662: Just Break the Law

44:04By the way, there's an easy way for you to try this out. You can go to, and we'll put a link in the show notes, the AI Studio at Google, and you can play with this. And it provides a familiar chat interface, but the direct access to the model, i.e. not via chatbot, and control over temperature and other inference parameters. You can get all that at this AI Studio thing. so if enterprise apps is a temperature equals zero like alexa and alexa plus most likely does and if temperature equals zero they should theoretically lead to always choosing the most likely next token so why do we still get non-deterministic behaviors from an lm the answer is hardware hardware level non-determinism i'm sorry what for efficiency reasons request the lms are dynamically batched with dozens of other user requests to be processed at once.

44:48This batch is then run in parallel across thousands of GPU cores. Here's the problem. Floating point math on a GPU is not associative. This means that if you did A plus B, in parentheses, plus C, that doesn't exactly equal A plus B plus C. Oh my god. Miniscule, rounding differences. Hey, I'm doing the best with what John has asked me to read. I deserve a medal for this, gentlemen. I hope that you would pronounce it that way. That's how I read it when I see that. I see A plus B plus C versus A plus B plus C. No, to be clear, Casey, you're doing a great job. The reality of this is crazy. Yeah, well, you know, a floating point on computers.

45:26It's a thing. Yeah, so continuing with what was written, the specific order of these operations chart changes based on the total batch size and server load at that instant. To be efficient, LM providers dynamically batch requests in different sizes. So a given query sometimes ends up with a batch of 8 requests, sometimes a batch of 64, etc. et cetera. So the GPU doesn't run the same code for a batch of 8 and a batch of 64. It uses different low-level computational strategies called kernels that are hyper-optimized for specific batch sizes and data shapes to maximize speed. An optimization for a small batch might sum the parallel computations in one order, for example, A plus B plus C plus D, while an optimization for a large batch might use a different faster reduction strategy that sums them in another order, for example, A plus B plus C plus D.

46:13So even at temperature zero, if two tokens have almost identical scores, this tiny unpredictable hardware variance can be enough to flip the winning token. And because of the way LLM's next token prediction system works, once a token changes, the entire rest of the response diverges. A post from Mira Murati's new company, she's the former CTO of OpenAI, dives even deeper into this. We'll link that in the show notes. So this is fascinating. So the temperature equals zero for enterprise application, that makes sense to me. But then going on to say, and by the way, temperature equals zero doesn't actually produce something deterministic because the hardware is perturbing it and you get these variations and you know like there's any kind of variation in this then you just go off in an entirely new direction now that hardware problem is solvable like you can read this and say oh i know how to solve it just don't do that thing in different batch sizes and don't do you know don't do different parentheses around the things yeah you can't make it deterministic but it seems like the problem is they're not doing these batch sizes for the hell of it they're trying mightily to get the results fast and inexpensively by doing something that's efficient and these things are unavoidable the way floating point approximations work in computers you could make a algorithm or you know whatever you could have a back end that does things in a deterministic manner at the cost of efficiency maybe it's a massive cost of efficiency maybe it's not feasible but it's good to know that it's there but anyway i found this this feedback very interesting both because of the hardware level non-determinism and the idea that the creativity that is useful in chat gpt is not desired in other applications i feel like the downside though for that with temperature equals zero uh for you know something like alexa or whatever is that if it does the wrong thing with a given input it's always going to do the wrong thing you know if they make it deterministic like there's no hope of it getting better and i'm not sure which is worse something that like doggedly refuses to understand what you're saying or something that sometimes understands what you're saying and sometimes doesn't.

48:09Anyway, thanks a lot for that feedback. I thought this was really interesting and I hope someone works on solving these problems because it looks like everybody who has tried to make their voice assistant smarter by using LLMs has not yet succeeded. We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. Right now, the headlines are chock full of data breaches and regulatory rollbacks, making us all vulnerable. but you can do something about it. Delete.me is here to make it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online from hundreds of data broker websites. Here's how this works. Data brokers are out there scraping up data, trying to sell it and trade it and accumulate it.

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50:19We have a first for ATP, and I'm saying that non-sarcastically. I really mean it. for the first time ever, I got some press review hardware, and I'm really excited about it. Congratulations. Thank you. I have in my house an M5 Vision Pro, and I'm really excited about it. And this arrived a little while ago, and there was an embargo until yesterday. So I couldn't and shouldn't have talked about it until basically now. And I got to tell you, it's really nice. um we did john had asked me to do some tests which i'd like you to talk about and i'll talk about the results um but the initial impressions that i got uh the box the unboxing process is basically the same um the dual knit headband or whatever they call it or the dual knit band is so much nicer it is incredible the difference that makes so i had typically used the single knit band that goes around the back of your head and you tighten it in so you're basically squeezing your head in the front and the back with the very comfortable thing in the back and then the light seal and guard thing or whatever they call it in the front.

51:29And this was fine for, you know, half an hour of use or something like that, but very quickly became not very comfortable. And Apple includes a really clunky, like, or did include a really clunky behind the head and above the head Velcro situation. I forget what that was called, with the M2 Vision Pro. And I didn't really ever like that. And then Belkin, I don't know, six months ago, came out with a thing that worked in concert with the single knit band around the back. And then there was a Velcro thing across the top. And that was nice. And I really liked that for the most part. But there were a couple of problems.

52:06Number one, because of the way it mounted on the little straps on the side, you couldn't use the developer strap with it. And we're going to talk more about that in a minute. And secondly, it was Velcro at the top. So it was a little fiddly. And I didn't love that either. So the new M5 Vision Pro has this dual knit band. And the way it works is there's the same thing you're used to in the back with a catch. And I'll explain that in a second. And basically a duplicate of that across the top. And the way it works is there's only one little dial, kind of like a humongous digital crown that's not very digital on the side.

52:41And like a mechanical watch, Marco, you twist it to adjust the back and then you pop it out and then twist it to adjust the top. It's really, really trick and clever and really well done. And it's incredibly, incredibly comfortable. I went to the library this morning and booked a little study room. So I wasn't out in the masses and worked with it for like 90 minutes and it was great. It really was incredibly comfortable. And I think part of the reason for that is there's actually little tungsten like strips or whatever in the back in the piece that goes behind your head to counterweight all the weight that's on the front of your head and it really does even things out nicely it's not flawless of course but it even evens things out pretty well and by the way that's why everyone was losing their minds about the vision pro being heavier now it's not actually have the unit itself is not actually heavier and In fact, I did compare and I took a little kitchen scale.

