580: Socks in the Knob-Hole

32:28Number one, the tech industry iterates so quickly that it is impossible for Congress to pass laws quickly enough to keep up adequately with these companies. And two, there is not a culture of highly technical employees in the federal government or in Congress to craft policy that appropriately addresses the uniqueness of the tech industry. The commission would include a quote-unquote code council staffed by technical experts, nonprofits, academics, and representatives from companies who own the platforms. This helps to solve many of the issues you noted, such as the federal government often having trouble defining what a market is in the industry.

33:00To address this concern, the commission would be required to enter into an MOU, a Memorandum of Understanding, with the FTC and DOJ to assist them in enforcing current laws where there is overlap in jurisdiction. I believe the most effective way for the federal government to approach the regulation of the tech industry would be to create a new agency dedicated to creating a comprehensive regulatory regime. I've done said here is assuming that bill went nowhere. Um, you know, uh, Congress going to Congress. Anyway, uh, this is one, uh, one bit of feedback I got from the last episode of me saying that it's, uh, the, uh, how preferable it is to be able to affirmatively make a law of saying what you want.

33:36and I think I did mention regulation several times but maybe I didn't emphasize it enough. You don't actually literally have to pass new laws every time you want something done. One of the things you can do, one of the things Congress can do is pass laws that create regulatory bodies and then the law imbues those regulatory bodies with the power to regulate the industries they control until Republicans get control of the government and then tell you that the EPA can't control people polluting in rivers. But anyway, setting that aside. besides that we have things like the fda and the epa that are regulatory bodies who are imbued by laws with the power to regulate the industries that they control and so every time the fda determines whether something is safe or unsafe or whatever makes some new guidelines for poultry or whatever you know whatever they're doing it's not like you have to pass a new law through congress every time these regulatory bodies are empowered to do that and so they can move much more nimbly and swiftly.

34:29The European Commission, from a U.S. perspective, looks like a regulatory body, right? They're not, you know, voting on and passing laws in the EU in the same way that Congress passes laws that apply to the U.S. They are a regulatory body that is tasked with regulating commerce, I guess, with European Commission or whatever. Anyway, they're currently looking at tech sector and they're passing whatever their system is. I'm sure it's different than ours, but it looks to us much more like a regulatory body. So it's not like you have to have individual tailored new laws every time you want to change something we can and do make regulatory bodies that regulate all parts of life in the u.s with some success i would say things like the faa fda uh even the epa despite my earlier snark i think have been shown to be useful and partially successful things within our government so a bill like this or even something that expands the i mean i wouldn't expand like the the ftc or whatever to cover this but anyway uh all i'm saying is it doesn't have to be a new law every single time we can actually have regulatory bodies all right we have breaking news as of earlier today do do do do do do uh wwdc has been announced i lost bet with myself it is actually marco's birthday week which i should have guessed because it always is no that's the thing it usually isn't it hasn't covered my birthday which is june 11 it hasn't covered june 11th for like seven or eight years it's been a while oh i feel like it always then abutted your birthday one way or not yeah it's always the week before i thought it would be the, what, the second or third or whatever it was that Monday.

35:55I don't have a calendar in front of me. And it turns out, nope, it's June 10 to 14, and it's going to be just like the last couple of years. A special event on Monday, June 10, and you can sign up to get a free ticket to go to that, which I have done. I honestly don't know if I will go even if I do get a ticket. I probably would if I got a press pass, but if I get a regular Schmo ticket, I don't know if I would bother because it's considerable expense, and we'll see. Marco, did you even know that this was a thing given how busy you've been and if so did you sign up i did indeed sign up um we'll see you know we'll see what happens wbdc for me is always fun even though you know business wise i shouldn't be too excited about apple stuff recently because of all this court stuff and it's putting a big damper on their images for me as a developer and everything that's all true i also just love their stuff and i and wbdc is always a really good time for me it's always a very motivating time as well like i always am there and i get all jazzed up and all motivated to just go do all the new stuff for overcast that i need to do and so it's it's good for that as well so even though i i continue to have conflicting feelings about how apple treats the app store and their relationship with developers i still generally maintain that that's a problem with a very small number of people at the top.

37:20And WBDC is a chance for you to see all the work and interact with all the other people in the company, most of whom have, I would say, healthier views of their relationship with developers. And so, like, it's the time when I get to feel really good about what they're doing and about what I'm doing as a developer on their platforms. Indeed. So, yeah, I mean, I've signed up as well. We'll see what happens. John, I'm sure that you signed up to leave your house for any reason. I did. I've been trying to go to W.A.C. ever since it's been at Apple Park. You did sign up? I'm stunned. I always sign up.

37:52Every year. What? Haven't you been listening to me? I've been so annoyed that I haven't been able to go because I'm like, I really want to go to one at Apple Park. Well, I have been to Apple Park, but officially I've never been there for an Apple event, let's say that. And so, yeah, I absolutely want to attend W.A.C. at Apple Park because I have never attended W.A.C. at Apple Park. I love going to W.A.C. in San Francisco. I didn't like to travel, but I loved going to it. I even mostly liked going to San Jose. say wasn't as good but still fun uh so yeah i put my hat in the ring to hopefully uh get a ticket this year despite missing out and to be fair to apple i was invited to go the year my son graduated from high school and the reason i remember that is because i had to decline because i had to go to his graduation and have to but i chose to go to his graduation rather than attend wwc because they literally overlapped uh and it was painful for me to have to say thank you so much i invited with a press pass thank you so much for the invitation but i unfortunately have to decline because my son is graduating high school.

38:45So I went to my son's high school graduation and I was never invited to WWDC again. Was that 21, I want to say? Is that right? He's a sophomore in college now. So I don't know. Do the math. Well, I don't want to do that math right now. But I think you and I both got relatively late invites, which is fine. I mean, I'll take it over no invite. But at that point, I think Michaela still wasn't vaccinated. And so I don't want to get on a plane. And you obviously had a much bigger thing to worry about than WWDC. And yeah, since then we've been ghosted, which is sad, but it's okay. Yeah. But anyway, I'm not thinking of getting a press pass.

39:18I'm like, I just want like one of the regular lottery things, which, and also to be fair to Apple, I was lucky enough to get a lottery driven ticket to WWDC and San Francisco and San Jose a lot more than should be allowed by chance. So I'm not going to say that I've been deprived. I absolutely haven't. But all I'm saying is that I would really like to go to at least one WWDC at Apple Park. So fingers crossed for this year. Yeah. man how how wild would it be if we do all end up at wwbc one way or the other this year that'd be pretty cool um so yeah so we'll see what happens uh greg jaswiak did tweet it's going to be capital a absolutely capital i incredible which i really don't like reading into these things but that seems pretty on the nose you don't need to read into that yeah exactly that is as upfront as it could possibly be yep uh and i don't i didn't uh look at the official wwc site i don't think they make any even uh feints towards ai stuff but of course we all know the rumors have been ai stuff this is the year of ai we talked about it in the very first episode of 2024 this is the year apple sprinkles ai sauce and everything right and so here's greg jazuek absolutely 100 % confirming that uh this wwdc ai is going to be a big thing so just in case you were wondering if those rumors are true because you know sometimes we have these rumors that go on for months and months and then apple like has to do like strategic leaks to undercut them like when we're all there There was all these rumors of hardware at WWDC and Apple basically had to say there's going to be no hardware at WWDC.

