638: Hop, Hop, Hop

29:25The app review guidelines have been updated for compliance with the United States court decision regarding buttons, external links, and other calls to action in apps. These changes affect apps distributed on the United States storefront of the App Store. Yeah, they were pretty quick. The little statement was, we disagree, we'll comply, we're going to appeal. They disagreed. they updated the things to comply and they're appealing so uh they did what they said uh although the update was like in typical fashion it was kind of like a text diff where it's like section 3.1.2a uh no longer says x y and z like it wasn't like a textual diff it was like a sentence description of like each section and what they it used to say that you know we no longer require this we we say this you can't like it was and people are trying to like parse it by looking at the original text and looking at this and then doing a text diff.

30:12And there was lots of questions going on, as we'll see in a second, about, okay, but like, what are the rules now? Yeah. So from NJSci's Roundup, one of the questions is, and this was raised by Ryan Jones, Ryan writes, at least how this is written right now, it seems like there's no mandate to link out. In other words, a Stripe Apple Pay button can be directly in the app or the entire paywall could be a web view with a button right there in it. Now, with that said, Gruber disagreed. Gruber wrote in his post, this does not mean apps can now use alternative payment processing in-app. It doesn't even mean apps are no longer required to offer Apple's IAP in-app for purchases and subscriptions.

30:52All it means is that apps in the US for now, but Apple really ought to make this worldwide, but I suspect Tim Cook wants to fight this on appeal in federal court, which he does, are free to inform users about offers available on the web and to link to those offers on the web. Those links must open outside the app in the user's default web browser. and i think that i think gruber is right about this as far as i can tell but honestly with app review who even knows what who even knows again what app review will actually do but the thing is like that that's what people even if you have to link out the prohibitions that were the most egregious were you couldn't even tell people anything about pricing like you couldn't say hey you know here's in-app purchase which apple makes us put in but you can get it for 15 to 30 percent less if you click this link and people are going to click that link because they want to save money So even if it goes outside and goes to a web page, you're like, people don't care.

31:41They'll like, people buy things on the web all the time. People buy things in Safari on the iPhone. It happens all the time. It's a thing people are used to. So that is the real freedom that matters. It would be better if like Ryan Jones suggested, you could just do it inside the app with the web view or whatever, because then people wouldn't even know. But we'll see how this shakes out. I mean, this, the reality is like this whole thing about like the rule. I mean, this is one area that I agree with Apple, I think. the idea of drawing the distinction of like well you can't have payments in your app but if you link out to the web browser and do it there that's so different of course it's the same thing like who cares you can make a you know a one-click link now you know with now that you don't have one unsigned link that can't include like any tokens or anything now you can just have the app generate a link that automatically logs in the user so you click a button in the app it kicks you over to Safari with this user-specific URL.

32:39There's a payment screen there. It could even have a one-click payment option like Apple Pay or ShopPay or Stripe's link thing. There's so many other things. You can have a one-click payment there, and then it can redirect you back to a URL that launches you back into the app. You're basically having payments for your app to your own payment processor. You just have a couple of weird screen animations between each direction to get there like i i know that we try to draw this distinction certainly you know apple doesn't want this but like there is no difference business wise between this being in the app and having the app kick you over to the browser and kick you back into the app like there is no difference like the especially if you're allowed to use web views in the app because then you literally won't leave the app and you're not to be clear but i like i don't think that matters like i think what this what what we've been arguing all this time is really that apps should be able to use their own payments if they want to.

33:34That's it. The idea of, well, it's okay if it happens in the browser, I think that is a distraction and not a meaningful distinction to the actual use of these apps in practice. And I think we will very much see a lot of these, again, simple one-click things. Right now, people are like, oh, everyone's going to build their own thing and you don't have to log in and into your credit card? No. I mean, yes, people will do that. But the more common case will be, you'll be kicked over to a page that has ShopPay or StripeLink or something where you already probably have that logged in. Or it could literally be Apple Pay on the web.

34:14It could be an Apple Pay button. But I think what we're going to see here is if, again, If this sticks, which that's a huge if, but if this sticks, we will see Apple compete. Maybe. I mean, because again, Apple is at its worst when it doesn't have to compete. That's when we always see the worst behavior and typically mediocre products from Apple. Apple does great when they have a fire lit under them from competition. When they have real competition in an area, they compete very well. But when they give themselves an advantage, like some form of technical or policy lock-in, we see them getting complacent and we see them releasing mediocre things or letting things linger forever, kind of unaddressed or non-competitive options.

35:05Apple being complacent in areas that they don't have to fairly compete in results in crap products and crap experiences. Right now, Apple Pay, in my opinion, is not the best way to pay for something on the web. the best way to pay for something on the web, in my opinion, is ShopPay. I think it's way better than Apple Pay because in my experience, it is way faster and more reliable. I have all sorts of problems with Apple Pay. How many times have you tried to use Apple Pay and it's like, you have to update your billing address for some reason, even though you've put it in 10 ,000 times. And by the way, where do you put it?

35:37God knows. There's so many weird little gotchas sometimes with Apple Pay or odd failures. I've never had ShopPay fail, not once, and it's just as fast. so like apple will actually be forced to compete in areas that like maybe they were class leading at one time but they have no longer they no longer are class leading and they've been able to be complacent because they had technical or policy lock-in that allowed them to be complacent now they'll have to compete and again i think that's better for apple apple does not do well in any way when it locks itself in to its advantages they do great when they have competition they really like They put resources behind things.

36:16They update faster. They ship better quality products when they have competition. And all these areas that they don't, they stagnate. So I think one of the many ways that it will actually be better for Apple if they lose some of this control by force, I think one of the ways this will be better is it will drive them to improve their products to become more competitive. And that will benefit things like their hardware business. So I think overall, I mean, I've been saying for a long time, I'm glad that our friends and other podcasts, hey, Upgrade, I'm sub-podcasting you just like you sub-podcasted me.

36:53By the way, the Upgrade segment on this was excellent. You got to go listen to Upgrade this week. It was very, very good. I can't believe how fired up Jason got. But it's very encouraging now to see that many other people on many other podcasts and publications are now coming to admit the possibility that maybe we need a new CEO at Apple. Because time after time, we keep seeing Tim Cook making decisions that really seem to be about short-term profit and not long-term strategy. And I think the long-term strategy is when Apple makes better solutions and better products, they make more money from their products because more people buy them because they're more competitive and they're better.

37:38So I think it is the best long-term strategy not for Apple to create more areas in which it can be complacent and get mediocre, but to actually keep making their products better. And the only way they consistently do that is when they have competition. So I actually think this will be good for Apple to have this control forcibly taken away from them. We'll see how it plays out. All right. So with that all in mind, Tim Sweeney is grandstanding again. Tim writes, we will return Fortnite to the US iOS App Store next week. This was a couple of days ago. Epic puts forth a peace proposal. If Apple extends the court's friction-free, Apple tax-free framework worldwide, we'll return fortnight to the app store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic he's got a little bit of a trump vibe like he'll start with a statement like we will return it to the app store next week that's not a thing he's empowered to do but he states it like it's going to happen but then you get to the next sentence this is all from him by the way it's a direct quote from him it's not us summarizing or anything if apple does this thing that we want them to do then we will deign to bring fortnight it's like i'm not sure you're in a position to make that uh uh demand tim but you know there he is out there saying stuff well and and you and my initial thought when i first heard this was why would apple care because you know they're not going to make any money from it but then i realized no again what i was just saying they should care because having fortnight on the iphone increases the value of people having iphones yeah that's what i said last week like it could come out as a net win from them because they now suddenly you have a ios with the with fortnite back in it but you know will apple will apple see it that way well that's the thing will tim cook see it that way i guarantee you no because he has shown time and time again he sees zero value in a software ecosystem for his devices we now have documentation showing how those top apple execs think of developers well and also they really hate epic They really hate Epic, but they also really don't respect software.

39:41Like, they really do not respect third-party developers developing stuff for their platforms. They see us solely as a resource to be harvested. And they do not see value that we bring to their platform. I understand. Look, all the Apple people who are out there getting mad at me right now, I understand that other people in the company think differently. But you look at what your top execs have literally said and have shown up in court and stated themselves or have now shown up in discovery and documentation. they what they say says clearly otherwise like they clearly see developers as a resource to be extracted and they do not see any value that we bring to their platforms except fees they see no value for our apps to exist on their platform except what they can extract directly from fees which is honestly scarily incompetent for the leaders of computing platforms i think you're stating their position a little bit more extreme than I'm not read what they say like what you're trying to say is they don't see as much value as as developers do or as most outside observers do which I totally agree with no their argument is literally that developers have like a free ride if we're not paying them they're like like we we get our apps for free like we we get to ride on their platform for free what they're saying is that we would we would benefit from the services they're provided without paying what they feel like is an adequate amount of money to pay for those services because the$99 a year is not sufficient to cover them.

41:02I think you're being very generous to them. I mean, to be clear, I disagree with their position entirely, but I think you're making it a little bit more extreme than it is. Honestly, you are making it what you hope it is, but what they actually say is very different. You haven't brought me the receipts, as the kids say, to show me the statement that is that extreme. Well, your homework, John. Congratulations. You've brought this upon yourself. Hey, congratulations. You played yourself. If you're going to make me read the judgment, I already did that. I guess so. Oh, well, see, then I think Marco is being slightly extreme, but only just, only the teeniest bit.

41:35I mean, it's a moot point. We don't need to argue this because I agree that they need a leadership change. So it doesn't really matter when it comes down to it. They need new leadership in this area. And if this area goes all the way to the top, then they need new leadership at the top. That's actually an idea I have for a future potential member special, but I might bring him to the main show. We'll see. All right. So back to Tim Sweeney grandstanding. He has said that, oh, or yes, he did say publicly, oh, I am going to, or we, Epic, is going to bring Fortnite back by way of the Swedish Epic Games Apple App Store account.

42:13Somehow Fortnite has returned. Yeah, right. So Tim wrote, we have conversed with Apple on the topic and we will use our Epic Games Sweden account to submit Fortnite to the U.S. App Store. we created this account last year to launch epic the epic game store in fortnight in the european union and apple required an eu domiciled account so since that's sitting there and that hasn't been banned from the app store like the american one was apparently that's their backstory it was remember they did ban it then it got unbanned there's this whole history behind it you can follow the link to see it but like the apple did because they created it after their thing was banned and then apple said ha you can't create that over there we're gonna ban that too but then they unbanned it and here's the thing this now he goes from being trumpish to be more lawyerish because he says we have conversed with apple on this topic which could be a true statement and then we will use epic games to account to submit okay that could also be true but those two things do not combine to equal therefore fortnight will appear on the app store because uh those are yeah that's we'll see what happens here but the apple is super mad at epic for reasons that uh make sense and i don't see them uh being particularly kind to uh to epic on this it's clear Apple has already decided that they have weighed benefits of having Fortnite on our platform and the detriment of Epic being annoying and they chose not to have Fortnite I'm not sure the math has changed for them I agree.