53:34So it's not the most accurate thing in the world. But I weighed both the M2 and the M5 Vision Pro with everything off of it. I mean, literally, it was just the glass hardware. No straps, no nothing. And it was the exact same weight. So anyways, the new strap is really great. With regard to the visuals, John, can you explain the genuinely extremely clever test you asked me to perform? yeah so i think this is after we knew that the screens were the same but the whole point is that it renders 10 more pixels in the area that you're looking at so what does that mean is that discernible because obviously it's you know literally kind of fuzzy because it's you know just it's the foveated rendering where it renders lots of pixels uh where you're looking and renders fewer elsewhere and so if you were ever to like capture the image that is on the screens what you would see is a bunch of blurry stuff surrounding a clear area where whoever is wearing the thing is looking and they're using more pixels in that area so that that is potentially clearer or not i don't people saying like oh we was the m2 one using non-native scaling like a monitor that is you know rendering an image that is smaller than the thing and then it's scaling it up i'm not sure that's the right way to think about this because obviously what the vision pro renders uh you know what buffer it renders before it sends it to the screen is a weird mishmash of a bunch of stuff the areas that are out of focus clearly have less information but the area that is in focus might actually even on the m2 one have more information than can fit on the pixels of the screen and they end up scaling it down uh you know if you get like a really big image and you scale it down you're not losing any information uh it's just squishing it into the available space so maybe it is putting more pixels in and then scaling it down and maybe it's above native and dead center but exactly native when you go out a little bit a few degrees and then less than native when you go out and obviously the edges are way less than native because it's all blurry uh but the question is so can you see that because i feel like tech spec wise if this is you know other than it having a faster processor which you can talk about in a bit about how that manifests the screens are the same but they're using the power of the better processor to render more pixels does that change the experience how are you supposed to tell this and my idea was put an eye chart on the wall on the virtual wall not the actual wall like so we're not going to use pass through put put like a an eye chart like i found a pdf of an eye chart so there's no it's vector graphics there's no you know pixels in it stick that on the wall somehow with vision pro magic and then walk backwards and look at the eye chart with the m5 vision pro and then take that off stay in the same spot and put on the m2 vision pro and look at the same thing and look at like that what's the smallest line you can read uh you know my idea was to move back far enough so that you couldn't read the bottom line in one but could read it in the other but uh there were some problems with that approach well anyway casey how did that go how did you feel that the difference was with those 10 more pixels so i think my actual thesis about the m5 vision pro is i guess it's better and i don't mean that in a like in a jerky way it's just nothing that i experienced i can say is like night and day better including the display.

56:42So I did try John's genuinely clever idea. I really don't want to come across like I didn't think it was a good idea. It really was a great idea. And I tried that. But the problem with the Vision Pro is that once you get more than about six to 10 real world feet away, so that's like, you know, two to three meters away, it will disappear whatever you're walking away from. Because as far as it's concerned, it's too far away. So I did the best I could.

57:09And I could get a half a step closer, or I guess I should say further away, actually, with the M5 Vision Pro. But we're talking like a foot, you know, like a third of a meter. It really wasn't that much of a difference. Additionally, I did do a fair, a little bit of Mac virtual display back and forth between the two. I did not do that today at the library, and I'll explain why a little bit later. But I did do a little bit of Mac virtual display. And here again, I thought it was better, but certainly not night and day better. And if I wasn't like really, really concentrating on it, I don't know that I really would have noticed the difference in terms of display fidelity.

57:43Now, with that said, I will repeat for the 900th time, my eyes are not great. I do wear hard contact lenses because I have a weird eye disease called keratoconus. And the only way to get decent vision is with hard contacts. Apple explicitly says that the Vision Pro does not work with hard contacts. And I have so far had a perfectly fine experience with it. But consider your source that my eyes are not great. And I'm telling you, I can't really see the difference. You know, this is like a person who can't hear saying, oh, well, you know, the super duper compressed MP3 sounds no different to me.

58:14Consider your source. With regard to the chip, I will say that there were a couple of places where I definitely noticed that it was faster. Startup is real fast. I feel I didn't have the presence of mind to do a test between the two devices, but the M5 definitely starts up faster. And the other thing that it was very quick about was doing the persona where you scan your face and whatnot, and you generate a persona. And that was also very, very quick as compared to the M2. But in every other way, it was mostly the same. I can't say enough good things about the dual knit band, which is available for sale and compatible with the M2 Vision Pro.

58:56It's only$100, which everything in Vision Pro land, it's like a wedding or a newborn. Everything is 10x what you think it should cost. And the dual netband at 100 bucks is genuinely a steal. And I will almost surely be getting one for my Vision Pro whenever I have to return this PR unit. And just a quick touch of Inside Baseball, the PR demo briefing that we got, they actually did in the Vision Pro in FaceTime on Mount Hood, which was super duper cool. And I don't think I can say too much about what had happened during that briefing, but it was really, really neat to be a part of that rather than just looking at a WebEx screen, which is how they typically do it.

59:37Any questions about that? We need to talk about the new developer strap here in a moment, but any questions specifically about the M5 before I talk developer strap? Did you notice the 120 Hertz pass through? No, not a bit. I mean, it was a hundred, it was up to a hundred before and now it's up to 120. So again, not a huge difference, but. Yeah. I mean, as I said, everything with the M5 vision pro is better, but not like, I was going to say demonstrably, that's not the word I'm looking for, but not like emphatically better. It's just a touch better. And that's not a bad thing. And I'm glad, I know we all like to snark on Apple and snark on the Vision Pro, but I think of the three of us, I'm clearly the most enthusiastic about it.

1:00:14And again, every time I put this darn thing on, I am amazed by it. I really truly am. I'm not blowing smoke. I really, really am. And like using it in the library today, I had a giant computer screen, quote unquote, attached to my little dinky 14 inch MacBook Pro. Like it is really incredible. That being said, I put myself in a little study room so nobody would see me with my silly face computer on. But it really, really is incredible. And so it's such a weird product because I genuinely really do love it. And yet I don't use it all that often. And it's so frustrating because I do love it so much, but I don't have the occasion to put it on all that often.

1:00:57And it's tough because on the one side, I want to say, you know, everyone should have one. They're incredible, which they are incredible. And I don't know if I should say everyone should have one. And at$3 ,500, like arguably not a lot of people should have one. It's so tough. But man, if you have the means, I highly suggest picking one up. That's a reference, John, because they are incredible. And being able to see like the immersive media, admittedly, there is not a ton of it, but there's a lot more than there used to be. And there's going to be more coming. They're getting a better rhythm with that.

1:01:32The immersive media is great. So much of it is so great. And you know what? I'd like to actually table the developer strap discussion. Let's come back around to that. I realized that we had an opportunity with me having a long-term loan of this M5 Vision Pro. So we colluded and decided that, John, why don't you take a long-term loan of my actual purchase paid for with my own money M2 Vision Pro? And so John, as of what, Saturday or Monday, sometime recently, you now have a Vision Pro in the house for the next couple of months. I have your Vision Pro. So yeah, you did have both the M2 and the M5 one for a while, but then you sent me the M2 one.

1:02:10So this is probably the only way a Vision Pro was going to show up in my house. Is this the only situation where anybody has ever had an extra Vision Pro? It very well could be. Maybe a lot of people have them in their closets. They may consider their one and only one to be an extra Vision Pro. Oh, sick burn. But anyway, to briefly interject, this is why I didn't do as many side-to-side comparisons as I otherwise would have is because I really wanted to get John a copy of it. I wanted to get him my M2 Vision Pro as quickly as possible. So my apologies to the listeners genuinely that I didn't do more side-to-side comparisons, but I did enough to get the gist.

1:02:43And then I shipped, John, my, which is sort of kind of your Vision Pro. So tell me, John, what is your M2 Vision Pro experience in 2025? Yeah. So I did do the in-store demo back when this thing first came out. And that's all my only experience with the Vision Pro was that demo. And, you know, I talked about it on a past episode. You can go back and listen to that. I was very impressed by the, you know, the technology. It didn't make me feel like I wanted to get one, but doing the demo made the product much more attractive to me than it was before doing the demo. So in that respect, the demo was a plus for the product.

1:03:21Now having one in the actual house with me and being able to use it to do real things gives me some more ideas about what it's like to actually own and use one of these things. so just to comment on the dual knit band i do have a dual knit band with this one as well and i'll echo casey's sentiment so i only wore it for half an hour in the demo and it was with the solo band thing and even just in that half an hour demo it was uncomfortable because with the soul in it it's just on the back of your head so the only way it has to keep that thing on your face is to press it against your face to press it against your forehead your cheeks you're like because that's the only place the band is the band is pulling it towards you there's one band in the back.