40:41Like to just make sure we all aren't disappointed on the day. Well, this is the opposite of that. They're saying AI stuff, it's coming. So I'm excited for that. We are brought to you this week by Factor. You can get meals delivered right to your door. These meals are never frozen and you can cook them in the microwave in about two minutes. That's about as long as you'll take listening to me tell you all the great stuff about Factor. Factor meals are always fresh. They're never frozen. They're chef-crafted, dietician-approved, and like I said, ready in just a couple of minutes. You have a ton of different options to choose from, and they have categories like Calorie Smart, Protein Plus, Keto, and more.

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42:48We're going to do a little bit of car related stuff. This isn't really neutral. This is technology that's car adjacent or car adjacent technology. You know what I mean? so don't immediately skip to the next chapter give us a chance, you might actually like it and the first thing we have to talk about is that people are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars, this was from July of 2023 apparently that JD Power which is a I don't know, they kind of do surveys and stuff of car owners yeah like user research and stuff so the Verge writes for the first time in 28 years of JD Power's car owner survey there's a consecutive year over year decline in satisfaction with most Most of the ire directed toward in-car infotainment.

43:29The overall satisfaction amongst car owners is 845 on a 1 ,000-point scale, a decrease of two whole points from a year ago and three points lower than in 2021. Only 56 % of owners prefer to use their vehicle's built-in system to play audio, down from 70 % in 2020. Less than half of owners said they like using their car's native controls for navigation, voice recognition, or to make phone calls. Yeah, I mean, I know all the electric car people. Hi, Marco. are going to come out and be like, oh no, the electric car people get it. There's so much better. But really, anyway, for all of us regular people with regular cars, I can tell you that I have never used an in-car infotainment that was even half as good as CarPlay.

44:09And my Volkswagen is pretty good. And I actually really liked my BMWs, even though even when I bought it, it was relatively aged. But that being said, they're just not as good as CarPlay. And so I am not surprised that these auto manufacturers who really don't know what they're doing when it comes to software. When they try software, I'm not surprised it doesn't go terribly well. They know what they're doing when it comes to pinching pennies, though. And I feel like the headline here is not so much that the score was awful or that the people don't like the native stuff and prefer their phone stuff.

44:39The headline is in 28 years of doing this stupid survey, and I don't put too much stock in their surveys, but either way, in 28 years, this is the first year-over-year decline, right? And so that shows it's not just like, well, it fluctuates from year to year and who cares or whatever. That's a long run with people generally saying each year they're a little bit more satisfied because car, you know, the tech inside their car would get better or whatever. Now, a year over your decline with most of them citing dissatisfaction with the infotainment. I see that squarely on the automakers of, like you say, Casey, A, not being good at this, but B, seeing as we've discussed and we're about to discuss further, dollar signs when they say, oh, we can get rid of all these buttons and stuff and just put everything on touchscreens.

45:20and yeah we're not very good at making touch screens but it'll save us so much money and it's futuristic people will love it and the you know the fancy electric cars that actually do have native in car stuff even though casey still wishes they had carplay um they're they're like mostly a rounding error with the exception of tesla the model y sells in huge numbers right and maybe that's trying to bring up the average for everybody else but i can tell you outside of tesla and the other good ev makers infotainment situation on cars that regular people buy has been getting worse and worse. It's really no good.

45:52And I mean, as much as I snark on Marco and his electric cars, I will absolutely admit and concede that the Teslas of the world and the Rivians of the world have way better infotainment than pretty much anything else that I've seen. For me, I still don't particularly care for it, and I still would vastly prefer CarPlay. Vastly prefer CarPlay. But they are definitely the best of the breed if you're not considering Android Auto or CarPlay. But they're also, and Tesla in particular, is one of the largest vendors for this next item. Right. So European crash tester, Euro NCAP, I mean, I don't know how to summarize it other than they're doing the Lord's work.

46:29So they say that car makers must bring back physical controls or they will pay the price in terms of ratings. So this was covered on Ars Technica earlier this month. Matthew Avery, who is the Director of Strategic Development for the Automotive Safety Organization European New Car Assessment Program, or Euro NCAP, says that the overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, amen, with almost every vehicle maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, preach, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes. Uh-huh. New Euro NCAP's tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate physical controls for basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes off-road time and therefore promoting safer driving.

47:16So Euro NCAP wants to see the physical controls for turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, the horn, and any SOS features like the European Union's e-call feature. Euro NCAP is not a government regulator, so it has no power to mandate the car makers use physical controls for these functions, but a five-star safety score from Euro NCAP is a strong selling point similar to the IAHS or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's coveted top safety pick program here in the US. And it is likely this pressure will be effective. just i'm here for this i'm so incredibly here for this this is one of the great things about it not being a government regulator so they're they're kind of making these assertions like there's no sort of burden of proof to say well but is it actually safer to have physical controls versus test controls how what have you tested to show this is the case and all sorts of things and i know that we've talked about stories in the past where people have done studies in this to show that it is safer but in general you look at this you're like oh common sense dictates that yeah you can use a physical control without looking at it much more easily you can use touchscreen without looking at it even if things never move in the touchscreen even if they're always in the same place you can't really feel for the location one of the things that i thought about uh when considering this story was like you know we're just just trying to get out of winter here although it's still a little ice on my morning walks with the dog but anyway um in theory spring is coming but during the whole winter uh in my wife's car which has heated seats uh i wear gloves in the car big winter gloves because my hands are always freezing anyway uh i can not only turn the seat heaters to off low or high for either one of the front seats with my gloves on without looking i can also tell if they are currently off low or high for both seats in the dark without looking at them with my winter gloves on with my big giant winter gloves on and you know why because they both have rocker switches that are level when the thing is off tilted forward when it's low and tilted back when it's high i can literally feel for that without looking at it ever i've never looked at those switches why would i look at them because they're down there they're like in front of the the stick shift right that's where they are on the like central console so when i look at this i'm like i don't have to see your 17 scientific surveys to support your new law the government is saying that you have to use physical controls when they say physical controls allow drivers to take their road of their eyes off the road less i look at that and say yes that is obviously true now i'm not saying they shouldn't study this they should the more evidence we have to say we no we didn't just assume this is true we actually tested it but the common sense in me says yeah in my experience that's true common sense to me says it's true my experience using touchscreens which at this point is vast says that it's true right uh and the fact that they're not making a law but they're just saying hey do what you want but we are a respected organization that rates cars based on their safety and we have decided as part of our ratings which are not law they're not binding right we're not a government we're not forcing you to do anything you do what you want but we think that here at euro end cap that if you don't do this you're gonna get dinged and you're not gonna get a five star score and the same thing we have those same things in the u.s where it's a thing that is respected that people look up the crash safety ratings we also have government things to do that as well but like the uh it's not legally binding you don't have to do what they tell you we don't stop you from selling a car if it doesn't get a five-star crash rating you can still sell it but know that people are going to look this up and they're going to see that your car got a three-star instead of a five-star and maybe they're going to pick a competitor car which is why as the story says even though this is not a law or a government regulatory body this kind of pressure will likely be effective even on u.s car makers because they're not going to make a separate car for europe with physical controls and then one for the u.s with just a touchscreen they're going to make one car to save again to save costs like they don't want to make two different cars for different directions so this will help us in the same way that california's more stringent like emissions laws tend to help like all cars in the u.s kind of sort of depending on how annoying the car maker is about making a california only model so i read this and i'm like you go euro end cap because i 100 agree with this i think the reason car makers are doing it is to save money and i think it's a terrible decision and i think it is unsafe but more importantly it's annoying yep couldn't agree more it's just there are certain things that you should be able to do without looking away from the road i think adjusting the temperature turn signals i could even say that hazards i i could get behind not having having to look at in order to use i think that's more like hazards type of thing where maybe the uh the touchscreen is dead because it's not like an essential like you know what i mean and so you need i would say you need a physical thing but like if you had some kind of accident or whatever and you got to turn the houses on because you're off the road and your touchscreen is dead, there should be a physical button for that.