43:35Alright so trying to move quickly here there's a litany of people that have come out of the woodwork and said ooh ooh there's a business opportunity here which there is. So very quickly Epic Games has decided they're going to set up web shops for iOS developers reading from MacRumors, Epic Games Today announced plans, this is on the first, for Epic Games Store Web Shops, a feature that will allow developers to launch digital storefronts that are hosted by the Epic Games Store. Now this is where I think it gets interesting. The Epic Games Store will charge developers a 0 % fee for the first$1 million in revenue they collect per app per year and after that developers will need to pay Epic a 12 % cut.

44:09The fees are applicable to all payments that are processed by the Epic Games Store. Epic Games also says that players that spend in Epic web shops will be able to accrue 5 % Epic rewards on all purchases. Competition. Imagine that. Stripe, as was foretold, I'm pretty sure I brought this up last week. Stripe has said, well, let me just read from The Verge. Payment processing platform Stripe just added a way for iOS developers to accept payments by linking outside their apps, dodging Apple's commission fees. Stripe has published a guide that shows developers how to accept transitions outside an app using Stripe checkout.

44:40In the sample video, you can see someone preparing to buy digital fruit with in-app currency, but instead of showing a transaction page inside the app, you launch a Safari and take the user straight to a buy now page. This is functionality Stripe already had, but they quickly put together a little guide and says, look, this is a thing we already do. You can add this to your app. Look how easy it is. Competition. Yep, with sample code. I mean, I skimmed their docs super fast, but it looked good. Then Patreon has said they will update their iPhone app. So reading from The Verge, Patreon is planning to submit an update to its iOS app that will let creators accept payments outside of Apple's payment system, a spokesperson, Adia Taylor, tells The Verge.

45:21Last year, Patreon said it was forced to switch to Apple's in-app purchase system, which applied a 30 % fee to all new memberships purchased in the app or else risk, quote, being removed from the App Store, quote. I will say, though, everyone is rushing to take advantage of this. And if you already have a business that can do this, that can take advantage of this quickly, great. I would say though don't count on this long term this is a brief possibly brief free for all but if Apple wins any kind of appeal or some other injunction I don't know how these things work in that kind of detail but the second Apple doesn't have to do this anymore they will close that door shut and cut everybody off if that happens so I would not rely on this like if I was like an investor I wouldn't invest in a company that relies on this.

46:13If I was making a brand new app, I wouldn't make a brand new app that relied on this. Like, take advantage of it while you can, but it is still in flux. It can still be, it is still being appealed. It only applies to the US, you know? So there are a bunch of asterisks on this. And so enjoy it while we can, but don't assume it will always be this way. Yeah, you got to have conditionals anyway, because like I said, it's US only. So just keep those conditionals there because you might need to, you know, turn off one of those feature flags if this thing goes the other way. Yeah, very abruptly, by the way.

46:45Then friend of the show, Riley Tested writes, I just submitted a new Delta update without all the external payment restrictions. Goodbye, scare screen. And then on The Verge, you can see some of the details of the scare screen, which we've talked about in the past. I mean, we can go into this more, John, if you want, but I feel like we've covered this before. Do you think I want to, Casey? I try. Let the record show. So I try to avoid just sitting here and reading at you. I don't put things in here for no reason. All right, well, here we go. Buckle up. Reading from the Verge. This is about, these are details about the scare screen.

47:20I just put this here instead of earlier because Riley specifically mentioned the scare screen and we've talked about it before, but we learned more about the origins of the scare screens from, I think this is from like the discovery process or something during the case. Apple chose to iterate on the scare screen with the goal of dissuading users from continuing on the web. The pop-up included a paragraph of text and employees discussed using scary language to warn people off. Rafael Onak, a user experience writing manager at Apple, instructed an employee to add the phrase external website to the screen because it sounds scary so execs will love it.

47:52I'm sorry, but that's just patently hilarious. Another employee gave a suggestion on how to make the screen even worse by using the developer's name rather than the app name. Ooh, keep going, another Apple employee responded in Slack. Even Cook got in on the action. When he finally saw the screen for approval, he asked that another warning be added to state that Apple's privacy and security promises would no longer apply out on the web. So this is a demonstration of a bunch of things here. So first of all, I mean, this is just the way it is in big companies. If your job in the company is to make this screen and your bosses have told you we want to discourage people from going outside of the app to make payments, how scary can you make this scare screen?

48:37So there they are being dutiful employees saying, well, we need to we want it to be truthful, but we also want to phrase it in a way that is as scary as possible. So we're not going to lie or make up stuff or whatever, but saying external website instead of just website. Oh, it's scary. Execs will love it. We feel like we're doing our job well. And then this one I thought was great because it's like using the developer's name rather than the app name. It's true. Like the app store, if you go to the app store, you see any app that's available. but you can see what the app is called, but you can also see the name of the developer.

49:09But not using the app name in the message is scarier because people don't know the name of the company that makes their app. Like even now, whenever it's like my wife is always saying, what is this charge from, you know, Boingo Co? And I'm like, I don't know, probably software because like I bought, you know, app XYZ. I might not even know what the name of the company is, but it shows up as a charge from the company. So, I mean, just off the top of the head of the people who are listening, do you know the names of all our companies um i bet you don't right you might know the names of our apps but our company names are different so put the company name in the message because if someone sees a message that says you know as the message says we have a screenshot here any accounts or purchases made outside of this apple we managed by the developer and then in quotes call them scare quotes if you want test tech it's like what the heck is test tech i'm using delta i don't know what test tech is that sounds like someone's trying to steal my credit card i'm not going to go to this link that is a clearly a documented conscious decision by apple employees to make the message scarier while obscuring it it annoys me in various instances of in-app purchase where you don't have enough characters to say something sensible and that's apple's own system so again competition would be better there yeah but this entirely reveals that like you know apple could say we're not trying to scare people away we're just saying the honest truth like you will be outside of it and everything in here is true but it you know the discovery discovery is a b as they say uh we were totally trying to make this scary and we were doing it in ways that essentially hurt the user experience and they and they felt so empowered to do that that they knew they would be rewarded for it like how much effort has been spent making their products more competitive in these areas compared to how much effort they spent on this intentionally degrading it so that it would be as uncompetitive as possible of an alternative.

51:01Like, this is what these people, this is what was encouraged by their higher ups and by the company culture. It goes all the way to the top, my friends. I hate to tell you, like, they are telling you right here, this is what they think of you. Believe them. This is what they think of you. This is how they develop software. This is how they make decisions. This is what they are optimizing for. there is no greater story about privacy and security this is what they actually care about right here laid bare at least this part of the company development relations probably has a different attitude but you know this is the part of the company that deals with app store and like speaking of effort they put in so much effort in dma compliance to essentially make it as difficult and unappealing as possible it would have been so much less effort not to do that but this part of the company that's responsible for complying with these judgments that they don't want to do in the first place is absolutely doing everything it can doing a tremendous amount of additional work to make it so that uh all the alternatives that they're being mandated to do are as unattractive as possible which is what we all said when we saw what they were doing but here is documented evidence from inside the company that it's not that's just not just a side effect of you know what happened it is consciously what they're trying to do yeah this is this is all part of why i say it's better for apple if they get cut off from this drug they're addicted to because look at how much it has perverted with their culture.

52:25Look at how much this has corroded and destroyed their priorities of things like user experience. This has been so bad for them culturally. It's been great short term. It's like a drug. It's been great short term for their feelings and their numbers short term. You keep saying short term, but that's the correction I would make before. Tim Cook made these decisions not for short term profits. He made them for long term profits because they've made years and years and years of tremendous profits. So So now he's making terrible short-term decisions about not complying. But when these decisions were made and policies were set down, long-term profits.

52:59Unfortunately, they're not true to the spirit of the company, which is we're supposed to make products that people love. And then from people loving them, we make money. This is sort of the opposite of that. Right. And the whole time he has been – I don't know if it legally qualifies as misleadingly shareholders. But I would certainly say BSing the shareholders in terms of the whole services category. They have been knowingly peddling a narrative that services is stuff like Ted Lasso. And the reality is the vast majority of services money comes from fees. The Google search deal and its App Store fees.

53:28That's the vast majority of services revenue. And so they've been kind of BSing the whole industry and the shareholders and being like, oh, they're making all their money from services. But it really comes down to these two large chunks of fees that are possibly in a precarious spot right now. I mean this whole thing, again, this has corroded their thinking. this has perverted their incentives. And this is not Apple at its best. We have seen the great things Apple can do at its best. Look at the hardware. The hardware is amazing these days. A lot of the stuff they do is great. Then you have this other area where they're really doing a lot of harm, all for short-term numbers.

54:07It's short-term, quick-hit numbers that I think are worse for the products and the company long-term overall. So I hope we get leadership in there that cares a lot more about the products and the long-term strategy of the company because Tim Cook does not. Then Spotify has also announced, hey, we want a piece of that action too. So reading from MacRumors, Spotify has updated its iPhone app in the US without of app pricing and subscription options for its premium plans. Spotify users in the US can now view pricing information for its individual duo, family, and student plans directly in the iPhone app.

54:39And there are buttons that lead to Spotify's website where users can complete the payment process. Spotify shared the following statement, And quote, in a victory for consumers, artists, creators, and authors, Apple has approved Spotify's U.S. app update. After nearly a decade, this will finally allow us to freely show clear pricing information and links to purchase, fostering transparency and choice for U.S. consumers. We can now give consumers lower prices, more control, and easier access to the Spotify experience. There's more work to do, but today represents a significant milestone for developers and entrepreneurs everywhere who want to build and compete on a more level playing field.

55:11This is more or less the sentiment of everybody. uh the reaction to this from developers and users alike is essentially celebration because users want to pay less money right yay cheaper things and developers are like finally and i put the screenshots in here of what it looks like on spotify because i think it's an interesting thing that may become standard if this turns out the way it is it's a button in the app but it's got the little box with an arrow pointing out of it on it not the not the shadow pointing out but like an arrow pointing up and to the right to essentially say by clicking this you know it's the open and new window glyph essentially the open and new window icon but on a button to let you know oh you're going to be sent to a web page where you'll do some payments and we'll check you back here and i wonder if that if that will become standardized across all these apps that the people will come young people maybe if this becomes standardized and sticks they'll become they'll start associating that icon not with open and new window but instead with pay because that's how you pay for things on the phone right it's like well let me tell you a story right We are sponsored by DeleteMe.