1:03:59Um, and if you don't pull it hard enough, it will start to slide down your nose or whatever. And if you pull it too hard, you get a big red mark on your forehead. The dual net band, as Casey pointed out is... really smart in the way it works in that yes it's got a band on top and on the back but the other thing to know about this is that the way the band attaches to the vision pro is through a rigid vertical vertical piece of metal thing so the band can't twist on the vision pro like the band is fixed where it is and this allows those tungsten weights that casey mentioned that are in the back of the band it's like well why are you putting more weight into the vision pro what the heck is that weight even doing the way it acts as a counterbalance is because the top strap acts as kind of like a fulcrum like on a seesaw and so the weight on the back causes the thing on the front of your face to tilt up so it doesn't press against your cheeks as much and so you don't have to pull it against your face so much there's the the adjustment of like the top versus the back strap i don't know why they just didn't do one dial one side one down the other but it is very clever to have one dial one side with the pull out and back end thing but you can adjust the top thing to lift the glasses up so they're not squishing your cheeks and then you can loosen the back one so it's not pushing the thing against your face so much more comfortable like this band is i never tried any of the hacks with the with the the multiple bands but this is a really well realized band for is it exactly the same price as the solo one is slash was i think but i am not sure okay it's it's a this not that you know this the product has a lot of problems we talked about at length but the problem of a quick to put on easy to adjust comfortable strap i feel like this solves the problem amazingly well and the reason i said that is because this thing is heavy i know i wore it for a half an hour demo but when you actually have the thing in your house and use it for more than a half an hour the weight becomes way more apparent you know you hear people talk about it and like oh it's heavy blah blah blah there's nothing like wearing it on your face for two hours to be like okay this thing is heavy even with the amazing new strap this thing is heavy i don't know they would have made it lighter if they could have maybe they didn't make the frame out of the metal maybe didn't have glass in the front or whatever i continue to be sad about the delay slash possible cancellation of the lighter version of this because it really needs to be lighter and yes by the way we all know that apple that samsung just announced their vision pro competitor for like 1800 bucks with the same resolution screens and yada yada i haven't read too much about it but just wanted to put that out there we know that exists apple should be feeling the heat because they haven't really updated the products in two years except for to add an m5 to it anyway um i did try mac virtual display which is the thing i asked to do it during the demo but they didn't let me because they have sort of a canned demo in the store but now i've got it at home i'm like oh i had it on in front of my mac and i'm like i'm gonna probably have to go over to one of the computers because surely this doesn't work with intel it does are you surprised i was yeah actually yeah i was like what the hell because you know mac virtual display it's like oh it's that one anyway i did match back virtual display with my pro display xdr and what mac virtual display does if i had to summon up in one sentence is it unretina is my display i have a huge expensive retina display and it's like but what if your display wasn't retina would you like that and the answer is no not like that literally it like i mean it's amazing that it works and if you're on a train or an airplane seat or in some confined place where you can't have or on the road and you can't have a pro display xdr it's better than looking at a tiny laptop screen but if you are near your computer you do not want to do mac virtual display because i could like it's just the actual display is so much sharper than mac virtual display and maybe it's the resolution of the screens we talked about this about the pixels per degree and everything and how it's not it doesn't match up with right like it's just a technical limitation it's not the ideal application of this to use mac virtual display with your computer right in front of you it's better to take the headset off and look at your screen because that's that's much better so i was not a fan of mac virtual display uh yeah um i'm kind of just say i'm so glad that you had that impression because i had that same impression and everyone last year told me like it looks great to me it looks perfectly sharp to me i'm like it does not yeah well so like the like i said when you talked about the only demo i got in the store was let's use like native safari inside vision pro and that i think is reasonable but the problem with mac virtual display is i can see the real display like right there it's the a b comparison is real easy here's what it looks like inside the headset here's what it looks like outside this is supposed to be the same screen in the same resolution and it's it's a big difference it's not like it's unreadable i think it's fine like i've used non-retina screens for my entire life until very recently it's fine like it's totally usable it's good like it's amazing that it works it's cool that it curves around you like everything about it is great but given the choice i'd rather look at the actual screen yeah sure i mean given a choice i would also rather look at an actual screen but i i didn't find it near in and don't find it near as egregious as the two of you seem to but again i mean that's considering here's the thing like it's not it's not obvious that you should prefer the real thing because if it was just as sharp i might prefer the virtual thing because it's so much more flexible you can put it wherever you want you can make it any size it subtly curves around you i can imagine a thing where you could adjust the curvature and like like there there are potential advantages for having a display in a virtual world than having a physical one it's just that the the the displays inside the vision power don't currently have enough pixel density to compete with an actual xdr which again we did we mathed out back when this thing first came out but just i'm just reiterating now i've experienced it in person and it is the math bears out in real life um one of the things i was surprised about again having used it over a long period of time in various parts of my house because i went and put widgets on all my walls and i set up applications in different rooms and was walking between them i'm sitting on my couch playing with i'm i'm really trying to use this thing in every possible way you can use it i was surprised at something i did not notice at all during the demo which is instability and misalignment in the virtual world i was when i did the demo i was amazed at how solid everything was it was just really it was just did an amazing job of making things look like they were fixed in space in front of you and having one in the house it still does that but very often when i go from one thing to another like i you know for example bringing up the whatever they call the home screen the thing where it shows all the app icons or whatever that goes away sometimes like you can make that go away and then you can call it back to you and i would make it go away and i would call it back to me and when i call it back i'm like is that tilted to the right a little bit oh yeah am i tilting my head i'm i'm a very visual person one of my if you want to read my old hypercritical post but like a lot of my sort of artistic experience of like doing fine arts and stuff as a kid um is sort of built on my i was going to say hypersensitivity but it's the right word how my hypersensitivity to the visual i don't know the visual size and shape and alignment of things if something is not centered i can tell if something is slightly crooked i can tell i'm very sensitive to that i can imagine a person who is not as sensitive like or has average sensitivity to this not noticing these things but for me if something that i was put in one place and i look at it again and it's like slightly or like the right side of it is a little bit closer to me than the left side of it, even though before it was perfectly square on with me, or if the top right is lower down than the top left slightly, and it wasn't like that before, I will notice.

1:11:41And I do notice, and there's nowhere, no way in Vision Pro to fix that. You can kind of, with the windows, if it's like closer to you, you can kind of shove it back and tilt it around. But I'm like, but why do I have to make these adjustments? The answer is you shouldn't make those adjustments. They shouldn't, they should just not bother you, but they do bother me. So that's, I'm assuming that's a limitation and a little bit of drift. I noticed that also with the widgets that i stuck on the wall like i put a clock on a wall and a picture frame on a wall and like when i go over and look at them later they'd be like a half inch off the wall and to vision pro's credit it would figure out that they're half an inch all the wall and it would animate them so they're stuck against the wall again but it's like i saw that you lost track a little bit i mean it's mind-boggling that it does this at all i don't even know how it does this is something i haven't really heard a lot of people talk about it but like think about like i put like a weather widget in my dining room and then i walk into my living room where i have a clock widget i can walk from living room to the dining room and the weather widget is still on the wall wall in there how the hell does it do that yeah i would also love to know because it's bananas is it making a 3d model of my entire house and depth mapping every wall and figuring out where they like it boggle it is it using gps is using distance from wi-fi things like i don't even know how it does that at all and yet here i am complaining that when i walk with this thing from one room to the other and look at the weather widget it's a centimeter off until it adjusts itself yeah i'm being picky but very quickly uh in order to adjust the uh how can i verbalize this so if you think about a window twisting on a vertical axis in the center of the window right so you want to take the left side and bring it closer to you while the right side goes further away from you if you grab the bar on the bottom that you use to just move the window in 3d space and tilt your head left and right so you're you're taking the crown of your head and making it go to toward your left shoulder towards your right shoulder.

