670: Institutionally Inescapable

28:58that's not good when we talked about this like you can't do it if you have test flight apps it's like oh just remove the test flight apps I'm sure it'll be fine anyway upon tapping a brief loading page I received the warning unable to migrate purchases one or both accounts is not eligible for purchase migration many hours later contacting Apple support a long phone call in which I was told to delete any and all of my music library even on my secondary account with the purchases I was simply told okay so you just aren't eligible have a great day eligible excuse me have a great day I've asked for an escalation but as of now I'm no closer to migration and without any music library.

29:29I did my best to back it all up so one day I could rebuild. Thought I'd let you know this whole process is still half-baked with no explanation from Apple support. And we're going to hear more about that in just a second. Any other thoughts on this, though? Yeah, when we talked about this, I think we all expressed skepticism and were kind of aghast at the limitations. I think one of which was like, you can't have a music library. So now I'm telling this person to delete their music library. Just this is definitely one of those things. One of those things that we've asked for for, you know, decades at this point, like oh we should be able to merge apple ids or transfer purchases and stuff and it's like okay fine apple after a decade we roll out this thing i'm like yeah but does it work and like for some people it works but it's just it's one of those features when apple announces something like this you're like i would do this if it was my last resort because i have no faith that it's going to work if it does hey great but if it doesn't you're just in the situation where there's no good way out like you've especially when you've done stuff like deleting your entire music library to try to make it work and that also doesn't work and then Apple support throws up their hands and says, eh, sorry, just sometimes things we make don't work for some people and you're one of those people.

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32:38Sort of kind of speaking of, we have a news report. Well, not even news. It's a thing that's been going around. It's a blog post. It starts with a blog post. Yeah, it starts with a blog post. And this is Paris Butfield Addison, who writes, After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple's own programming languages, and spending tens upon tens of thousands of dollars on devices, apps, conferences, and services, I have been locked out of my personal and professional digital life with no explanation and no recourse. The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a$500 Apple gift card to pay for my 6-terabyte iCloud Plus storage plan.

33:10The code failed. The vendor suggested that the card number was likely compromised and agreed to reissue it. shortly after my account was locked an apple support representative suggested that this was the cause of the issue indicating that something was likely untoward about this card the card was purchased from a major brick and mortar retailer so if i cannot rely on the provenance of that and have no recourse what am i meant to do we have even sent the receipt including the card serial number and purchase location to apple the consequence is that my account is flagged as closed in accordance with apple media services terms and conditions i contacted apple support immediately.

33:42The experience was terrifyingly dismissive. Support staff refused to tell me why the account was banned or provide specific details on the decision. When I begged for an escalation to executive customer relations or ECR, noting that I would lose the ability to do my job and that my devices were useless, I was told that, quote, an additional escalation won't lead to a different outcome. That is the support way of saying a polite, f*** you. Like, what is the point of escalation if the people you asked to escalate can say no uh they won't say anything different than we do like that that means escalation doesn't exist right exactly uh anyways many of the reps i've spoken to have suggested strange things one of the strangers was telling me that i could physically go to apple's australian hq at level three 20 martin place sydney and plead my case this just makes me think what is it like 42 wallaby lane uh from finding nemo anyway uh they put me on hold for five minutes while they looked up the address um all right so most Most insultingly, the official advice from Senior Advisor was to create a new Apple account and update payment information.

34:41This advice is technically and legally disastrous, in my opinion. And there's a bunch of reasons for that. Well, we should touch on the reasons, though. Because they're basically saying, oh, just make a new Apple ID, essentially. But so many things in Apple systems say, hey, if we ban you and you just go make another Apple ID, that's a violation of our terms. If you have a bunch of apps, like if you're a developer and we ban your developer account and you just go make another Apple ID and republish your apps, that's a violation. Like following this advice from Apple would itself be violations that would cause his Apple ID to get banned.

