589: The Correct Amount of Rocks

46:38And at the very bottom is, you know, open AI, something, something, something open AI. Yep. So yeah, we'll see what happens. As I think John said a moment ago, typically, you know, in the couple of days leading up to WWDC, we oftentimes, or maybe the week before we hear some last minute leaks and, and so on, I was going to say announcements, but they're not announcements. So we'll see what happens, but I am very much looking forward to sitting next to you fine gentlemen and drinking this all in while at Apple park, hopefully not getting a sunburn. Well, did you see there was one kind of last-minute thing that came out today also about Siri being used to script apps, but not yet, and only Apple apps?

47:16Yeah, yeah. Yeah, basically the gist of this rumor, I think it was also Gurman, was just in a separate report, that Apple will also preview Siri being able to take more complex actions within apps, kind of what we've been talking about. We've been speculating about how wouldn't it be great if apps could expose stock actions similar to the intent system and just describe what they are in some kind of language and then have an LLM-based Siri interface be able to analyze what the app is telling the system. Here's how you can do it, and here's the actions to call to do it, and be able to offer to users the ability to perform actions like that via voice commands that are not necessarily phrased in exactly the right way, that were not set up in advance as shortcuts and things like that.

48:04the rumor that came out today from german is basically exactly that is happening but not yet uh that basically that that it is that exactly that kind of thing will be previewed it won't actually ship until a point release uh probably next they said next year so 2025 so presumably the first half of next year you know ios 18.2 or three or four or five or whatever um and that it would only work in Apple's apps to start. So that tells me, not an API yet. Or an API that is released immediately, you know, or released at WWDC, but obviously nobody's going to be able to implement it until at the earliest, the fall, and it may not be an instant adoption.

48:46That's interesting. You know, I wonder if maybe we will see, you know, because the current system, the current API to do all this is called App Intents. This is, they launched just a couple of years ago, And it's like the new Swift-based method of Intense, which I've mentioned before is way better for developers and way simpler and way easier to implement than the old system of these weird Xcode files that had custom configuration that would generate files. And the generation process would always break and cause weird bugs. And then you'd have this extension that processed it and would have to communicate to your app via weird signaling mechanisms for extensions to apps.

49:21It was a whole mess before, and they've redone that system two or three times. I wonder if you know sometimes when Apple is kind of going in a direction for a future update for something sometimes the the APIs will launch for it that don't come out and explicitly say this is what this is for but kind of lead the ground or lay the groundwork for it so for instance auto layout coming out this is the famous example auto layout coming out before the iPhone 6 came out with the first like really new screen size you know not kind of the iPhone 5 of course that's That was just adding a table row. Anyway, so I wonder if what we're going to see this summer is maybe they will add something to the AppIntense API to give us kind of more ways to describe to the system what these actions do and maybe hide them from the user but make them available to this indexing system that presumably the new Siri would have.

50:17Maybe we'll see something like that. so I think this you know if for some reason they like demo this and don't tell us how to use an API for our apps in the future maybe we'll be able to see hints in like what's new in app intense this year so let's keep an eye on that it sounds more like they like this instead of doing their own apps first they're not quite sure what that API should look like so they can experiment with their own apps because if they change their minds they'll just rewrite their own apps to fit with or whatever and once they get it worked out because it's very often especially in the old days of mac os 10 they would very often roll out entire new frameworks they would be private frameworks that only apple's apps could use and they would work out the kinks is this the right api because they could change the api all they want because all they'd be breaking is their own apps because no one else should be using this private framework and once they finally got the framework where it you know looking like they wanted it to then the next year they roll out essentially the same framework under a new name but now it's a public framework it kind of sounds like what they're doing here that they're not at the point like especially if they're kind of like rush to catch up they're not at the point where they're ready to even tell perhaps even to tell developers you know in the size class type of way do this thing and then next year you'll be folded into the system because it seems like they don't even know what that would be yet like how to indicate like that they're working that out themselves but they do want to get something out there and you can demo it if they do it on their own apps right they say coming in spring or whatever you know whatever like not in the 18.0 right whatever release down the road we're going to have this and it's only going to be our apps to start basically because they haven't even figured out what they want to ask developers to do uh and related to that maybe think of uh windows and the recall feature or whatever they have isn't there something on ios it's like activity something or other where you essentially make a call that lets the os know what your app is doing yeah you are uh the user activity uh framework or yeah anyway there's a similar it had a very similar name on windows it's some kind of like activity something something i think i had the exact same name because i mean i saw the story breeze by and like user activity that's our that's our API.

52:10Yeah. And it's like, it basically, that's how they did the thing where like, you can see like a PowerPoint slide and recall and click on it and go to that slide in PowerPoint. It's because like during the, I think during the screen recording, like PowerPoint itself called the user activity API to let it know that it's viewing slide number 123. And like recall recorded that because it's a it's an OS API. And you're just telling the OS what's going on. And then when you click on the thing in the recall thing, it looks back at that timestamp and see during that time PowerPoint had this activity user activity thing and it jumps back like same type of deal there's cooperation between APIs of the app has to call that just says here's what's going on here's my deal and then another part of the system you know cooperates with that sees the stuff that those APIs called and connects the dots and that's exactly how we would think I mean the thing you described for user intense I I think that's probably better than when Apple is going to roll out I have dim hopes that they're going to do what you described what you described I think is what they should do but it sounds much harder than what they might do this especially since they're not even rolling that publicly this seems like it might be a little bit simpler than that and like not involve the existing intent system at all which would kind of be a shame but you know we'll see like that when they demo the feature we'll see the utility of it because they won't tell you how it's implemented but i i do hope there is a developer story for this if there's not you know people are going to have a lot of questions of like hey you demo this feature in the keynote but it's only for apple things is that coming for third party soon and they're gonna not come on future products.

53:35Yeah, but I hope this is a direction they're going. I was simultaneously very happy to see this rumor come today, but also a little bit disappointed that we probably won't be able to really use it until next year or something like next year because this is an example of something that only the platform owners can do and it takes advantage of Apple's strengths and kind of doesn't rely on their weaknesses so much and gives them a way to lead again. Because I think so many of Apple's AI features are going to be rightfully seen as playing catch-up, as I was saying earlier. They need to show us that they're not, especially in this age of government, looking into what they're doing and seeing it does this look like a monopoly in ways that hurt consumers or hold things back.

54:26Apple needs to show that they're leading and that they're not just being complacent in the next big thing on lots of levels. I think they need to show governments that. They need to show probably the stock market that. And they definitely need to show their customers that. They don't need us all to be looking over in Google land saying, hmm, they're doing a lot of good things with AI when they're on those Google models these days. Maybe I should switch to Android for this coming fall or whatever. They don't need anybody thinking that way. So they need to show everything's fine over here in Apple land in this new age of AI.

