619: Master Plan to Take Over the World

37:25It's essentially a photogrammetry based, I hope I got that right, method for capturing still 3D images of objects or entire environments. What's remarkable is its ability to render realistic perspectives from multiple angles, complete with accurate reflections and specular highlights. So this is NERF, which is representing scenes as neural, N-E, radiance, R, fields, F, for view synthesis. Again, we'll put a link in the show notes to a talk that was given by, among other people, Matthew Tancic. We present a method that achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of input views.

38:03I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I can tell you having watched the video, what it appears to be is, let's take I think it's a couple of stills. I don't recall if it was one or several, but one way or another, take one or more stills and be able to figure out, okay, what is the depth in this? Very much like you know the the portrait videos on an iphone yeah it definitely is i think it is more than one picture because the whole point is like the thing i just described where you can watch a video and do it for different perspectives this is the photo version of that where it's just one moment in time but it's captured from different perspectives and then when you look at it you have the ability to look from different angles at your still image yep so uh continuing on from joseph humphrey while it's not ready for video capture yet and the quality isn't perfect meta has created an impressive demo for the Quest, and there's a MetaNerf demo for the Quest, which is called MetaHorizon Hyperspace Demo.

38:54The description is, this is a demo experience to showcase our vision for photorealism as a profound new way to feel like you're physically there. We created these digital replicas using mobile phone scanning and cloud-based processing. Scanning is not available to users today. So now returning back to Joseph, what excites me most is the potential to fully capture 3D scenes including different perspectives without the need for manual 3D modeling. if future research leads to viable quote-unquote video version of this the possibilities could be incredible you should check out that google link because that's what they're doing it's basically the video version of that but the the 2d version of it is much more well established like nerf stuff has been around for a while again this is from a 2020 uh paper um it's you if you have the sort of still image version of it that works really well for you know to fool you into thinking it's a dynamic environment you can do what they do in video games it's just like it's basically a bunch of still textures but then you put like some video of uh rippling water on top of the water thing so the things that you expect to be moving are moving but um you know or even just like if you look at the demos of hero you can be convinced like that this is video until you notice like none of the blades of grass are moving or whatever so the google thing is exciting because they're really trying to do it with video with very limited motion and this nerf thing is exciting because I imagine this is the type of thing you could actually do on a phone.

40:12Take it, you know, wave your phone in front of a person. It takes 15 pictures. It reconstructs this and now you have what appears to be a 3D image of the person. Yeah, these video demos are incredibly impressive. All right, moving on from immersive video, let's talk about John's app and some feedback with regard to it or things adjacent to it. Wait, are we talking about Storacusa or are we talking about 4-H space? if you like forage space like the British person who pointed out that in UK English those words don't rhyme forage and starch don't rhyme yes because they pronounce the O as an A it's forage space or whatever it's ridiculous must be their Boston accent well done it's a hybrid accent anyway alright so I'll stick with Storacusa I'm going to keep calling it Storacusa until you tell us another name I like forage space I also like Storacusa for the record but I like forage space I think that's great and you know they're the same people that can't understand when we say hover, which is bananas.

41:06So I don't really care what they have to say. Theirs is English traditional. We're English modern. Anyway. Star-Racusa. Dave Nanian, friend of the show, Dave Nanian. Dave Nanian writes, and this is with regard to SuperDuper's smart update in making clones. Dave writes, to be clear, smart update does not separate clones unless oh, excuse me, not making clones, I'm sorry, using clones on the file system. To be clear, smart update does not separate clones unless those clones change, which starts to separate them on the source as well. What we can't do is only change the diverged blocks. And also, I'm not worried about my support because I can offer solutions.

41:43I'm worried about things like migration. And again, this is going to be run by those who are out of space, not those who want to optimize their drive storage. Yeah, the thing about a smart update, like that's a good nuance about what I was describing last time. Like on the first clone with SuperDuper, it will faithfully reproduce your clones. So if you have some drive that is essentially over provisioned because you have you know many many clones of a very large file that if they all took up their individual space it would overflow your drive uh when you do that first erasing clone with super duper it will faithfully reproduce that but in subsequent uh clones like do using smart update which says hey just copy the stuff that's changed since last time um at that point if one of the clones has changed and diverged on the source it can diverge a little bit at a time based on how much has differed from the other ones but during smart update if it's diverged at all you get an entire complete separate copy uh during the smart update and that can cause you to slowly fill your quote-unquote equally sized drive with a series of smart updates of course you can always fix this by doing an erase update uh and that will restore all your clones but that's just a fact of life um and in terms of people over subscribing their discs and having problems during migration yeah that's that's potentially a problem like i said that could be a problem today because the Finder does the same thing when you duplicate files.

43:03And depending on how oversubscribed people are on their drives, they could already be in a situation where they can't migrate. I would hope that Apple would come up with a way to faithfully reproduce clones during the migration process. That would be very helpful. They certainly have the expertise, technology, and access to the innards of macOS to do that. But I also don't see that as something that is forthcoming. So make sure your drives are always big enough. Peter Marks writes, It's all this talk of RAM doubler and disk doubler and ATP triggered a memory of a time in the 90s when someone released software that drastically sped up Finder copies.

43:36I was working at Apple at the time, and we were amazed. It turned out, this is such an amazing story. It turned out that the Finder was updating the progress bar so frequently that it slowed down the file copy. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Still a modern thing. when early in my development of the my app that i'm working on i was testing the speed of you know scanning for duplicates and stuff like that and i at first tried the naive implementation of every time you've scanned another item you know convey that information in the ui and scanning especially on ssd goes really really fast and uh probably faster than 60 frames per second it was a lot of updates i'm not sure if it was slowing things down but i think it might have actually gotten faster when i throttled the ui updates because you don't want i mean it's probably not that big of a deal especially since it's two separate threads and i had a i have a lot of cores and had a thread dedicated just updating the ui but it's still kind of a waste so yeah updating the ui at faster than the refresh rate of the screen is usually not a good idea and then back in the bad old days i think it was just probably burning cpu because you didn't have multiple cores and i I think it was probably wasting a lot of CPU time, you know, updating the UI as fast as it possibly could.

44:54I think he might be referring to SpeedDubbler, the thing I mentioned on the past show. I don't remember what SpeedDubbler did. I only remember that I ran it and it did make things perceptibly faster. And maybe this was one of the things, that it sped up file copies by updating the progress bar less frequently. Then Harvey Simon writes, Why should we care about how much free space we have if we've turned on desktop and document sync in iCloud Drive? If we run low on storage, older files are offloaded to iCloud, freeing up space locally, especially if one has, say, a desktop Mac with a large SSD and a MacBook with only 256-gig SSD.

45:24Why worry if 256 gigs is sufficient if it looks like all one's files are where they belong, and everything's backed up, and you're online? I don't personally like—I mean, on paper, this makes sense, but I don't think I would trust Apple to do this and do this well, personally. Yeah, I mean, it looks like everything's there, until you need that one file and you don't have an internet connection. And also I will add that some cloud services, in my experience, iCloud Drive, are not really great about doing the thing you want them to do right now, right now. I know they have pinning for iCloud now, finally, where you can say, please don't offload this file.

45:57I always want it to be local. But in situations even when you have a network connection, you can be waiting for iCloud to take its sweet time to do something. I talked about my son's iCloud Drive disaster where he had so many files. you could just sit there staring at them for all day saying when is it going to download the files that are in this folder you can double click them and it would just sit there spinning and it's like eventually it might do it or maybe it never will because there's too many files it's not a i'm not a fan of iCloud Drive I've never been a fan I continue not to be a fan that big disaster with my son did not make me fan that's years after iCloud Drive has been out for a while I know people have a lot of success with it but I think they're using it lightly they don't have lots of files they don't have lots of churn and it's just like oh it's magic my files are just always there in my experience that is not how iCloud Drive works when pressed even a little bit Dropbox at the very least has like I said one of the things I like about Dropbox is if you use it the old way I'm still not using the one with the file providers which I know everyone else is probably using but somehow I'm still not updated to it but the old one when you launched it it would brute force right now right now with all its you know cpu cycles download all the files locally i'd have it not to do streaming keep every file locally like the old style old school way you i could see it working it would go through the files find all the ones that have changed download them all and then be done i was never staring at like a little cloud icon unless you in the finder wondering when is it going to download is there anything i can make it download faster so yeah As for should we care about disk space, if you keep everything in like a Google Drive or OneDrive or something that you do trust that you think is reliable that you can actually get to upload and download files when you need them to and you're always connected to the network, sure, feel free.

47:44But I think that for most people, they either don't have as reliable network access to that or they don't have fast enough network access to that as both or both. And even if you do have all that, I have very fast, very reliable network assets in my house. Practically speaking, I don't want to have to wait around for something to download. If I want to like, you know, we're doing our member special on Kiki's delivery service and I want to scrub through the movie. I don't want to have to wait for a multi gigabyte movie to download. I just double click it and move the scrubber and it should be as fast as my SSD can read it.

48:12And I don't have to worry about, oh, that file isn't there yet. How fast can you download a gigabyte? Because remember, it's not just your network connection. The server has to serve it to you at that speed. Your network connection can be as fast as you want. but if the server is doling the thing out to you at a slow data rate because it's overwhelmed with doing a bunch of other stuff or because the network connection between you and it is slow, you're still SOL. So yeah, if you think local storage is still not relevant and you're leading that life, that's good for you, but I don't think we're there yet.