1:13:24If memory serves, that will cause the window that you're holding to spin across the vertical axis. I'll have to try that. It's not stellar, but it's not obvious that that's something you can do. Yeah, I'd be looking for anything because you can't actually just like, what I usually do is I would shove it far away from me and then bring it back again and get it square, right? But what you're saying is there's an actual way to do this. I'll have to try that. And speaking of windows, me being a big window management person, I was looking for and failing to find something to help me with app switching window management because i'd have a lot of things open at once and they'd be sort of vertically stacked on top of each other and i wouldn't want them to be stacked in that way and yeah i could take the ones i don't want and chuck them off to the side but i didn't want them off to the side i still wanted them to be in front of me i just wanted to hide them whereas the hide function and that doesn't seem to exist which i can kind of understand because how would you bring them back like there's reasons for it but yeah the the window and app management or even if they are stacked i was like i just want to switch to the app in the back well i can look at the little part of this this pointing out and then tap my fingers together and bring it to the front but like Sometimes it's difficult to pull that off well.

1:14:25I was looking for some kind of hand-wavy app switcher. If three-finger swipe, they should have Tom Cruise minority port hand-waved to the side to cycle through the current application or hide it or whatever, but they don't. So that's something that I missed. And then, of course, if you get a Vision Pro in the house, as I think one of you mentioned in a very recent episode, the first and most important thing you do with it is demo it to other people. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I did that. My wife's the only one here now. I gave her a demo. I, you know, I'm talking about the M2 Vision Pro in 2025.

1:15:00This is old news, I know, but it's not old news for me. But anyway, you've heard people complain that when they demo, it's hard to demo things because when you try to get somebody to watch video and you're mirroring what they see on like your laptop screen or something, it blacks out because of stupid copyright stuff, which it's the worst. It's annoying and frustrating here's the thing that i didn't fully understand or have forgotten um when you do that and by the way the reason we're mirroring what they see on the screen because otherwise try explaining it's like playing charades try explain to somebody who's never used vision pro what they're supposed to do without being able to see what they're seeing i'd only use it for like a day before i gave my wife a demo so it's not like i've memorized every pixel that's going to be on the screen but it really is like describe to me what you see it's like trying to do tech support over the phone with somebody because they can see stuff but you can't see it so that's why apple provides this great feature where you can see a version of what they're seeing on your laptop screen or whatever that's really helpful because then you can see what they're seeing although you also see their foveated rendering so a lot of times it's blurry you're like go look over there look over there anyway as soon as you bring them to like okay go to the tv app go to this thing you know run the play this immersive demo uh you can't see it on your laptop screen laptop screen goes black because it's immersive video it goes around everything which that is that is totally fine and i'm not that aggrieved by that well it's stupid but okay but also i mean inside the headset they only see blackness too but it still plays the video so they hear the sound they're like it took me a while to even realize it's just like am i supposed to be seeing something i'm like but i could hear the audio playing because she didn't have had using the the speakers and the straps and she's like i'm supposed to be seeing something like she just sees blackness but it tries to play it anyway that is insane like i get that you can't show it on two screens at once show it on one and then as we said in the past when we talked about this apple it's your own video like break the law apple this is a rare case where i'm saying apple just break the law civil disobedience literally implement this thing that violates the htcp standard break the law see if somebody comes for you no one's going to care because nobody has vision pros no one is pirating things by mirroring the foveated rendering of a vision pro and a laptop and then screen recording it we have way better ways to pirate things nobody would want that just break the law right and see if somebody comes through you've got so much money i believe you could defend this lawsuit maybe we'll change the hdcp standard apple you need to break the law because this is so stupid yeah i mean i again i i can i can forgive not showing what the person is seeing, not showing the video the person is seeing on the mirror.

1:17:36Like if I typically do this with an iPad, you can absolutely do with a laptop. If the iPad or laptop or what have you isn't showing the video that a person is seeing and just showing a black box, fine. It's a little annoying, but fine. Understandable. But the fact that they black out what's in the Vision Pro is utterly bananas to me. Yeah. And like I said, civil disobedience. You break the law on purpose and you accept the punishment for breaking the law as a way to highlight the injustice of the law and the stupidity of the law and hdcp or whatever law contract whatever it is not a law whatever it is like that standard is so stupid and has been causing such harm to the entire ecosystem for years and here it is not the vision pro doesn't need this it's got enough problems of its own on top of that to having to deal with hdcp copy right standard crap it's so stupid um also for some reason i don't even know if this is a bug but like when changing environments it would black out both of our screens as well what the hell environment's not oh i don't remember that copyrighted video this might have just been a bug but i was like go to environments and put on the new environment and dial it up in the crown it would black everything out for both of us again um the other experience she had with vision pro first of all she wasn't that impressed by the things that impressed me didn't impress her about the visuals and everything fine she found dealing with the ui very frustrating part of that was me trying to explain to her what to do when i couldn't see what she was seeing which is just going to be frustrating no matter what it's frustrating for both of us but part of it was she just didn't feel like she took to it very well she could she could do most things very quickly she's pretty technically savvy but she found sort of the limitations of that world in terms of managing the windows and things and uh you know and the typical vision pro thing that i think we've all discussed before on this thing that I even saw in the demo, which is you look at a thing with your eyes, you pinch with your fingers to activate it.

1:19:22But it's human nature that as soon as you look it with your eyes and decide to pinch, you then move your eyes off to something else. But your fingers haven't pinched yet. You've sent the thought down for them to pinch like a brontosaurus telling it to move its tail, right? But the signal takes a while to go down there. Meanwhile, your eyes have moved to something else on the screen. And so you end up not pinching the thing you thought you were pinching or not pinching anything at all. And it takes some practice in the Vision Pro I would remember stare at it until the pinch completes, then look somewhere else.

1:19:51And that can be frustrating for new users as well. But yeah, she was not impressed and found the UI frustrating and didn't understand why people would want to have this thing. And you know, that's not a, that's not a new complaint. I did use it as a replacement for my iPad in the bed. Hold on. Was she, was, was she impressed at all by the immersive stuff or no? No. Well, that's surprising to me because I have not given a demo to someone that hasn't at least said holy smokes that's cool you know that may sometimes sometimes followed up by oh i would never want one of these but immediately holy smokes that's cool i was super impressed by it maybe go back and listen to the episode i'm still very impressed by it i think it's great she was not impressed um so i said well maybe this will be maybe one of the benefits will be because i you know again i watch tv on my ipad in bed very often she's asleep next to me on the rare occasions that she can't get to sleep she blames it on my ipad and i have to put it away but it's nothing to do with my ipad it's just to do with whatever is keeping her awake because most nights she goes to sleep instantly and is snoring away next to me while i watch stuff on my ipad um but anyway what if you could what if i could watch tv in my bed without having any light coming out uh using the vision pro so i tried that obviously not ideal to have that big thing uh you know in bed and have to find a place for it when you take it off and you're kind of you know you're really closing yourself off from your partner when you have a big headset on but if she's asleep anyway it's not that big of a deal so i tried it um the various theater modes where you can have it in like a movie theater uh incorporate your your thing you're watching into the environment so it could be floating over a mountain lake and have it reflecting in the lake or you could just have it as a window in and out of an environment lots of options there and i was able to find a whole bunch of different options that worked well for me laying in my bed propped up against a pillow watching video one of the fun things was that i could put my knees up so they were quote-unquote blocking the screen but of course they weren't blocking the screen the screen just draws right over top of them which was amazing that's something i can't do when i watch tv and then laying down on the couch and put my knees up and if i block the tv you know what i mean you don't have to worry about that envision pro your knees aren't real uh it was weird that i could still see my hands a lot of the time i was like burying my hands in the cover so i wouldn't see my little like uh you know composited outline hands because i just always try to keep track of where your hands are it's like i don't want to see my hands i'm just watching the thing um i i do think that watching the video that way as cool as it is uh one of the sort of known issues with the vision pro um is that they're like i don't i don't know what these come from but they are a thing some kind of internal reflection thing is going on in there i don't know if these are reflections inside the lenses if these if this is light bouncing off parts of the inside of the case but if you're watching video and there's bright stuff on the screen very often you will see a faint ghostly echo of that bright stuff floating in your field of vision kind of around the middle and whatever causes that they need to fix it because if as far as i'm concerned watching i watch many hours of video in this thing so far that is the biggest downside versus me watching on my ipad it's not even the resolution my ipad is sharper than this is because i hold it real close to my face and it's high resolution and it's oled and it's amazing these screens are also amazing i see that the lower resolution but it doesn't matter when you're watching like people on a screen like you're not looking at like a retina display for people it's fine like i recognize that it's lower res but but also it has the advantage of being huge and my knees don't block it and like there's other advantages to it but those whatever they're light up ghost artifacts things whatever is causing those they make the experience of watching video worse for me than watching on my ipad it's not even what i thought it would be like a big heavy thing my face getting hot all that other stuff because with the new strap it actually is pretty comfortable and i feel like it's sort of it's a wash if i'm laying in bed i'm willing to deal with all those things it's that it's those little ghostly things and again i don't know where they come from i imagine their internal reflections and lenses or something i'm sure if they were easy to solve apple would have solved them um i'm using contact lenses in the vision pro because i don't have lens inserts for them so it's not reflections in my glasses i'm wearing my contact lenses and i don't have hard contact lenses they're regular ones so and marco has said that he sees these same ghostly things even when he's not wearing glasses of corrective stuff.