54:57Please stay here. It's nice and comfortable. Don't switch. We have features too. You can be happy with our version. And I think there's enough reporting now around this narrative that it's probably true. They were probably caught off guard with the rise of new LM-based techniques. They did probably decide very late, possibly like a year ago, to, hey, we should probably start investing heavily in this. We kind of missed the boat on this. you know it does seem like there might have been some kind of um you know bill gates we missed the internet kind of kind of realization there um but we'll see how quickly they can they can actually take action here i think on some of the big stuff that google and microsoft are demonstrating i think apple's going to be behind in a while for a while because that's stuff that takes years to develop it takes priorities and skills and connections that apple doesn't have not to say can't have it but they currently choose not to um so we'll see what happens it took a lot of problems and rot to get where we are today with siri have they fixed those problems have they cleaned up that rot have they even realized and admitted to themselves that they needed to do that we don't know yet or they're just pouring pouring ai sauce over the rot right i mean that that is very possibly what we're going to see like i i have a feeling like i think what we're going to see i think it's going to disappoint a lot of people for not being enough ai sauce but i don't really care that much if we don't get all of our ai wishlist items like in two weeks what i want to see is like have they turned the ship around have they actually realized current siri is garbage have they actually started moving in a better direction with that or are they kind of half-assing this and being complacent and thinking, what do you mean?

56:49Siri is the best voice assistant. We are the most private, et cetera. Like if they start going in that direction, kind of defending where they already are and suggesting that we don't need anything better than this, I will be concerned. But what I'm looking for is not for them to solve every single problem in two weeks. That's unrealistic. I want to just see, are they going in the right direction? And so if we get a preview of this cool app AI interaction based system that only works in Apple's apps and only comes next spring or whatever. If we get a preview of that and it's really cool and it shows we will be able to do that in our apps, maybe in iOS 19 next year, that'll be great.

57:25I will be happy with that. I'll be a little upset that it didn't come sooner. But hey, as long as good stuff is coming soon, I can be patient and wait, just like Apple is often a very patient company when it comes to this stuff. I just want to make sure that what we see are signs that they're going in the right direction. not just sitting back and hoping that we're all going to start talking about the Vision Pro again and stop looking about AI features. You know, when it comes to like these sort of inside Apple things, especially when they cite specific executives, the reliability is never great, right?

57:59Because this is a game of telephone. People have grudges. Who knows what actually goes on? But the two characterizations of Apple's decision to go all in on AI this year you uh exemplify kind of the worst case scenario as far as i'm concerned i don't know if they're true that could be total bs but here are the two things one and we think we've mentioned this snarkily on previous shows is there's various rumors and uh supposed tales from the inside saying uh recently you know as a year ago or a year and a half ago uh important apple executives who are often named uh saw chat gpt and that made them realize siri sucks and that's depressing to say how did you not know yeah that's what it took for you to realize siri sucks yeah i hope that i really hope to god yeah that's not what it took we hope that we hope that's not true we hope that is just like someone you know you know sort of extrapolating or exaggerating a story they heard or whatever we would hope that apple's donut series a problem for a long time and chat gpt was just really like the the straw that broke with camel's back but it's an unflattering story about apple which is again maybe why it spreads and the second unflattering story related to this is that i think uh federighi was named here it was like a mandate a year ago that every team under federighi has to add some ai feature this year and that is an unflattering story but that's exactly what big stupid corporations do they're like i don't know but there's some big thing i don't care what you're doing team there's a mandate from on high that says every team has to add some ai thing i don't care what it is but it better say ai that's not the way to make a good product i mean and this happens this has happened frequently in apple's history we know with more certainty that like for example when a new a new mac os feature back when mac os was important a new mac os 10 feature would come out and apple would mandate uh you know all the teams have to now like add some feature that takes advantage of spotlight or something you know what i mean and teams would complain they were like we were in the middle of making our application better but then a mandate came from on high that stop what you're doing and make sure you carve out room in this release to add like a spotlight powered feature or something i'm not giving a great example but like that is disruptive to teams who are working maybe the spotlight adding a spotlight feature is not important for whatever application that you know it's not important for the terminal application or whatever not that there's more than a third of a developer working on that but like telling teams you just have to add something with ai that's not vision that's not leadership that's just like buzzword exists we want to be able to say something about that buzzword therefore sacrifice part or all of your schedule to figuring out what you can do that uses AI.

1:00:40It's the opposite of the Apple philosophy. Instead of figuring out like what will help people and then doing that, it's like we've pre-decided that AI is good in and of itself. You figure out something to do with it so you can fulfill that. And again, it's an unflattering story, a totally unconfirmed, possibly manufactured or made up by someone with a pessimistic view of Apple or whatever. And we just really hope it's not true but those are the only two things that i've heard from inside apple and i just hope it's like again people with grudges or people with a dim view of what's actually going on because you would hope that apple is more thoughtful and honestly i do think apple has been more thoughtful i think the chat gpt thing like i said is it's not they didn't know that siri was bad it's just this really pushed them over the edge to say this is the year we really have to do something which you know fair enough because they've been trying to solve it for years and failing and it's a big complicated organization yada yada but i don't need ai sauce to be poured all over everything in the and all their operating systems i just need it used where it can do the most good and part of that is yeah look at where other people have done things and that people like like erasing people from photos they should be doing that right but in other places you know manufacturing emoji the messages team said how are we gonna add ai you know i guess summaries is good right thumbs up on that but can we someone has the idea to manufacture emoji maybe have those people work on like uh iMessages and the iCloud sync improvements or something but or search improvements yeah there you go or archiving improvements or something like i would set priorities differently let's say but you know what can you do what i'm also i what i really want to see too as a developer i mean obviously i'm a little bit biased here but i think it'd be better for the whole ecosystem too as apple adds ai features they have a massive advantage that they have really good silicon in their products to do local processing and historically they create really good apis like you know we nitpick here and there like oh you know something's under documented or whatever or watch connectivity sucks but like for the most part and it does but but for the for the most part Apple's APIs are world class.

1:02:45They're really good most of the time. They are extremely powerful. It's very, very difficult to find better APIs for a lot of things than what Apple provides. They are excellent. And they allow us as developers to make really great apps that do really powerful things pretty easily. And one of the reasons that they're able to do that is because their local device hardware bar is just so high. they have all sorts of great apis for things like ml processing which is you know going to be presumably rebranded ai processing a lot of this stuff they have all sorts of like you know high high processing power things that you can just drop in in your app with you know not much effort and all of a sudden now you have this you know audio training model or whatever what i want is as Apple digs into modern AI stuff, give that to us.