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57:54we have some people who wrote in with regard to ubiquity um the original person who had asked about it was ryan budish who writes i get what marco was saying cloud gateways are the routers and you need switches access points and some kind of poe or power over ethernet which may or may not be built into the switches but i think marco was someone who has a hobby of putting networking equipment into homes and restaurants was perhaps slightly underestimating the complexity of the of the ubiquity offerings for someone with less experience. For example, they offer seven, excluding the rack-mounted enterprise and large scale, cloud gateways, 15 access points, not including the enterprise outdoor mega capacity or bridging offerings, and 14 or more switches, not counting any of the rack-mounted switches like the one that Marco was telling Casey to get.

58:33I think John was trying to ask the question I'm getting at. For a technically-minded homeowner who probably has more than the average amount of internet-connected devices but is running neither a restaurant nor an enterprise from their home, how should they evaluate the 1 ,470-plus different combinations of router switches and access points i mean this is a it's a little ridiculous like i i get i get ryan's point like it is there are a lot of options they have more options than for example eero or apple used to yeah right but again this i mean this is enterprise gear enterprises have lots of different needs and i think the products i think you can actually look at them and for the most part be pretty sure whether something is for you or not you know For instance, do you need a 16-port switch, a 24-port switch, a 48-port switch?

59:20Well, how many things are you plugging in? Those questions can be answered pretty well. Do you need it to be POE? Do you need it to be 10 gig? You know the answers to those things when you're buying them. For the most part, keep in mind, again, this is enterprise gear. Most of their offerings, you can pick the lowest one that fits your physical needs. So if you have five ports, you can get the cheapest five-port switch. Like, you know, that kind of thing. Because for the most part, like the higher end stuff, these things scale from Casey's house to sports stadiums. Like, you know, they're designed for like to serve that entire market.

59:58The existence of the higher ends and more specialized products doesn't necessarily make it harder to know what you can get. I would suggest the only area that I think it really where you really don't know is when you look at the APs, the wireless APs. because some of them are like pro versus light. Sometimes they have ones called long range. Obviously, they do have some called outdoor. I think obviously the outdoor question is pretty easy for most people to answer. But between like pro and light, you can just get light. It's fine. You can get pro if you really want to. The price difference usually is not like massive.

1:00:34It might be an extra like 60, 70 bucks. So it depends on your price sensitivity and how many you're going to be buying. usually for for home use the light ap's are fine i've used a mix of lights and long ranges and pros in my various installations over time and they've all been fine enough for my needs the ones the options that seem to change the most often are the cloud gateways aka the routers and again those are mostly it mostly comes down to like how much processing grunt do you want and what form factor do you want it in do you like if you need rack mount or not you probably know that so you know if you need built-in hard drives to be to serve as a video camera recorder you probably know that too um so most of it comes down to like how big do you want the internal storage if any and how much processing power do you want um and that again that that really depends like do you have a gigabit connection then probably get one of the medium to high-end ones do you have you know just a basic thing for an office with a few users, you can get the cheap one.

1:01:40It's fine. So there's a lot of different options, but that's because they serve a lot of different markets. But it doesn't mean it's necessarily impossible for a home user to figure it out. But hey, if you want more help, we're happy to keep getting this question every year or two of like, what Ubiquiti stuff should I buy? And I'll give current recommendations at any given time. Indeed. Then Brian Donovan writes, John hit the nail on the head with the main shortcoming of ubiquity in the home networking market. What do I buy? That question still exists for Eero, etc., but it's much simpler. I hope you do spend some time discussing this because Marco's short answer on episode 636 was insufficient.

1:02:14Just buy a, quote, cloud gateway, aka router, and one or more access points that may also be routers. I recently bought five of the Unify Express cloud gateways thinking I could just one-to-one swap my Google Wi-Fi 2017 mesh devices. It was at best an uneven improvement. The most important thing, networking performance was worse. Streaming to my Apple TV became less reliable so the family noticed. The setup experience was worse because it might see the new devices as I plug them in, but then it would just sit forever on configuring. I ended up having to reconfigure the network from scratch multiple times, but the performance issues never went away.

1:02:45I ended up reverting to the Google Wi-Fi. Is this my fault? Probably, but I'm not sure what I should have done differently. I hope you cover this topic again and that Marco tries a little harder to get into the beginner's mindset to the extent possible. Despite my negative experiences, I'm willing to give it another try. I do need to replace my nearly decade-old Wi-Fi equipment eventually, and Ubiquiti is still in the running. So I put this in here for specific reason let me just i'm going to give a brief very fast hopefully not too inaccurate overview the people will yell at me about who know more about networking um but this gets to uh one of the things like i think maybe where this person went wrong is they they have a google wi-fi network which i assume is a mesh network and they were just trying to replace it with a ubiquity one like one for one as they said which i'm not sure whether we're working out but i just this is a good sort of atp 101 brief segment here uh we talk about mesh networks and wi-fi all the time and I'm not sure people, I mean, I don't know, maybe everyone listening to this podcast knows the difference.

1:03:37But for the people who don't, I want to explain because I think it's super important. Back in the old days, you'd have a Wi-Fi access point in your house. And if your house was really big and the Wi-Fi access point wasn't centrally located, there were rooms in your house that got bad signal. Mesh networking was an attempt to help with that. And that would let you have a place in your house where you have Wi-Fi. And if you had bad signal that was far away from the place in your house where the Wi-Fi thing was, you could put another Wi-Fi thing. And the reason that would help is because you, your device, your phone, your laptop or whatever, talk to the Wi-Fi thing that you are close to.

1:04:11And like a relay race, that thing would say, oh, I just, I got someone over here talking to me. And it would send its signal to the next thing that's closest to it and so on and so forth until it eventually gets back down to the one router that's connected to your internet, like sort of, you know, relay race or, you know, handing off. you talk to this point this thing talks to that point that thing goes to that point that is a mesh network it's a series of devices that all see each other configure each other and then you just wander around the house and the wi-fi access points tell your device oh it looks like you're going into that room over there you should probably talk to this access point because it's closer to you and then your phone would say okay and it would talk to that access point and whatever access point you're pointing you're talking to you you talk to it and it passes on to the next one the next one hop hop hop until it gets to where it's going that's mesh network uh and it's better it actually extends your signal better than like repeaters and other stuff like that because if you need to reach some other point you just buy another one of these things and you plug it in somewhere and then it sort of self-configures my question for both of you which i don't actually have the answer to because i'm not researching ubiquity like you two are is does ubiquity have mesh networking nodes yes and most of the access points can also support like a mesh uplink um which is basically you give them poe but they They don't have to be connected to the network.

1:05:24They will wirelessly peer. However, this is where I will say, if you need wireless meshing, like if you cannot run network cables to each AP from the central source, don't bother with Ubiquity. Those are features that they have, but they are not really optimized for that market. I think the Google Wi-Fi is fine for that. if you're going to be doing that kind of meshing where like you know you have basically repeaters and i know the mesh people get really sensitive when you say repeaters because that's something else sort of technically maybe but like it absolutely is that's that's the whole that's the whole important distinction yeah it is but yeah but they they don't work that much better than the ones with repeaters it's nowhere near the performance of wired oh no they they absolutely do they absolutely maybe the ubiquity ones don't but like that was my question because like i when when I see you guys talking about ubiquity stuff, I definitely see that the ubiquity is, I didn't know if it was just not possible or they were just leaning heavily into it.

1:06:21But like to clarify, when ubiquity, if you buy like wireless access points, say you bought one of them, like either your router has a wireless access point and some ubiquity things do, or you buy a wireless router and another access point. Oh, I can't get signal in this far part of my house. What ubiquity expects, sort of like the default of ubiquity thing is, oh, well, of course that other part of your house slash office slash stadium, just take the ethernet drop that's in that room and plug in another wi-fi access point and what that means is like that wi-fi access point would be in the far part of your house where you get bad signal and your device would talk to that and you know what that wi-fi access point would do it would send your signal along the ethernet wire that's attached to it and is probably powering it back to the router it wouldn't say oh i gotta find some other access point and wirelessly talk to it and they can talk to the next one and hop hop hop no it's got a wired connection to your actual network and that's how like you know wi-fi and offices work you run ethernet to all over the place every place you need an access point like in hotels in stadiums in offices the wi-fi access points have ethernet wires connected to them so whatever access point you're near you go wirelessly to the access point and then you're all wired back the reason people love mesh networks for home is people don't have ethernet every room in their house most of the time you want to reach a wireless to that far room that gets bad signal.

1:07:40And all you want to do is plug something into power in the wall and you'd be like done and done. And Ubiquiti's products are often so far from that that you can't even plug them into a wall unless you get a power over ethernet adapter because they take all their power from the ethernet cable that they expect you to be plugged into. And you're like, how do I plug this into the wall? I'll just get a PoE thing and adapter. It's like, okay, well, how does it get its signal? So I'm glad to know that they can do mesh networking, but the home focused products like Eero and apparently Google Wi-Fi and Orbi and all those other ones are so focused on the home case, they're like, nobody has Ethernet all over their house.

1:08:14Just assume that the only thing this is going to be plugged into is power. And they also include dedicated radios just for doing the, I think they call it the backhaul or whatever, just for doing the between node communication. So they have radios for talking to Wi-Fi at all the different frequencies. And then when your signal hits an access point, it's got another radio whose sole purpose is to talk to whatever is the nearest mesh node to send your signal hop, hop, hop on its way back to the one router that's actually plugged into Ethernet. Yes. And that is like, I actually don't know if Ubiquiti's routers have like separate, I mean, they all have, or if their APs rather have separate radios for that wireless backhaul.