51:54Not that you need to see it when you're driving. That's why that's required in the U.S. Yeah. But yeah, I think most of these, you know, most of the things that this European body is requesting are very reasonable. You know, turn signals, horn, like that all is very reasonable. And I think really the only car, as far as I know, that has not already complied with that is Tesla's new steering wheel designs for many of their cars. Now, I thought, John, weren't there some ferraris that had turn signals on the wheel or something like that yeah the the new ferraris have uh well so here's the thing i don't know the details of this but it says physical controls the controls on the ferrari i think are capacitive touch but a lot of the like the the the tesla ones i believe it's that stupid thing where the entire thing is a button and where you have your finger on it you know we talked about it before like the whole thing does move so i think tesla's might be compliant but it depends on when they say like physical controls do they mean it has to be a stock or can it be a stupid button on your steering wheel yeah either way i i think this is mostly currently aimed at tesla i mean i don't think many people are going to um change their mind on their ferrari purchase because euro end cap does not give it a full safety rating yeah and and and a ferrari to be clear does not care what you're yes has to say about its cars they don't need to no one's cross shopping the ferrari and say but it doesn't have a five-star crash rating right yes exactly um you know that i you know of the three of us i'm the only one who drives you know cars with touch controls largely um but you know like i think old tesla like you know the the model s's that i had you know years ago and my current you know rivian they i think strike a fairly good overall balance of there are stocks and buttons for some critical things and then a lot of other stuff is on the touch screen i'm fine with that like and and i think what you know what euro end cap is saying here is not all touch controls are bad what they're saying is there are certain controls that are so important to safety and basic operation that they need to be physical and the vehicles i've owned have had those controls be physical and it's i and i agree that that is a very good balance um and that's that's part of the reason why i don't like you know the modern direction tesla has gone because they're going a little further a little too far in that direction for my taste.

54:08But I think this is not like a massive shift in what we have to do or what they want people to do. I think this is a small course correction that mostly just applies to Tesla and not many of their makers. Well, I mean, it's like the thing we talked about with the, whenever we talked about Volkswagen, like that they had a couple of generations of cars where they have the climate controls on the touchscreen and their customers complain so much that they're changing out on all their models going forward. But unfortunately, they just introduced the whole new line of like this year's model year crop of cars that have the old system and so it's like no we i know you're annoyed by it but we totally fixed this the not these cars but yeah next time we show you a car uh and that stuff is not part of ncap i'm not saying you have to have climate controls according to this thing here right but but customers want that and so customer feedback is also a way to make this happen like and it took however many years of vw shipping cars with the climate controls and touch and it's not that much it's not it's only been for the mark 8 uh gulfs as far as i understand and but it's also on like the id4 and all their other that's true but it's only been a couple of years it's it's been like one or two yeah but the reason they get dinged for it is because they have the benefit of seeing every other car maker do this and get complained about and they didn't learn from it it's like you know these are recent models right and you know climate controls and touchscreen it's everywhere bmw does it on all their new cars they are not going back on it like everybody does it you know and it remains to be seen if anyone who complain about that or maybe they won't care because everyone just uses automatic climate control and BMWs but stuff like that I think falls into the category of foolish cost savings or foolish attempt to be futuristic.

55:43like i mean the the worst one for me is aiming the aiming the air and the teslas with that stupid interface they've always had oh geez louise just let me point a vent like it's just so much better in every possible way but you got to save those two cents on a little you know or whatever it is 50 cents on the little moving vent pieces just it drives me bonkers right so consumer feedback will give you some of this but apparently consumer feedback isn't sufficient to to like you know to fix all the problems rapidly and this is like like marco said this is for the essential stuff i don't know what the details are but i i really do think that things like turn signals being buttons on a steering wheel then the steering wheel like you know turns and you have to kind of like find them it's just going to make people either use their blinkers less frequently or less adeptly uh or not use them at all like bmw drivers because the the stock interface to turn signals the fact that the stock is always in the same place and doesn't move and you can just hit it like that is an amazing interface the stock interface or turn signals the traditional one where it stays up when you push it to go to the right and stays down when you push it to go to the left.

56:42That stock interface has amazing ergonomics. It's so easy to do. It's so unconscious. It's so clear what you're in the process of doing. The little blinking light on the instrument cluster just to show the arrow where it's like, it's tried and true for a reason. I would say the same thing, by the way, about round steering wheels, car makers, if you're listening. Round is a good shape for a thing that rotates, just FYI. No one wants to make round steering wheels anymore. Hopefully that will come around, but we'll see. I don't feel that strongly about like flat-bottomed wheels. My Volkswagen's wheel is a flat bottom and that's, it's fine.

57:13Like I'm not saying you're wrong for the record. It's, it's fine. But now they're flat everywhere. Have you seen Casey? They're not flat bottom anymore. Like you're, it's just a circle with a flat bottom. Now they're all like hexagons or. Yeah, no, no, no. I know. I think my dad's Corvette, if I'm not mistaken, has a flat top and a flat bottom. Yeah, it does. And they're getting even funkier. It's like wheels, man, wheels. But like, I mean, the big thing about this, about picking like which controls need to be fiscal in which don't just brings up a thing that i brought up when we were talking about touchscreens years ago it's like okay why don't you just put the steering wheel on touch screen and everyone's like well that's ridiculous steering wheel on the touch screen uh aside from all the people think the cars are going to drive themselves no one would ever put the steering wheel on touch screen but then a few years later tesla put the freaking gear selector on the touch screen right well why not but the steering wheel on the touch screen is so great everyone has their limit it's like okay i'm with you right up until you put the steering wheel on the touch screen i'm like well good so now we know there is a limit we're just arguing over where it is.

58:02And I think Euro NCAP is going to help move that line back a little bit. I sure hope so. I don't know. Aaron's car has, you know, climate control on the screen and it is fine, but it is not fun to use. Like I would much rather be able to have a dial for the temperature and preferably for heated seats, like a button or a rocker or something like that. Both heated seats and wheel and temperature, all of that is on the touchscreen and I really don't care for it. And I mean, and I mostly like her infotainment. It's pretty good. And honestly, the only time we use CarPlay is generally speaking, if I'm driving the car, which is pretty rare, you know, she does occasionally use CarPlay, but very infrequently, she generally just uses the infotainment and leaving aside the fact that it takes a calendar year to start the infotainment.

58:48It's actually pretty good. But I absolutely am driven bananas by having the HVAC controls in the touchscreen. I don't care for it at all. It is so much nicer in my car to just reach down to where the dial, I know where that dial will be, and I just twist the littlest bit. And you can feel for it. That's the important thing. People are like, oh, but it's always in the same place as the touchscreen. I know just where it will be. Okay, that helps, but you can't feel for it. Like in the dark or to micro-adjust your reach if you just were off by a little bit. Well, but, you know, in defense of these controls on touchscreen, I've driven the Model S, I've driven the Rivian.

59:26Both of those have almost all of the HVAC, if not all of the HVAC stuff. I think both of them, all the HVAC stuff is on the touchscreen. I did have some issues with the Model S when that Facebook designer took over and redid their whole design and did things like hide the defroster inside of a menu. But that was later in the ownership of that car. And for the first few years of owning that car, that was not a problem and it was great. I would caution you not to rule out the concept when it is possible to design a good one you know in the sense that like if for instance suppose the iphone hadn't happened yet and we were all using weird advanced versions of blackberries and they put out tuck screen things and it's like well tuck screen phones just don't work and the real problem might be that the tuck screen phone that we had that we were accustomed to or that we had been exposed to was not a good tuck screen phone or didn't have a good tuck screen design.