48:40All right, let's talk some topics. And Marco, you had yet more homework. I feel like we've done maybe three out of four of the last episodes, you've had some sort of Vision Pro-related homework, and here we are yet again with Vision Pro-related homework. Apple, right after we recorded last week, released a new episode of their Adventure series, and this one is called Ice Dive, and it's 15 minutes long. Its piers off the top of my head are, was it the hottest? No, it was the tightrope walker and then the parkour, if I'm not mistaken, were the two others. Yes, that's right. And this one is Ice Dive, where we follow an ice diver that's trying to set a world record for swimming 200 yards, which is something like 180 meters, underwater with a fin on, but with one breath of air.

49:31And so he is swimming, hopefully, 200 yards, one breath of air under ice, in the water under ice. So it's probably a little bit cold. Yeah, it's very, very cold. He does a wetsuit on, but still. Anyways, it's like 15 minutes, and I wanted to not only alert some of you that this exists, but I also wanted to hear your thoughts, and I have some thoughts. Would you like me to start, or would you like to start? I think mine will be pretty quick. I didn't get all the way through it. I got about eight minutes in. I stopped because I was getting motion sick. Oh, really? Oh, that's very surprising to me.

50:04Huh. Yeah, so this series, I didn't see the middle one, the parkour one. I saw the tightrope walking one. I got about the same amount into that one before I had to stop. Um, this series does a lot more camera movement and a lot more cuts between different scenes. And so what I find is like, I, I'm trying to focus on things, uh, and then all of a sudden, boom, we're cut away. And then, oh, now I'm flying over a mountain. Like, Whoa. So it's, there's a lot more motion in this. And this series too, um, they focus on very close up shots of people and things. so similar to like you know the the very first uh opening scene of the tightrope walking one you i described in the past how like you're like right in front of this woman's face it's a little unnerving you're like i would never be this close to a person i was not romantically involved with of you know in any other context in life so it kind of feels wrong to to be that close to somebody and to have it look so so lifelike well they start the they start this way this one the same way with the swimmer guy.

51:08So again, it's just like, whoa, this is very intimate, a little bit oddly so. So they keep doing all these close-up shots of people and things, but I think they are doing the close-up shots with an assumption of sharpness that, as I was saying earlier, isn't actually there in the viewing experience. So what you get is really close-up people that look a little bit out of focus, or a little bit blurry, or a little bit soft, and so your eyes, it plays tricks on your eyes in ways that the other immersive series i haven't had that much of a problem with um because i think they just shot like a little bit further away from things uh with a little bit less camera movement so this one this this series i think is just i i can't like my eyes and my motion brain i think can't handle this series uh but hey i'm glad they're putting up more content yeah yeah and i mean again the pace of the new content has been really good uh i'm bummed well sorry i'm grading on a heavy curve there.

52:02To be clear, you can still watch every single bit of immersive video on the Vision Pro the first night you take one home. Yep. I think that is true. And certainly Underscore's chart from a few weeks back would probably lend Corinthians to it. Anyways, I wanted to call this out partially, like I said, because it's new. But also, I thought that this one was possibly my favorite of the reality, or not reality, but docu-serieses that Apple has done so far. I feel like it's a bit longer. I, my recollection is the parkour one was closer to 10 ish minutes, and this is like a full 15 or so. And I've been thinking a lot about what do I think made this good?

52:41And I didn't get a chance to look and see if the director is the same or not, but she did a phenomenal job on this one. And I think part of what I really, really enjoyed about this was that the, the, the type rope walking one just had the, the, the smell of it being completely staged. Like, you know, of course, at one point she's going to fall off the tightrope and of course she's tethered to it. So it's no big deal, but you still have that moment and whatnot. The parkour one was a little of that, but they tried to a degree to build a little bit of a story. And toward the end, spoiler alert, they're trying to do like a really big jump and you're supposed to be stressed out about whether or not they're going to make the jump.

53:21And I mean, you are to a degree because you can look down where the camera is and see how high up they are. but it was kind of a contrived story. You know, it was clear that it was a story, but it was kind of forced. Whereas this one, there is a, a, a plot and I'm using air quotes here, but there's a plot to it. There is a thing, a challenge that, that is going to be conquered if all goes according to plan and there's consequences if it doesn't. And so you have a hero and, and the, the villain, I guess, to the degree that there is, is the situation, but there's a hero and you're watching a hero's journey, literally.

53:56And not only that, but I thought, I mean, I didn't have any motion sickness problems. And I thought that the way it was filmed was good. There's some, you know, annotations on the video showing how far away everything is and like where the start is and where the end is. And it's not overdone. It's in that Apple style that they're developing over these immersive videos that I like. I just thought it was really, really, really good. And I really enjoyed it. And I thought it was, it was very captivating. And so here again, If you live near an Apple store, have a friend that has one of these. I presume they'll let you watch it if you want to.

54:28And I think it's worth your time. I thought it was pretty darn good. So check that out. Apple Adventure Ice Dive. John, thoughts on this? I can't believe Marco's getting motion sick and you're not. I mean, neither one of you is particularly prone to it. But, you know, it's one of the, I feel like it's one of the limitations of this type of content. It's just, I'm not sure how you can get over that other than just not making content that moves around too much. uh because it's really limiting from the like the recording perspective to try to do interesting things or show something dynamic uh and again the assumption is that you know the person who's watching it is not going to know how to move to match the movement of the camera even if they could which they probably can't because they're sitting on their couch so there's always going to be this disconnect between what you see and uh what you're actually feeling as you sit there so yeah, I think this stuff is cool and I would like to watch it, but I definitely don't like to feel sick, so I'm torn.

55:26Fair enough. No, I just think it's really cool. And again, if you have the ability to go check this out, I strongly encourage you to. Speaking earlier of Dave Nanian and Super Duper, there's been a bit of a brouhaha over bootable backups on macOS. And so to back up a little bit and set the stage, Super Duper, and I can't speak for a Carbon Copy cloner, which is a, I guess a competitive product to SuperDuper. I've only ever used SuperDuper. But anyway, SuperDuper's thing, or one of its things, is that you can create a bootable backup of your drive and then update it, you know, every night, every other night, you know, however often you want to update it.

56:01But the key is that if you plug in this external drive and, you know, do whatever incantation and dance you need to do in order to tell your Mac to boot from it, it should be able to boot from it. And that's worked really, really well for a really, really, really long time. But then a week or so ago, or whenever, I guess, 15.2 came out, Dave had problems. And so Dave wrote a blog post, of which I will read some excerpts. Mac OS 15.2 was released with a surprise, a terrible, awful surprise. Apple broke the replicator, or ASR, Apple Software Restore. Toward the end of replicating the data volume, seemingly when it's about to copy either preboot or recovery, which is to say the system stuff, it fails with a resource busy error.

56:40In the past, resource busy could be worked around by ensuring the system was kept awake. but this new bug means on most systems there's no fix it just fails since apple took away the ability for third parties for examples the super duper folks to copy the os it took on the responsibility themselves it's been up to them to ensure this functionality continues to work and in that they failed in mac os 15.2 because this is their code and we're forced to rely on it to copy the os os copying will not work until they fix it to put it bluntly this sucks it's bad Sad enough, we have to work around other bugs in this code, but when it breaks completely, we're stuck pointing fingers and offering workarounds that don't involve the replicator.

57:18Now, with that said, we had a response to a degree from Mike Bombich, who is the developer on CarbonCopyCopyCloner for MacOS. and we took out some of the spicier hot takes in this blog post but it was it was a spicy blog post uh so you might might be worth checking out if you're interested anyways mike writes while some developers seem surprised by a change in mac os 15.2 there's a little bit spice uh we've known for several years that making bootable backups would eventually become impossible we shifted carbon copy cloner strategy away from relying on external boots so our users wouldn't be affected by this inevitable result several years ago i wrote a blog post about the mac os big sur changes that affected how third-party developers would be able to make copies of the system.

57:59In that blog post, I made reference to a conference call that I had with Apple on December 2nd, 2020. Participating in that conference call was the APFS team lead, someone from developer technical support, and to my surprise, Apple's director of product marketing. When I joined the call, I was prepared for a technical discussion of what was broken in the ASR and whether Apple would be able to fix those issues and make it reliable enough for a commercial backup solution. The call didn't quite go in that direction. The marketing director kicked off the call by asking, So how would it look if someday in the future you simply couldn't make a copy of the system at all?

58:29He and the more technical folks on the call went on to explain that why only ASR could be allowed to copy the system and that they were committed to addressing any problems with it as long as it did not require making a compromise to platform security. Platform security is a top priority at Apple, and one of the keys to that security is a secure boot environment. Allowing system files to be copied introduces an opportunity for attackers to modify key system components. Some of this can be mitigated by only allowing Apple's ASR utility to make the copy, but there are still inherent opportunities to inject changes when copying system files.

58:59Apple has invested a lot of effort into the recovery mode environment and migration assistant. It has become trivial to boot a Mac into recovery mode, perform a clean, secure install of the system, verified and signed, and then recover user data via migration assistant. All that can be done without compromising the security of the boot environment. Will Apple fix this issue so that bootable backups can limp along a little further? Maybe, but that's getting to be a moot question. Apple made it unambiguously clear that bootable backups and system cloning are fundamentally incompatible with platform security.

59:28All right, so a couple of things here. To start, why do we care about bootable backups? Why do we use something like SuperDuper? Why is this a valuable thing to have? And most importantly, on Mike's post, why is recovery mode not a sufficient replacement? The magic of bootable backups. is that if something goes wrong with your main drive, you can just reboot and be back up and running in the time it takes you to boot from your other drive. This was much more important in the days of spinning disks and also much more reliable in the days before Apple Silicon because as we noted on a show a week or two ago, Apple Silicon Macs cannot really boot from external drives.