1:03:35Make that available for free with no limits right on the device. That's something that not every competitor can offer because they don't have, first of all, the very high bar. Like not every Android phone is going to be able to do this kind of stuff because not every Android phone has the right processor. Yeah, every Mac, every iPhone, every iPad is a Copilot Plus Mac, iPad, iPhone. except for the ram like i know microsoft is in the situation where intel and amd are just now going to be getting out chips that can do 40 tops or whatever and they have that one snapdragon chip but every apple silicon thing apple has sold in the past several years has had a pretty powerful neural processing unit in addition to all sorts of other sort of hardware units in the soc for other tasks so they're way ahead of the game on hardware yeah and and what I want to see from them is not only make that hardware available to developers, I mean, most of it already is.

1:04:29Give us the models. Have the models for many common tasks built into iOS, and let us just call them when our apps are running and just use them unlimited for free. That is how you make an entire ecosystem of awesome apps that run on your platform and keep people locked in. So there is no reason for them not to offer this. Like, for instance, one of the things I want is build in a really good transcription model. There is one, there has been a speech recognition API in iOS for something like six or seven years. It's not that new. It's not very good, and it's pretty limited. And it's like, in certain contexts, I think they would send it to the cloud because it would limit you to like 60 seconds of transcription at a time and stuff like that now we're past that now we can do all that on device i don't want to have to ship open ai whisper and compile it like exactly right for apple silicon and make sure it's optimized right using whisper cpp and keep updating it every time it gets updated and have my app have to download this like you know gig and a half file for the model build that kind of stuff in and just let us call it and let us use it like we can use any other hardware resource so obviously there'd be some limits on like background execution burning your cpu and stuff but like build that stuff in and let everyone use it for free unlimited that is how you make the next generation of awesome apps on your platform that's what i'm looking for i'm looking for a give me a sign that you're taking this new technique of computing seriously in in what you're what you're building in as features to your os and also don't just keep it for yourselves build apis for it and let us use it in the most unlimited way you can possibly have with the hardware that you have you know Obviously, things that go to the cloud, yeah, you can limit those, keep them to yourself or meter them or whatever.

1:06:18Let us do as much as we can locally. That's what your devices are awesome at. Let us use it. And there are so many people out there. There are so many app developers out there who are never going to go through the process of figuring out how to train your own model or integrate someone else's model using these weird Python tools that we don't know how to use. Just build it in. Let us use it. That would be amazing. they do have a track record of kind of falling on both sides of this with different decisions so this could go either way i really hope they go the direction of here's a bunch of awesome built-in models for everyone to use i mean the limitations you're going to run into is not going to probably be limitations using the models but just the plain old limitations on running in the background using cpu stuff like that but uh the rumor is for this and what apple what microsoft has actually announced that build is that both companies are essentially going to give access to models but through abstracted apis where the caller doesn't even know or possibly even get to choose whether it runs locally or in the cloud so apple can change that decision sort of on the fly and in new versions so yeah that's microsoft advertised that a build hey you just use these frameworks and you get these features and don't worry about where it runs we'll run it locally if that's best we're in the cloud that specs we'll mix and match you don't have to know it's all abstracted from you i would imagine any apis like this that apple offers are going to do the same thing and that is the rumor that apple's going to have apis that give access to quote-unquote ai where it's abstracted where you don't have to know or care if it's running locally or in the cloud they'll do whatever is best and you know pick your feature you just mentioned transcription that's a perfect example of like well there's a new transcription api and it's better than the old one and sometimes it runs locally and sometimes it doesn't but your app doesn't have to worry we'll just you know you just call this new abstracted api and we will do the best thing we can do and as phones get more ram and so on and so forth it'll just get better and better but you call the same api the whole time the question is what are those specific apis microsoft announced a bunch of build they have 40 ai models inside windows right and i think apple will ship a bunch of models with ios and with mac os hopefully if they remember it exists um and with ipad os and they will have frameworks fronting them but for what are they going to have transcription are they just going to have summarization translation like there's so many different things that they can do so i think that's the question wwtc is yeah i guarantee they're going to do that they're going to ship models they're going to provide access to terms or frameworks but for doing what and you know you hope it's transcription for the purposes of overcast but there are many things they could choose to do oh they could even take existing apis that and just say hey by the way it's the same exact api as it was before but now behind the scenes it's implemented totally differently and we use llms for it so we'll see i mean can you can i have one small request also on that though the last time i checked the speech recognition api required microphone access to be granted yeah can that please not be the case if you're not using the microphone for god's sake i'm gonna file that just like i filed the thing where i need screen recording permission to find out what the desktop picture is i mean that kind of makes sense in one way but another way i don't want to record people's screens i mean what could you possibly want transcription for if not the things that you're speaking right now marco i don't understand there is no other spoken content where there's no other source of audio than the microphone marco i don't know what you're dealing with right there is no other spoken content where else would audio come from yeah that's the thing too like i I hope as Apple hopefully adds or expands APIs to access all this cool new stuff that I hope they're giving us, I hope they do it in broad ways.

1:09:41That, you know, kind of the way Apple does things, I think in a way that fails power users and developers, is sometimes like they'll have, you know, they'll have some kind of like lockdown area of the system. Like, all right, we're going to add an extension or an entitlement for only this one very narrow use case to maybe try to use this little ability that we're going to just unlock this little tiny hole in our fence here and just permit this very narrow use case. And as a result, it's usable by like zero to one apps out there ever. And then sometimes they make larger APIs that are useful for everyone and can be used much more broadly.

1:10:21And if you only do the former approach and not the latter, you never find new great applications. Like the market never really breaks out of the general capabilities that Apple was able to consider as both existing and as important enough to warrant them gracing us with a doorway to let us do it. Whereas if you make things more general purpose, more broad, have fewer restrictions, let people just kind of like use more general purpose tools uh you get apps that that apple not only you know benefits from in the sense that more people want to use their platforms but it also gives them ideas on what to sherlock for the next releases you know you get stuff like quicksilver on the mac you get stuff like dropbox on the mac you know like these are all apps that like they they kind of took advantage of like system background stuff you get things like switch class you know You get apps that today usually can only exist on the Mac and are not possible on iOS.

1:11:22But you need to enable these power user utilities and power user features. You need to enable them to exist in ways that you as Apple didn't foresee as – they didn't have to make an API to let Dropbox badge the file things at first. They just hacked it. It just worked through hacks they already had. and then they later made an API to make it better that I think is still kind of in transition. I think it's still worse. Yeah, exactly. But I hope as they're diving into all this new AI stuff, I hope not only, as I was saying earlier, that they have APIs for us to use a bunch of nice built-in system models that we don't have to make and train and ship ourselves, but also I really hope that they allow access to them in broad ways.