1:00:20I think this is a bad example, Marco, because we look at our phones when we use them. No, but this is not a bad example because you can account for a lot of the flaws of your experience. Like, you know, Casey, your experience with the Volvo one. What you keep saying is it's poorly designed. It's slow. It's cumbersome. Like those are not inherent flaws of touchscreens. That is flaws of that touchscreen system. But it is possible to make good touchscreen controls for many of these things. And in some ways, the trade-offs end up being better. Like, for instance, the vent thing that you hate so much, John, where you get to aim the vents on modern Teslas.

1:00:57I didn't have that on my Model S. I do have that on the Rivian. It's fine. There are certain advantages. There are certain disadvantages. It's fine. And a lot of people with Tesla Model 3s that have that love them. It's fine. Many of these differences are just different. And there are pluses and minuses but if you've only ever if you never really lived with one you might still only ever be in the transition learning phase this thing sucks uh phase instead of like i actually am used to this now and i appreciate what's better about it or if you've only been exposed to a bad one like you know casey's volvo like you know that maybe it's possible that there's good ones out there that you just haven't lived with because i can say like as the only one of us that has actually owned two touch actually three touch screen cars i don't hate all these climate controls on the touch screen when it is properly designed when the defroster is always in that one spot and always available which it is on the rivian and it was for most of the model s when they are well designed it's fine it is totally fine and there actually are some benefits well you just highlighted one of the problems with it which is that you bought the car and it was fine and then there was a software update and it was buried in a menu and that doesn't happen with a button so that's one downside obviously there's an upside to that too which is they can fix things that are annoying later on and they can't move a button and honestly and as as much as that drove me nuts with the tesla when they did that i mean that was that was just a bad design um but as much as that drove me nuts i also did benefit quite a lot from tesla adding features and making improvements over the time that i own the vehicle yeah we're not saying touchscreens are bad and they shouldn't be in cars we're just saying what you put on them like again what we were just talking about was like we're talking about hvac specifically none of us were talking about like the drive mode selector or the place where you program in your personalized driving thing where you pick the steering feel and the regen and blah like obviously the touch screens are great for all of that we know what their strengths are right but even the thing where you're saying like well you just haven't tried a good one that is a another condemnation of using touchscreens for things like vents because we weren't in a situation where we didn't have a tried and true solution that everybody could do nobody was confused for the most part that most car makers were not confused about how to do a vent that you could point the airflow out pretty much all the car makers did a thing and it was competent enter touchscreens and now suddenly a thing that we had a solution to on every car from inexpensive to expensive now it's chaos and it's like nobody knows how to do it anymore it's like wait a second we do know how to do it it's called a vent and you pointed to people and only the good expensive car makers know how to do it you took a thing that was a solved problem across the entire industry and you turn it into a thing where well you just have to make sure you get the right one you must have just got a bad one so that's one damning thing the second thing i'm going to say about your phone example and the blackberry thing is like i said we're meant to look at our phones in fact we're when we use our phones we're looking at them so much so that the fact that we do have to look at our phones to use them is used as an example of why you should not use your phone while you're driving because when you're driving you have to look at the road that's how much you have to look at the phone it's a thing that you look at so the things that we're complaining about for touchscreens and hvac that's not a weakness of the phone because when you go to use it you're looking at it so you don't have to wonder where the button is you're always looking at it that's how you use a phone whereas how you drive a car is looking out the windshield of the road and when i want to turn on the seat heaters or figure out if they're on low or high or whatever i should be able to do that without taking my eyes off the road at all with winter gloves on which was if it was a capacitive button or something else there's no way i could do that i could feel through the winter gloves what position the switch is already in and adjust at the position i want and i would say seat heaters is a pretty esoteric feature of the car it's not like turn signals or whatever and the fact that we can do that with seat heaters with the amazing technology called switches that i don't want to give up for the hopes that someone can define something you know on a touch screen that's almost as good but only if you buy a very expensive very fancy car like i said touchscreens have huge advantages they should be used for all the things that are impossible to do with buttons or way worse with buttons but there are enough things that that is not the case on and hvac i can i i just like i don't think i would i'm not going to not buy another car a new car because it has hvac on touchscreen in fact i'm probably going to have no choice right that's not a actually a big deal to me but for me if i could choose where to draw the line i would make hvac physical right but the line that euro ncap is drawing is like turn signals the steering wheel wipers like and i totally agree with that that stuff is so much more essential like not being able to having to fiddle to turn on the wipers oh just use automatic wipers that work perfectly well you must not have good ones the good automatic ones work well like no wipers are a solved problem again it's a stock you know or however you're going to do it a twisty thing on the stock or a stock itself i want to be able to get to the wipers asap i want to be able to know how to adjust them without thinking i don't want to have to use a touchscreen for that so i'm cheering on euro end cap but hvac my preferences for not to be there casey doesn't like his touchscreen hvac but i am perfectly willing to believe the touchscreen hvac will not or is not the end of the world and will not drive me completely insane but we'll see when i get one yeah i think you might eat those words at some point but we'll see i mean and i do take marco's broader point that you know a well-done infotainment can be not that bad but I don't know.

1:06:12There are certain things that I'm willing to futz around on a screen for, and certain things I'm not. And for me, HVAC is one of those things. I do not want to go to a screen for it. I don't doubt that the Rivian screen is way better and works much faster and better and so on and so forth. But ultimately, particularly when I'm driving, I don't want to have to look anywhere. And yes, I know that these buttons don't move within the screen, but because there's nothing physical to feel for, I will never be 100 % sure where these buttons are. And you have to look to check state. That's why I keep talking about the heat seat, the seat heating buttons.

1:06:42I can check the state of it. Is it already on? Is it already on high? Is it already on low? Is my daughter's in the passenger seat? Is hers on high? And I'm going to need to turn it off. She's going to complain that she's getting too hot. Right. Like that. I can check that with my gloved fingers in the dark without looking. All right. So there's one more piece of automotive-related news. Mark Gurman wrote, what is this, on my birthday, actually, that Apple's new CarPlay, this is the thing where they take over the instrument cluster and the whole rigmarole, is their last hope to crack the auto industry.

1:07:13Gurman writes, the concept for the new CarPlay, known as Project Ironheart, within Apple, was to take the system to the next level by fully integrating it into vehicles. It would take over more screens in a car's instrument cluster, as well as features like the radio and air conditioning system. This is a big change from the current CarPlay interface, which is more focused on letting you operate Apple services and doesn't handle most of the car's controls. At this point, we should probably do a quick refresher on what the equivalent system is from Google. So I'm going to start, and John, just interrupt me when I go off the rails here, but Google for a long time has had Android Auto, which is their equivalent of CarPlay.

1:07:48This is how you music app or, you know, your podcasting app and so forth. It's how you project your phone onto car screens. So if you have an Android phone and your car has Android Auto, your Android phone can project its screen onto one or more screens in the car. And that's what CarPlay does. It projects your iPhone screen onto one or more screens in your car. Exactly. So it may not be exactly one-to-one with CarPlay, but it's effectively the same thing. However, in the last few years, they've come out with Android Automotive. This is different than Android Auto that we just described, but Android Automotive.