1:00:15They always essentially boot from the internal drive and say oh i see you wanted to boot from an external drive and essentially hand off control and continue to boot from there but the secure boot environment is all contained within the hardware that apple sells and it's you know cryptographically as secure as it can be knowing that it's booting off a known good system and allowing that all to be bypassed by saying just trust whatever's on this drive is a you know a potential problem all right that's part of that's the secure boot environment that apple is defending that's why apple silicon max work like they do but what it also means is unlike the old days if your boot drive like dies dies like you know is totally broken or is fried or like just you know you're you're in the old days you're spinning hard drive the heads crashed into the platters like it's just dead the old days you're like okay i'll take this internal drive rip it out of my computer throw it in the garbage can and boot for my super duper clone and i'm up and running as of whenever the last backup was which might have been last night right just in the amount of time it takes to boot i don't have to wait for a whole os install which can take a very long time i don't have to do any of that stuff i'm just up and running and by the way i just booted my mac that has no hard drive in it i booted it from an external drive because that hard drive that was broken is now in the garbage can if your apple silicon mac if the ssd goes bad like totally dead on it you cannot boot off an external drive that mac will not boot if anything because you need the internal ssd to at least have enough parts of it working to boot from the little part of the os that's needed to go to external boot stuff so that is different but still if you hosed yourself accidentally deleted a bunch of files broke some part of your user directory you know accidentally recursively deleted parts of your home library directory as root your system could be entirely hosed but your ssd still works so you will be able to boot from an external backup and that's where having a super duper bootable backup can get you up and running much faster i mean that that whole like you know as i develop this app that i'm working on maybe i will accidentally hose my you know hose my directories my files in a way that didn't damage the ssd but renders my system entirely useless to me it will be great to boot from my super duper backup in that scenario so i think bootable backup still is very important and recovery is absolutely not a substitute because if anyone has ever done recovery mode even though we have a fast computers fast internet connections reinstalling mac os takes longer than you think it does if you're in a hurry or you know if you're trying like you might as well just write off the whole rest of the day to dealing with that sometimes because it takes you'll just be sparing it staring at indeterminate spinners for a long time wondering how long it's going to take how many more reboots is going to take how many more progress bars am i gonna have to see so i don't think that's a great solution all right given all that this whole discussion in 2020 with uh was it is phil schiller at the time is the director of product marketing i think that was already past the change i don't know who it is but anyway so the the quote we know there's a quote or paraphrase or whatever it says uh how would it look someday in the future if you simply couldn't make a copy of the system at all the conclusions that mike draws from this that uh that bootable backups are not a thing uh and that apple made it unambiguously clear that bootable backups and system cloning are fundamentally incompatible platform security i'm not sure i agree with that so first of all the statement is is an apple person saying how would it look someday in the future if you simply couldn't make a copy if you third-party developer simply couldn't that came to pass third-party developers can't make bootable copies you have to run apple's asr tool to do it apple can make a bootable backup you can't which is why super duper is in the bind it is because they can't do it they have to use apple's you know privilege signed secure tool to do it but i i'm not and the second thing is i'm not sure i'm not saying this is not true only that i have not been convinced that it's true by reading this post the idea that if copies of system files can be made by anybody including apple somehow this is a security issue so saying like allowing system files to be copied introduces an opportunity for attackers to modify key system components some of this can be mitigated by only allowing asr to make a copy but there are still opportunities to inject changes i don't understand how that could possibly be the case the whole point is you cryptographically sign the whole thing with the the the sealed system volume or whatever and those cryptographic keys are secured by keys that are in the hardware and verified over the internet and yada yada like if you modify any part of the system if you if a nefarious third party modified part of the operating system when copying it like that would be detected because the signatures wouldn't match by and the secure boot environment like the apple silicon max booting from their internal drive and making sure they have a secure boot environment ensures that the thing doing the verification can't be tampered with because that's the thing that kicks off the boot process on the external drive and it can verify that the system value is sealed correctly whatever maybe i'm missing something here but i think the conclusions being drawn here are at least do not convince me that apple thinks that bootable that making a bootable drive should not be possible because that doesn't make any sense you make a bootable drive all the time you make a bootable drive when you install the os that is an example of apple software making a bootable drive it's no different when they're doing it to the one and only drive on your mac or doing it to the second and you know another drive on your mac it is still Apple software connecting to the internet and putting in an OS there and yes it put it by downloading off the internet but there's no difference than it putting it by copying it from another location in both cases it has to verify that the OS is proper and signed and so on and so forth so this is unfortunate like ASR has broken before by the way SuperDuper has always been dealing we've been in the age where only ASR can copy the operating system for a while now and it's as Dave says it's broken in the past and it's cruddy because you're a third party you're like look i can't do it myself i have to use this tool that apple provides and if the apple provided tool has bugs or does weird things or just plain doesn't work you just have to sit around and wait for apple to fix it for you i assume that's what will happen in this case i assume apple will fix it like i said i am not personally convinced that apple was trying to say that it is impossible to make a bootable version of make a make a drive that is able to boot mac os using apple software because it just doesn't make any sense to me.

1:06:44That's what software, that's what the OS installation and recovery process do. I don't see how cloning is that different. Worst case scenario, you could say, okay, it won't copy the operating system from one drive to another. It will install a fresh one from the internet. But because the thing that you boot from is a read-only cryptographically signed snapshot, it's the same for everybody. It's a separate volume. It's not where your data is. there should be no difference between copying the operating system from one drive to another and putting a fresh version of that operating system by downloading it from the internet the only place where this there there are you know questions here is like okay well what if apple is no longer signing that version of the operating system or you can't get it because it's so old or whatever in that case a copy would work but a download wouldn't but i don't know i just i I think and hope that this is just yet another one of unfortunate bugs in macOS because these parts of the OS are understaffed and that they will eventually fix it and SuperDuper will start working again and all will be if not right with the world then better but I just like again if someone knows someone can explain to me how what Mike Bombich is saying makes any kind of sense please do but right now i feel like apple was not trying to say that it will be impossible to make bootable versions of mac os only that third-party developers wouldn't be able to do it themselves only apple could do it that's another thing that only apple can do i would hope that apple provides a mechanism to do this and maintains it but i don't know we'll see what happens we'll see how this shakes out yeah i kind of wish like so the promise of apfs and all the new file system stuff they did is that this type of stuff could get better and it did get better in many ways like a lot of the parts of the system that deal with this like time machine and stuff like time machine will now like make a snapshot first and then copy that snapshot kind of i'm assuming one of the benefits of that is that it helps with the painting the golden gate bridge problem where in the bad old days time machine would start running and it would start copying files from your disk to your time machine backup and in the beginning it would copy you know a bunch of files or whatever two hours pass and it's copying the last files during that two hours the files that it copied at the beginning could have changed and so you're like oh well when am i done do i have to go back to the beginning now because i noticed some new things changed oh wait now by the time i get to the end of that there's still things that you keep going back and back you know it just copies it once and says okay i'm done you may end up writing an inconsistent view like the source disk never looked like this at any moment in time.

1:09:22The beginning of the source disk looks like this, and by two hours later, the end of the source disk looked like this, but the thing that you wrote has files that you copied in the beginning looked like it did an hour ago, and files that you copied the end look like they do right now. Snapshots, avoid that, because you can take a moment-in-time snapshot and say, here's a frozen snapshot of what this drive looked like at a given moment. And now I can take my time leisurely copying that snapshot because that snapshot's never going to change. It is literally a moment in time snapshot. So even if it takes you four hours to copy that snapshot, the file you copy at the end is exactly from the exact same moment of time as the file you copy to the beginning.