1:24:03So this is a thing and I don't know where it comes from. And I wonder if Samsung's fixed it as well, but I was surprised to see that that was the thing that made me think that the iPad is a better choice than the vision pro for watching in bed. Anyway, I'll, you know, I'm keeping this thing as long as Casey's keeping his review unit. So whenever he wants his thing back, I'll send it back to him and he'll send in his review unit back. So I'll have this thing for a while and I hope I'll find a new uses for it and other things to do with it. We are sponsored this week by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs that stand out and succeed online.

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1:26:32There is possibly an even larger miracle than you receiving even a secondhand borrowed Vision Pro, and that is that we found a reason and a way to get Marco to strap his Vision Pro to his face. And the three of us did a, like, almost hour-long spatial FaceTime call, which I think either John you had never done one in Marco you either hadn't or hadn't done one in forever is that right? I had never done one. Okay. And so we did that and I have spoken I think in the past about how cool I think this is and for a while there Jason and Steven and Mike and James and I had a standing and actually Dan Morin as well for a while had a standing by every two weeks appointment that we would inevitably always blow off wherein we would do one of these spatial calls but we only ended up or I only ended up connecting on like five of them over the span of a year or two.

1:27:24But for me, I thought that that was the closest, the vibe of it and the feel of it was as close as I've gotten to hanging out with people that are far away without actually hanging out with the people that are far away. And I'm curious, and since John and I have been talking a lot, perhaps Marco, you can kick us off, but I'm curious what you thought of that. I also compelled Marco and John to play, what is this game something? I forget what the name of the app is. Game Room. Game Room, thank you. and play like a legally distinct version of Battleship in Game Room against each other while I was spectating.

1:27:56And I'm curious to hear, Marco, what did you think of the spatial FaceTime and what did you think of Game Room? Well, the first thing you notice with the spatial FaceTime is like, so what Casey made me do was install iOS or Vision OS 26 and then remake my Persona because the Personas got a lot better in OS 26. And so I did that. I made my whole self again, re-scanned my face, and the resulting persona actually does look a lot like me. But immediately upon entering, John was, of course, immediately saying, oh, it looks like your neck has weird Botox or something. It looks a lot like the person.

1:28:40It's like if you hired a stuntman to double for Marco to do the stunts, this is what the stuntman would look like. like and like it's it's almost across the uncanny valley but it's definitely in the uncanny valley i don't know so here's the thing here's the thing about the personas like when i saw like the you know not having one i would just see the pictures like here's what they look like and here's the improved versions like all the improved ones are way better but like it's different when you're looking at a persona of a person that you don't know yeah versus when i see marco's persona i know what marco looks like some that you've seen for a long time in person you are again hypersensitive to any minor like humans are are you know evolutionarily selected to be good at recognizing faces that's why the uncanny valley exists because if it's like it's almost real but not quite it it looks scary if something is wrong with it and so if you if you don't know marco and you saw his persona you're like that's amazing i would be convinced that it's him but if you know marco there's no way in hell you would be going to sit him because it doesn't look like him it's so close but i don't agree i think it looks pretty good i don't think it's that far off yeah i agree with marco yours was casey's was closer than yours but they got your whole bottom part of your face wrong if you were wearing a batman mask it wouldn't even look like you because you don't see the bottom of your face coming out of the mask like and it looked great it looked amazing it looked a little bit like you know robotic with the mouth things but like it's what it does is amazing but i'm you know i there's no way you could fool me into thinking that was marco i'd always know it's his persona and same thing with casey but casey was closer i i agree that you would always know it's a persona but i i really think that what marco said a few minutes ago for me i feel like most personas that i've interacted with are on the other side of the uncanny valley now that maybe there are maybe they're on the edge of it you know so they're like teeter-tottering you'll wave in their arms if you will right it looks better since still than in motion.

1:30:35Once it starts moving, you're like, okay, you're a little bit back in the valley. That is, that is true. But I really do think, not only is it amazing, but I do think it is a reasonably good facsimile of your faces. Until the movement, the movement is a little not great to your point, but in general, I think that they're astonishingly good facsimiles of your faces. What it has going for it is it is higher fidelity than your typical FaceTime video. Because FaceTime video is compressed and it's blurry and if there's a hitch in the network like you know but these things are always full res because they're being rendered locally essentially or it's i'm assuming they're being rendered locally so and then they fit into the world like it's it's like in engine cut scenes in games it fits in with the rest of the world like i'm not saying they're bad they're they're amazing and they accomplished their job very well but i was surprised that because i had not experienced this with anybody that i knew i just seen still images sometimes with people that i knew and still images of strangers but being in that environment with people that i know what their actual face looks like i was startled by how much i decided that this is not marco this is a marco stuntman puppet well and like and most like every part of the kind of like simulated reality of this like first of all like everything has a combination of incredible technical achievement and also it's kind of wrong like and that's like like we were saying earlier like everything the vision pro does it it is just a stunning remarkable technical achievement like to to do what it does in like the basics of what it does put this helmet on your face that is opaque and has screens in it and make it look like you can see through it into the room that alone and how well it does that is remarkable and that was so much engineering and so much sophistication and so much work to get that to be as good as it is but the result is you put it on you're like ah it's kind of a crappy view of my room it's a little bit laggy and smeary and gives me a little bit motion sickness yeah and that's mostly limited by the camera hardware which is a shame but you know it's already 30 100 bucks so what do you want right and like okay so you get into the world and every step of the way i was i was like oh my god this does look a lot like me and oh wow that does look a lot like the two of you but not quite and it's like again once you think about what it is doing it is as if there is a camera on my face but there is not a camera on my face there are parts of my face that the sensors can't even see and they just have to kind of guess like Like what like my mouth is doing?

1:33:18What are my cheeks doing? Like it can see some of that like from the sensors inside, but not a lot of it. It has to guess what are my shoulders doing? It can see some of that, but not all that. And it does all of that with remarkable quality. But again, the result is it's kind of off. It's kind of wrong. And I feel like this is the story of the entire Vision Pro. like and like the the hardware and capabilities i'll get to the content in a second but like the hardware and capability side of the entire version pro is like remarkable technical achievement to result in something that is kind of cool but you're like but i don't really want to use this or do this but it's it's amazing that i can do this but the the overall product and the overall experience to the customer is hmm this is kind of weird or this is kind of crappy or this is kind of limited um and and certainly like you know like even just the basics of it like this this is the longest i'd use the vision pro in probably six months at least um maybe a year so i i kind of got like a fresh look on it and you know some of the newer stuff that it can do i can see why people are really excited about this but it's almost like everything the vision Pro does.