1:08:21And Android Automotive is, I don't know how to appropriately describe it, but it's the infotainment system that the car is running, irrespective of whether or not a phone is connected, right? It's an operating system. Like, basically, you can think of it this way. Oh, my car runs Linux. Well, just say, oh, my car runs Android Automotive, which is Linux-based, whatever. Like, Android Automotive is running on your car. It's not running on your phone. You don't have to have a phone at all. You can get in any car that's running Android Automotive, and when you start the thing up, and the infotainment screen lights up and lets you pick radio stations and do whatever you're going to do.

1:08:52The operating system that those screens are projecting from is Android Automotive and it is running on the car. It is not related to your phone at all. You can have Android Automotive in your car and many manufacturers do. And Android Automotive cars can support CarPlay and Android Auto, right? So the operating system of the car, Android, not the whole car, but just the infotainment thing is Android Automotive. And that supports CarPlay. When you say, oh, I really wish they would add CarPlay support to my car. Chances are good that your car is running Android Automotive, and when you say you want them to add CarPlay support, you want them to add CarPlay support to the Android Automotive operating system that is running on your car.

1:09:28Because that's how your car is able to project itself onto the screens in your car, because the OS that your car is running, which is Android Automotive, lets that happen. Exactly. And actually, my parents just got a new Volvo, and their new Volvo has Android Automotive as the infotainment system, and I've used it for literally 30 seconds. But that being said, it was so much faster and nicer than our, what is it, like almost 10-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old Volvo at this point. It was so much more responsive and so much nicer. But again, that was only 30 seconds of use. I might have a different opinion over time.

1:10:04But my understanding from those who have used Android automotive, like our friend Jelly has a Polestar sedan. I forget which one that is, the Polestar 2, I think. and jelly has had very complimentary things to be to say about android automotive as well so anyway uh coming back to mark german poll star there you go porsche bmw excuse me porsche bmw volkswagen ford lucid stelantis which is you know a chrysler etc and general motors now offer cars with the android automotive operating system built in after just seven years android automotive is the market leader with an estimated 35 of the car operating system market the new car play is a response to that.

1:10:41Apple hopes it can win over users and automakers with a slicker interface and greater customization. There's one big difference, though. The new CarPlay still runs on the phone and isn't a new OS embedded in the vehicle. So we need to stop right here. This is not a place where a German's analysis, as usual, makes me just, my head spin. Like, how in the world is the new CarPlay a response to an operating system that runs on the car? But the difference is it's not an operating system that runs on the car. It's, I mean, it's not the same thing. What I'm saying is, the new CarPlay, the one that projects itself on all the different screens, still runs on your phone.

1:11:12You still need an iPhone and needs to be in the car and needs to be connected either wired or wirelessly to make the new CarPlay experience, which means that all these cars need to have some operating system that runs them when you don't have a phone because you need to be able to get into them and drive without an iPhone or without any phone, like the car should work, right? So is it a response? Maybe you can say yes, because Apple thinks this is the way it should work. But the bottom line is that this new CarPlay does absolutely nothing to stop car manufacturers from using Android Automotive, because how the heck are you going to do this new CarPlay without some kind of operating system on the car?

1:11:47And the car needs to have, you know, a speedometer and stuff when you're not in it with your iPhone. So I object to this entire paragraph, but I kind of get what he's trying to say, but pick different words. All right. So coming back to Gurman, Apple Explorer turning the new CarPlay into a full operating system that runs on cars directly. but the approach would have worked best with Apple design chips and other proprietary technologies like displays. It wasn't seen as practical to install that in cars. Another pause, another pause now. So I, I get what he's saying here too, but I would say that the counter example, the Apple counter example, uh, is Apple TV, right?

1:12:24They sell a little hockey puck with Apple Silicon in it that will run TVOS and it will do Apple TV plus, you know, and a bunch of other apps and stuff too. but also you can buy a tv and watch apple tv plus on it and there's no apple silicon in that tv it's some garbagey media tech chip right like when it comes to it apple can get its software onto non-apple silicon with much worse processors and these weird things they have to deal with all these different manufacturers but when it's important they do it and it's important to get more people to watch and pay for apple tv plus so now every time you buy a tv it's got netflix built in it's got apple tv plus built in it's got all these things built in and that is not apple silicon in there uh and you know there's no apple proprietary hardware in there making that happen it is just plain oh the smart tvs are essentially little computers by the way that a lot of them are on android uh and apple wants to be everywhere so it makes sure that it writes a little app apple tv plus app that works there um so i understand why apple would prefer that all these cars have apple silicon in them to give really good experience and i would imagine that the iPhone that people are projecting from is significantly more powerful and better tuned to iOS than any car is going to be.

1:13:36But when it's important, if you actually want to be everywhere in the market, like they did with Apple TV Plus, it's a thing that Apple is actually willing to do sometimes. I take your point, but I don't think it's apples to apples. Like in the case of an infotainment system, it would still probably, particularly for gauges, need to be a real-time OS, which has very specific constraints. I don't think any gauges are real-time OS. Do you think, the gauges are owned by real-time OS? I think they have to be. I mean, they're certainly not in CarPlay. That's the thing, is that, well, oh, you mean in the new CarPlay?

1:14:05Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, in the new CarPlay. Yeah, I don't know, but I think if you were the car manufacturer and Apple comes to you and says, hey, we'll take over the gauge cluster for you, I would say, like, look, you need to have something that's reliable and that's real-time, you know, in every definition of the word. I don't think the gauge cluster in Marcos Rivian is real-time OS. I don't think the gauge cluster in any car i mean every car has an lcd gauge cluster now i don't think there's a real-time os running that i think that is just the same it can crash at any time it's not a big deal thing that that is running the infotainment it's basically android android automotive is running those instrument clusters and it's not real time didn't we get some feedback of a few months back that they had to be real time in the u.s i yeah again i don't i don't know the details but my guess would be that's not what they're currently doing um i mean and with apple doing it with the iphone thing apple hasn't announced anything related to that so we can i actually had this discussion recently with somebody about uh apple vision pro and the r1 chip we've talked about before about is it running a real-time os or is it not and still no one from apple has officially come down from on high and given a secret anonymous feedback to let us know definitively what is risen real time there's supposedly some real-time subsystem that's happening somewhere in ios but ios itself is not a real-time operating system and i don't know um but anyway uh i a lot of the stuff like you don't bottom line is if your instrument cluster goes black the car continues to work yeah it's bad that you can't see the speedometer and all that other stuff and it shouldn't be that way permanently but it's not as essential as like the steer by wire system right or your brakes the brake by wire systems you know what i mean yeah that's a good point and i guess what i was eventually driving at was if i was apple and i was building a car with project titan and i built a real-time os i probably would have built that real-time os against some sort of apple silicon and it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't particularly want to have to build that same os against a different kind of silicon and it's not impossible i would assume but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't want to and so that's kind of how they back themselves into this corner there's another thing i don't know does android automotive have a real-time uh kernel or the ability to run real-time processes for its uh instrument cluster stuff i don't i don't know and i don't think i'd be able to figure that out without having to give future marco a whole bunch of work we'll presumably get some feedback maybe sam of welsummit is still listening yeah it'd be interesting like this this whole thing to to clarify technically if people know when we say real-time operating system what does that mean or whatever it's basically like if you think about uh the example from my childhood is uh operating systems that would run on space probes right and the thing that distinguishes them is that uh when you set something up and you say this program runs and does this thing it always does things according to uh guaranteed deadlines so there's no scenario in which some operation uh that's supposed to get done at the very latest by this particular time will occasionally take a little bit longer and how could that happen well for example say your program's running along and all of a sudden some other process starts and it allocates a bunch of memory and then when some instruction goes in your program your thing is supposed to be done already but it's like oops uh this page was uh swapped out and now i gotta pull it back in from swap so this operation took twice as long as it normally does sorry about that now you just missed your deadline real-time operating systems for things like space probes or whatever like if they miss their deadline for anything the like it's a complete failure like absolutely 100 complete failure it's not like oopsie or whatever that's not how our computers work now if you do something like run a benchmark and then you like start up some other program and start rendering in the background your benchmark score will go down because your other process is taking resources from it real-time operating systems allow processes to reserve essentially i am always going to get these resources my things are always going to happen on this time schedule guaranteed by the operating system there's nothing anything else on this system can do to make it so that i don't hit my deadlines that is important for things like space probes that are going you know hundreds of thousands of miles an hour or whatever and they have to make split second decisions you can't have a situation in which like oops some other process ran and your thing ran a little slower now you missed your deadline um as you can imagine that's not important for phones computers all these systems that we have where yeah you know if you run two things you one thing will go slower than if you're running it by itself right that's why we say if you're running benchmarks make sure you don't have other processes running make sure time machine isn't running in the background because the things we do with our computers do not get reserved unperturbable guaranteed resources with deadlines on all of them that's not the way we want our computers to work but if you have something that's supposed to control like a machine hurtling down the road that could kill somebody it's a good idea to have some part of that system be if it's running software be real time such that you're never surprised by like something taking twice as long as expected or some other process spinning up and making your things slower and delaying something uh and so that's what we mean when we need real-time operating system i'll put a link in the show notes to the wikipedia page which there are other various more vague definitions of it but this is what we're talking about things happen on a guaranteed time resources are guaranteed and nothing else that happens on the system can perturb those and that is totally inappropriate for the thing that lets you play podcasts over bluetooth in your car so that's not going to be a real-time operating system that is not essential functionality speedometers is that essential it would be useful because like if you want it to be as real time as a physical speedometer used to be in the really old days but in the end the car still works without it but when we say drive by wire and brake by wire what we mean is lots of modern cars have a brake pedal that is not physically connected in any way to the braking system it's just basically like an electronic switch that sends a signal to a computer that actuates the braking system and they have steer by wire systems where your steering wheel is not connected to the front wheels physically but instead is just connected to a thing that senses its position and then activates a bunch of electronic motors and those those probably don't even run an operating system at all really to speak of it's probably just embedded systems or whatever but if there was any kind of involvement of any operating system or a kernel involved in those systems it's probably a real-time operating system because you want pretty hard guarantees that when you turn the wheel under some very controlled deadline uh the wheels of your car will also react in turn.