1:10:02Stuff like that is great. One of the strategies time machine uses to figure out what has changed since my last backup so I don't have to scan the entire disk again one of the strategies is some kind of snapshot diffing thing i really hoped that they would go whole hog zfs thing zfs has the ability to send block level diffs between snapshots where not only does it you know know exactly what changed in i'm not sure if it's constant time but it might just be linear but anyway an efficient way to tell exactly what changed it does it at the block level not at the file level so it doesn't if a file changes it's copying whole files it says i know this block from this file change and these two blocks in this file change and can efficiently transfer just those blocks to another thing but there's lots of limitations to doing that in dfs anyway i was hoping that kind of technology would come to mac os and they've sort of kind of got a little bit of it but not really and you know cloning is a whole other thing it would be but anyway it would be great if they continued to advance their file system apis and support for this type of thing to do efficient um essentially what super duper does efficient copies like that smart update only copy the things that changed over here and yes to also be able to make bootable efficient clone copy backup things like i'm not saying put super duper out of business but i'm kind of saying like eventually technology gets to the point where what was once uh a thing that only a third party could do because it was so not supported by the operating system eventually should become something that is so easily supported by the operating system kind of like what i'm doing my app is doing stuff that is so easily supported by the system i'm just providing like a fancy wrapper on top of it i would hope that's where super duper would get eventually building on asr to say okay well we can't do it we have to use apple's tool it seems like it's going in that direction except asr is so much less capable the code that super duper when it was doing it itself because asr is just like well i've just got one job i'm called apple software restore i'm not called uh be the underlying engine for super duper so it is so limited and so brute force and so not what super duper would want uh but you know maybe someday like it took us so long to get apfs and we got lots of benefits from it but i still think we're a long way from really realizing all the benefits of modern file systems to make stuff like this so much better and you know yeah i appreciate the time machine snapshots local snapshots where you can do essentially time machine backups without having your time machine drive attached so you can go back in time to something from 10 minutes ago because a local time machine backup was taken that's all well and good but time machine itself still feels like kind of abandoned and lonely and filled with bugs uh and yeah asr being the one and only tool that can copy a bootable version of the operating system from one disk to another it doesn't seem tenable to me and as for only being able to boot it off internal drive and apple silicon i don't know what the solution to that is because i do understand this i do understand why they do that like that's the security implications of not allowing that makes sense to me but it is very limiting when it comes to the ability to recover quickly from a disaster it kind of makes the most um workable solution for that to essentially have a second mac right so you know have two macs that are both as up-to-date as they can start your project and if you really if you're like if this mac fails i need to be able to continue work immediately just throw that whole mac away slide in the new mac and just try to pick up where you left off uh if apple's cloud syncing was better than it actually is you could probably do that but as it stands you're probably starting work from wherever you were at the beginning of the day all right let's do some ask atp zero mazola writes with the max latest operating system updates sequoia 15.2 apple's created a new folder for recording your history it's called recents it's an option in the finder sidebar how does this fit in with apple's policy of privacy is this really new i swear this is not new but maybe it is um i i don't i don't i think i might be missing the point here why why is this not privacy so this is all right so i think what zero is saying is like if this is in the sidebar and if you see it in the sidebar and you click on it you may be shocked to see there's all the files that i've messed with recently and it's sort of like a trail of your activity and if you thought you are secretly messing with some files somewhere and you have a document that says my master plan to take over the world.txt uh and suddenly when someone clicks on something in your sidebar they see that file and your plans have been revealed um what that recent thing is doing is the same thing you can do if you hit command f in the finder and you search for files recently opened within the last 30 days which is the thing that you can do that you've been able to do for decades on mac os it is just finding it's just a saved search finding files that have been opened recently or whatever the whatever the thing let me put up in the finder to see the exact thing i think it is um last open to date last that open date is within the last 30 days you've always been able to run that search now it's more accessible as a sidebar item in the finder than having to hit command f pick and pick one item from a pop menu type 30 hit return but practically speaking this is not a privacy invading feature this is just part of a fact of life if someone else has access to your computer logged in as you they can hit command f and find files based on any criteria they want they can find image files last opened within the last 30 days that are jpegs that are larger than this like and they can save that as a a save search in a smart folder that looks like a little folder icon but when you double click it it opens the folder but the contents of that folder are the contents of a saved search this whole idea was something i really uh liked back in the days of like bos where their file system had native support for this with like indexing in the file system and really fast searches mac os still supports it some people get a lot of use out of it i think its implementation is a little bit janky and its integration in the finder is not great so many people don't even know it exists such that when they put something called recent files in the sidebar they're like privacy invasion where did this come from it's a new feature in 15.2 i kind of see the point but just fyi this has always been there it's kind of like realizing that your web browser is keeping track of your browser history if you're not running an incognito mode all the time you can just go and there's a menu item this shows history and you'll scroll this is every web page i've been doing it's watching my every move i mean you know google chrome was probably reporting it back to google as well but yeah that's how computers work to some degree if you don't like it there's not much of a solution some things in like mac os like within individual applications if you go to the file menu there'll be an open sub menu with like recent items you can clear that recent items menu which is used to be just like a p list somewhere i don't know where they're storing it these days but anyway you sometimes you can clear the recent items to clear the last things that you've opened but practically speaking if it's file system metadata the find command can search based on it and return results uh you could wipe that metadata if you wanted every file that you last opened go through it and wipe the metadata or duplicate that file and delete the original or like there's all sorts of stuff you could do but like what are you trying to do here really if you don't want people knowing this about your computer don't let them access to your computer logged in as you that's the solution oh yeah yeah all right tucker writes What is the quote-unquote correct directory location to save random Python shell, Ruby, Pearl, PHP, etc.

1:17:21scripts to keep them organized and easily accessible, or excuse me, executable? I use the fish shell, and I typically write my scripts of that sort using fish. And so there's a particular folder that you're supposed to put them in. And then occasionally if I write other stuff, I'll just put it in my home folder because I have very little in my home folder. I'm sure this is going to make John roll over in his not grave, but grave. so before john tells us all what we're supposed to be doing marco what is your approach uh for this kind of like you know random scripts and stuff for my local mac to run i actually have a folder in dropbox for those and part of my new mac setup is to add to my well first install bash and then add to my bash profile to include a bash profile file that is in in this dropbox folder And then that does everything else for me.

1:18:13So that way, when I set up a new Mac or managing between my desktop and laptop, I don't need to constantly be shuttling things back and forth manually or resetting things up. Any of that stuff just lives in Dropbox and including most of my bash profile, which again, is just included by the actual local bash profile. It includes the Dropbox bash profile and that sets everything else up. That's where all of my aliases are and all sorts of stuff like that. So I suggest whether you use Dropbox or whatever other file sync provider you use, keep it in there unless you have some really good reason not to.

1:18:49All right, John, what are we supposed to be doing? So there is a correct, with the scare quotes, like this question says, a correct directory for saving executable scripts from a cultural perspective for everybody my age and older who cut their teeth on Unix in the late 80s or early 90s. And that answer is tilde slash bin. B-I-N. lowercase you make a directory called bin in your home directory you put all your executable files there you add your you know tilde slash bin to your path uh and on every system you do that and whatever things you want to be executable you put in there that's mostly just a cultural answer uh and it's based on the fact that if you were on a multi-user unique system back in those days probably at your university or whatever uh you didn't have access to the system-wide directories so you had to pick some other directory to put things but you did have access to your home directory but you'd want the directories in your home directory to be structured like the system wide ones and so uh you know the ls command is bin ls and your customized version of the ls command would be tilde slash bin ls i in fact do have a bin directory in my home directory i make it invisible so it doesn't show up in the max side of things uh with just the hidden attribute but it is in fact there it is in my path that is the correct location for files that you want to be in your home directory now if you just want to say stuff that you just want to be able to run the other correct location on your own mac where unlike in university you do have access to the system-wide files is user local bin and that's usr not user and it's all lowercase all lowercase slash usr slash local slash bin user local apple has essentially pledged uh like uh uh europa in 2010 uh you know attempt no landing there all these words of your all these worlds of yours except user local um they said they won't mess with user local they're not going to put their stuff there they're not going to accidentally wipe it during an os update that was a promise statement for many many years ago so far it has still been true if you would like to put system wide stuff somewhere for yourself manually user local user local bin user local include user local man, user local lib, user local share, everything in user local is yours.

1:21:04And what do you put there the same directories that are at the top level a bin, a lib, a share and include anything you want you put there. So user local bin is where I put the executables that I want to be generally available to everybody on the system. And my path also includes user local bin, which is another common thing to have in your in your shell path on a unique system. So those are the answers bin and user local bin for executables as for keeping them organized that's different than keeping them easily executable you might want to organize them by category and make subfolders but now you're adding even more files to your path and maybe you could have sim links up to the top level put them down to other things and if you're using a package manager all your crap is an opt and it's messing with your path and you're using rvm and nvm and all these virtual environments to point to different versions of node and different versions of ruby and different versions of python and this whole web of sim links and just i don't like that it rubs me the wrong way but it is how a lot of the world works and speaking of fish every single one of these freaking things assumes of course you're running zss zsh bash or fish or some other posix compliant shell so it's no problem if you want to use nvm just type dot space nvm dot sh and you're up and running oh but you're not running zsh or bash or sh or fish are you oh well tough luck because you can't source that file because it's written in the shell that your thing doesn't support so i guess you just can't use our thing oh well there's no other shells in the world except for bash csh and fish as we all know so that will never come up guess which shell i use not one of those three um what do you use so that i'm used tcsh uh because i'm old and that was on my first unix system and someday i'll be forced to change probably to csh or bash or something else i probably won't change the fish a little too weird for me um but yeah a lot of those systems just assume they know what shell you're using and nothing works you can't use the node installed by nvm until you source the nvm thing or unless you you know port it to tcsh or figure out how it's manipulating your path to do what it's supposed to do this is why i compile everything from source and put it installed under user link it comes with me across os updates it's always where i want it to be it's not a web of sim links and everything works fine i think that is a reasonable organization, but I'm an old Unix person and I don't like these newfangled things and I don't use Homebrew and I don't use any kind of package manager and I kind of wish Apple would write a package manager for Mac OS that was natively supported, but so far they haven't.

1:23:31All right. John had opinions. Who knew? Shocked. Saul Sutherland writes, do you keep the internet firewall enabled on your Mac? It comes off by default on new installs, but I make it a habit to enable it to protect myself from incoming connections on coffee shop Wi-Fi and when my Mac is connected directly to the internet for testing it work. For me, I don't turn it on. I don't think I ever have. I'm not that concerned about incoming connections. I mean, I could make an argument why one should and could be, but I don't know. I'm not that worried about it. And no, I leave it off. And when I'm on coffee shop Wi-Fi, I use Tailscales, not a sponsor of this episode, but obviously I'm in love with them.

1:24:09Tailscales exit node functionality basically says, take all of your outbound traffic anyway and route it through something else and I route it through my house. So for me, no, don't use it. Again, because I think John will have most opinions. Let's start with Marco. Marco, do you use the internet firewall? No, I think most software these days is designed to assume any network you're on is hostile and to not grant open access to others on your network without your permission. So I don't think I think it's super necessary for most people to worry about that. But if you have that kind of extremely high security need for the networks you're on, then you might have different priorities.