35:13So it's ridiculous. And yes, I know we keep calling it Apple ID even though they renamed it Apple account. We'll see how long it takes at least me to pick up that vocabulary. All right. So there's been some updates since this was originally written on the 13th of December. Then this is Australia, right? So Paris' 13th of December is really my 12th of December, generally speaking. But anyways, on Paris' December 14, someone from executive relations at Apple says they're looking into it. I hope this is true. They say they'll call me back tomorrow on the 15th of December. Then later that same day, the 14th of December for Paris, no luck so far, not looking good.

35:48Anyone got a good lawyer to send them a letter and or help me sue them? Here's my email address, says Paris. December 16, which is the 15th for us, no luck yet. December 18, as I sit here on the 17th recording. So it's the future. Paris writes, we're back. A lovely man from Singapore working for Apple Executive Relations who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days says, let me know it's all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way. It sounds like classic gift card tampering. And my account was caught by that.

36:17Obviously, it's unacceptable that this can happen, and I'm still trying to get more information out of him. But at least things are now mostly working. Strangely, he did tell me to only ever buy gift cards from Apple themselves. I asked if that means Apple supply chain, a Blackhawk network, Incom, and other gift card vendors is insecure, and he was unwilling to comment. I'll post a more substantive update soon. So I'm glad this story got resolved before we talked about it because it started in between our recordings, and I was hoping by the time we record, hopefully this will all be coming. I was surprised at how long it took because once I saw executive relations in the mix, I'm like, oh, this will probably be resolved.

36:49But it still took another, what, four days for it to get resolved? uh but yeah this has been going around and all the various uh you know blogs and websites and podcasts talking about it and not because of the specific thing we i don't know this person and you know it's not like we have a personal relationship with them but i wish i grabbed these stats i thought i saw it fly by of like how many uh apple ids apple bands per year it's some astronomical oh yeah yeah like because there's just so much fraud and stuff like that um and like to be clear just like driving your computer to craig federighi's house this is not a scalable system no for for support which is make a blog post get everyone in the mac enthusiast uh you know tech sphere to notice it and constantly talk about it and then maybe in a week someone from apple will wake up and say what is this i'm hearing about something something what about like the thousands of other people who are in exact same situation and don't have the ability to essentially mobilize the uh the apple tech nerd press to make stuff like this happen but uh i mean i think this is a good opportunity to just talk about this as a more general issue i'm glad this person's specific issue was resolved although it is terrible that it happened in the first place but every time something like this happens it just kind of reminds us all like how vulnerable we are to these companies and you get all sorts of different people making suggestions about what could be done.

38:15Like the most common one I see is people say, um, it shouldn't be legal for companies to take away all your stuff like this with no recourse. Like at the very least, people have this innate sense of justice, which is like, you know, I know Apple's not the government, but doesn't it seem bad or unfair that they can take away all your stuff and not tell you why? Right. Because if they told you why you could have a chance to defend yourself, they could say, we think you're, you know, trafficking stolen iPods. And you're like, but i'm not trafficking stolen like what is the what is the accusation what is the burden of proof whatever and the fact is it's the company and they can do whatever they want and whatever terms you agreed to basically say we can do whatever we want whenever we want you have no like we get it but because our digital lives as we call them here like the apps you make for a platform all your family photos all your email like whatever digital stuff we have tied up into your google account or your apple id or whatever it feels like that stuff is so important to us that it shouldn't be able to get taken away with a snap of the fingers but then people say well what do you what do you want to happen here like they're just a private company and you agree to their terms and so what's the solution and that's why people start demanding like but there should be a law like for this specific case and i think people reaching for there should be a law or companies shouldn't be allowed to do this is just one of the many many signs of the same topic we talk about all the time of insufficient competition, too much power in too few players because in an ideal system, in a market economy, quote unquote, like the fantasy version of this is that if you do things that consumers don't like, they will take their business elsewhere until you amass enough power to lock them in to the point where almost nothing you can do is bad enough to make them go elsewhere because A, there's nowhere else for their go or B, going elsewhere is so incredibly painful that no one will ever do it.