1:34:37Every single thing. The content, the virtual FaceTime things, the games, every single thing. It reminded me of there was some popular video that went around about a month ago of a guy who had asked ChatGPT count to a million. And it was this funny video because ChatGPT, this was in voicemail, and GPT kept saying like, okay, one, two, and so on. And I would just keep going like this. And he's like, no, no, no. don't don't tell me what you would do just actually do it count to a million okay four five six and it would go on like this and the guy's like no no you keep stop stopping you just keep going and no matter what the guy did it would just be like well it would be like seven eight nine like that that is how every single thing in the vision pro feels every single i know this is a leap bear bear with me every single thing i have ever done in the vision pro every bit of content, every application every experience, every single thing has been like well this is the kind of thing you could do in the Vision Pro okay so do it oh well, okay it would go kind of like this this is kind of how you would have a meeting in the Vision Pro or this is the kind of TV show that we could make for the Vision Pro okay make it here's some more demos of here's some more things you could do in the Vision Pro Here is an example of what sports could be like in the Vision Pro.

1:36:07Here's an example of what this adventure series might be like in the Vision Pro. Here's an example of what a concert could be in the Vision Pro. Okay, well, where is it? We're now like two years in. Where is it? Where is all this stuff? Where is the application? What happens? What is it like to actually follow through and actually do all of these things? and so far every single thing i've done even like you know we're i'm sure i was talking a moment moment about like we played um we played a board game we played battleship together and it was like okay this is an interesting demo of an experience i'm never gonna do it again but okay this is an example of the kind of thing i could do in the future i'm not going to of course but i could it's like uh where is the thing it seems like we're always heading towards the thing we can see the thing off in the future maybe potential things of how this might go this might be amazing in the future.

1:37:04Okay, well, when? And what do you do with the product now, as it exists in the present, that was bought with present or past money, with this present ecosystem and all this past engineering work? Like, okay, what do we do with this now? And it seems like everyone is looking so far forward, so far into the distance, including Apple that no one is kind of looking at the present and realizing hmm we don't actually want to do any of these things in the present more than like once as a demo there's stuff in there that's not demo where like we did some of the things like looking at pictures together that's a fully realized thing that I wish I could do better in FaceTime on the phone and the iPad I know you can do it in FaceTime on the phone the iPad but it's such a pain because the interface is so bad but getting everybody in a virtual space and looking at photos together was real easy i was i'm a first timer doing it and maybe casey has some experience with it but like it was really easy to take a bunch of pictures or you know videos or whatever and show them to people it's very often when i'm doing facetimes with family i want to show pictures or other things and this makes it easy and way nicer because you're all sitting together it puts you like sort of you know you're all facing the screen you can move the screen you can resize it you can pick pick what you want to show on it you can play video you can take a panorama and wrap it around everybody that's a fully realized experience like as someone in the chat room said uh when you were uh complaining about the uh the sort of uh demo nature of it that it's like that's not fair the vision pro is only about 75 demo which is true like there are fully realized experiences in there for a lot of basic things mac virtual display i think is a fully realized experience for what it is it you know it does it lets you see and control your mac completely uh it's just you know there's just not an off-resolution on the screen for it to look like retina but other than that it does that thing a lot of their apps are like that i feel like the virtual space is like that the games there are a bunch of games maybe not enough but there are some of them and those are it's not just this is what it would be like this is an actual game uh watching movies i think it's a fairly fully realized experience with lots of different options even before you get into third-party ops like uh apps like uh um theater adam sagor's a television app which i tried out that lets you have like 3d models of televisions even before you get into that realm just the built-in stuff for watching video and movies like 2d movies or quote-unquote 3d movies like avatar or whatever that's fully realized and it works uh but yeah there is a lot of potential that is not realized because the ecosystem has not built up around it and because there's not enough content for it as we've said but um for the things that it does do i think it is does offer a complete implementation of those things.

1:39:41You know, I also wanted to point out that when you do the spatial FaceTime thing, you're seated in some sort of like circle-ish thing. Are you seated? You have no lower torso, it's hard to say. That's fair. But you appear to be maybe seated. And if one person stands up, they will raise up in the virtual space. You can point with your hands because your hands exist in the virtual space. But as you were saying a moment ago, what's really cool about the spatial FaceTime is that they kind of seat you in a circle-ish pattern, and you're maybe seated. It's kind of ambiguous because you don't have a lower half.

1:40:14But, you know, if one of us stands up in the real world, that person's spatial avatar will braise up in the spatial world, which is really neat. And you can point and whatnot because you have your hands in the spatial world. You can tend to your fingers together, interlace your fingers, and you can tell that the person's fingers are interlaced. But when you present something, like a photo or what have you, it's smart enough to put us all in a row, which is actually not entirely stellar because then you have to look through one of the, if you're on one of the extreme ends, you have to look through the person in the middle to see the person on the far end.

1:40:44But still, I give them 90 % marks on this because it's basically doing what you would want it to do. And you get to look at something together, which is really neat. But I think that one of the more fun demos of the Vision Pro is the Legally Distinct Battleship game. So it seems like, Marco, you were not entirely impressed. John, what did you think of the Legally Distinct Battleship? i mean that's a good application like doing board games like that um it is uh unlike sharing photos doing a board game in person is just much nicer obviously if you're on the other side of the world from somebody in the virtual one is the only one you've got that's fine and it's a more intimate experience than just playing a 2d version but you know sometimes playing a 2d one can be good too if you're like i know a lot of people do this i'm sure your kids you've seen your kids do it where they're on facetime with their friends but they're also playing a network game with their friends with a different device or even the same device um that actually is similar to this with far less technology um but yeah i can see you know board games uh would be a good application of this technology because you do get to reach out and do things with the virtual board in front of you and stuff like that's just battleships not that exciting of a game so um you know i don't i and there are other games we had to try lots of other games and now with the the ps2 vr controllers that they're compatible with that apple will sell you separately from the headset now they actually have handsets which potentially opens up the world to more games but the game situation is just so much better on the quest and obviously so much better on the uh the valve index or the you know all the other sort of game-centric things or the playstation vr even than it is apple and that's their own fault for you know being typical apple and not getting games and refusing to ship their own hand controllers and only belatedly incorporating third-party hand controllers see also apple tv and third-party controllers so you know it is what it is but it's a good application but like uh sharing photos it's better in the vision pro because even if you're in person with somebody you can't take your little uh five by seven uh print and stretch it out to fill the room right or unless you have a very large screen you can't like project from your laptop and share i'm gonna project my picture up on that entire wall do you have a wall size screen no but a vision pro you do uh and it's cool and it's i think it's better it's like renting out a movie theater to show your family pictures to people.

1:42:56And again, you don't expect, oh, a whole family just needs a$3 ,500 headset and we can all do it. Like, I get it. It's not realistic. But three of us had them and we put them on and we had an experience looking at pictures that would be better than if I was just swiping through them on my phone and you were trying to look at my phone screen. Yeah. Yeah, very much so. All right. Finally, we should at least briefly mention the developer strap. Today, we were told that there is a new developer strap. Reading from MacRumors, the second-generation developer strap offers data transfer speeds of up to 20 gigabits per second when connected to a Mac, whereas the original version was limited to USB 2.0 speeds of up to 480 megabits per second.