1:08:50They do all have multiple wireless radios these days. So they might be able to just like, you know, use one for that. But that is not a market that Ubiquiti focuses very much on. So they don't put a lot of effort into it. Yeah, I think that was one of the upgrades in Eero was like they used to have multiple radios for like 2.4 and 5 or whatever but then they did an upgrade a couple years back it's like actually we're gonna add a whole other radio just for the backhaul instead of reusing any of the other radios and that helped the performance yeah so i would say like if if you are having wireless linking between ap's if you cannot wire them all back to the home switch just stick with the consumer stuff stick with google and eero like those are those are going to be fine for that purpose until ubiquity decides they want to address that market because they totally could like it's like they have all the technology and it seems like it should be possible than the rest just like the reason i want to ask about this is because i think a lot of our listeners are just like oh i just have a home setup and they might already have one of these mesh ones and i i'm not sure ubiquity addresses them that well yet i don't see any reason that they couldn't and i hope they do because they seem to have way more home products like i just recently a video showing the the dream machine a little r2d2 trash can thing that's so like it's basically like an airport express yeah but that's that's one of their pro routers that's what that's what i use at the beach right it's got it's got a wi-fi in it and it's a router and it has a tiny bit of storage with an sd card slot but it's not it's not a it doesn't seem like it's a mesh network out of the box i think i still expect you if you're adding a piece to have other wires anyway that's i think this is an important clarifying point for people who are dying to get uh ubiquity stuff because it seems like they haven't quite reached that far down to the consumer realm for people who absolutely need mesh networking yeah and to be clear they do offer that but it's not very good and it's not it's not going to be meaningfully better than what google and euro are doing for that it doesn't sound like their products are focused on that no they they can do it but they're not focused on it no um and and certainly it's not you know it's not going to magically be better than google and euro you know substantially in those areas um this is designed for people who are going to be wiring things casey it's designed it's designed for people who are going to be wiring every ap back somehow to the home switch and that so what i would get to answer the question out of today's lineup what i would suggest for a typical home uh full of a nerd you know but other people who tolerate the nerd i would say your router choice right now is the cloud gateway max or the cloud gateway fiber the cloud cloud gateway fiber is higher end it is more expensive and it's out of stock that's another thing to know about ubiquity is that turns out we are not the only people who like them.

1:11:23Many people have learned the good word about Ubiquity. And so whenever they have a new high demand product, oftentimes it is out of stock. What you need to know about Ubiquity also is that if you go on Amazon to buy their products, they are usually sold for above retail price on Amazon by third parties. You can also get them from other retailers like B &H Photo is a Ubiquity retailer. And so sometimes I'm able to get stuff from there if Ubiquiti doesn't have it or if it's, you know, it might be faster from B &H for me because I'm in New York and they're in New York. But for the most part, they don't have that many other first-party retailers that sell things at MSRP.

1:12:00So usually, if you want something from Ubiquiti, buy it directly from them. It will usually be substantially cheaper than the same thing on Amazon. And sometimes things go out of stock when they're new and in high demand. Sometimes they're hard to get for a long time, usually not for too long. And they have, you know, alert me when it's back in stock. So anyway, so going back to the question, what I would suggest cloud gateway max or cloud gateway uh fiber for the router right now of the current lineup if you want an inexpensive poe switch the ultra switch like just one word ultra it's an eight port switch uh that has two different uh options for ac adapters 60 watt and 210 watt if you're going to be powering a bunch of like sub switches i would get the 210 if not get the 60 if you're going to be powering a few APs.

1:12:45And then for the APs, you can use the U7 Lite and get two or three of those for a typical American house. So those are$100 each, so$200 or$300 for your APs. You got a little under$200 for the switch and$200 for the router, so you're in$600 maybe. And plan on running Ethernet to all those access points. Yes, you should run Ethernet to all of your access points. That's a really good home setup for almost anybody. Do you have any U7s installed in either the restaurant or your house? It doesn't matter where. Yes, I have my new Long Island house is all U7 Pro. I have two Pros, one Lite, and one of the little in-wall ones.

1:13:25the reason i ask is i've heard rumblings that the wi-fi 7 support is real spotty and in general the u7 line of wireless access points is not nearly as not physically sturdy but like um computationally sturdy for lack of a better way to describe it as the u6 line but i don't have any personal experience with this so maybe i'm lying to you yeah i know our friend steven hackett had that problem with the u7s when he put them in his house um for that reason i bought all u6s for the restaurant, even though I have U7s here in the house. I'm sitting in talking to you through right now. But I figured just in case, let me stick with the U6s because I don't need all of the fancy Wi-Fi 6 gigahertz radios that the U7 added.

1:14:07So it's fine for my purposes in the restaurant. But I will say I've had no problems with the U7 stuff. And sometimes Ubiquity will have one product that has a little bit flaky software and you get a few software updates later and usually it's fixed. So that's, I think the U7 AP line is pretty new still, you know, it's only, I think a year or two old. And so I think people had issues with it early on. I don't know how many of those issues remain because again, I'm only using it in one place. And in that one place, I have no issues, but who knows, but those are definitely software support. Do you happen to know just off the top of your head what the major noteworthy differences are between the light and regular and pro editions of the access points?

1:14:53You have to check each generation because they vary, but typically the pro usually has way more radios. And so the idea of the pro is it's made for higher density environments. So that's the one you put in the stadium. You put a bunch of pros because that's like when you're going to have a lot of clients talking to an AP, you need to share a bunch of bandwidth and do a lot. it like so if you want like a lot of radio bandwidth get the pro for most home use that's really not necessary now if you care a lot about your wi-fi transfer speeds if you want to like run a speed test from your brand new you know iphone that has wi-fi 7 or whatever you want to run that speed test and you want to get like you want you want to max out what you can get get like you know over over a gigabit you know if you want to do that yeah you're going to want the pro probably because that's going to have like the most radios it can start using them in parallel and stuff like that.

1:15:46But for most people's needs, including my own, frankly, the lights are fine. Good deal. So you had mentioned that the Cloud Gateway Fiber is new and never in stock. And let me tell you a tale. I've been talking with Stephen about doing this in fits and spurts in the house and properly wiring the house for Ethernet. The way it exists today or existed last week, spoiler alert, is that I had an Eero Pro 6, I believe, in the office running as a main router. Then by way of a Mocha bridge that converts from Ethernet to coax, and then another one on the other end, I had an Eero Pro 6 in the primary bedroom working as a wireless access point, again, with effectively a wired backhaul by way of a combination of coax and Ethernet, and then an Eero Pro in the living room as an additional wireless access point.

1:16:41and Stephen said to me, you know, I really recommend the Cloud Gateway Fiber in Stephen's experience. He had originally bought the Cloud Gateway Max that you had recommended and he found that he was having trouble saturating. I think he said upstream, but I don't recall. One direction of his connection to the internet, he found the throughput was not as good on the Cloud Gateway Max and the Cloud Gateway Fiber fixed that problem. Your mileage may vary. I don't know. But I noticed that the Cloud Gateway Fiber is apparently sold out till kingdom come. And so So one of the benefits of having my apparatus, which this is a term I stole from Merlin, is that one of my 350 Docker containers is a thing called change detection dot IO.

1:17:20That is the website. And what you can do is you can self host a thing that will basically just ping away at other websites and tell you when they change. And over the last several releases, it's also gotten a feature where it will it sees that, oh, you're looking at a product page for something. and it will parse out, you know, without you having to provide regex or anything like that, it'll parse out what the product is, how much it costs and whether or not it's in stock. And I have that hooked up. It's incredible. And they have a hosted version for the record. Like I run this myself because it's not very computationally intensive and I have Docker set up and squared away.

1:17:53So it's no big deal, right? But you could, and I genuinely don't know how much it costs, but you can get a hosted version of this where you have them host all of this for you. but I have something like 20 or 30 different web pages that I monitor on this none of which are really critical in the grand scheme of things but it is nice if you have a place where you it it will tell you when something changes and so I put the cloud gateway fiber on there and I tweaked it so that it'll check every like 10 minutes or something like that instead of the like once or twice a day that I would for most things and sure enough in combination with pushover which I've talked about many times in the past which is a mechanism by which you can send yourself text messenger up excuse me, push notifications.

1:18:31And it has an API that a lot of different open source projects, you know, integrate with. So I got a push one day last week saying, oh, the Cloud Gateway Fiber is in stock. And so I ran upstairs and Insta bought one. And late last week, I was able to find the time to install it. And I got to tell you, this has been both a blessing and a curse. So the installation process was - First of all, congrats on snagging one. That is not easy for a high-demand ubiquity product, so good job. Yeah, I'm telling you, changedetection.io, for something like the Switch 2, it's not enough because that's just like bananas demand.

1:19:11This is a lot of demand. That's a whole different level. I didn't ask you to. Did you try to get a Switch 2 on launch? I did, and there's a whole story there that maybe we can talk about in the after show. Nothing bad, but it's just not worth getting into right now. But the short answer is yes, we have a reservation. How we got that is a whole thing. But we'll come back to that. Marco, did you get one? No, I tried when I woke up that day and it was already over. Yeah, no, it's not the kind of product you wait to wake up about. Yeah, I didn't care that much to get it on launch day. But I'll try to get one when it comes out.

1:19:45Maybe it'll take me a few months, but it's fine. And John, you got one at midnight? I got one the old-fashioned way. Lots of open tabs and devices. Atta boy. So anyway, I got the Cloud Gateway Fiber. and let me just jump straight to the end. The worst part about the Cloud Gateway Fiber, which you warned me about, which Marco warned me about, which Steven warned me about, is now I need all of my networking equipment to be ubiquity. I need all of it to be ubiquity and I don't want to spend that kind of money all in one shot because I like being married. So I don't know what the future holds for me, but I'm like itching because I need switches and wireless access points.

1:20:21I need all of it. Do you need to run wires too? No, because I've got the, coax. The MoCA thing. Yeah, exactly. You already have the wires. I mean, it's not optimal, but it is more than sufficient for my needs. So anyways, so I go to install it, and what I did, which I don't think was the right choice in retrospect, what I did was I just pulled the Ethernet cord that goes into the Eero that comes out of the ONT, the fiber optic ONT. I pulled that out of the Eero, and I plugged it into the 10 gigabit port on the Cloud Gateway fiber and basically told it, go. And it was fine. It did set itself up okay.

1:21:03And it seemed to be working. And let me tell you, there's a lot of switches to fiddle with, and it is reasonably user-friendly. I am not a networking guru by any means, but it was reasonably straightforward to figure out. But then once I got it squared away and it was talking to the internet, which was also a nice surprise because my recollection of doing this with Fios in years past was that you had to like go on Verizon's website and tell them to like basically kick the ONT to allow a different Mac address to connect to it. It was like a whole nightmare years ago. And now it was, it didn't care.

1:21:34It could go back and forth between whatever. Didn't, didn't matter at all. Uh, I freaking love Verizon files. Uh, you can take it from my cold dead hands, but anyways. Um, but I did notice after connecting my laptop physically, uh, to the, to the router, to the cloud gateway fiber, uh, first of all, depending on what, what I was doing, my laptop was getting 100 megabits per second. And I've narrowed that down to, I believe that was a bad old ethernet cable. So that was my own fault. But consistently, I was only getting 250 megabits upstream. Now I have a symmetric gigabit connection and consistently I was topping out at 250 megabits as though I was being speed limited somewhere.