40:07And that is at the heart of all these things. Like, why can companies get away with being bad to us? Why do we feel like we have no recourse other than to fashion these bespoke laws that only apply to three companies to like fix these problems piecemeal, right? It's because there's not enough competition in this market. They essentially have us locked in. And if they want to enjoy that privileged position, there should be additional responsibilities to go with it in this particular country we have the complete ability to pass any useful laws including privacy laws i think someone said like the last privacy law we passed was maybe hipaa in the 80s or 90s i might have timelines wrong but we're not able to pass anything for legislation europe is passing privacy laws and and rearranging them or whatever but it's just like the root of the problem is there are too few companies with too much power over us and they are unconstrained uh mostly unconstrained by any you know sense of decency or like you know like it's impossible to be it's impossible to behave perfectly it's impossible for a company to not make mistakes banning accounts right and very often these stories come out and it's like you find out actually the person was running an illegal ipod stealing ring right but like we the reason we say kafka ask is it should never feel like you're in like uh you know a maze of twisty passages with no way out and like you can't get in touch with a human and no one will talk to you and then he talked to you said we can't tell you why we did it we're not going to change our mind right i mean think until this was fixed this person was like so you took away all my stuff you won't tell me why and there's nothing i can do about it and they say that's correct sir like that's terrible um and i don't think the solution is making individual laws about your digital identity and digital photos that apply to apple and google right it's rather we should have systems where it's either not possible to get this big and have this much power or there are constraints on companies that get this big and have this much power that apply to all such companies, not just the two that store our photos.

42:07Yeah, this is a really scary story because it shows, like, you know, back in the earlier days of consumer computing, things were a lot less controlled by online accounts from one or two or three companies like it was hard for you to lose all your data by the decision of like one computer company in the 90s or yeah you could do it yourself right because it was all like on your hard drive yeah you could screw it up yourself but then you had yourself to blame that felt better i guess yeah you could lose all your data by not having a backup um and you know as we've gone more and more into you know cloud hosted stuff servers sync platforms um into the mobile world where everything has to be like synced through services and stuff and not just online but the fact that it's all um encryption encumbered and in our country protected by the mca so that like when you get locked out of it it's a felony to try to get it back yourself right which i mean it wouldn't stop anybody in this case they would use whatever tools they had at their disposal but the problem is like once things are backed by services there's really nothing more you can do about it like you can't you can't go in and hack apple's servers to get your stuff back or change your account status or whatever.

43:20And so as we've moved into the current world of all of our computing platforms being so service dependent, that exacerbates the problem John was saying about there being so few companies that are involved here because not only are there very few companies that have us under such extreme control, but so much of our computing life is under their control. It isn't like if if apple blocks my account for some reason not only do i lose access to a lot of data that you know that anything that's not backed up locally which this is one of the reasons why i run my own backup service and have my own offline backups and stuff like that like that's this is one reason why because at least like you know i wouldn't like lose photos or anything but if my apple id gets locked i could lose access to like businesses i could like you know depending on which like does my Overcast ID get locked, then I could lose access to my entire business.

44:16And what am I supposed to do then? Upload a new copy to the App Store under a new developer account? That's a violation of terms of service because if they locked your Overcast account, you're not allowed to bypass it by saying, great, I'll just make a new Apple ID and put Overcast there. And even if support told me, yeah, go ahead, you're allowed to do it. First of all, I would never trust that. But second of all, I would lose all my customers, all my subscriptions, I would lose it all. So that's not a solution. And so what has to happen here is these companies, I see the challenge here because there obviously needs to be more ways for you to appeal these decisions and for humans to override them.

44:54You shouldn't have to like email the executives and have somebody and hope that somebody takes pity on you and gives it to their executive relations team to solve your problem. Well, I mean, again, I felt like there would be more of a targeted solution to this, but the real solution is like, I mean, to give a tiny, tiny example from the bad old days when you couldn't you couldn't have a portable cell phone number and then they passed a law that said no the car the phone companies have to let you take your number from AT &T to Verizon right that was what one of the tiniest things they could possibly do but before that boy was it like a big decision to go from AT &T to Verizon because you got to tell everybody your new number uh those type of laws like saying uh even if you ban someone's like a a hippotype law of like basically saying to apple or google or whatever this data doesn't belong to you so yeah you can ban their account but you have to by law give them access to all of their stuff and on that front by the way you're like oh i wouldn't lose my photos or anything i back off all my photos too in many different ways but if they locked my uh apple id or actually be my wife's apple she's got the real account although who knows god knows how to work with shared libraries But anyway, if they locked my Apple ID, I'm not sure I could launch the photos app.