1:24:48But I think for most people, you don't have to. John? As someone who essentially never does a clean install and has just simply been migrating from one Mac to the next and installing new versions of macOS on top of the old ones since 1984, it's sometimes a mystery to me what my settings actually are. because the last time i looked at them they have been a decade or more in the past so i had to actually go to system settings to see do i have the firewall enabled and this would have been something that i said back in the mac os 10 days right because it didn't exist in classic mac os the answer to my surprise because i thought i had it turned off is yes i do have it active why maybe it was the default a long time ago maybe it's currently the default but i have it active and it has never affected my life so i'm inclined to keep it that way i don't think about it actively uh in general i agree that like most sort of network security happens outside the realm of your computer i'm a desktop guy so i'm not going to coffee shops with laptops uh but my advice for firewall is if it's not on by default on a new mac which i don't know the answer of if it's not on by default try turning it on and see if it annoys you if it doesn't annoy you leave it on it's providing some additional measure of protection if it starts annoying you too much then you can figure out, is there a way I can keep this on and have it be less annoying?

1:26:09And if you can't figure it out, then just turn it off. But I would advise the default being turn it on and leave it on until or unless there's some reason not to. Torstein writes, is Marco still using his XT5 or did he go back to his iPhone again like he predicted he would? Also, what are the rest of y 'all using these days going into the holiday season? iPhones or camera cameras? I guess since Marco was quoted in this or named in this, why don't you start, Marco, and then I'll continue after you. Yeah, so my Fuji X-T5 remains my most commonly used standalone camera that's not an iPhone. I believe I've mentioned a couple times in the past, I did really bite the Fuji bug or get bitten by the Fuji bug hard.

1:26:50And last year, around the Black Friday season, I picked up on Great Sale their giant medium format GFX100S. it has since been succeeded by the GFX100S2 I have the first one whatever I'm willing to carry around a very big camera I bring the GFX100S and it is ridiculous and I only have the I only have two primes for it I have the 110mm portrait and the little the relatively little pancake lens for it which is the size of a grapefruit the 50 or 55mm one I keep that 50-ish millimeter one on most of the time. That is my landscape everything camera. Because it is so big and heavy, I more often have the Fuji with me.

1:27:43If I'm going somewhere with a backpack, I will often have the X-T5 with me is what I mean. And on that, I have the little tiny pancake prime for that, the 27mm, which converts to like a 45-ish. I love that combo. It's a fantastic camera. The X-T5, even though it is not technically as amazing as the GFX100S, I greatly prefer its controls. I think it is my favorite camera I have ever used in terms of handling and controls and capabilities. It has tons of manual control dials. And so I'm able, especially when I have a lens, which most of my lenses do, where the lens has an aperture ring on it, then I have physical controls for all of the main things.

1:28:34You know, I have shutter speed, ISO, aperture and exposure. All of those there's rings for if your lens has an aperture ring on it. I just love the X-T5 because everything is just clear and obvious. You can tell what all the important settings are just by looking at the top of the camera. That's how I like to shoot. It handles the way I want a camera to handle. Things are laid out in a great way, which is not what I can say about the GFX. But the GFX wins on tech detail. But anyway, the X-T5 I absolutely love. So to answer the question whether I'm still using it or whether I went back to my iPhone, I never stopped using my iPhone to take pictures.

1:29:13Now I just, when I have the ability to have a big camera with me, I do take pictures with the X-T5 and I really enjoy it. And in fact, today I was going on a sunny winter day walk at the beach and I brought the X-T5 and I took some pictures around the beach of the snowy town and it was delightful. So I do use the X-T5 as often as I've used any other big camera in the last 15 years, which is not incredibly often, but I'm glad I have it when I want it. Christmas, I'm going to be using both of those heavily. Our Christmas setup is kind of a multi-camera setup usually. It's a big family ordeal, and there's different cameras for different purposes.

1:29:59So I will have the GFX with me with that prime lens on it, especially when light gets low. But for other times of the day, I'll be using the X-T5 with a more versatile zoom lens on it. So the answer is yes, I use it and it's great. For me, I have a Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera, which is why my interest was piqued earlier with that immersive camera. I use, I don't remember what generation it is to be completely honest with you, but I use an Olympus OM-D E-M10. I want to say it's a Mark III, but I'm not 100 % sure. the Mark IV appears to be the latest and greatest that camera while I love it and to my eyes takes incredible pictures I've come to the conclusion over the last several years I want to say three or four years ago now that if I'm indoors unless I have a lot of light then the iPhone is likely to do a better job taking a photo than this is obviously the the bokeh won't be nearly as good from the iPhone.

1:31:00In fact, it will either be synthetic or not great. But in general, I find that particularly indoors, the iPhone does better. And then outdoors, it depends on what I'm up to, because the Olympus doesn't have automatic, or my Olympus doesn't have automatic, like HDR or anything like that. And so I will choose between having subjects that are, you know, exposed properly in a washed out sky or vice versa. And so I do still use the Olympus, particularly when I want a zoom because I have some flavor of zoom lens that I forget off the top of my head on it, which is again, less relevant now with the iPhone's 5X camera.

1:31:40Or if I'm outdoors, for sure, if I'm outdoors trying to capture like people or whatever, I am 100 % reaching for the Olympus. But that's about it. If I'm not outdoors in decent light, then oftentimes it's just less fuss to use the iPhone. And that's typically what I'm doing. Uh, John, I need you to keep this to under three hours. Which one of your 17 cameras are you using? What scenarios please? Uh, so for the holidays, uh, I just, well, really for everything except for Long Island beach photography, I use my phone, obviously, and also what I consider my main camera, which is the Sony A7 III that Marco generously gifted me all those years ago.

1:32:23Love it. Still getting great mileage out of it. The lens I use on it is what I consider my sort of everyday lens. It's the most versatile single lens I have for this camera. It's the Sony 24 to 70 f2.8 GM2. What I like about the lens is the zoom range is reasonable the aperture at 2.8 is reasonable and the size is reasonable you can get lenses with longer ranges and with a wider aperture they're all bigger and heavier this one is already kind of at the limit of big and heaviness but it is versatile enough that i can use it in any kind of indoor or outdoor scenario where i'm going to be taking pictures of people at an event or doing a thing so christmas morning is that camera and occasionally the phone which I will take out for I don't do it don't do any video on my big camera I do video only on the phone and occasionally I'll take out my phone to do video and then snap some uh shots with it as well depending on how quickly I need to get the shot is the camera around my neck my family complains that all the pictures of me uh Christmas morning I have a camera around my neck with like someone's got to take the pictures and it's going to be me so any picture they take of me with their phones which they're terrible quality phones uh is me with a camera a camera around their neck um yeah so that's my plan for this year as well same lens same camera it'll be around my neck while opening presents i'm gonna be taking pictures of everybody else and they're gonna end up going in the calendar that hangs in the fridge and it's just the way it works plus my iphone pictures my iphone pictures get better every year because well not every every two years my iphone pictures get better because i get a better phone and that trend continues but uh it's gonna be a little while before i ever upgrade the big camera there are obviously many better cameras but like me with my tvs i'm waiting for that right better camera first of all a better camera is going to cost me a whole bunch of money so uh you know and i'm gonna i'm looking at the sony cameras because i want to be able to reuse all my lenses and i like sony cameras and so i'm just waiting for that right one like the uh uh the a7r5 was actually a really good one but i don't know if i want the r series with that much extra resolution i'm not sure if i want or need that to make my photos bigger the a1 was tempting but super expensive the new version of the a1 is like oh it's better but they didn't change the really the sensor then there's the a9 with the electronic sensor it's like maybe i should just wait until they basically have something with the uh dynamic range of the a1 series but with the uh instant readout i forget what the name of it is but like the the electronic shutter instant readout thing of the a9 and that is a technology that doesn't exist yet so i'm just sitting here waiting i'm saying in the meantime i love my a7iii take tons of pictures with it i have lots of different interesting lenses for it that i use in occasions when i have time to prepare but my everyday lens uh the sony 24 to 70 gm2 highly recommended lens great compromise between image quality weight and aperture if you have to pick one single lens to use for anything and when i take you know sometimes like my kids are going to like a dance at school or something like that, where I know I'm going to be taking pictures of people all dressed up in their nice outfits, I'll put on one of my prime lenses to get better pictures out of it.

1:35:30But most of the time, the everyday lens gets me through. Alright, thank you to our sponsor this week, The Members. Thank you so much, members. You mean a lot to us, especially now we're getting all sentimental about holidays and everything. Thank you very much. You really mean a lot to us. If you want to join and be a member, one of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime. This week in overtime, we're going to go through a wonderful idea John had. We're going to name each of us is going to name our best tech thing of 2024, our worst tech thing of 2024, and the tech thing we are most looking forward to in 2025.

1:36:06If you want to hear that and every other thing we do in overtime every week and all of our other bonus content and all the other benefits of being a member, you can join us at ATP.FM slash join. Thank you, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into 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.

1:37:01N T Marco Armin. S I R A C USA Syracuse. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So I thought maybe we could take the opportunity to do like a quick catch up on Aaron's car. If you recall, in June, when we were all at WWDC together, Aaron's old Volvo had a catastrophic engine failure. I forget which episode we talked about it, but you should go and listen to it. It is caused by a very small pebble. Correct. How are you not going to say, like, I was just waiting for you to get to that point. You're just going to say, oh, it had a catastrophic engine failure anyway, continuing on.

1:37:51It's like, no. It had a catastrophic engine failure caused by a pebble. It had an encounter with a pebble. It was defeated by a pebble. It was destroyed by a pebble. There's so many different ways you can do this. The important part is the pebble. It was possibly the most interesting catastrophic engine failure I've ever heard. Yeah. See, there you go. So anyway, you can hear the details on a prior episode. I don't recall which one. But that was in June. And then in early July, we figured out that we really just wanted to stick with Volvo. And I don't need to hear any feedback as to whether or not that was smart.