1:22:13For life may I couldn't figure this out. And eventually I did enough tagging and Googling and duck-duck going and whatnot, that somebody had said, change the WAN connection from the 10 gigabit Ethernet jacks, receptacle, whatever you want to call it, a port, there's what I'm looking for, change it to one of the other ports and plug in the WAN there. Now, there's a couple things here. First of all, how freaking cool is it that you can tell the Ubiquity, I would like the internet to come in over there, please, rather than on this port. I would like it on this other port. And it's very straightforward to do it.

1:22:47So before I actually committed to moving the port, because the management is mostly via the web, and it appears to me to be via Ubiquiti's website, it, I guess, proxies or what have you or establishes some connection between your local device. You can log into your router from anywhere and manage it from anywhere. Which is mostly nice, but a little unnerving in a case like this where, you know, what if I lose the connection to the internet? But anyways, so I at least did that correctly. So I moved. Oh, wait. And by the way, to be clear, you can also do it locally. Like it also works locally. And by the way, another thing you could try that you probably didn't immediately assume would be very good, the iOS app.

1:23:27I did try that. It's pretty good. And it can also, the iOS app can connect directly via Bluetooth to most of the new routers. Oh, hey, you can log into this locally. Who knew? Yeah, it's great. So basically, whatever connectivity is available to get to it, it will use. Good deal. So anyway, so I move the WAN port. I tell the management interface, I would like the WAN to come in on port one, reconnect it, and everything's right as rain. Good to go. That all is well and good. The place where I think I screwed up is I did not tell the Eero to go into bridge mode before doing all this. I think in retrospect, what I should have done is before I pulled the internet connection away from the Eero, I should have said to the Eero, go into bridge mode, and then basically immediately cut off the internet and throw it into the cloud gateway.

1:24:19I didn't do that. And let me tell you, that Eero was frigging pissed because the only way you manage the Eero is through their iOS app. And it's a similar thing to what we were just describing where you go to the iOS app. The iOS app is communicating with Amazon servers. Amazon servers communicating with the Eero. It was a nightmare getting that squared away. Eventually, I was able to convince it to know, really, I need you in bridge mode now. Eventually, with enough patience, which is not something that comes naturally to me, it did seem to figure itself out and everything was all well and good.

1:24:50But it took like an hour or two for the Eero to get a grip. Now, again, some of that I think was my fault by perhaps choosing the wrong order of operations, but it did eventually get a grip. So then I start poking about in the management interface. And one of the things it does is deep packet inspection. So it'll tell you not only what devices are using, what, you know, so much and so on bandwidth, but also what applications. And I see that Netflix is like, and this is early on, you know, right within a couple hours of installing. Netflix is like the third most used application. The kids were either not home or like not playing with their screens.

1:25:27We don't even have a frigging Netflix account. What kind of trash is this? Would you like to guess what the problem was? Hmm. Remember, I'm doing a lot of diagnostics while this is going on. Was speed test accessing Netflix? Fast.com, baby. You know who hosts that? Netflix. Oh, that's great. Sure enough. So it took me a minute, but I was like, why is Netflix being listed here? And it was like gigs upon gigs of data. And sure enough, it's accurate. It's because this dummy over here was going to Fast.com on the regular. That's awesome. Yeah, it's incredible. So the problem I have with this is that it has all sorts of incredibly cool, really snazzy like topology graphs and it'll show exactly what's connected to what.

1:26:13It'll show – you can hit a little button that says show internet traffic and this is the thing that ruined me when I was in Memphis. And you can see the little dots flying around the graph of the topology. So you can see the dots going from Verizon to the Cloud Gateway Fiber and then flowing into my MacBook or whatever the case may be. Do you feel like you're watching the actual audio move and audio hijack when you see them? Basically. Yeah, basically. It's about the same thing. It's incredible. The problem, though, is that I have something like 55 devices connected to the cloud gateway fiber, and they're all flat because they're all either on a non-ubiquity switch or they're hanging off the Eros.

1:26:49And so as far as the cloud gateway fiber is concerned, that's just one flat network. What I got to get in my life is a switch for the office. That's a unified switch. So that'll separate things out. I got to get some Unify access points. So if you're looking to get rid of somewhat modern Unify equipment on the cheap, let me know. I might be. I know. Well, I'm not kidding. I would love some semi. Like, I don't want to go out the U3 if such a thing exists. I'd like, you know, a six or seven or something like that. But if you, the listener, happen to be wanting to get rid of something, do let me know.

1:27:19Marco, if you would like to send me something and pad it with ubiquity access points a la Kindles, do let me know. I will say, too, when you are looking at that kind of switches and stuff, I suggest getting one really good switch. Have that be your main switch. But then your leaf node switches, so to speak, the ones that you put with your TV and stuff, those can be the cheap little flex switches that are just PoE-powered and have maybe four or five ports on them and usually cost like$40. bucks like they those can be really inexpensive switches because they you would still get all of that management and introspection features you know of ubiquity you still get those with their little tiny cheap switches too you know they don't have as much like throughput and they don't have as many features but like all of the stuff that you're talking about you just need it to be a ubiquity switch they're all like what we used to call managed switches back in the day they're all manic switches, even the cheap ones.

1:28:14So you don't need every switch in your network to be some$300 powerhouse. You can just have one good one in kind of fueling them all. And that's kind of all you need. Yeah. So I'll put in the Slack. And if I remember, I'll put in the show notes. But to be honest, I'll probably forget. And there's not much to look at. But if you look at my topology, it's a frigging mess because it's just everything is microscopic because it's one you know, exceedingly wide list of 50 some devices. And it's just, I cannot, I cannot have this. Um, but no, the, the, the equipment is incredibly cool. It's, there's so many things to fiddle with, but I don't feel like I've had to fiddle with them for the most part outside of this WAN problem, which admittedly shouldn't be a thing.

1:28:57Like it should work just fine the way I initially started, but at least I had an easy solution and I could take care of that on my own. but the deep packet inspection is cool the graphs are cool not only just the internet traffic but like there's all sorts of different graphs and things you can look at when you go to the devices instead of like some very good looking but kind of funny like line art that Eero uses you get like full color pictures that are like accurate to all of these random devices that I have in my house like they have the pictures of each individual sinology and mostly auto discovered the right one like it's incredible it's if you're if you're the kind of person that wants to like tweak and fiddle with knobs and just just play around oh it's so great but now i need all the ubiquity equipment and and another time i'd like to talk to you about how i should lay this out um which speaking of i don't want to belabor the point and i do think we need to move on but one of the things that somebody might have been steven pointed out to me is there if you go to design.ui.com you have to upload something as a floor plan, but it can literally be a blank image, but you can draw out your floor plan, which I have done.

1:30:08And you can draw out, if you set a scale, so this wall is 20 feet or whatever the case may be, you can draw out a floor plan of your house. And I found an app called, what is it called? It's called Magic Plan, all one word, where it's really designed for professionals. but if you want to do a single place, you know, like your house and nothing else, uh, then it's free to do that. But once you start adding more places, you have to pay for it. It's pretty expensive because it's mostly a professional tool, but I use that to light our scan the house. And there were a couple of small problems with it, but for the most part, it was great and took a lot less time than, you know, measuring everything and so on and so forth.

1:30:47And it's probably not perfectly accurate, but for the purposes that I'm trying to accomplish, it's more than enough. So I uploaded that to, You don't have a floor plan to your house? We never had a good one when we bought it back in 2008. And I'd like to get another one done at some point, but I'm both too cheap and too lazy. How do you buy a house without seeing a floor plan? What's going on down there, Virginia? No, there is a floor plan, but it's awful. It's truly terrible. It's not good at all. And I have, I like did web archives of the listing for the house when it was up for sale from 2008.

1:31:17I can still get to them right now because guess where they are, gentlemen? On the Synology. and anyways, but the floor plans are trash. But the point is you can drop access points, wireless access points and if you tell this design tool what the material of your walls is, is it metal, is it wood, is it drywall, etc., it will make a colorful map of approximately what your Wi-Fi coverage will be based on where you're placing what items. Again, I'm going to put a link or I put something in Slack. I'm not, I don't think this is going to go in the show notes for sure and in fact, neither of these links might or pictures might go in the show notes because a little bit of don't be creepy.

1:31:53But imagine there's a floor plan of the house and you're seeing like green and yellow and red and so on and so forth. And the same thing with cameras, you point the camera and it'll show you the approximate coverage area of the cameras. And so I don't have any cameras yet, but that's one of the things I do plan to do eventually. This stuff is incredible. And this is all for free on the design app, but don't ever look at this. This is my tip to you. Unless Ubiquiti wants to sponsors, never, ever get their equipment because you'll send all of your money to Ubiquiti. just be blissfully ignorant i made a just a terrible mistake by signing myself up for this be blissfully ignorant learn from my mistakes don't don't ever look at anything that ubiquity does because it's all so cool that's awesome oh yeah yeah all right john you've been busy tell me what's going on with hyperspace just to remind everybody uh or people who are just listening to the first time i recently launched an app called hyperspace the deal with that app i need to come up with like a snappy elevator pitch or whatever but it's basically you can get back some disk space without deleting anything.

1:32:49If you are a digital hoarder like me, you want to, you know, have as much free disk space as possible, but you don't want to delete anything. And there's tons of apps out there that will like find duplicate files and then tell you to pick which ones you want to delete. But that's like picking among my children. I don't want to delete any of my files. I just want the disk space back. So Hyperspace does that for you because it finds files that have the same contents and it makes them so they're sharing a single instance of those contents on disk instead of each having their own private copy. That's what the app does.

1:33:17and i talked about it on the show i before i even had a name i talked about on the show that i'm thinking of making this app and i the title of that episode was an incredibly dangerous app because it is in the end an app that modifies a bunch of people's files and it doesn't know what those files are it doesn't it's like those files were created by other apps uh those files have your data in them and here comes my app this app that knows nothing about them and says yeah i'm gonna mess with those files so incredibly dangerous app when i launched it in 1.0 i launched it with a very safe feature set i made it not do a lot like a lot of the most difficult things that it could possibly do it just didn't do them in 1.0 i knew there was a potential risk in terms of like people are going to get the app and be like uh you know i all my files are in icloud drive this ignores the one star and that happened right but that's i knew that was going to happen but my plan was always launch with a safe feature set get the thing out there to a bunch of users because even though I had a really good, really big beta test with ATP members, in fact, as part of a membership promotion thing we were doing.

1:34:16If you're an ATP member, you get to be on the beta and a bunch of people did. There is nothing like giving the app to regular customers who are not listening to a tech podcast. You get so much better results and feedback and everything from that than you do with the beta test. Yes, that's true. Let me jump in here, though. One of the best decisions I think I made for CallSheet, and I've said this before, but I want to say it again, was opening that up to the ATP members made CallSheet so much better. And I suspect that it was the same with Hyperspace. And even though this was the perfect, like, I'll scratch your back, you'll scratch mine kind of situation because I wanted to juice membership, full stop.