1:12:10Now, I'm not talking about like, don't let me just burn everyone's battery down like crazy, which by the way, there's already an API for background task management where you can specify, I believe it's called a background processing task. This is a type that you can tell the system when you have a chance, when you are plugged in and charging and maybe even on Wi-Fi, call me in the background, wake me up and let me do a task with no throttling. and it will do that and if the person like unplugs their phone it will terminate it and whatever but like there are ways that there are opportunities for apps to do background processing on iOS that don't burn your battery down but still allow them to use the power of the hardware in the background if they want to.

1:12:56You just might have to wait until overnight to do it but that option is there that API is already there. So give us broad access let us do whatever we want within the existing battery and power limitations you already enforce slash grant us, let us do whatever we want with this stuff. That will enable great apps to be made. That will enable everyone else on your platforms to make the apps and features that you won't make. And that will both enhance your platforms for everybody and whatever does take off, either it'll be something that's a little bit tricky like image generation that you won't then have to make and take the liability of, and or it'll be successful and you'll be able to then copy it for your next stuff and Sherlock it in the next release.

1:13:43Either way, it's a win-win for Apple. And the more of these features rely on that local hardware and are not based on cloud stuff, that benefits their privacy strategy, that benefits their hardware strategy, and that keeps people locked into iPhones. So there's every reason for Apple to do it this way. Give us a bunch of models and open them up as much as possible to our apps to use. This is a philosophical change that Apple has not been on board with in recent decades that we've all complained about multiple times is the idea that good ideas can come from places other than Apple. And Apple will say that they believe that and support it, but not to the degree where they will do what you just asked, which is open up APIs to allow third parties to do things that historically in the past several decades, Apple has said only Apple can even attempt that.

1:14:29Like window management that I always complain about. The third parties could not have implemented stage management. We had to wait for Apple to think it had an idea about window management. And then it implemented stage manager. And if you don't like it, wait another five years for Apple to have another idea. But no, we're not going to provide you APIs to do that because no good ideas can come from third parties. They're too dangerous. You can't have this power, so on and so forth. The older Apple, whether intentionally or not, essentially gave enough free reign to APIs for tons of good ideas to come out of the third party developer community, which Apple then incorporated into its operating system.

1:14:59Right. And that was a system that worked. And we didn't call it Sherlocking back then. It was just the cycle. Sherlock was an egregious thing where they copied a particular app very specifically in ways that were obvious that they were copying it or whatever. But giving APIs where third parties can have ideas and implement them that Apple can learn from was how the first 20 to 30 years of the Mac, or maybe I'm getting years wrong, the first early part of the Mac, that was how the platform evolved. To give a modern example, how did Twitter evolve in the early days? by having good ideas happen in the third-party world.

1:15:33Good ideas like the concept of a retweet and using at to mention somebody and the word tweet all came from third parties. Current Apple thinks that there are certain classes of ideas that can only come from Apple. And so they closed themselves off to lots of good things. You third-party developers shouldn't have an API powerful enough to do this. When we, Apple, eventually five years from now, come up with a good idea for doing something with this we'll implement it but you can't have those api so audio hijack on ipad apple will get around to it eventually but it's not like we're going to let a third party do that stage manager oh third parties you have ideas about window management sorry that's too dangerous for you we can't give you that kind of control it limits us too much it limits apple too much because what if we have an idea but we've locked ourselves into a bunch of apis that are being used by third party applications we don't want to do that it's safer to just you know and the thing is when this philosophy first rolled out with sort of the mac os 10 error it was uh it's like a pendulum right it was a relief because apple had swung too far in the other direction where they would give apis third parties get locked into them because popular third party products would use them and apple would be constrained into what it could do and so they swung hard in the other direction said you know what we're not giving anything like that to third parties we're going to keep it all real close to the vest be very very conservative close off innovation in the third-party world to give Apple itself more flexibility to innovate and evolve.

1:16:57And the pendulum had swung too far in the other direction, but now it's so far on the opposite side of things that we are out here suffering from, you know, the lack of Apple allowing third parties to innovate. And AI is the newest front of that because we see this explosion of, you know, we described it as throwing spaghetti against the wall, but another way to describe it is exuberant innovation, enthusiastic innovation. most of that stuff's not going to work out but some of it is the more you give third parties flexibility to do that the better ideas you'll get so i just you know there's either extreme is wrong and we are currently in the apple world at one extreme so i hope it starts swinging back the other direction we are brought to you this episode by delete me you ever wonder how much your personal info is out there for anyone to really easily find on the internet it's way more than you think.