1:38:25Don't care. That's what we did. It's already done. And what we did this time, though, was, you know, Aaron had a Volvo XC90. It was a 2017. We bought a 2024. We leased, actually, a 2024 XC90. But this one is a plug-in hybrid, an XC90 T8. and basically what that means is it has a turbocharged four-cylinder engine and it also has a battery electric engine if your motor i guess strictly speaking if you will uh and anyway so it gets about 30 to 35 miles of range generally speaking uh we can charge it in about five hours from dead uh here at home because we have a like american dryer style plug which is a 220 volt plug i want to say it's like 50 amps something like that uh which then gets converted down to uh i think it's a 30 amp which is all that the car wants because it's not a huge battery i believe it's 18 kilowatt hours or 18 kilowatts excuse me um something like that anyway you were at the first time no there we go i screwed it up um but i thought it would be interesting to talk about what it's like for uh someone to have a plug-in hybrid car and i gotta tell you for our particular needs And our particular needs are relatively unique.

1:39:41But for us, I freaking love this thing. And I think it was the perfect solution for our family. So generally speaking, Erin drives 10 miles in a day, maybe 20 at most on an average day. And I just told you that the battery lasts roughly 30 miles, give or take a little bit, generally speaking. so that means that almost all of her driving she can do on electricity and that also means that we bought the car i want to say it was like july 10 or thereabouts i forget exactly what day it was but it was in the top half of july a couple of weeks ago we put our second tank of gas in the car how much horsepower is the electric motor you know i honestly don't know i want to say it's like 100 horsepower but i really truly don't remember off the top of my head because i was Are you forcing it into EV-only mode?

1:40:31Essentially, you get in, you put it into the mode that says, don't use the gas engine at all? That does exist. It's called Pure. And I have done that a handful of times. And oftentimes, if I do it, it's because I want to allow myself the full depth of the accelerator pedal. You know how in an automatic, you can just kind of feel, not physically feel, but you just kind of feel out that, oh, if I go any further, the car will downshift. And you know that unless you're really trying to get going somewhere, you can just that that that say 50 depth on the accelerator is all you've really got at that particular moment well the same sort of thing is true here now it is an automatic when it's using the gasoline engine but that's not what i'm talking about what i mean is you can just kind of tell that if i go beyond this depth of the pedal it's going to kick on the gas motor not only that but the but the the tachometer it to the or i guess it's the power meter strictly speaking it has a droplet i'm not sure why it's a droplet but it's a droplet and a line that indicates okay hey, if you ask for any power beyond this point, I'm kicking on the gasoline.

1:41:31And so we run it in hybrid mode 99 % of the time. And it is exceedingly rare that it will turn on the gasoline for just getting around town purposes. Now, if we're on an interstate or something like that, it will absolutely kick the gasoline on from time to time. And then also I've found that if you use the onboard navigation, and this has Android Automotive, which means it's the Google-powered thing. It has Google Maps and whatnot. If you tell the car the destination rather than using Apple Maps on CarPlay, it will do some sort of computational magic such that it will kick on the gasoline when there's plenty of battery power left.

1:42:10I believe because it thinks, okay, later in the trip, when you're close to your destination, you're going to want the juice for then. That being said, I'm not sure I really agree with some of its choices. It would use battery at times where I thought the gasoline might have served it better, like say on the interstate. And it used gasoline when I thought the battery might have served it better, like around town. Maybe it's right. And certainly it's presumably smarter than me. But I don't know. It just felt weird. But that was many words to say, no, we don't typically put it in pure mode. We typically run it in hybrid mode.

1:42:40I'm surprised that your gas tanks last in that long, because you're not disallowing the gas engine from turning on. So it turns on whenever it feels like it. Although it does sound like you're kind of babying it because you don't want the gas engine to turn on. But still, it's turning on in your daily use. but I guess just a little bit, just briefly, and not enough to go through. Does that have a big gas tank? How big is the gas tank? You know, that's a great question, which I also don't know off the top of my head. You only filled it up twice. Yeah, I've only filled it twice. Let me see if I can quickly find the – I log our fuel spreadsheet and number spreadsheet.

1:43:14I don't know why I do it. I just like doing it. I have no good justification for it. Even less so now. Yeah, right. The last time we filled it up, it was pretty darn near empty, and we put in almost 16 gallons, like just a shade shy of 16 gallons. And that was an effective miles per gallon on that tank of 77.2. And that is by taking the amount of miles driven, you know, divided by the amount of gallons burned. But again, that's not really fair because most of that time we were running on electricity rather than gasoline. That's one of the things that always worries me about hybrids. I'm always so worried about Marco's i3's range extensure is like if you don't ever use the gas engine, A, you're just, you know, wasting electricity hauling this big heavy thing around.

1:43:59And B, if you don't run a gasoline engine for long periods of time, it gets cranky. Like you do have to occasionally start it and you are like you're it's clearly turning on. And although it auto stop start also makes me have empathy for the engine. yes being i know they're designed to auto stop start i know all the things they did to change the engine so they can do that and more robust starters and yada yada it's still not good for the engine still right so i do worry that yeah i mean you're just listening so who cares but like as one of the strange compromises about hybrids is you know depending on how you use them in like the quote-unquote best case scenario where you're basically on ev almost all the time a it's inefficient to hug the line lug the engine around and b that engine is having a sad, difficult life.

1:44:43That's probably not being run enough. It wants to be run. It's like, you know, a thoroughbred horse. It wants to get out there and run, and you're just like, nope, electric motor's got it. Yeah. And I mean, I would say that it probably, if I were to wager a guess, in the six months or thereabouts that we've had the car, I would say the gasoline motor has been on 10 hours or less, maybe. Like, it is very rare for the gasoline motor to run. See, that's not a good healthy life for a gas engine. I know who cares about the whole point is you don't want to be burning gasoline. Like I get that, but it's like it just that's why I always feel like a pure EV is so much more of a simple solution.

1:45:20But, you know, hey, live and learn. Yeah. And I mean, again, I can't find any particular, you know, beef that I have with anything you just said. I agree with you. But so far, you know, six months in, it has been incredible because we almost never use gasoline. And again, it's been a couple of thousand miles. shoot, I already closed the numbers document. But I think we were at like, at the time of the last fueling, we were at 3 ,000 miles at the time we last fueled it. 3 ,000 miles. And we have put in a sum total of 26 gallons of gas, which is just bananas. And for our uses, it is the best of both worlds because easily 90 plus percent of the time, Aaron is using it just on electricity.

1:46:05and then the handful of times that we want to go further. Now, admittedly, we haven't taken it on a proper trip yet. When I say further, I'm saying like a sum total of 100, 150 miles, which I know most reasonable EVs would laugh at. But that being said, anytime we want to take it further than like 30 or so, then the gasoline just kicks on and it's no problem. And that's worked out super duper well. And I think we could, our family could have a EX90, which is the full electric version of this car. I mean, it's strictly speaking a little bit different, but it's effectively the full electric version of the XC90.

1:46:41And I certainly think we could make that work without too much compromise. But I really, I wasn't ready for the family hauler to be full electric yet. I 100 % believe that I should have years ago gotten a full electric for myself. I haven't for several different reasons. But for the family hauler, I didn't want it to be full electric yet. And I stand by that for now. Um, and I honestly, I could make a strong argument about how wrong I am. So I'm not, you know, this, this is a weak opinion loosely, right? Exactly. It's a weak opinion held loosely. I'll be the first to tell you, but, uh, certainly for sticking our toe in the water, the, the, the plug-in hybrid has been excellent and I'm really, really happy with it.

1:47:23The qualms I have with the car are, well, let me, let me ask you guys, if you were to just hazard a guess, what do you think my biggest complaint about the car is? Infotainment. close oh i was gonna say the transmission no no no well there is no transmission 90 of the time we drive it um no it's software the software is not great and it's it's google's android automotive now maybe it's volvo's application thereof i've never had an android automotive car before yeah android automotive is is a perfectly solid foundation it's all the crap that the manufacturers put on top of it that often has bugs by the way that's what i meant by infotain how am I close?

1:48:00I'm exactly right. It's infotainment. That's the, that's the term of art for the thing you're describing. It's the software that runs on the middle things. Yeah, but I can't put my, there are times that it's something at a lower level than the infotainment. 90 % of my complaints, you're exactly right. It's the infotainment, but there, there are occasions. And of course I can't put my finger on one specifically right the second, but there are occasions that it's something that I think is a lower level than that, but definitely most of my complaints are the infotainment and it and i actually liked the i think they called it census which was the volvo homegrown thing that predated android auto or excuse me android automotive um i liked it most people did not they've kind of tried to make a faux census on top of android automotive and it's all right but i just don't love the way some of it works and some silly things have been regressions.