1:34:51That's what I was after. And I wanted my app to get better. And then the members got access to something that was kind of not illicit, but like cool and hidden and secret. And I am so glad that I did that. And I was not convinced I had made the right choice when I opened it up to ATP members. And I am so very glad and so very thankful for anyone who spent time looking at it and issuing bug reports and so on. So if there is another app, which is sitting here now, I have zero plans for anything else at the moment. I plan to do the same thing again because for me, it was incredibly helpful. And I just want to thank the members that did participate one more time because it was great.

1:35:23Yeah, like I said, when I launched the app, the beta was great. But there is a difference between beta testers and regular users, especially for an app like mine, because an app like mine doesn't exist just on its own with its own data or with like in your case with the movie database behind it or whatever yeah it acts on people's data and if you're a beta tester you very quickly learn well i kind of i kind of have to either like have it configured not to really do it or i was all i'll get rid of all my duplicates and i can't really be a good beta tester anymore so most beta testers i imagine we're rerunning it in the mode where it doesn't really do the final step of the thing and they're really running on the same set of data over and over again they're like the variable that i needed in the mix here was regular users using it on their real data for real and you just need real users to do that because you don't want testers to use it on their real data for real because once they do they're like well i can no longer test your app unless i like somehow manufacture data we have an ask it to be a question for a future episode people wondering how that worked but anyway that was the key i it's data based i need people to run it on their data to find out where all the problems are on their real data and their real experience with real customers hands uh and i did a blog post about this uh because recently i rolled out a version 1.3 of hyperspace and 1.3 marks the end of a journey that started with 1.0 at launch where i was slowly adding back all the features that i didn't launch with when i say adding back because basically i launched with restrictions like when i was running it locally i just turn off all the restrictions and it could just have access to everything so i knew that there were problems with certain classes of things so the three big classes of things that i described my blog post was number one packages which is the thing most people don't even know about but i try to explain in the documentation basically it's a folder that looks like a file they're all over the place in mac os applications are packages they are you know whatever mail.app that's a folder it's got a bunch of stuff in it i remember talking about it in my mac os 10 reviews back in the day this is technology from the next world it's a folder that looks like a file and inside that folder are a bunch of other files and certain uh packages have certain structure there is a difference between bundle and a package and it's too esoteric to get into it's not that important but the point is lots of stuff in macOS they look like files but they're not they're folders with stuff in them photo libraries your apple photos library it's called it's like i don't like a dot photos library file name extension guess what that's a folder all the stuff is inside there it's a massive folder with like millions of files inside it if you have a big library.

1:37:54.rtfd files that you save in text edit folders. So packages. Does that read the effing document? That's, I believe, I wrote it in the documentation. It's like rich text format with attachments. I don't know. That makes sense. With attachments. It's not the RTFM document, although that's probably taken. Anyway, I was avoiding those. But because, you know, well, messing around in people's photo libraries, dangerous and also because lots of people don't know that they're folders they don't know you can right click them and do show package contents they're not used to as i say in the blog post cracking them open and digging around in the guts so if anything went wrong with reclaiming one of these files and my error message directs them into one of their packages they'd be like i don't what the heck is this i'm inside this thing that i didn't even know was a folder because the finder will do it like you don't need to use terminal or anything you can do it in the finder but it's not something people are used to so i wanted to wait until i got most of the you know major problems worked out not doing packages so version 1.1 that was about a little a little less than a month after launch i added support for packages and that was after i don't know four or five or six releases in the 1.0.x series five releases i did five 1.0.x releases before i was ready for 1.1 so i did package support the next big one was cloud storage everybody who had all their folders in iCloud Drive was like this app is useless to me uh it doesn't do cloud storage I mean they haven't paid for it at that point so it's good that they didn't have to do that but they were still mad they're like I was excited to use this app and it turns out it won't even tell me how much space I can save because it totally ignores cloud storage I had to tackle cloud storage cloud storage is not like normal files they're weird and I had to deal with them and required using a bunch of Apple's APIs which actually went better than I expected but it was still tricky so version 1.2 uh in april uh supported cloud storage that includes iCloud Drive some versions of Dropbox OneDrive all the other things that use the file provider extension and then finally in version 1.3 which is the very end of April I supported library directories in your home directory you'll see a directory called library which I think is hidden by default so maybe you'll only see it if you unhide it by switching the flag from the terminal or if you just look in terminals there anyway the reason apple hid the library directory is because for years people would go on a mac open their home directory see a folder called library like what the hell is this and they would just like either start rummaging around in it and throwing stuff out or they would try to delete the whole library folder don't do that you need that folder it's super duper important i think it's actually protected now in addition to being hidden i think you can't actually delete it now but you can delete stuff inside it anyway don't don't delete stuff in there it's super important but i had been avoiding that directory and the library directory that's the top level of your boot volume because there's there's super important stuff in there and it changes really often any running application or any running background process is very likely messing with stuff inside your library folder and there's a huge amount of stuff in there and if you screw up the stuff in there or corrupt it or damage it applications could start crashing or have problems and you wouldn't understand why because people don't even know what's in there they're not supposed to know it's private stuff that belongs to individual applications your preferences cache files the you know the container directories for the sandbox documents it's you know there's lots of sort of you know non-user serviceable parts inside library directories that was the one i saved for last even though i think it is one of the biggest sources of data uh that you can get back and so in version 1.3 i supported libraries all these things packages cloud stories library storage and libraries they're all disabled by default in settings so i'm probably gonna have to add a fact item that says hey it didn't find a lot of data what can i do about that i'm gonna say well if you go to settings you can turn flip this switch from this switch to this switch you know every one of these switches even though the version 1.3 has all these features and we'll do all of them they're off by default because i want the default experience still to be the safest for people who don't know the details but if you do know the details if you're the type of person who immediately hits command comma to see what the settings are turn on the settings that you want i even put in settings for like you can go inside packages but you can refuse to reclaim from inside them instead just use them as the source for reclaiming stuff outside of them um yeah it's it's still extremely conservative maybe i'll change my mind about that going forward but it's an important milestone uh version 1.3 doesn't seem like a big deal but this was always my plan from the beginning 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 i'm not going to say feature complete because i've still got more stuff on my to-do list and more features that i'm going to add but this is what i had in mind as like as i said at the end of this this is kind of what 1.0 quote-unquote should have been but it was i would feel i wouldn't have felt as safe doing 1.0 with this feature set in it uh and in retrospect i'm glad i didn't because boy i fixed so many bugs at every stage i was fixing bugs and all of those bugs contributed to like the most dangerous thing the library directory being as safe as it is in 1.3 so far i haven't heard any disasters or complaints so fingers crossed i think things are going well if you tried uh hyperspace and it didn't do anything for you uh check it out now also remember i'll probably have this as a fact as well the file type list is also very conservative uh you can probably safely at this point with version 1.3 tell it to allow any file in the file type list and so it won't filter by file type that'll make your scans a little bit faster and also it'll probably find a lot more data so yeah toggle on packages toggle on cloud storage and if you're really brave toggle on libraries and see how much more data you can find i'm really glad that you haven't had the you know oh i've lost all my family photos and it's all your fault feedback as yet yeah like i said mostly just got the one star reviews which i like i'm glad the developer replies were in there because they're like you know one star doesn't do photo libraries and then i would release version 1.1 i would say oh i just released version 1.1 and it does support photo libraries and you're just in there waiting and you're hoping the person will notice that they gave a one-star review for a feature that your program didn't have and then a week later you added that feature and you're like come on notice the review revise your review sometimes they do sometimes they don't same thing one star no support for cloud storage developer replies and now supports cloud storage then you're waiting come on notice that i reply you know you win some you lose some like that's the downside to launching conservative but so far no one has said you deleted all my data like Like, programs have bugs.

1:44:15It could happen. But, you know, so far, so good. That's awesome. So I've been doing a little bit of vibe coding recently. Speaking of bugs. Yeah, speaking of bugs. So this all started with me wanting to post a GIF on Blue Sky. And I don't even remember what it was, to be honest. I think I was trying to reply to a post that Jamel Bowie had written. He is just so freaking smart and so cool. But that's neither here nor there. Anyways, I was trying to reply to a post of his. I think it was something like, you know, name a movie you've seen or reply with a movie you've seen a million times. And, you know, everyone was replying with GIFs.

1:44:52And so, of course, I was going to post a Hunt for an October GIF. I forget exactly what it was. It's too long ago to dig up. But anyways, I wanted to reply with a GIF. And so I went to my favorite, you know, GIF repository app, which is written by my friend Jelly. And I went to GIF Wrapped and I copied the GIF, the actual image. and I went to paste it in the BlueSky app on my phone and nothing happened. All right, well, maybe BlueSky doesn't want to take a GIF either from GifWrapped or just in general. I know what I'll do is I'll go to GifWrapped and I'll copy the URL and I'll put that in. And I tried that and it still wasn't quite right.

1:45:25And I was very annoyed at this point. And I didn't know if maybe it was because of some weird GifWrapped URL or something like that. So I realized what I want is, or I felt like I wanted at the time, is I want to be able to put a repository of all my GIFs on some publicly accessible web page so that I could just grab a world accessible URL for them at any point. My friend Steve has something like this on his own website that he uses from time to time. I want to do that too. Now, none of this is conceptually challenging, right? None of it is difficult. And now I've added another new shiny hammer to my tool belt, which is Cloudflare and Cloudflare Pages, because that's what I used for the call sheet web presence.

1:46:10So I thought, well, maybe I could do that. And so how do I, what is the best, most reasonable way to do that? Well, I can, you know, put a bunch of GIFs in a folder, put that on GitHub and connect Cloudflare to that GitHub account or GitHub repository, and maybe that would work. And then I thought, well, but, you know, I need to, apparently there's no mechanism by which I can parse out or read a list of files in the file system using any of the like Cloudflare APIs. I'm sure if I like went full on Node or something like that, I could do it. But, you know, for just when I'm trying to just whip this together real fast, there was no obvious answer to that.

1:46:49And honestly, it doesn't, if you know an answer, it doesn't matter. It's just bear with me. I'm just telling the story. So I tried doing that and that didn't really work out. And so I was like, all right, well, maybe what I can do is, well, I don't know what I should do. What can I do about this? So I thought, you know, let me ask ChatGPT, see what it says. and around the same time I was thinking of it, I had this like nebulous thought in my mind and chat GPT said, oh, here's what you can do. Just make a list of all of the GIFs and store that as like JSON or something like that. I was like, you know what?