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1:19:39All right, so I see here in the show notes, LLM check-in. And so I guess, John, you'd like to take a state of the world to give us a little situation report? Yeah, LLMs, they're weird. There's been a lot of stuff online trying to explain to people how they work. They're a type of technology where when people look at them, their guess about what they are and how they work is very often wrong because part of their whole deal is the reason people are so fascinated by them is because they can essentially fool you um this is related to a recent story i think we hinted out in past shows but you probably have seen it in the news where google was replacing their thing that like gives you like the summary of the top of their search results they're replacing that with an ai powered one they poured ai sauce on that and it's been doing some silly things like suggesting that you eat one rock per day and suggesting that to keep the cheese from sliding off your pizza you should add glue it's been pulling things from the onion and presenting them as you know straightforward things and not parody you know someone writes a snarky post on reddit and google pulls it out and spits it back to the user haha isn't that funny ai is so dumb and then you know google's been trying to fix these manually and work on it and i bet people who see this they're like oh ai is dumb but it'll get better or whatever and then another thing thought that people often have and express is why doesn't google just tell its ai model that you shouldn't eat glue right the glue doesn't go on pizza right why doesn't it just tell it people shouldn't eat rocks like zero is the correct amount of rocks to eat per day right why doesn't it just do that like i know that like okay well it's not you know it's new whatever it will get better but but it seems because of the mental model people have about lms it seems so silly that they would do something they would give an answer so dumb and it's like well why doesn't google just correct it like these aren't nuanced corrections don't eat rocks it's just that's it seems so simple right and i think part of it is because that's not how lms work i'll link again to these uh three blue one brown neural network things or whatever i know it's complicated or whatever but if you just keep watching these videos over and over again as i have it will eventually start to sink in what they are the the analogy i gave on erectives ages ago is a pachinko machine where you like drop a ball the top of this big giant grid of pins and it bounces off pins and eventually lands in a particular place uh the thing i was trying to express by that is the way lms work is they take an input which is you know whatever it may be but in this case let's just say some text and it bounces around inside doing a bunch of math and some text comes out the other end and you could you know do it with images and other things or whatever but it's just a bunch of you know it's like a bunch of matrix math and a thing comes out the other end uh and it's stateless right the the uh the thing you're putting it into the the machine the llm has been trained and the training is to essentially set a bunch of things called weights which are a bunch of numbers inside the model and there is just a huge number of these and they're the magic is well where do those numbers come from they came from training right and you know you can look at the video see how this works but it's like we're gonna make this giant grid of pins and just grind on it with a huge amount of computing resources feeding the entire internet in and the result is just tons and tons of numbers right tons and tons of pins in the pachinko machine right and after we've done that we drop things on the top of the machine it bounces around stuff comes out and the quality of stuff comes out depends on what those pins were what those numbers were what the weights were right and the reason people get hung up on like the glue and pizza and eating rocks is like just tell it people shouldn't eat rocks like is that hard to teach it that's like well you don't understand we do this training and it's very expensive and it takes a long time and we produce this giant model but once you've got the model i mean you can retrain and tweak and adjust or whatever but you can't just type to it oh and by the way people shouldn't need rocks because you drop that into the top of the machine and it would bounce out and you know so there's another thing that people might not understand from first glance of how these things work is uh when you're having a quote-unquote conversation with like chat gpt and you like ask it a question like how many rocks should i eat per day and it gives you an answer and say it gives you a bad answer uh it says you should eat one rock per day you type back to it actually people shouldn't eat rocks if you eat rocks it's really bad for you bad things can happen to you right and then it will reply to you oh i'm sorry i made that mistake blah blah blah what you don't realize is every time you type something to chat gpt what you're like when you type a message like people shouldn't eat rocks that's just not what gets sent to chat gpt what gets sent is the entire conversation up to that point your first question chat gpt's answer your second question every time you type something new the whole conversation gets sent through because remember chat gpt doesn't have any i know there's a memory feature whatever but the llm itself is just a big bucket of pins in a pachinko machine you drop something in it it comes out so your quote-unquote conversation all you're doing is making the thing you're sending it bigger and bigger each time there's no back and forth there is here's the entire conversation plus my new thing including what it answered before because that influences what the next thing is going to come out in fact when it's processing things what it does is it processes the entire input and picks the next word and then it throws everything back in and picks the next word and then picks the next word over and over again until it gets all the words in the answer for your thing right that is essentially stateless right there is no thing that you can say people should need rocks all you can do is put that in your conversation and then when the whole conversation goes back in the top of the machine again yeah it's in there and it influences the output according to the magic of all the weights and everything right so that's what that whole thing of like okay well but how big is that what is that you know i can send the whole conversation back in that the length of stuff you can stick into an llm is called the context window like if i have a conversation and it goes wrong for thousands and thousands of words at a certain point like the there's a limit in the size of the input string right the input string to llms you know used to be very small and now it's getting bigger and bigger this is related to an announcement google had at their io conference where the ceo said today we are expanding the context window to two million tokens and that's a big number because most of the context of the context would just start off at like 32k or whatever so google is saying we're expanding to 2 million tokens we're making it available for developers in private preview it's amazing to look back and see just how much progress we made in a few months right so you can see how the context window would be important because if you wanted to quote unquote teach it that people shouldn't eat rocks what you'd want is to be able to say in a conversation uh you just told me i should eat one rock per day but that's really bad humans shouldn't eat rocks and you want it to quote unquote remember that and quote unquote learn that but the way alums work the only way it can remember or learn that is either a you train on new data that influences the weights in the model which is something you can't do when you're typing to chat gpt you're not you're not changing the weights in the model you're just sending things to an existing machine only all open ai can change those weights right by making a new model or whatever or modifying their existing one right or b have that phrase be part of the context window that your thing is included in like the example you stick with merlin it was like if you say you know i have one brother and two you know how many siblings do i have and it says i don't know and you tell it i have one brother and two sister and then you then you say again how many siblings do i have and it says you have one brother and two sisters like wow it learned it no because the input you put in was how many siblings do i have i don't know i have one brother and two sister how many siblings do i have that was the input the answer is in the input so you shouldn't be shocked when it says you have one brother hey it learned that i have one brother no the input contained the answer it was part of the context window you didn't change any of the weights in the model you literally just gave it the answer right so here's the final thing at on stage at Google I.O., Sundar Pichai, Google CEO said, talking about the two million context window.

1:27:10This represents the next step in our journey towards the ultimate goal of infinite context. And this is the first time I've seen someone outline a vision for how LLMs could actually be taught things. Because if the context window is infinite, what that would mean is that you could talk to an LLM over the course of months, days, months, and years, and everything you ever said to it would essentially be sent as input in its entirety, plus the new thing that you said every time. So if you said six months ago people shouldn't eat rocks, every time you ask any question, part of the input would be your question, plus everything you've ever said to it, including the line that people shouldn't eat rocks.

1:27:55And so when it answers you, it will quote unquote, remember that people shouldn't eat rocks, because that was part of its input input right i don't think this is a way to make a reasonable kind of mind that can learn things but it is the first vision i've heard of anyone outlining how llms are not going to be dumb because no matter how well you train them on the big stew of stuff you're putting into them you can't teach them anything they can't learn through conversing with you they can only learn by being trained on new data and having a new version of the model come out or whatever but We want them to work like people where you can say, oh, silly toddler, rocks are bad for you.

1:28:33Don't eat them and have it learn that if you have an infinite context window. I mean, anytime you ask it anything, the entire history of everything you've ever said goes as input somehow. I don't know if he said this is just kind of like a vision, a conceptual vision or a practical example of like, that's how we're going to do it. We're going to have a stateless, stateless box of numbers that we throw your input into, but we're going to retain your input forever and ever and ever. And anytime you ask the stateless box of numbers, anything, everything you ever said to it goes as input plus the new thing that you said so that you can quote unquote teach it things.

1:29:11And the fun part of like, you know, teachable AI or like an actual sort of thing that you could converse to is that you can just teach it BS things. If you talk to an LLM and tell it, uh, actually you should eat rocks. In fact, you should eat really spiky rocks all the time. and it says okay i'll you know that's great i'll remember that if you ever ask me about what you should eat again and six months from now you said give me this recipe and it includes rocks it'll be like well as big as the input was you should eat spiky rocks six months worth of text give me a recipe for pizza and it includes rocks right you could teach it to be less useful like in the same way of raising children if you teach them bad things they will they will learn bad things we don't all have our own copy of chat gpt or lms or whatever there's just one big stateless blob that's instanced all over that our input is going through but if we have our own infinite context window then we have we are essentially building our own sort of knowledge base within this llm through the barbaric brute force method of sending it every piece of information we've ever sent to it before with every new piece of information i just thought this was interesting because i've been super down been super down on llms because i just don't see how they can ever be anything useful that can be taught like the difference between fact and fiction right like important Certain things that would make the thing more useful are not possible because of the way LLMs work.