1:43:30It is unclear if there are any other changes. The new strap is compatible with both the original Vision Pro with the M2 chip and the updated model of the M5 chip. I am told that the M2 will get the increased data speeds, but I don't think I've seen this verified at any point. But the tech specs from Apple read the usbc data connection is up to 20 gigabits per second individually amplified dual driver audio pods compatible with the mac and it's compatible with vision pro m2 and the vision pro m5 so the increased data rate uh that's like when you're you know when you're doing development that's why it's called a developer trap and you're you build and run your application in xcode and it will ship it over to the vision pro to run on device presumably it will do that shipping over faster because instead of 480 megabits it's up to 20 gigabits like is that the main advantage you see in this thing?

1:44:16I think so, yeah. But I can fathom, you know, somebody had said when the original came out, like, why can't we do, you know, like, HDMI to USB-C? Because what's coming out of the developer strap, let me back up. The way the developer strap works is you use, like, a little pin like you would have to pop out a SIM tray. You pop out the left-hand, I think that's right, the left-hand strap, which is the thing that has, that comes off the Vision Pro that the headpiece is connected to. And you pop that off and you put in a new one. So it has the speaker in it, but it also has a permanently attached little dongle-y thing that has a USB-C input into it.

1:44:56And you can't charge through this. All you can do is connect it to a computer and send data back and forth to the computer. But why couldn't you connect it to Ethernet? Why couldn't you connect it to HDMI? And what if you could suck in an arbitrary HDMI video feed into the Vision Pro? That would be amazing. but that's not currently possible. So to more directly answer your question, yeah, the only thing that this really is useful for is sending developer stuff back and forth. And I can't think of, even when Apple has you demo immersive content, if I recall correctly, what they do is you basically connect to your Mac via presumably ad hoc Wi-Fi and it streams content from your Mac to your Vision Pro.

1:45:41I don't know that that would even help. I don't know that the developer strap would help with that either, even though it seems like it would be the perfect timing for it, if you will. So, yeah, I don't know what this is for. We also talked about having lower latency for Mac virtual display with a wired connection. Yeah, that's true. I'm sorry. I did forget about that. Yeah, hypothetically, it would be lower latency for Mac virtual display. It also wouldn't be doing the ad hoc Wi-Fi thing for Mac virtual display. So that would presumably be not only more solid but more performant. I mean, I occasionally use my developer strap on the rare occasions that I'm doing development.

1:46:15And if I'm going to a questionable Wi-Fi environment, including occasionally the library, sometimes I'll go ahead and swap it on and connect to my Mac just to make it a little more reliable. But generally speaking, I don't think this is necessary. But I'm curious to try it out, especially if the Mac virtual display is much better. Then if you're a Mac virtual display person, and I know there are people that use their Vision Pro for hours a day, with Mac Virtual Display, if you're one of those people, then this might be worth it. It is, I think it's$300, if I'm not mistaken, which is not cheap.

1:46:45$300. Mm-hmm. It's not cheap, especially if you've already bought one. But yeah, it certainly is a heck of a lot more powerful than the one we were used to. Although it's still like, you know, the original Vision Pro's developer strap had, I think, two major problems. Number one was the cost, which I believe was also$300. And number two was that when you are wearing, so when normally wearing the Vision Pro, you have the battery with the power cable. So the battery's in your pocket, and the power cable's snaking up, usually up around your back or your chest, and up around your ear into the stick that it goes into.

1:47:27Now with the Vision Pro developer strap, and the first one too, you have the other stick of the Vision Pro. you now have another cable going into that so you have cables going down both sides of your head into various things if you think the vision pro is awkward with one cable it is so much more awkward with two and they had a chance to make they made a second vision pro developer strap and did they solve that major physical problem nope seemed like they made no effort whatsoever to solve that major physical problem and it's just like it's like every other thing about the vision pro update it's like okay they upgraded some stuff did they solve any of the massive problems and challenges and drawbacks it had nope not a single one not even not even adjusted any of them but it's new well i don't maybe they can't do that because maybe data only goes in the right side but uh power can only go in the left because of the electronics on the inside of the thing you got that backwards i think but yeah i take your point but they they made the vision pro and the developer strap at the same time.

1:48:34Oh, yeah, I know. I know. I'm just saying, like, if you're looking for them to fix design problems, the one where they didn't redesign the product is not going to be the one that's going to solve them. Either way, I'm curious to see how this works out. And again, like, my overall summary of the M5 Vision Pro is, if you like the Vision Pro, but wanted a more modern, faster version of it, then yeah, it's pretty great. If you already have an M2 Vision Pro, would I recommend upgrading? No, I don't think so. especially since you don't get anything from trading into Apple. Yeah, you can't trade in. But no, I mean, it is more of all the things that are great about the Vision Pro and depending on how you feel.

1:49:10And I'm not trying to imply that Marco is wrong because nothing Marco said is particularly wrong. I just have a slightly different attitude about it. But if you are enthusiastic about the Vision Pro but wanted a more modern version, then hey, man, you got it. This is it. But I wouldn't necessarily say this is a necessary upgrade unless apparently you have phenomenal eyesight and can tell the difference from about a 10 % change. So yeah, but I'm really genuinely quite thankful to Apple for sending me one. And I hope that maybe there'll be more of things like this in the future. All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Lisa, and DeleteMe.

1:49:47And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in overtime, we're going to be talking about how Apple is now the new exclusive broadcast partner for Formula One in the U.S. So we'll have our own little kind of overstream going on here. So thank you very much, everybody, for listening. And we will talk to you next week.

1:50:26Margo and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M And T-Marco 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. I have an unsatisfying bug story. It's unsatisfying because it happened literally today and it's not resolved. It's much better when you have a bug story like Marco did, where it's like, I had this weird problem and i tried to figure it out and turn out to be this thing i've got the first part of that maybe people write in to say what they think it is but it's probably just one of those weird bugs that i'm just gonna have to like it'll probably go away when i reboot or log out or something you just never think about it again you don't want to say the non-determinism of llms well there's seeming non-determinism in software but it's actually completely deterministic if there are no llms involved because they're just bugs it's just seems non-deterministic because you see all the things that are happening anyway here is the bug uh the atp store launched today and as part of that launch uh over the past several days i've been gathering all the many many uh product photos that are on atp.fm store and when you click through to the products it just goes to the cotton bureau site that's where the real things are right but i like to have a landing page that shows the products and also i don't like to just have one static image for a product if the shirt comes in 17 different colors and there's long sleeve and shorts i just want to i want to show everything So I rotate them.

1:52:20Like if you stare at the page, these pictures rotate, which is kind of annoying, but I don't want people to think, oh, I don't want a t-shirt. I want them to see it rotating. Oh, long sleeve one. Oh, hoodie. Maybe I'll try that. Oh, it comes in. I don't like blue. I'm not going to get that one. Oh, it comes in red. It comes in yellow. You know, that's what I want on that store page. So I have to make little versions of all the product pictures and put them in there so they can rotate. And that is a time consuming and tedious process. There is a shocking number of product photos once you add up all the variations and all the other stuff.