1:47:15That's a great idea. I'll do that. All right, so can you write me a little script or something? I forget exactly. This was like a week and a half ago and the particulars don't really matter, but I can figure out some way that you can do that and can I run that as like a pre-build step or something like that? And it's, well, I don't know about that. Oh, wait, no, I know what I can do. what if I did it with GitHub workflow? And it said, yes, you could do that with GitHub workflow. Let's work on this together. And so, you know, I'm writing, I'm vibe coding my way through this. Well, here's what I want to do, blah, blah, blah.

1:47:40Okay, we'll try this. Oh, that didn't work. And here's why, blah, blah, blah. And so we went back and forth. And then finally, I got to the position that, oh, I've got all of my GIFs in Cloudflare, publicly accessible if I want it. But hey, since we're already vibe coding my way through this entire self-assigned project, what if I had it generate some sort of like web front end where it's just, just put all the gifts on one webpage. It's like 300 gifts. It's a terrible decision. I fully recognize that's a terrible decision, but who cares? This is only for me. Can you do it? And sure enough, it did.

1:48:11And then said, Hey, I can make it better in such and such way. Okay, sure. Do it. Okay. I can make it better in this other way. Sure. Sounds great. Within the span of a couple of hours, which granted, maybe I could have done this in less time by myself. I don't know. But in a couple of hours, I had a pretty decent looking web-based GIF repository, and it was all done via Vibe coding. I am capable. I genuinely believe in my heart, I am capable of doing this by hand, 100%. But I also genuinely believe that it would have taken a lot longer for me to do it because I'm so far out of the web game at this point, folks.

1:48:48I can do web stuff, but it's just not my bag anymore. And I think Marco, you're right there with me on that one. And so, and so it's just not something that really revs my engine. I wanted the destination. I didn't really care that much about the journey. And it turns out in a couple hours with chat GPT, I got there. None of the story is that remarkable in and of itself, but this was the first time for me that I just sat there and pinged away at chat GPT and together we fixed a problem. And let me tell you, there are only a handful of times that I really get that jolt of feeling like I've got co-workers again in the good way.

1:49:24Obviously, there's co-workers in the bad way. I'm talking about in the good way. Yeah. No, no, not at all. Not at all. But, but no, it was, it was not as good as having an actual coworker, but let me tell you for someone who works independently, 95 % of my, or well, not in this context, but in the term, in terms of like programming, I've worked independently almost entirely. And it was so great to like have a coworker for a minute and it really worked out well. And it was a resounding success. Now, and we can come back to in just a second, but in contrast to that, I have started down the path of adding just a link to Letterboxd in, or I'm sorry, John, Letterboxd in call sheet.

1:50:05So it's one of the quick actions. You can just hop over to Letterboxd and it'll open that film in Letterboxd directly. So you don't have to search for it over there or anything like that. Well, the mechanism by which I have all these links, it's a SF symbol and it's a bit of text. And there is no SF symbol for Letterboxd. Of course not. There is an envelope, but there's no three overlapping circles, which is the Letterboxd logo. There's no SF symbol for that. So I dug up, I think I might've asked it to just make one and it didn't work at all. And then I dug up a copy of Letterboxd, an SVG of their logo, just a straight up SVG.

1:50:48and I fed that into chat GPT and it tried and tried and tried and tried to try to get that to be an SF symbol and it took for freaking ever to get it to the point that the SF symbols app would even import what it created and I'm continually feeding it, oh, it can't find the margins it can't find the margins, it can't do this, it can't do that couldn't you just do this in a straight Swift UI? it's such a simple logo, you know probably, but I needed because of other uninteresting reasons it would be incredibly preferred for it to be an SF symbol It can be a custom SF symbol. I have other ones like that, but an SF symbol nonetheless.

1:51:22And for uninteresting, complicated reasons. So I tried so hard to get it to work. Eventually it did import into the SF symbols app, but what I saw was blank. So like it sucked in whatever this, you know, bespoke SF, SVG was, but it doesn't appear to be anything. And I haven't gone back to try this again in the last couple of days because I've been busy with other things. In fact, I've been busy with peak of you, which we're going to come back to in a moment. but for the life of me I haven't been able to do it and the other thing that's a really chap in my butt is because I'm cheap and I don't want to pay the 20 bucks a month in perpetuity you gotta pay for chat GPT man it's worth it I think I do if I continue to use it like this I absolutely will I started paying for it before I started hyperspace though yeah see there you go so anyway so I think that might be in my future is paying for it let me tell you everybody out there like if you're gonna spend a bit of money on subscriptions in the tech world there are two subscriptions that you need to buy before everything else.

1:52:16YouTube with no ads and ChatGPT's unlimited plan. Okay, stop. That's not true. The zeroth element is ATP.fm slash join. Okay, yes, you're right. Three things. Actually, it's funny you bring that up because you know what I've been on the precipice of engaging on even though I'm so cheap and I really don't want to do it. But I am on the precipice of doing YouTube without ads because they have the new cheaper plan. You don't have it yet? What? You're not doing YouTube without ads? No. Oh my God. I know. I think I'm really playing myself here. Don't buy any ubiquity switches until you buy that. Seriously.

1:52:47Seriously. Bang for your buck. Quality of life improvement for YouTube. Like, you have to. Especially your kids, if they're not already watching YouTube, they will be soon. Oh, no, they are. You've got to turn off. You've got to get rid of those ads. Oh, yeah. You don't know what it's already done to them. My daughter knows what the Geico Gecko is for like the one week before I turned off ads on YouTube when she was like five or whatever. Well, the thing is, I really played myself because I didn't turn it off or I didn't subscribe or whatever during election season. And that was a dire mistake.

1:53:14You got to turn this off now. I feel like making you stop the podcast and pay for you. Madness. All right. Anyway, but focus, focus, focus. So part of the problem though, is because I haven't yet paid for it is I have to wait like a day between every three attempts because it's like, dude, I ran out of compute on this one. You're gonna have to try it. I can't believe you're doing 20 bucks. What are you doing? Well, because I don't think I'm, I genuinely don't think the 20 bucks will get me over the edge. I don't think it's capable of solving this. Oh no, it probably won't help you with this here, but like it's, absolutely worth it.

1:53:44Yeah. When you have something that's very limited like that, you avoid using it because you don't want to spend it or you don't want to hit the limits. Right. And you need to fail a lot with these things. That is also very true. Yes. But once something is unlimited, you start finding more opportunities to use it and the value of it to your life increases by usually a pretty good amount. So this is the kind of thing where if you ever have any reason to ask ChatGPT things, you should probably pay for the plan because then you can use it in all sorts of ways that you don't think of. Yeah, that's very fair.

1:54:18I'm probably sure. Or if you're me, you pay for multiple ones so you can pit them against each other. Well, actually, very quickly, I tried all this in Claude as well, and it did a smidgen better, but not really that much better. Yeah, so you can watch multiple LMs fall on their faces. Exactly. So as a final note on this, if you, the listener, are capable of making a approximately square aspect ratio letterboxd SF symbol. Send it my way and stickers will be returned. Isn't there a WWDC session on doing custom SF symbols? That's literally three circles. I am incapable. There's no chance I'll be able to do it.

1:54:54Watch the WWDC session, draw three circles, fill them with a color. I genuinely don't think I'm capable of that. Plus, I don't have Illustrator and all the other stuff that you need. I think Affinity Designer is a free trial. I don't know. I bet you can find a free vector tool to make three circles. You could use, what do you call it, that code, that paint code thing that Marco loves? Yeah, which is not free, though, but you can use, I'm sure there are free options. It's fine, it's fine, but anyway. But no, the real thesis of this whole story, though, is that if it's not something that you really, really, really care about, like this GIF repository that was just me goofing off, and this SF symbol thing, I do really care about it, but it either would have worked or didn't, right?

1:55:31Like, it's not a do-or-die thing. It has been real nice for those sorts of scenarios. So I've been really surprised how much I enjoyed just vibe coding my way through this little GIF project that I self-assigned. And even though it was frustrating, a lot of that obviously is my own fault. But that's a simple thing. Like, it definitely was getting there. I just don't think I'll ever get it quite over the hump. Depending if you are a vibe coding prescriptivist or descriptivist, I've heard lots of people push back against our past discussion and other discussions that don't involve us at all about what actually is vibe coding.

1:56:06is what casey just described is that vibe coding the stricter definitions i've seen would say this does not qualify what this is just is is you using chat gpt to help you code and you'd be like well no but i didn't write any of it it wrote it all itself isn't that vibe coding i think like the person who coined the phrase has said something about like you have to not care about the result uh whether the result works or not and you do care about it like that's that's that's all i mean all you care about is whether it works or not but anyway if you're about to email us and tell us that what Casey did isn't really vibe coding.

1:56:37I would say that I think the phrase vibe coding is currently in the early stages of evolving. And like so many things in the world, what the inventor of the phrase wants it to mean is not necessarily what it will come to mean. So Casey already thinks that what he just described is vibe coding. I'm not entirely sure. If you disagree, I would just say, I think this is a fluid situation, as they say, and vibe coding will mean what it means. Either we will fade from a vocabulary and we will laugh at ourselves for using this phrase in a few years or we'll mutate into a totally different definition.

1:57:10Yeah, hasn't it only existed for like three weeks as a term? Yeah, seriously. It's pretty new, but already people are saying, that's not vibe coding. So I just wanted to head that off. Yeah, I got news for you, everybody in the world. You don't get to control what terms mean. And once people start using it to mean a certain thing, you've lost control and that's just what it means. That's just how language works. Marco, the descriptorist. all right so uh we are running long so we should probably cut this off but i just want to say uh for next week on the docket already is the backblaze stuff so we aren't going to talk about it this week we've run too long we will be talking about it next week so don't worry we'll get there so please email only casey about the backblaze stuff in the meantime the opposite of what i want damn it all right thank you to our sponsors this week squarespace and delete me and thank you to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join.

1:58:04One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. In addition to all the other exclusive member content, you get a weekly bonus topic every single episode. This week's Overtime, we're going to be talking about rumors of a Vision Pro successor or successors, including one rumor for a Mac tethered product. We'll be talking about that in Overtime this week. Join And now to listen, 8thep.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research.

1:58:45Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. 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, N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast, so long. So, Casey, I actually did my own vibe coding recently, I think. Oh. Maybe we'll see if it qualifies. So I mentioned when talking about my e-ink tablet journey between the Remarkable 2 and the SuperNote, I mentioned that I wished that the Remarkable had links the way the SuperNote can like, you can like draw something on a SuperNote note and just like lasso it and have it link to a different page or a different note or even a web URL if you want.