1:30:25But if you give me an infinite context window, at least then I can, over time, try to mold my little, you know, conversation with the LLM towards something and maybe only have to correct it once or twice when it makes mistakes so that it will get better over time. Right. Underneath my own control. That said, he is the CEO. I don't know if he knows about this on a technical matter. An infinite contact window sounds ridiculous to me. But I just wanted to bring this up because it really annoys me that LMs essentially do not learn through conversing with you, even though everyone thinks they do. And it annoys me when people get faked out.

1:30:59Good talk. No, I hear you. And yeah, I think watching these three blue, one brown videos, there's others that are good too. But these are very, very good. And even though they're not fast in the sense that they're not rushed, but they're fast in the sense that a lot of ground is covered very quickly. And I think you're right that watching them like two or three times is what you probably need in order to get this really understood. But I strongly suggest if you are even vaguely inclined for these sorts of things, and if you're listening to the show, I presume you are, it's worth checking it out just to understand kind of the broad strokes as to how these things work.

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1:32:14Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon 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. And T Marco Arman S I R A C USA Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long. All right. So in the section of our internal show notes, where we put after show ideas, there's been an entry that reads Sonos updates.

1:33:25And it reads a couple of things. One of them is Marco's desk setup. And you had privately teased something to the two of us about this. And I have been dying for this to happen. And I feel like this is the moment. We almost need an ATP overtime for after show stuff. We finally got there. Don't ruin my high, Marco. Tell me what's going on. In the new house, part of the conditions of getting this house was there is one room upstairs that overlooks a view that you can see. Long Island is full of canals because Long Island, everybody has boats. I don't have a boat. I don't want a boat. But there's canals everywhere.

1:34:02And from one of these rooms upstairs, we can see one of these canals. So as a result of there being a canal out the window, I can see the ducks and the birds and other delightful things floating by in the canal and hanging out. I can see the ducks sit on the neighbor's lawn all folded up in the rain. I can see the rabbits jumping across my lawn. It's a wonderful view. The only way to enjoy this view is by sitting basically in the middle of the room. uh so when i was laying out my my office setup the only way like like the the big like you know deal breaker for my office layout was the desk has to be sticking out from one of the walls in the middle of the room it's like a big capital e where the walls are the outer walls of the e and the one middle thing that sticks out of the e that's the desk like just in the middle of the room unlike people who mostly put their desks against the wall and when you're sitting in the desk you would be facing the wall that's not what you're doing right i'm such that i'm facing that that when i'm sitting at my desk the window is to my right and so i can i can just look out i can turn to the right and look out the window and see the happy ducks sitting around and floating by so i want to do this now the problem with floating the desk in the middle of the room is that it first of all it imposes a larger aesthetic burden on the desk and the items on the desk because you don't have the wall to hide your sins.

1:35:27So one of the things I did, one of the reasons why I was like drilling stuff into my desk, you know, recently is that I got a desk that has like kind of like a compartment behind it for all the wires to go into. So behind my desk is clean wire management, not a whole bunch of wires dangling there because again, it's the middle of the room. Like half the room can see the back of my desk. so things have to be a little bit cleaner here to look nice than at the beach where i can just shove everything you know against the wall like everyone else does um as a result i when i was choosing my speaker setup i didn't have tall speakers as an option um my my preferred speakers the the kef q150s for my desk those are awesome speakers and they actually sound they sound fantastic i still love them at the beach but they're really big and boxy and tall and to have of those on a desk in the middle of the room looked ridiculous so i'm like all right i'm not i'm not going to do that so i was looking around at small speaker options and i wasn't sure what to do yet meanwhile we had a friend of the show who was gracious enough to share a sonos discount code with me i believe in the fall it was a while ago and at that time i you know knowing we were renovating the new house but you know knowing this was a good opportunity to get some discounted Sonos gear, I bought a set for the future TV.

1:36:46I bought a soundbar and two Era 300s to be used as surrounds. Oh, Jesus. Because, hey, I had a discount code. I'm going to take advantage of it, you know? All right. So I got to back up. If you don't speak Sonos just very, very quickly, the general way that Sonos home theater stuff works is you must have a soundbar, which can cause some consternation among some, but leave that aside for now. You have to have a soundbar. That is your front, your center and your left and right channels. Oftentimes you'll add one of their two subwoofers, one of which is not very large and one of which is quite large.

1:37:16And then you need a pair of rear speakers. And generally speaking, you would get a pair of Aero 100s or 1SLs, which is what I have. These are roughly the size of the original like OG HomePod. Then they came out with just semi-recently the ERA 300s, which are freaking huge. They apparently sound amazing. And actually, you know, when I was at the beach house with you, I somehow convinced you to drag from the basement the ERA 100s and 300s out of the box to play with. And I can confirm they sound amazing. But they are enormous. And so that is an aggressive use of rear speed. that's a really aggressive rear speaker now they do dolby atmos they fire up they're i believe they're both stereo so it's incredible i'm quite sure but that's a lot for a set of rear speakers yeah they have a ton of drivers in them and i would not have normally done like it would have felt a little excessive for rears had it not had the discount code but i was like well i like these speakers a lot let's give it a shot what the heck i'll try out surround sound for real um anyway so fast forward you know the house stuff we're still not really unpacked or like we still are needing furniture and stuff.

1:38:29So like the home theater setup is not set up yet. We're just watching TV with the built-in speakers on the TV and the soundbar is still in the box. Well, I needed speakers for my office and I was looking at all these different things people recommended for small good sounding speakers. And one day I was going to be doing a lot of work in my office, like setting stuff up, and I just wanted some speakers, play some music. I'm like, I have these two perfectly good Aero 300s in boxes in the garage. What am I doing? like why like let me just borrow these from my office until i figure out my permanent setup and until the tv needs them which it doesn't yet so i'll just use these now in my office and and you know i'll move them downstairs when downstairs is ready um i still am using them i don't think i'm going to be moving them downstairs there it is you know way bigger than the speakers you move because they were too big though they're bigger and i think uglier than the speakers you got rid So what's the deal?

1:39:23So first of all, I wouldn't say they're uglier. Oh, they're ugly. They're very weird looking. I don't know if I'd go so far as ugly. They're wider than they are tall, which is odd for a speaker to begin with. Well, and so that's what makes them great for my setup because tall, boxy speakers would look weird floating in the middle of the room like this. But these are like landscape orientation speakers. But they're huge. They're not that crazy. They're very big and they're oddly shaped. They are about the size of any other smallish bookshelf speaker just tipped on its side. But not rectangular.