1:48:50So a great example of this is I don't particularly care for the radio in any capacity. Erin loves listening to the radio in the car. And she really has come to like Sirius XM. I think we've talked about this in the past, but she likes satellite radio. And Erin is not one to want to pay money for really anything if she can avoid it. She's very frugal, maybe, is the word I'm looking for. I think there's an even more complimentary term than that that I can't put my finger on but she doesn't like to spend money frivolously meanwhile that's my specialty but that's neither here nor there um but and and i am a mere apprentice to marco's expert level at this but nevertheless um you see how he snuck in the new version of the the big medium format fuji in there yeah exactly exactly i didn't know i didn't say i own the new version of the medium i just i there is a new version i have the old version oh i thought you'd bought the new version no it's mentioned it as a off to the side during your story okay that's a good clarification marco did not buy the new one no by the way remind me to tell you sometime about long island christmas light installation pricing oh my god anyway like paying somebody else to do it this is okay i'm sorry for the derail this is go for it go for this is a thing i don't know how long this has been a thing i'm relatively new to long island um but this is a thing that that there are a lot of houses especially as you get towards like you know the nicer blocks in town a lot of houses have professionally installed commercial grade christmas lights and you can identify them pretty easily there i believe it's the c9 sizes i think i think it's what they're called but um they're they're they're the large lights that are perfectly evenly spaced and are all perfectly aligned to outline the roof line and all the sidelines of a house and usually some of their landscaping and maybe maybe their driveway and everything this is so prevalent i like i'm i'm shocked like how many houses do this and first of all i respect what they're trying to achieve I do think it kind of goes against the spirit of Christmas lights if they're all perfect and corporate installed by like, you know, like somebody you're paying to put them on your house.

1:51:07Like I feel like that that kind of is against the spirit of Christmas lights. And I I prefer a more organic look where somebody just like went out there themselves and draped some lights over their bushes. Like I like that look better. It's a little more homey. And I think that's kind of what I go for. But anyway, so there's all these like, you know, just residential homes. Our kids saw this one time and was like, oh, my God, we have to have that. How like how do we do that? So we called around some different places that, you know, we saw signs for. You would not believe what this costs. On Long Island, I'm sure it's thousands.

1:51:40Yes, which greatly surprised us. You know, and we were asking for like a very basic thing. And it was the quote blew us away. We scaled it back quite a bit. But based on the quote that we got and based on what everyone else was charging for the same thing and based on what everyone else seems to be doing to their houses, I think there are at least 15 houses within a few blocks of here that have spent over$5 ,000, possibly over$10 ,000 for their Christmas light installation. And that's just for the year. That's just for this year. Don't forget about the electricity. believe me that's nothing compared to you know if if you're paying five or ten thousand dollars for your light installations every year the electricity is not going to matter at all back when they were incandescence i think i think you could uh compete with that if you left them on all the time but yeah with leds hopefully it's not that much this shot it's shocking to me that people would pay like you know five or ten thousand dollars to decorate their house for like three weeks you see how it works because you just got done saying how you think it's uh you know not to your taste but then also you're looked into paying for some because the neighbors did it that's how it works the neighbors have lights and you want to have the lights and just keeping up with the joneses and it's happening to you too because like why did you even agree just because adam wanted it and you're like okay well i don't like it but adam wants it so we'll do it yeah i figured you know we'd try it for a year and then whoa you could have hung them yourself like i mean that's the you know the old way i i saw this by just not doing lights at all but when i was a kid my dad and i did lights we hung them ourselves and it was dangerous and stupid and that's the christmas spirit but these these are somewhat involved to do yourself because like it's one of those you know to to get the perfect alignment each light has its own bracket it isn't you're not just like you know stapling a couple of staples for the wires yeah no i understand like i agree with you i don't like that look i when i'm hanging them i say like you have nails stuck into like the the eaves of your house and you hang wires over the nails and nothing is evenly spaced and you know it's very organic yeah that i i prefer that look but there are a lot of people who prefer this look and i don't know i like once i learned how much it costs it kind of ruined it for me now i'm just kind of like oh my god those people wasted so like so anyway all this is to say that uh believe me casey there are people who are way better at wasting money than either of us good to know you could put a projector on your lawn marco and have it project lights onto your house you know those things where they take like you know things on to serve They won't be as bright as the neighbor's lights, but you can have any configuration you want, and it's just one little projector.

1:54:13Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyways, Erin doesn't really love spending money if she can avoid it, which is great because I'm very good at it. And so she really likes SiriusXM. And I was starting to say before we got a little sidetracked that one of the things that's worse about this new version of Sensus, if they're even calling it that now, is that on her old car, when you looked at the list of channels in SiriusXM, if you're trying to flip to like a different channel, it would show you what the currently playing song was on each channel. So like on this list, it would say, you know, hits whatever is playing Justin Bieber and hit then, you know, 90s on nine is playing so-and-so and zeros on zero is playing such and such.

1:54:54And it would show you whatever's playing on each thing. And it doesn't do that on this version of the software. And to John's earlier point, I believe that is Volvo. I don't think that's Android or excuse me. I don't think that's Google at all. That's Volvo's work. And it's silly things like that that are frustrating. And oftentimes there'll be little bugs and little quirks. And every great once in a while, we'll have to do a hard reset on the infotainment, which takes down like everything, including the HVAC. So we can be hurtling down the road and have to pull a Marco in his Model S and have to reboot the center console.

1:55:24This has only happened a handful of times in six months. But every time it does, it's infuriating. And I can't tell if that's 100 % Volvo, if it's 100 % Google, or in all likelihood a combination thereof. but that drives me nuts. It's just the software is the issue on this car. And it's not bad enough that I would say don't buy one. I really do love this car, but it's the software. Oh, another great example. This hasn't happened in a while actually, but when we first got the car, I don't know if it was where we had things stored in the garage or something like that. We have a fairly spacious garage actually, but Aaron would go backing into the garage and it was not infrequent for the car to panic stop.

1:56:05And understandably, that drove her up a fucking wall because every time it happened, it's intense. Granted, she's not bombing into the garage. We back in because we're adults and that's what adults should do. And we back into the garage. And so she's not driving at 15 miles an hour into the garage in reverse, but she's going quick enough that if you get this thing panic stopping, it's all of a sudden, it's stopped. You're going from moving to dead. and 90 % or maybe not 90 % of the time, but a lot of the time she has kids in the car and it scares the piss out of the kids too. Of course. And so we rearranged a couple of things we had in the garage that really were not that close to the car, but were close enough that I think it might've been setting this off.

1:56:46But like, that's a software thing. You can't just disable that? You probably could, but I don't think you can permanently, you know, short of like, you know, coding the car or something like that. It's like the proximity things, like when, you know, my wife got her new car, it's the first car we had with any of these proximity auto stop thingies. and we haven't had the auto stop thingy but we did have like the beepy things that yell at you if you get too close to something yeah or yell at you when you're changing lanes with your blind spot and the proximity ones in particular at least in this car there's a very prominent actual physical button on the dashboard uh that you can hit to turn that feature on and off so what you just do is when you're pulling into the garage you hit the proximity thing off i was telling i tell her is that she has it off by default i tell her turn it on when you're parking so if you know you're getting close to some stuff but in aaron's case i would say turn it off when you're back into the garage uh even if it comes on as soon as you start the car like that's what you want so you should check to see if there's a way to turn off i mean your problem it's not the proximity sensing it's the emergency stopping that you don't like and volvo being volvo may not let you turn that off but you should double check exactly uh but i mean i think it was a software thing and i think by rearranging some things in the garage it has made a big difference but when it does happen It's happened with me in the car a couple of times.

1:57:55I don't get driven up a wall by it, but unquestionably it's unsettling. And that's being generous. Like it's very unsettling to the point that it's almost scary. And that's as a passenger, much less as a driver. Does it beep at you too, besides just emergency stopping? Well, it'll beep, beep, beep, beep. And then it'll like slam on the brakes and like, you know, sound some sort of alarm or something like that. Ryan Booker in the chat is saying that was a bug. I think Polestar used to do the same thing backing into our driveway. way if there was a blade of grass in the way uh is as soon as you go into the reverse gear you can just turn it off but you have to do it every time and that that i believe corroborates what my experience was do you have to go through menus on the touch screen to turn it off i don't i don't recall to be honest with you but um it's not it's not great in that regard but again it's partially our work potentially partially volvo's work that's gotten better that's that's um you know so volvo again being volvo and being very safety focused i can see how they might turn a lot of these things on by default, but Honda...

1:58:52trying to do the right thing in its interiors with both the proximity sensor and also the auto stop start the proximity sensor again a prominent button directly on the dashboard dedicated to this just turning the proximity on and off and it defaults to on uh but then you can turn it off or you i think you can set it to default off and then you turn it on but then the auto stop start has to default on for them to get the good epa like mileage rating blah blah blah so it always turns on but it's right by like the gear shift lever like the auto stop start button uh and there is an 80 thing as i think i mentioned when she got this car there is an 80 thing you can can buy and shove inside your dashboard that will turn it off by default but honda's trying to to say look we know which features of our car are annoying and we will give you ways to defeat them that are as convenient as possible very prominently located easy to reach easy to see the auto stop start thing has a gigantic dedicated badge on the uh the lcd instrument cluster so you always know when it's on and off it never goes away it's like the most important thing on the display besides It's like the amount of fuel you have and your speed, but they have to turn it on by default for safety reasons.

1:59:58So Volvo is not really meeting you halfway about knowing which things are annoying. I think they probably just think this emergency stopping thing is going to save your life someday. And you're like, I'm just trying to back into the garage. Yeah. The other nice thing about having a plug-in hybrid is that even though the car is parked in a garage with garage door closed overnight, and even though you two particularly john seem to think that we live effectively on the equator because we are south of i don't know philadelphia um that's obviously correct as it turns out it does actually get cold here uh by any reasonable definition and so but not cold enough that your water heater isn't in your garage you can't help yourself can you anyway the point is it's 15 degrees here okay my water heater is not in my garage at least mine isn't outside like jason's Anyway, the point is...