1:20:04Real-time follow-up from Hairline1 in the chat. Apparently, Android Auto is not real-time. Hairline1 provided a page where there's a compare and contrast between QNX, which is the kind of de facto standard real-time OS that's used in most cars, versus Android Auto, and that's one of the cons for Android Automotive, is that it's not real-time. And then as I was clicking around looking at QNX a little bit, it was written by two different people, Dan Dodge and Gordon Bell, and apparently Dan Dodge, as per Wikipedia, announced his retirement from QNX in 2015. And then in mid to late 2016, it was reported that he joined Apple to work on the Project Titan thing, which I did not know.

1:20:44So there you go. I wonder what he's doing now. All right. So just to finish out this never-ending topic on CarPlay, Mark Garman writes, the limited rollout of the new version of CarPlay is focused on very high-end cars. In fact, the only model confirmed to be getting the new CarPlay is the Aston Martin DB12, which costs roughly$245 ,000 and up. Porsche hasn't said which model or models are getting the feature. Gurman says, I'm told that Apple has no plan in place to make money from the new software. As with the current version of CarPlay, the company isn't looking to charge users for it or force car manufacturers to pay to install it.

1:21:14Just for the record, Apple, if you are listening, if you would like to send me a DB12 to test for a little while, I am happy to do that at no cost to you. And I will happily feature that car in that experience on a full episode of this podcast. I promise that to you. They won't give you a press pass to any of their events, but they'll send you a$245 ,000 car. That's right. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm here for it. I've waited. They knew what was coming. They knew I needed to build up the credits, so to speak, so I could get this. This is my moment. This is my time to shine. Please send me the DB12 whenever you're ready.

1:21:45Yeah, and not to drag this back down to the regulatory stuff, but there is a bunch of stuff in the DOJ complained about the potential threat of Apple extending its monopoly power to take over the car industry. And I hope you've seen as we've gone through the landscape and what Apple is currently doing that I don't think Android Automotive has much to worry about from CarPlay at this moment. I don't think so either. So we should probably do some Ask ATP, and we're going to start that right now with a question from Ask Cortex, episode 153. I love if we just steal whatever we want from other podcasts, it's fine.

1:22:17It's part of the community of podcasting. We are a melting pot. Stolen from Ask Cortex, number 153, Nick writes, how soon after waking up do you begin actively engaging with your phone or another screen? I don't want to answer this question. Marco, how about you? I will give the answer that we all do because if we're all being honest, we all know I interact with my phone pretty much immediately after waking up. It says actively engaging. So I'm going to say that clarifying this question, I'm going to say turning off your alarm does not count. Okay. Well, okay. So most days I just hit snooze, you know, once or twice, then get up.

1:22:52But when I go into the bathroom to like brush my teeth and stuff, I bring my phone with me. You're going to brush his little phone teeth. Usually I'm reading, you know, I'm like doing my initial phone triage of check the email, you know, all that stuff. Usually I'm doing that while brushing my teeth. Well, wait a second. This is actually related. You wake up and immediately brush your teeth? Yes. Am I doing this wrong? Yes, you are. I brush mine after breakfast. Correct. That is the correct answer. Now, using a communal cup to rinse is not the correct answer, but brushing your teeth after breakfast is the correct answer.

1:23:26So, see, now we're going to hear from all, like, the dentists. But, like, so what I read forever ago somewhere, you know, which is not a very credible information source, is that you don't want all of the, like, crap in your mouth from overnight. You don't want to, like, consume that. So the idea is brush and get it out of your mouth as soon as you can when you wake up. Oh, you said something different than I thought you were going to say. No, I have never heard that. I also don't think that's a thing. But, you know, there's no harm in brushing before as long as you also brush after breakfast.

1:23:56That's fair. That's fair. I will allow that. Yeah, for me, I wake up and generally speaking, and this has been the case for most of my life, if I open my eyes, even just to look at a clock, I will be, if it's after like, or if it's within an hour of when I normally need to wake up, the moment I open my eyes, that's it for the day. I'm up. And so that's generally speaking the way it works. And so if I open my eyes, I maybe will wait 15 seconds before I grab my phone and start screwing around on it. But yeah, it's pretty much instant. I don't use an alarm pretty much ever because Erin gets out of bed before me.