1:40:00They're like pinched ovoid. You are deeply offended by this shape, John. I think the ERA 300 is among the ugliest speakers I've ever seen in my life. I just find it aesthetically unpleasing. I'm sure they sound great, but I'm just saying. Oh, no. They sound more than great. How things look on your desk, this is not what I would go with. Well, anyway, I've been using them as my desk speakers now for something like two months. They're really good. So let me say first, I think aesthetically they work great. It's a very clean looking setup because they are like wider than they are tall. They don't look like too boxy on the desk in the middle of the room.

1:40:37So it's wonderful. Now, I went through a couple of ways to hook them up. Here are the downsides and upsides. So first of all, I tried the very first day. I didn't have any audio cables or anything. I didn't even have network cables that first day. So I was like, all right, I'm just going to use AirPlay from my Mac. Never do this. I strongly recommend not using AirPlay from your Mac for pretty much anything. But AirPlay is so responsive. What was that? Oh, my God. So my office setup is I occasionally will use the studio display speakers, which are very good for display speakers, but they're still mostly trash.

1:41:15And then I have an original move, which is the Sonos, big Sonos portable speaker. And I often AirPlay using the music app, which maybe, I guess maybe that's the thing is that because the music app is such a pile of garbage that anything that works after that, I consider to be a perk, but I don't typically have any problem with it. And it sounds pretty, just the one move, one, you know, the original move just the one of them sounds pretty good i mean it doesn't sound near as good as your pair of era 300s and you know as a stereo pair i'm quite sure but it surprisingly sounds pretty good the move does sound surprisingly good um but you know it is still like a single speaker there's going to be limitations to that oh i believe you can stereo pair them i don't know why you would buy two of those because they're you know it's not really what it's for um but But anyway, so don't use AirPlay as a – like don't expect to use AirPlay as a permanent desk speaker setup because there's multiple issues.

1:42:13The biggest one of which is just latency. There's massive latency. I believe it's the old two-second AirPlay 1 latency. So everything has a two-second delay, and it's pretty – it makes it pretty hard to use without wanting to pull your hair out. It's also just unreliable. Like it disconnects all the time. and like there's there's airplay for the system that you get to from control center and there's also airplay built into the itunes app on the mac both of them are unreliable in different and creative ways and don't play well with each other and there's there's so many just please don't use airplay it turns off all the time it's it's slow just it is not airplay is great for what it's for it's for streaming audio from your iphone to a speaker or it's for mirroring your video off your laptop onto an Apple TV.

1:42:59It's good for that. It is not good to be your permanent desk speaker protocol. Fortunately, that is not the only option with these. Sonos sells this little like$30 adapter that provides a line-in jack to all their modern speakers, I believe. Certainly, they are 300s and 100s. It's a line-in jack via USB-C, and it also has a network port on it. I believe they sell one that doesn't have the network port, but it's like$5 more to get the usbc line in and ethernet combo so get that one because here's the other thing with using this setup sonos supports line in through these methods but they always have some degree of latency the way their protocol works is you you can tell their app like all right when you know pair these speakers together and then like when there's a line in input to this one automatically switch to it and then send it to the other one you can set the latency on that the minimum you can set it for though is 75 milliseconds it's just enough latency that it would be fairly annoying for games and watching people speak in movies however it is fine for music like for my purposes it's totally fine for music i do notice it a little bit but it's it's not a problem for me and i don't usually play games i don't i never play games on this computer and i i almost never watch movies on this computer so those issues are are not really a problem for me i wish there was a lower latency option but there isn't the other weird thing about this is that because these are all like you know smart and you know automatic and everything and because this is a stereo pair of two networked speakers when you first when you haven't been playing audio for for a little while even just as short as like a minute they seem to go to sleep or whatever and then the next time you play audio for the first cut like you'll lose the first second or two of what you play because the speaker will be asleep and won't have woken up yet then the left one which is what it's connected to that one will wake up first and then like a half second later the right one will join in the party so it's a little annoying i'm tolerating that annoyance for now because it sounds fantastic i have a suggestion for you with the setup but you just described why don't you other than it requiring more crap why don't you just connect these to like uh i don't want to say the r word to scare you but another box that you can control through airplay that plays music and then still let your poor mac be able to like show you youtube video with correct lip sync by having it you know i don't know use the built-in speakers in your xdr doesn't have them but anyway like let these be your music playing speakers essentially connect these to your stereo to use 80s lingo and let your stereo be controlled through airplay you know what i mean like airplay to your stereo that is connected to the era 300 to listen to your cool music and everything but like those things just you know you just want to watch like a funny tiktok someone sent you you want to watch a youtube video or you want to watch a wwc video and you lose half a second of thing and the left one turns on before the right and there's audio lag come on i don't do those things through speakers very often i i'm almost for that kind of stuff i'm almost always wearing headphones uh speakers are really like no one's around and i want to play some music that's what i'm saying have them connected to your stereo and use headphones for your mac then my computer is my stereo but you know what i mean you'd still be controlling you'd still be playing your fish library in the music app right you'd just be air playing to your stereo because every single stereo supports and i keep saying stereo because i don't want to say receiver because i know people flip out but like receivers they all support airplay you could just connect the arrow 100 well you can't connect the air 300 no trust me as i was saying that's using airplay for that is a terrible experience i would i would run playing music i don't care i would run a line cable from them from my desk to the receiver here you could just you just get actual speakers and not these weird computers that are pretend to be speakers you know like you connect them with speaker wire you know like i know i know i'm i'm i'm complicating things for you but it just sounds like such a miserable experience using these as computer speakers and when you really you just want good music speakers well and that's what i i have that at my beach office where i just have the q150s and a little like you know 50 little amp velcro to the bottom of my desk and a subwoofer like i have all that there and it's great but that setup would look ridiculous here like that that would not fit my aestheticals and the aero 300s don't i need to see pictures convince me show me this doesn't look ridiculous yeah i mean yeah well i would love to see pictures of this because i i am not as deeply offended by the look of these as john is i can understand john how you got to that perspective because it's not unreasonable but i'm not as you know offended as as you seem to be um but no i i i i get what you're going for here i wonder if and now this is going to bring up the whole um new app situation but i wonder if an alternative is for for your use would be to use the sonos app to play whatever you want to play on the speakers and thus not involve anything computer at all.

1:48:06The Sonos app sucks. I know they just rewrote it and it sucks even more, and I'm sorry for everyone who's affected by that. I don't use the Sonos app, except for configuring the speakers when I first set them up, and then I never touch it again because I play music from the music app, previously called iTunes, on my Mac while I work. That is the use case here. I'm not going to take out my phone and play with the app. I'm controlling it through the music app, period. I get that, but they have a native app. Well, I don't know if I should say native. They have an app for the Mac. I heard rumblings that it's going away.

