are our own thing with our own phone number and our own operating system and our own uh lack of apps or whatever they were pitching like we have experiences not apps it's like you have to build all of that for what's probably going to turn out to be if not a bad idea then at the very least an idea that is too ahead of its time because the tech is just not ready for it yet

From the publisher

Pre-show:
- 🚨 LAST CHANCE FOR THE ATP HOLIDAY STORE 🚨
  - Note: long-sleeve and utes sizes have been added!
Follow-up:
- Keyboard wear
  - Finger grease (via Ryan Holmes)
    - ABS plastic
    - PBT plastic
  - A true horror show (via Andrew)
- MacBook Pro thermal tests
- More about chip packaging
  - Johny Srouji interview from July 2023
    - Timestamp link to clip cited
  - Stratechery with Pat Gelsinger
  - Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express
- ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED just will not die
  - Stack Overflow question
  - Tailscale’s patch (via Gil Pedersen)
  - Anonymous info
  - SpaceX’s extremely dubious technical choices
OpenAI
- The Verge headlines/coverage
- Net promoter score
#askatp:
- What ever happened to ECC RAM, now that Apple Silicon is here? (via Tim Schmitz)
- How do we photograph kid art (via Chris Gleim)
  - Procreate
- Does tech actually improve our lives? (via Jamie West)
  - Automators #140: LimitLiss Automations with Casey
Post-show: Humane ai pin
- Product launch video
- TED Talk

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