1:52:48and so i have you know automated this workflow as best i can and the most recent thing i did in the for the holiday store is um after i've downloaded the pictures they come down as right now cotton beer is using uh what is it avif is that the right format i gotta look it up here yeah avif that image format which is apparently popular but i'm not going to put an avif on a web page at this point so i download the pictures from them and rename them the way i want them and then i select them on the finder and do right click and do like i'm still in sequoia here so it's right click quick actions and there's like a convert image quick action that comes with the operating system that you can convert all those avivfs to pngs great and then i wrote in shortcuts which was you know people liken it to programming with you wearing oven mitts i would have less kind things to say about it but anyway for for programmers shortcuts is like having our fingernails removed with pliers wow it's not really feel i like so many times i'm like why am i doing this why don't i just go back and write a program i can do this in a thousand different languages i can have a debugger it'll be over so much quicker i'm like no i'm gonna do it in shortcuts because then it will be easily in the right click menu and yes i know there's a million ways you can get things into right click menus without using shortcuts but i was going to use shortcuts damn it because the next step i have to do is take those pings and resize them and i wanted a little prompting with the dialogue and say how big do you want to resize them i wanted to default the size that i used for the atp store like it's making a little thing and then it resizes them and then i wanted to rename them to be the old file name with dash resized at the end of the the name and then i wanted to put in the same directory as the other files and doing that took me so much longer than it should have because i'm inexperienced with shortcuts and because half the time i was tearing my hair out going i know how to do this a thousand different ways in a real programming language don't make me drag these stupid boxes around i was like i was begging for apple scripts like can i just can i just can just type i know can i just type what this is i know how to make a loop i know just no anyway eventually i figured it out it's fine so i was doing this with the images download them cotton bureau convert from avif to png uh put those pngs in a folder called originals uh right click them all uh do the resize action then it makes all the resize one then take all the resize ones and drag them up to the parent folder then select them all I'll right click them all use the rename function in the finder to rename the minus resize.

1:55:04I could automate this further, but this is good enough, right? I was doing this for product after product. And I did a couple of products. And then at one point I would like switch back to the finder. I was like, huh, where the hell did all those resize images just go? Because I had like a list view finder window open and I could see my originals, the original dot PNGs, but all the resize ones were gone. What the hell? I had just uploaded them to the ATP website. Like I knew they, you know, i had them i was not imagining it they're there on the website how did they get there i'm like did i upload the originals did i not upload the resize one so i looked at the ones upload like no it's the size i expected it to be and so i just kept doing this for product after product and i would look back in the fire and go what the hell all the resize images are gone again where did they go and so i wasn't paying too much attention to this because i just had work to do i'm like look they're gone so i can recreate them in two seconds right click reset like it's it's an automation i have the originals i can remake them and i remake them and they would disappear again and i was like okay now i once i got the store up and running and i was i was going back and forth with kind of your folks hammering out the details of like metadata and stuff like i've got the images up on atp.fm i got the atp.fm store page ready to go that part is done let me pay put some attention into this bug so at first i described it in one of the slacks like hey maybe somebody knows what this is um and then i just i don't know why i decided to do this because it makes no sense as any kind of debugging thing but it's just i don't know i decided to screen record it because i look if there are if these images are disappearing from a finder window i ought to be able to get a screen recording of it happening and if it's not just my imagination i'm not just like forgetting things or keep that i misdrag something that i accidentally hit command delete that i whatever so i was going to take a screen recording of it and so i you know i make the images of the automation i start screen recording of that window and i let it run um and while it's running let's pretend it's running now let me tell you all the things that you're probably thinking the files weren't in the trash i'm not running hazel i'm not running a full direction there's no cron job like everything you would think of to check for this like is there some did you accidentally delete them did you hit a key if you hit undo did they come back no no no no none of these things none of these things are the case these are newly created folders with no full directions i do not have hazel installed there is no cron job doing this they're not and aimed in any particular way they would like there's no explanation uh like i said they're not in the finder didn't see anything on the console for them though the console's real noisy so i admit i might have missed something that was there um so i'm running my screen recording uh and then the screensaver kicks in and when i unlock the screen after the screensaver kicked in screen recording it stopped because that's the thing that quick time does a quick time player will stop a screen recording when the screensaver starts fine disable the screensaver i disable the screensaver i let it run i go do something else i come back like 20 minutes later everything's still there i'm like huh i don't know maybe it's just not going to happen again or something and then i just go start using my computer again and then i glance back at the window and they're gone god damn it i missed it like it's like it's like the refrigerator light is it on when you you know when you close the door is it i really turn off you can't really tell Well, I eventually in my debugging got it got a recording of it happening and this is what i had to do um i did find that like if i let it sit for 20 minutes because i thought it was time-based thing i let it sit for 20 minutes then i activated the screensaver that i quickly unlocked the screensaver i could see the window but now the screen recording isn't running but then they would disappear before i could restart the screen recording so like maybe the screensaver activated but no that's not the answer either but eventually came up with was start the screen recording let it sit for some amount of time i don't know what that amount of time is maybe it doesn't have to be that long but let it sit for each time i'm doing this by the way i'm recreating the files with the automation that i described earlier start the screen recording let it sit come back to it click into of any other application like i clicked on a terminal window so now finder is not the active app terminal is everything's still fine click back on the window with all the files in it the second i click back on that window and activate that window files disappear and like i said when i say disappear i mean disappear as in they are not there in the directory they're not in the trash they're not anywhere they're like deleted from the disk that's as far as i've gotten with this bug but it is 100 reproducible if i create these images with this automation and let it sit there and click into another application click back to it they are deleted and i did a little actually i did a little bit more debugging which is like okay if i create these images and then create a zip archive of all the images, right?

1:59:38And then I wait for the bug to happen. The bug happens. All the images go away, but I've still got the zip archive that had all those images in it. So then I can unzip that archive and lo and behold, the images reappear. Those images that I unzip from that archive do not get deleted ever. They just stay on the disc like you would expect them to. So that eliminates a whole bunch of other stuff like hazel things or jobs running that are deleting stuff because why the hell would it not delete the ones that came from the zip file? How almost as if my shortcut is keeping the file ids because i rename these files i move these files and rename them i run the shortcut that makes you know dash resized versions of these images right then i move all of them to a different directory then i rename all of them and yet somehow something in the system is keeping enough track of them to delete all of them at some point later when i switch away from finder and come back it's the weirdest bug i've ever seen i have no idea what the hell's causing it and it's one of the spookiest things ever because like you don't expect if you make a bunch of files like there's like literally hundreds of files you don't expect them to just disappear from your disk with nothing happening so if anyone has any bright ideas feel free to tell me i really do think this is a type of bug where it's some like something inside the shortcuts mechanism has gone awry and it really does have like open file descriptors and all those files so even if i rename them move them file descriptor is still a file descriptor and as long as that process is still alive and those files still exist it can delete them why it decides to delete them you know essentially unlink them all like i have no freaking idea but that's what i think is happening and i think if i logged out or rebooted i would never see this bug again but i guess i'll update you on uh in the future if i ever figure this out but one of the scariest bugs i've ever seen because it's literally a like silent instant data loss bug with no recourse it just happened to be in a scenario where i can always reproduce these files wow that's really weird it's terrifying that's why i did a screen recording because like no one's going to freaking believe me but i have a screen recording of it to happen you see the arrow come over you see it click on the title the bar and then boom images disappear from the directory a lot of images instantly that's right i have no guesses yeah my my only guess was uh something to do with the shortcut but you've already said that and woof other than that i got yeah it's like like something inside the shortcuts mechanism or the automation mechanism like it's the only thing that would have an open file handle on these files and that's i feel like if either you have an open file handler or you have kept track of like the unique file id that like hfs and hfs plus had and i think apfs has as well like if you keep track even though when you rename and move a file the file id stays the same so if you have that file id you can reopen it but certainly if you have an open file handle then you can move and rename those files all you want i believe you will still be able you could still like unlink them if you wanted to anyway i just i put the video in slack if you want to see it um that's a lot of images of the m5 shirt uh disappearing when i when i come and click on the finder window uh it is baffling that is i i hate this this is not good it's not making me feel better about shortcuts let me tell you it's really making me want to like use one of those things that lets me run like a bash script or a pearl script in response to a right click thing because i know how those work and they will not auto delete my files 10 minutes later for no reason wow if they do it is because i made a bug in my code which just happens but like whatever this is this is bad.