1:24:32And even though she is effectively a ninja when she gets out of bed, I am a light sleeper, like I said, when it gets to morning time. And so by her getting out of bed before me, it wakes me up. And yeah, in the time it takes her to walk from the bed to the bathroom, and I assure you our house is not that large, I have already grabbed my phone and started looking at something. Does she use an alarm? She does, although more often than not, she'll wake up before the alarm by a little bit and so she'll have silenced it before it goes off but again just her getting out of bed will wake me up even if the even if her alarm doesn't well i guess i'm the only one out here uh hold hold in strong against the uh the uh irresistible draw of the phone uh so like like both of you apparently my phone is reachable from my bed it's on my nightstand where it charges i don't use it as my alarm clock i have a uh super crappy ancient uh clock radio sony digital clock radio thing that i use as my alarm is it the square white one that we all had in the no it's it's but it's a it's a you would be a familiar model it's it's not great but i've had it forever i think what i should probably just do is record that i hate all the phone uh alarms like i the only time i use my phone is when i'm traveling and i have like ptsd from it like waking me up at like 5 a.m to get a line on wwc so i and all the ring all the all the alarm tones that i use just give me bad memories of travel stress and that's just a me thing anyway so i have my clock radio i do set an alarm on it um my routine on my routine on weekdays is very well defined um sometimes i wake up before my alarm sometimes i don't or whatever but anyway uh i get out of bed i pick up my phone and i put it in my pocket i take my airpods and put them in my pocket too and then i make eventually make my way downstairs and put my phone and my airpods in the downstairs location which is like on a little sideboard table or whatever and i do my morning routine which has involved various times and still does involve getting my kids ready for school and currently involves driving my daughter to school and dropping her off at school that whole morning routine happens and i literally do not look at my phone i don't even look to see if there are notifications on it what so because i remember i put it i put it in my pocket i put it on the sideboard put everything downstairs here's here's how we know john doesn't run servers a i don't really want servers but b if they're like if if my phone made a noise or like vibrated with the notification i would probably look at it but my notifications are so like i have so few of them that's probably not going to happen unless like unless literally somebody calls me i guess if i got a text message my phone would vibrate so So it's not like I'm like I have text messages notifications on, but I get so few text messages.

1:27:16Right. But in the absence of any surprising thing, my phone screen goes unlooked at, I guess, until essentially. Well, it used to be until I would get in the car to like drive kids. But now the kids don't let me play my music in the car anyway. So but I do take my phone and stick it to the MagSafe mount. But it's not doing anything there except for like trickle charging. Right. So I bring my phone with me in case like I get into an accident, need to call somebody or whatever. Like when I leave the house, I have my phone, but still I have not actively engaged with the screen. Only when I get back after the morning has been done, everybody's off to where they need to go, and I'm back in the house.

1:27:52That is when I sit down and look at my phone screen, usually when I'm eating breakfast. That is bananas to me. I thought it was bananas enough that Snell keeps his, well, I say that as though it's bad. I thought it was unusual that Snell charges his phone in a different room. That's not bad. It's actually probably healthy, but it's unusual. But for you not to even look at it until you've made an entire school run, that is wow. Yeah, because at this point, I'm waking up 7-ish, 7.30, and then I'm back at the house after dropping my daughter off at a little bit after 9. So my first active engagement with the phone screen every day is, you know, an hour.

1:28:28Wait, it takes you an hour and a half to drop her off? That's not how long it takes. That's when I wake up versus when I drop her off. Well, what are you doing then? go downstairs clean up whatever mess was in the kitchen make her lunch make sure she's awake deal with whatever last minute emergencies there are related to school stuff like things like that and the thing is because this is uh this is specifically asked about my phone screen it didn't answer ask about my mac screen and if i manage to get everything ready and i'm waiting for her to finish getting ready i may go in and look at what's happening on my mac and look at my email on my mac screen for two minutes usually i don't have that kind of time but because i'm usually try to chase her out of the house because she's not a morning person um but if i do have time that's what i know too but my phone my phone screen does not get looked at until i'm back at the house and i'm about to eat breakfast and even then like i'll put the phone on the table and then i'll get my breakfast get all my stuff or whatever and like as i'm you know eating breakfast i'm putting the food into my mouth then i'm unlocking my phone and probably going to mastodon oh my god good for you i mean i i'm poking fun a little bit but good for you that's probably um i would argue that is a much healthier relationship than i have so credit to you i mean the thing is like i'm also not a morning person so if i woke up a half an hour earlier i could stare at my phone for half an hour in bed but i'd rather be asleep so like it's i get up when i have to to do the things i have to do in the morning which involves you know used to be hurting two people and i was just hurting one person but you know and like i said depending on what kind of disaster is in the kitchen from the night before the didn't get cleaned up i'm dealing with that emptying the dishwasher doing all that stuff in the morning making my daughter breakfast if that's what she wants me to do at that time figuring out if she does want me to make her breakfast you know there's there's a lot of child serving going on once all my kids are off at college maybe this routine will change and i'll stare at my phone in the bed like a normal person but right now it's not happening and then and then on weekends i try to sleep on weekends because i don't have to do anything in the morning if i'm lucky uh and in weekends i will if i'm able actually to sleep in i will grab my phone and look at it in bed before i get out of bed because it's the luxury of the weekend that i don't have have to go and deal with anything if i'm lucky if that happens to be a day if i don't have to drive someone somewhere to to do something i will look at it for a few minutes before i get out of bed wow i've learned a lot tonight all right brian asks you mentioned on a recent episode that will probably not upgrade to 128 bit in our lifetime what would it be the impetus for going from 64 bit to 128 bit wasn't this about memory in in 8 to 16 to 32 to 64 wasn't it about addressable memory Well, sort of, yeah.

1:30:59So this came up like, I was talking about how, like, it came up like, why did mobile phone software age out, like, the early mobile phone software aged out of being able to run so quickly compared to early computer software. And one of the things I said was like, well, we did a bunch of transitions over the last few years, like 32 to 64-bit, that we probably, like, we probably won't have to do that again in our lifetime for that particular one. And the reason why is, I mean, obviously, like there's not every value that processors deal with is 64 bits these days. There's all sorts of different ways that processors can deal with larger numbers or larger, you know, wider data paths than this.

1:31:39But 64 bit is kind of like when usually we're referring to whether a processor is 32 bit or 64 bit, usually we are referring to the size of the like kind of regular integer type as well as the memory address. so like when you are referring to address in memory that's usually like the size of the pointer that refers to the memory addresses and so all sorts of you know software you know details and tricks rely on these sizes and everything that so it's fairly important to how software is compiled and how it's made and everything else and of course it implies limits of how much memory you can address and things like that and the reason why we are unlikely to to make that jump again in our lifetime to go from 64-bit to 128-bit on that kind of level is do the math.

1:32:24See what kind of numbers you are dealing with when you compare 2 to the 64th to 2 to the 128th. And I think what you will find is that all of those doublings that are happening with every single one of those bits really add up. And so the amount of resources that we would be talking about that would require over 64 bits of address space. I don't have the number in front of me right this second. I can look it up while John explains why I'm wrong. But it's a large amount of memory, a very, very large amount of memory. You're not wrong, but the more important comparison is 32-bit. 2 to the 32nd is an attractive number.

1:33:03It's like 4 billion. You can think of all sorts of real-world problems where being able to count up to 4 billion is a limiting factor. It's like, especially if it's a sign thing and now it's negative 2 billion to positive 2 billion or whatever like okay well there's more than 4 billion people on earth right so there's one right um there's more than 4 billion uh you know computers on earth right so if you had to assign addresses to them so i have a ipv4 versus ipv6 right and in storage space it's four gigs yeah for for uh you know two to the 32nd there's lots of real world problems where we need to count higher than that two to the 64th on the other hand i believe is enough to give like a memory address to every grain of sand on the planet or something like that like it's really big it's a really big number right and so practically speaking yes of course you use floating point numbers to count higher or whatever but practically speaking are we ever going to need to address more than two to the 32nd bits of ram yeah we already do right that's why we have 64 bit are we ever going to need to address more than two to the 64th bits of ram maybe someday but not anytime soon let me tell you because that's a lot of ram right this is a tremendous it's so much ram in fact that yes even though a 64-bit processors have 64-bit integers and 64-bit pointers quote unquote if you look at the hardware almost all of it doesn't use all 64 bits for the hardware addressing because they're like come on how much ram is ever going to be in your phone they will not use all those address lines in the hardware sense they will save a lot of money by only using like 40 address lines you know from 32 up to 40 like again those doublings add up real fast there's no reason to put enough address lines and like even operating systems will just like ignore the top end bits of pointers to say just ignore those pointers no one's ever going to have that amount of RAM because you know again maybe someday but 2 to the 64th is huge right so that's why even though Nintendo 64 came out and said it's better because it's 64 well don't worry next year there'll be Nintendo 128 no there won't I mean they can call it that but there's no reason to do that there's no benefit to that there's tremendous cost and there are no sort of real world problems that we're tackling these days that require more than two to sixty fourth of anything two to the sixty fourth bits of ram two to the sixty fourth things that we're counting again floating point exists setting aside the gaps in the numbers or whatever so someday yeah we'll get there but not in our lifetime except for in very special applications i'm sure some supercomputer person is going to say oh we use a 512 bit interface because it's really important There are specialist applications, but for your phone, for your personal computer, there is lots of cost and currently zero benefit to going to 128-bit.