2:00:04And I wanted to use that to interlink between my major notes of personal, restaurant, and overcast. Those are my major areas of notes. And rather than having to jump all the way back to the document picker or to swipe between different pages, I wanted just buttons at the top of each screen. well I learned that there's this whole community of remarkable like templates that you can buy that people will sell you if they have some kind of like some kind of like system like a journaling system okay buy buy these pdfs and they interlink within themselves so you can like jump to different sections and use my journaling system and but they're just pdfs with links inside of them so it turns out the remarkable supports pdf links with so two different pages within the same document that is the only way they're supported they're supported only by touch not by hitting them with a pen but they are indeed supported in that way within a pdf so i thought hmm what if i make a pdf template for my notes that has the major areas like as buttons across the top oh that's very clever and it would just be blank the whole rest of the document would be blank because you don't have a bullet journal system or a theme system journal or anything like that it's just an empty page right because i only wanted like basically two one or two pages per thing plus like a scratch pad with a few pages on that one or two pages wait i thought it was the whole deal this just has to be one page occasionally i need to overflow for like a sub category that's the thing so like page inflation happening here the stuff on the second page you're never gonna see it i know well so i'm what i'm using it for is like so you know in the context of the restaurant we have a sub project of the stock room making a stock room and it's like okay well that that has like you know its own set of 10 things so on page one the main page i have stock room and then i have an arrow pointing off to off the right margin to say next page and then on that page is all the stock room specific stuff basically a sub project and by the way if anyone for remarkable is listening what you should do is make it so that when you underline some text it you a thing pops up that says do you want to make this a link that would be cool i mean maybe just any kind of any kind of you know user creatable link on device would be amazing pretty much in any form it takes anyway so I learned I figured okay what if I make a pdf how do I do this so I'll send you a picture of what here I'll put this in our slack here it's it's full of stuff so I'm not gonna share it publicly but this is this is a picture of what i have created you can see across the top there are four like icons that i have drawn oh i love that little stick person for personal restaurant symbol overcast symbol and scratch pad symbols what you're seeing here is one of the scratch pad pages i love this i know it's supposed to be don't swing the lights but it looks a little bit like a gallows or something well i know what it means this is for me maybe maybe you have a tiff give you a helping hand with some of these the artwork or maybe have her help draw the lines a little bit straighter on your list well i feel like it's actually like i like the slightly imperfect look of handwriting that's my overcast icon i could have just imported the overcast icon perfectly but i didn't i drew it by hand and i didn't even use the remarkable's like perfect circle methods i just drew a freehand circle that was not a perfect circle because i just like the look better in this context anyway so i'm so i'm trying to figure out okay how do i create i know pdfs can have links how do i make one so first i go to chat gpt and i say what tools can do this and it's a bunch of stuff i haven't heard of and acrobat i'm like well i have creative cloud i install acrobat and i spent a good half hour trying and i kept going back to chat gpt you're x y problem on this one already because you you're thinking like a programmer being like what tools can do this thing that i need to do instead of thinking like a non-programmer and saying make me a pdf with links in it well i actually never thought to do quite that but i did for a while i'm like you know trying to get chat gpt to talk me through how the heck to use acrobat what a weird app that is didn't you feel good about installing that on your computer oh god i saw it on my laptop like i didn't want it on my main computer yeah you have to isolate you have to isolate an acrobat exactly anyway so eventually i i'm like i just give up an acrobat like this this is taking so long trying to like copy and paste the links between pages like sort of worked but not quite and it was a mess.

2:04:36It was just a disaster. And then I realized, wait a minute. I'm a programmer. Do you... Here, I'm going to send you a screenshot here. Do you remember what this language is? It's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time. Oh, God. Is that PostScript? John?

2:04:59I don't know. It's not ringing any bells. I mean, I thought you were about to show me PostScript, but this doesn't look like PostScript. This is LaTeX. uh yeah i've never written that by hand oh gracious so i i'm like wait a minute that's like programming language that i can use to create pdfs you know you just got done uh complaining oh i don't know web stuff or whatever but as people in the chat room have pointed out if you just made an html page with links and then printed it to pdf that might have worked too what i don't know it's a theory it would have been a quick thing to try because i'm pretty sure you still remember enough html to make a document with a link in it i mean maybe but who knows all these modern like box model stuff i honestly think you should have asked chat gpt make me a pdf with four links at the top called this with these icons well i didn't for some reason i didn't think to try that but i did say here my initial prompt was generate latex markup for a page with a row of four square round rect in the corner of 0.5 inches per side and it did it and it was big it worked like it and I didn't ask it for links yet.

2:06:03I'm like, let me just see if it can do just the layout and then I'll figure out how to do the links. And it did it and it worked. And then of course I asked like, by the way, how do I install this on a Mac? What Mac do I need? Did it tell you to use Homebrew? No, this is too old for Homebrew. I haven't seen LaTeX since college. Oh, that's still in use, believe me. Oh, I'm sure. But it's like if you want a programming language to lay out a page. That's where you'll see it. You'll first see it in college. That's for sure. Yeah. But it turns out you can go to Mac Tech and there is a 6GB package you can install that will do this.

2:06:40And it's like, okay, great. I installed it. And then I had to figure out how to get the links in. And when you're using ChatGPT to generate code for you, you can tell it. Like in this case, I had to tell it, oh, move it to the top right corner. like they picked the wrong corner and then you know down down down like and then i asked later on like how do i fill in the shapes and how do i make page breaks because i wanted this to be multiple pages okay and then told me here's how you make the page here's how you can do with loop and everything it was working i even there was some place where it does shading and it's like the example it gave me was like fill gray exclamation point 30 i asked what's the numeric range on the gray it gave me a whole table for all the different gray values and what they mean go on, how to do links.

2:07:25Now at some point, eventually, I had to create the links for me, but it wasn't aligned. It wasn't actually working. The links were like off to the side. So I just said, the link is not aligned with the shape. And then you see, ah, yes, it actually doesn't work. And so this is a pattern that Casey might be relevant to your SF symbols not working thing. ChatGPT will generate you code. If it doesn't work, you can just tell it in that thread that doesn't work instead yeah it's giving this error or it's doing this bad behavior and it will usually say something like oh yeah you're right that doesn't work here's something that does so i mean it's very agreeable in that way but the uh the sort of the death spiral pattern that you will come into if you do this a lot is um it will say oh you're right here try this approach instead and then you'll say that approach doesn't work either and they'll say oh you're right that one doesn't work try this and it will oscillate between the two non-working ones no matter what you say whenever you say it doesn't work it'll say here try this and you'll say you just told me that that one didn't work from earlier do you remember that and it would be like oh yes you're right try this one back and forth a and b a and b and neither a nor b works uh yeah there's lots of there's lots of uh dead ends in these conversations but uh that's why that's why i enjoy having multiple ones of these going because like same prompt for multiple different lms and they will go off in wildly different directions often they'll all produce non-working stuff but sometimes one of them will go in a direction you find promising and then i just start over a white screen, start a new thread with a new approach and then try them all at the same time.

2:08:51It's lots of fun. I eventually got what I wanted. However, let me show you the abomination that creates what I wanted. What I pasted you now is a PHP script that I wrote to generate LaTeX code. Of course. I couldn't figure out how to do some of the loops and sets and counts correctly in LaTeX. I can just do this in PHP. You can brute force it. Yeah. Yeah. Inline everything. So I have possibly the world's only PHP script that generates LaTeX code. Oh, no, I guarantee this is not the world's only. PHP is generating LaTeX everywhere, believe me. But hey, it was a crazy pile of hacks of ancient technology, but it works.

2:09:35And so now I have in my Remarkable a PDF with my little icons in the corner that I can tap to jump between types of notes. And it's not quite as good as having dynamically creatable links on the device. But in the meantime, until and unless Remarkable ever adds that, this is great. And all it took was a bunch of really obscure old technology combined with extremely new technology to tell me how to use it. That is wild. That's very cool. This is what I'm talking about. Like, obviously, AI training is its whole ball of wax that I don't at this very moment want to get into. But this sort of thing is very cool and very unlike anything that I've experienced in my career so far.

2:10:17It's very slick. Yeah. Again, I continue to think, like, the benefit to programmer productivity here is massive. This is like LLM-based code generation and completion and tweaking and stuff like that. It's on the level of like a higher – it's like jumping two levels higher in high-level languages. When we went from assembly to C and then C to memory-managed languages. We've had these jumps over time. This is like two of those jumps. You're still a programmer. You still have to be a programmer to really make much out of these results, but it's a leap forward in productivity in some cases, in many cases.

2:11:04It isn't going to be the solution to every problem, and there's still many problems that we need to do ourselves, but this can give us a really big head start and a really big leg up and just can save us a bunch of time. the upcoming episode of rectifs i think i think that's the one i talked a lot about this talking about me using uh lms for development and what i said one of the things i said there was like even if it doesn't come up with a solution which is very often the case because i'm challenging it very often to do things that are difficult or you know just that are hard for humans to do and it's just failing utterly even if it fails utterly over and over and over again kind of like rubber duck debugging where just describing the problem to an inanimate object can help you solve a problem i will usually by sort of exhausting the lm's ability to do anything get new ideas about how to approach it even if it's just like being satisfied that what i was trying the way i was trying to do is just never going to work or or it will suggest an approach that also won't work but it'll give me an idea it's you know it's not that you don't get these things from googling because you do and i and i would encourage people to do this don't forget about googling don't forget about looking at reference documentation this is not replacing all your existing tools it's augmenting them you should if you only use lms and stop using reference documentation and stop using google you'll be less productive not more but having the lm in the mix throwing out a bunch of essentially search results and various things and solutions that don't work even when it makes up apis that don't work it gives me like new things to google new vocabulary like if i don't know what word is used in this API for this type of thing and it throws out a fake API but uses the correct vocabulary for this particular verb or noun now I have a better thing to google or a better thing to ask the LLM about uh incredibly useful even when it just fails utterly which it does for me almost all the time because what I'm asking it to do is things that I don't have any idea how to do or that may even be impossible and it will gladly spew a bunch of crap and not lead to a solution like what you were doing marco was like a thing that somebody could do who knew the technologies involved i'm most often asking it to do things with a language i already know with an api i'm somewhat familiar with uh with like subtle nuances of doing it in a particular like i've already got something that works but i think it could be done in a better way or whatever and it just flails or whatever but it gives me ideas like that the rubber duck programming is the best examples you're like well all of them are stupid how can they help you rubber ducks are inanimate objects they're one of the most powerful tools program has at their disposal speaking of co-workers casey but back when you had co-workers i'm sure you you've used humans as rubber ducks where you go over to someone's desk describe the problem to them before they open their mouth because you walk through the problem describing to them now you realize the solution and you just walk away it's great so if you think of llms as that but better uh that's a good start