1:48:41This is not insider information. I think they might have announced this at some point. And their app for the Mac is fine. I wouldn't say it's great, but it resolves a lot of these issues that plague you. And it will interface with your library. Now, a library of your library size? I don't know. but it is supposed to interface with your, you know, iTunes match library. And just briefly, you know, I think I talked about this. I might've talked about it on the show and certainly talked about it on analog, but like the new app, it's fine. If well, as long as you don't need accessibility features, which are coming slower than they should, but it's fine.

1:49:16The only thing that I, that really chaps my bottom about it is you can't do any queue management or like playlist management or not playlist. I guess queue is a better word for it. So if I really, really, really want to play a particular song next, there's nothing I can do about that except run up to my computer and use the old app to do it, which stinks. And that's coming and that will come soon-ish. But for the most part, I don't mind the new app and I think it is less clunky than the old app. It's very different than the old one, so it requires relearning some stuff. but I use the Sonos app to play music almost exclusively.

1:49:49The only time I really don't is, like I said, when I'm at my computer and I agree with you ultimately that I find it easier to find the music I want using the music app and that's what I do when I airplay it to the move and that's fine. But especially if I'm just going for ambient music and not, you know, as I'm around the house or whatnot or, you know, just want to play an album or something like that, oftentimes I'll use the Sonos app including sometimes on the computer. I mean, that is an option, but that is just, that is a direction I don't want to go. Like, I don't want to play things that way.

1:50:19That is not my workflow. I don't want to change my workflow. I think my workflow for my needs and preferences is better. So, yeah, I just don't want to deal with that. Fair enough. And honestly, once I, so I did hardwire them. They each have Ethernet going to them. Nice and clean, of course. So they each have Ethernet. They each have, the one has the line in and sends it to the other one over the network. and when they were both on Wi-Fi it was a little bit shaky. I had to use the higher latency settings. It wasn't good. Sonos products don't have great Wi-Fi radios but when I wired them they became rock solid reliable.

1:50:55I've never had one since wiring them to the network I've never had one drop out or be too out of sync or whatever. It's never happened. So it is fantastic. Anyway, so if you're willing to do this crazy setup which again, this is ridiculous. You really shouldn't do this. But if for some reason you're crazy like me and you want to do this, it sounds great. In most ways, it sounds, I think, even better than my Q150s. Not at mid-range and vocals and guitars. The Q150s still are my favorite sound for that. However, they are bigger, they are deeper, they are uglier. And the challenge with the Q150s they're really not made for desk listening distance and they have a fairly small sweet spot in speaker terms this is like how much does the sound change or get worse if you like shift your body to different directions or like are leaning or whatever like is there like how how big is the sweet spot where it sounds the best most speakers are not great at this uh the the q150s are especially at a distance of like four feet um they're not really made for that they're they're not it doesn't have a very big sweet spot the era 300 pair each speaker has like seven drivers firing in different directions like there's a lot going on there that fire sounds in a whole bunch of different places and so as a result the sweet spot is very wide and broad um it also you know in in speaker terms it has a very the era 300 has a really impressive sound stage again just by its design this is this is what what this means is like how wide or big does it sound like the sound is coming from like does it sound like it's coming from two points in front of you or does it sound like you're in like an auditorium full of sound coming you know from the big wall in front of you whatever that's the the sound stage these have a massive sound stage for speakers that fit on your desk and that you're listening to from four feet away like that it And again, because there's drivers firing in every direction and they're doing all sorts of processing, it is really impressive for that.

1:53:05By far the best soundstage I've heard in speakers at this distance. And they have pretty good bass for their size. Especially considering not having a subwoofer, they have very impressive bass. They destroy the Q150s in bass. And they even destroy the Q350s in bass, which are bigger speakers. like they have really good bass for their size and so you don't need a subwoofer however then i added a subwoofer which one the sub of course because that was also the big one yes because that was that was also part of the set uh that i got for the for the living room oh i bet that sounds so flipping good oh my gosh so the thing about the sonos this is this is their big subwoofer the one they've had for a while it is force cancelling i believe i discussed this a long time ago when i when i discussed my q150s and my setup at the beach and i bought this very expensive kef subwoofer for the q150s at the beach because it was force cancelling the sonos sub only works with sonos it is only like their wireless protocol although i mean you can like you can network wire it but like it's only it doesn't have a line in is what i'm saying So it only works with Sonos stuff.

1:54:20So I couldn't use it at my setup at the beach, but I could use it here. And it is a really good force-canceling subwoofer for less money than, as far as I know, any other force-canceling subwoofer on the market by a pretty big margin. And what force-canceling is great for is, and this is why Apple always touts it in the MacBook Pros, because I believe they also have force-canceling subwoofers in their laptops. What's great about that is that it significantly reduces buzzing and vibration from subwoofers. You hear the sound, but because it has two drivers firing in opposite directions, the vibration is largely or completely canceled out.

1:55:00So you don't usually hear too much boominess. You don't really hear materials nearby vibrating as much. It doesn't vibrate with the floor because it is canceling out by doing two different directions at the same time. so the these speakers there are 300s again by themselves they have great bass with the subwoofer it's a lot of fun like this is a ridiculous setup like again nobody needs to do this i don't need to do this i happen to have these things for my living room and i decided to set them up in my office for a while first and it's a lot of fun the subwoofer is it's not honestly it's not a massive difference because the bass in them is already pretty good.

1:55:42But it does improve things and it does make it a lot of fun. I don't need it, but it's really fun. Well, I am glad you are satisfied. So sitting here now when the living room is ready, are you going to then buy another batch of all these things? I mean, I already have the soundbar for down there. Maybe that'll be enough. I like how the original motivation was these speakers are too big on my desk and you replaced it with two i think also very big speakers and a giant subwoofer it's it's giant for that application i wouldn't say it's that giant particularly for a home theater but for that application it's not small you should do the measurements how many square inches of speaker did you remove and how many square inches of speaker did you add in their place well i relocated it the subwoofer is across the room like at the opposite wall that i'm looking at right and then the two speakers are you know they're tipped over to their sides the only the only one you know weird thing about these speakers is that because of their design um i can't pile crap on top of them i i learned that's what i'm saying they're weirdly shaped yeah plus there's there's up firing drivers anyway isn't it yes but that there's probably aesthetic benefits to me not being able to pile crap on top of my speakers like at the beach with the kefs like those are just boxes and so the top of them becomes a work area like there's there's always papers on them when i was burning the blu-ray discs to back up all my stuff the um the uh m discs the blu-ray uh drive just lived on top of one of the speakers like there's always crap on top of my speakers at the beach and here i can't do that that's because they take up so much desk space there's no desk space left to put stuff so you have to put it on top of the speakers this this is fun and i get to watch the ducks while i listen to my awesome music on my ridiculous setup so i'm happy Beep beep beep.