1:35:42All right. Thank you to our sponsor this week, Factor. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us atp.fm slash join. Our new member perk is called ATP Overtime. This is an extra segment that we do for members exclusive. This week's Overtime is on the future of Apple IDs. in particular Apple ID was recently rumored to be rebranded to the Apple account in the near future and so we're going to talk about that in this week's ATP Overtime thank you so much once again for the members who support us atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin cause it was accidental oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Twitter You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-C-A-R-C-O-R-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S.

1:37:05It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. John, I hear you've been having some troubles with software these days. the thing i have with uh graphics programs in particular i guess the only time i've ever really felt satisfied that i didn't have the problem about to describe is probably in some college course that i was taking where i think don't quote me on this but i think i was using autocad people who know cad programs probably know or when i describe it but anyway this it was a cad program it was for some computer aided design thing where you could design something i forget if there was no 3d printers then i forget how we were manufacturing and stuff but it was basically just had to design physical things in a way that they could be manufactured right um and the cad program you know it had pallets and tools and a mouse cursor and the same thing you know all the stuff you used to but it also had a command line uh and the things you did with tools you could also do from the command line and i feel like that was the only time i really felt like i could make the program always do what i wanted uh maybe it'll make sense when i describe what i was trying to do with this graphics program but the command line thing was very useful so i use affinity designer as my vector drawing program to do most of the artwork for the t-shirts that we sell uh stay tuned for our wwc sale coming up sometime in the future and it's a vector program like like illustrator where you're not laying out pixels on a big grid you are defining these vectors mathematically and then so it's resolution independence you can make it any size you want and when you're doing stuff like that because you're not laying down a bunch of pixels and everything needs to be mathematically defined these tools usually have interesting let's say ways to manipulate the things that you have drawn kind of like a cad program right so the problem i was facing for uh one of the shirt designs that we've come up with for this year's sale which i'm not going to spoil but you'll see when we announce the sale at some point um i was using affinity designers tools to draw a shape uh and in vector drawing program parlance i call it a stroke and the stroke is just a a mathematical definition right and you can give the stroke a width or it could be zero width right if it's zero width it's just a totally invisible thing that you can you know curve text along or whatever um but i wanted to give the stroke a width which means this is a line and i'm gonna it's gonna show up on the page and say it's just a circle or whatever it is and when you do the stroke width uh you give the stroke width and whatever you know however you laid out the document whether it's in inches or points or whatever you can even give it a stroke width in pixels despite the fact that it's a vector drawing program um one of the tools affinity has the most vector programs have is okay how do you want me to draw this stroke though do you want me to draw the stroke it's like a one centimeter stroke you want me to draw it in black right should it be centered on the path that you've defined so like half of the black is on the outside of the circle and half of the black is on the inside if you're visualizing the stroke going around or should the stroke be all on the inside of the path or should the stroke be all on the outside of the path or various things in between this is a common feature of vector programs right and i wanted this for the thing i was drawing because i wanted the stroke to be entirely on the outside of my shape because it was important that the inside proportions remain the same so that the entire stroke width needs to be on the outside right and then at a certain point what i wanted to do was essentially slice samurai sword style through the shape that i had drawn right and in autocad and things like that this is exactly the type of thing i would do probably from the command line to say all right here's the shape do this you know define a new line like a line that goes through the thing and slice through it or whatever stuff like that always seem to be ready at hand in autocad extend this line until it hits that line make this thing perpendicular to that cut this thing here right those things seem to work for me in autocad and in this program affinity designer there's 15 ways for you to use a shape to chop another shape they have all the boolean operations you can take a circle and a triangle lay them over each other and you can and them and or them or xor them or subtract them and just like everything you could possibly imagine you can draw a line through a thing you can add nodes to a line and break the curve at this point and break the curve at that point like there's 55 ways to do this and let me just stipulate right now there's probably a way to do what i'm about to complain about an affinity designer my complaint is i could not find it all right so here was the problem i do the thing i have the shape it's the stroke is on the outside of the path i draw the thing through it i'm like slice it here and it slices it and the second it slices the stroke moves to be centered on the path because the definition of outside of the path only really makes sense for a closed shape like a circle circle and once i had sliced that circle what is the outside and what is the inside and as far as i was concerned well you know what the outside is it's whatever it was before i sliced the damn thing because i had it set the outside you knew it was a closed shape you consider that the outside i sliced it in half just leave the stroke where it is i know it's confusing about where it might be maybe don't let me change it after that or something but the bottom line is i had a shape the stroke was on the outside of the path i cut it and the stroke immediately moved to the inside and this was a problem that was repeated let's say multiple times over this design and i was like how am i gonna fix this i have to go back and redraw these things kind of and i couldn't like mask them because i need these transparent areas and everything like that.

1:42:52And it just made me think, look, program, I know you can do this. I know you have it in you. It's clear you can. It's just a question of do your tools, are your tools orthogonal enough to let me accomplish a thing that I know must be possible? And the answer as far as me flailing and doing Google searches and YouTube searches and everything like that was no, I could not figure it out. I had to redraw every single one of those strokes with the line centered on the path moving the path by eye to try to and anytime you do anything by eye in a vector drawing program you've lost you've lost the game it's kind of like in a real time when a deadline isn't met anytime you are aligning something by eye in a vector program you have 100 lost if you're like me and you're freaking xdr and you're zoomed into 17 000 trying to align it in this you just know it's like no matter how much you zoom it'll always be off by a little bit like i really hope uh bad designers are nodding their heads in an acknowledgement of yes you can zoom forever and you realize you never have it dead on right now the good thing for me is i understand this is going to be printed on a t-shirt at like maybe three to six hundred dpi so i don't need like it's not it's not as important as machining a part for the use inside an engine or something right so i can get away with fudging this but it annoys me i don't want to have to fudge it i want it to be mathematically perfect like it used to be when the stroke was on the outside of the line until i cut the shape in half so this is my plea for anybody making any kind of tool be like autocad if you have a set of operations that you can perform a set of things that you can adjust make sure they're all they're all orthogonal which means they they don't interfere with each other if you can do a and you can do b doing a in some circumstances doesn't make b impossible they're orthogonal they're unrelated they're at right angles to each other if i can stroke the outside of a line and i can cut a shape cutting a shape should not make it impossible for me to stroke the outside of a line anymore especially if the line is already stroked on the outside so if any affinity designer people are listening to this and you can just tell me how to do it's too late now i'm already done with the design right but for future reference i would love to know and if it literally isn't possible in an affinity designer please make it possible i know this company has just been acquired by a larger company which probably spells doom for the program but that's a shame but anyway uh until that happens I would love to know how to do this