2:00:43I mean, it's 24 degrees here, and my water heater is currently air conditioning my garage. It's 28 here. Thank you very much. So it's not like it's that frigging different. Anyway... That's tropical. Jesus Christ, I quit. Anyway, so the point is, in the mornings, when it got properly cold here, which, again, happens more often than you two, John, think, I would oftentimes pull Erin's car out before the kids and her got in it because she drives them to school. I would pull her car out maybe 5 or 10 minutes before they were going to leave so the kids don't have to get into a freezing cold car and Aaron too but particularly the kids and with this if the car isn't plugged in you can only run the electric like preheat or pre-cool for 3 minutes and it turns itself off probably because the battery is so darn small but if the car is plugged in you can run it for a solid 30 minutes and so any time within 30 minutes of them needing to leave in the morning, I can just flip that bad boy on from my phone and it's just perfect in there by the time she gets in and unplugs it, which is great.

2:01:48So again, there's a lot to be said for battery electric or plug-in hybrid cars. I'm sure there's other things I'm not thinking of that I could say about this, but I got to tell you, if you're in a situation where most of your driving happens within the range of the battery on your plug-in hybrid, but you still want to be able to drive, two, three, four, 500 miles without having to stop for 45 minutes at a clip, then I got to tell you, I am really happy with our plug-in hybrid. And I really do think that my next car will be full-on battery electric. And that will actually probably make some very interesting changes in the way Aaron and I drive our cars.

2:02:25Because right now, it is very clear that I have my car and she has hers because she can't drive a stick. And once I get a battery electric, when that goes away and there are only two pedals i'm very curious to see how we split the duty of our cars you know will she generally speaking take quote-unquote mine when she's doing basic stuff around town because she's not going to want to haul the i think it's like 5 000 5 500 6 000 pound car in order to do stuff or will she just take hers because she's more comfortable with it how much do you think your ev is going to weigh i was going to say one of those 3 000 pound evs yeah i have bad news for you about how much evs weigh you make a very good point even when they're not suvs They're all heavy.

2:03:03Yeah. That is very true. You're right about that. But you still take my point, though. I mean, whatever battery I get. Yes, smaller dimensions would maybe be better around town for parking and stuff. Exactly. So, I mean, I don't know. We'll see what happens. I'm not currently in the market for a car. And I do, I really do love my car. And I know I'm going to desperately miss having a stick whenever I get something different. But I am really, really happy with her plug-in hybrid. And, you know, some quibbles here and there for sure. but I'm really, really glad this is where we ended up. And it may come a time, I presume there will come a time that we get both of us full on electric cars.

2:03:41And I'll say to Marco, you know what, Marco, you were right. We could have done it for that 2024 that we leased, but sitting here now to get our foot in the water, I'm really, really happy with it. And if you have this situation where, you know, you work from home or your commute is very, very, very short. I mean, when I was working outside the home, my commute was like three miles. So if you're in the situation where you're not driving a whole ton every day, and yet you still want to be able to drive far if you so desire. Plug-in hybrid, man, it's great. Plug-in hybrids are great for a lot of people.

2:04:11That being said, once you actually live with a full EV, you're going to realize how it was so not a big deal the way you thought it would be. I'm sure you're right. I don't doubt it. In terms of long trips. Look, I get range anxiety. I get trying to avoid EV charging infrastructure because it's unfamiliar and scary. I get that. And yes, there are downsides for certain use cases for EVs, but it's so much less of a big deal than people think it will be to take EVs on long trips before they own them. Once you own one and live with it and actually do it, you're like, oh, that's fine. It isn't better in every way, but it's better in a lot of ways.

2:04:59And it's not that much worse than you think it'll be in the few ways it is worse. So, yeah, it's not a big deal. But in the meantime, plug-in hybrids are a good transitional option. And so I'm glad you're enjoying it. I'm glad it's working as kind of training wheels into the world of electric. And I'm glad you're able to enjoy some of those benefits of electric only use or electric primary use in the meantime. So that's great. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more that this is training wheels at the moment. And the funny thing about this is that if I'm honest with you two, there are definitely times that Aaron's prior XC90, the pure gasoline XC90, there are definitely some multi-hundred mile trips we went on with that car.

2:05:47But generally speaking, in an average year, the longest trip that Aaron's car made, and this one will make, is 140 miles, which is well within the range of—now, that's one way, mind you. So what is that, about 300 miles round trip, which is still almost, you know, I would say most electric cars jump in, Marco, but most electric cars have roundabouts of 250 to 300 mile range. So even round trip, we could probably do it in one charge if we really needed to. But, you know, so generally speaking, her car does not go far. So that's even more credence that I'm full of it and Marco's right that we should just have a full battery electric for Aaron.

2:06:27You're currently using an EV with 35 miles of range, you realize. It's your living that is able to serve all of your needs with an EV with 35 miles of range. It just happens to weigh 5 ,500 pounds. I agree. You're not wrong. That being said, we are going on a longer trip this upcoming summer, which is 320 miles each way. But that doesn't mean we couldn't charge when we're there. And it's going to be a week-long trip. So presumably, even if we were plugged into a standard 110-volt outlet, I would assume in the span of literally a week, we would be able to top that thing up. But you would never do that because fast charging is really easy.

2:07:03Also fair. But my point is that it could happen. I'm not trying to say that it is an impossibility for us. It's just something that I certainly wasn't comfortable with. And if I wasn't comfortable with it, there is no chance that Aaron would be comfortable with it. And actually, John is writing something in our internal show notes as we speak, which reminded me of the one thing I meant to say, which I've forgotten to say. um aaron the other day when it started to get cold by our standards which at this point i will concede is not cold by northeastern standards this was like maybe a month ago aaron gets in the car and is like uh is something wrong with my car and i was like oh god what why she said well it's not saying i have 30 plus miles range it says like 28 29 27 something like that i forget what it was and i was like huh and then i stepped outside oh yep yep that's the thing she said what what are you talking about?

2:07:56I was like, oh yeah, it's cold outside. Yeah. Well, the battery doesn't work as well as it's cold when it's cold. What? Now, let me be clear. Erin is not a dumb woman. I would say she's brighter than me in almost every capacity, but she's not as knowledgeable as me about cars and that sort of thing. And she had no idea that she would take a hit for range during, during the winter. And yeah, the 32 ish miles that we were getting in the summer. Uh, it's now like 27 ish. Usually when we pull out of the garage in morning yeah but again like yes that is like a thing that happens but that it that's less about like inherent shortcomings of evs and more just about lack of familiarity like i always think yeah i agree there was that one blog post that we linked to a thousand years ago from like it was like written from the perspective of somebody who's just discovering gas cars for the first time after having evs oh yes that was very good i forget i don't think we could find it but that That was very good.

2:08:50Let's dig it up. But yeah, but it was like, I love that perspective. It's like a lot of what people consider downsides of EVs are not considering similar downsides of gas cars or, you know, it's like it's comparing it against like a perfect ideal that doesn't exist rather than looking at what actually is, you know, there's downsides with everything and there's different trade-offs. Part of the reason why EVs have to, you know, make their own heat in the winter, which is somewhat inefficient and uses more range is because there isn't a giant inefficient heat reaction happening as it operates to drive itself forward the way it is in gas like gas cars can heat the cabin for basically for free because there is just so much waste heat coming out of the engine right and you're like okay well that's great that's free but you're like well hmm you mean we're wasting all of that energy all the rest of the time and huh it's it's heating up the world all the rest of the time like like that that isn't without downside either you know so like there is you know there's there's a lot of of kind of you know just you know gas car you know bias in our minds because it's like that's we've accepted that as normal we we have internalized like yeah well this is just how quote normal cars operate so then when evs come around like we see all the differences without realizing like there's a lot of downsides to gas cars too oh definitely um definitely and and again like i'm not i'm i i will never say that evs are better at everything i will say that they are better at most things and and again like the ways the ways they are worse are not as much worse for most people as they might think um but in almost every other way they're better.

2:10:34Yeah. And again, I think we could absolutely make an EV work. And I say that as though it would be some immense burden. It wouldn't be. It wouldn't be. And intellectually, I know that, but I just wasn't there yet. And again, if I'm not there yet, I don't think Aaron was either. But I suspect what's going to happen is whenever my car gets replaced, and I don't know if that's tomorrow or 10 years from now, but whenever my car gets replaced, I'll get some sort of full electric car and once we live with that i think it'll be it'll quickly become very clear to us that oh we could make this work and it wouldn't be as burdensome as we fear oh it'll be it'll be better than that you won't just be making it work you'll love it like give it give it like two months or less and you'll be like oh my god why do we wait this long well that's that's true too because aaron's car went in full battery mode either because it's in the quote-unquote pure or because we just haven't kicked on the gasoline yet.

2:11:26It's sufficiently quick, but it is not quick. I mean, it is a very heavy car and it is not a tremendous motor that's driving it. And so it is not fast by any means. It's actually surprisingly peppy once you've got both of them working together because the gasoline, I believe, only drives the front axle and the battery only drives the rear. But generally speaking, when we drive it, it's, like I said, it's sufficiently quick, but it is not quick. Whereas even slow EVs that I've driven, And like my, my parents have a Chevy, is it Bolt? I always get it Bolt and Volt wrong. I forget which one it is, but whatever one is the, is the one that they were producing up until like a year ago.

2:12:03Maybe it's a Volt. Crap. I don't remember. It doesn't matter. Anyways. Molt. Fair. Yeah. It's, it's sheds. It sheds all the time. Every, every couple of seasons. It's very weird. But anyways, whatever their piece of crap Chevy electric is, it is a piece of crap Chevy electric. And yet it's actually delightful. And from zero to 30 miles an hour, pretty damn fast. You'd be surprised. And that's not a performance car by any stretch of the imagination. So I am looking forward to whenever we get a full battery electric to have, you know, that instant torque in more than just a small helping of it from zero RPM.