46:06And my photos are not just a bunch of raw JPEG sitting in the file system. I have edits to them. And those edits exist as like entries in SQLite databases, like the procedural, they're non-destructive edits. And those non-destructive edits only manifest by me launching the photos app and see, and it displays my photos. Would that app even launch or run if my Apple ID was banned? Because again, iCloud photos is turned on. Would I even be able to get to the settings screen to turn iCloud photos off? Like, I'm not sure. Like, do these things work offline, right? So much stuff is tied in, cryptographically tied in to our Apple IDs that if they're locked, I mean, I'm pretty sure I could still log into my Mac, my accounts on my Mac because I'm not using Apple ID login there.

46:48I think that's one of the options. But I have no confidence that like literally any Apple app that contains my data would launch, even though the data would be on my thing, like unplug all my internet from my house like there's no kill switch coming in there's no find my wipe coming in how many apps would launch and display data would the notes app work what i mean it's just it's terrifying because it's this is a thing that is never tested and by law apple doesn't have to do anything they can just say bye all your stuff is gone you have no recourse my position is that there there needs to be like a human appeals and override process it can't just be like sorry support said no there's nothing we can do sorry it's final that's it like there there needs to be chances to run to the press which never helps but it's the only thing that works yeah there needs to be a a human escalation process at all these companies i also understand that at the scale they're operating at the amount of scams that are trying to be done against them constantly is so incredibly high like you know we've talked before about like you know hearing bits and pieces about things like Like the Chinese parts scams against iPhones.

47:56And like there's so much, so many attempts. Yeah, that's why I wish I had that number of how many accounts they banned. Like it was like millions of accounts because there's so much scamming that there has to be an automated system to knock them down. Right. And so I understand why they might feel that it's impossible to offer any kind of appeal at some level because it would just be overwhelmed. But that's their responsibility by being in this position in the first place. There needs to be a process. And that's why you have to mandate it by law because then all their competitors would have to do it too.

48:26And so they can't say, well, if we did this but our competitors didn't, now we're spending millions of dollars a year that our competitors aren't spending. Never mind that there's barely any competitors. But yeah, mandate it by law. Yeah, and I think it's one of those things, you know, Apple, as we've talked about before, Apple is very cheap with labor, both in terms of, you know, maybe not necessarily paying super competitive salaries when, you know, Meta's paying big bucks in certain areas. But also, Apple historically understaffs a lot of departments by just numbers. Like whatever you think the number of people working on something at Apple is, it's probably a lot less than that because they just don't like doing that.

49:02And in many ways, that helps. The more people you have, you get a lot more bloat. You get a lot more management requirements and challenges. And obviously, there's limitations in a lot of ways and trade-offs in a lot of ways. But the reality is Apple teams can often be way smaller than they need to be for their current scale. We see that in developer relations. We've seen it in things like documentation. You know, you see a lot of issues with like a lot of Apple teams seem like they're pretty understaffed. So that also could be a role here that like maybe for Apple to offer a real human escalation process here, they just don't want to hire that many people.

49:38To me, again, my response, if that would be their answer, would basically be that's too bad. like you have this responsibility um now i don't think first of all there's two things i don't think the other tech companies are particularly better at this than apple is um no no this is apple just happens to be today's example but it could just easily be your google account yeah like we've heard stories about google doing similar things too with your entire google account like it that that happens with all the big tech companies amazon you know it happens to them to them all because because they all have the same problem as you pointed out they all have millions and millions of customers they're not going to pay enough human beings to service the in-person human to human requests of millions of people who ran into this most of which are legitimate you know illegitimate fraud or whatever to find the one human who was wrongly accused they just have automated systems because it's cheaper and because nothing is telling them that they can't do that and why would they spend millions of dollars that their supposed competitors don't have to spend or why would they just spend it because they're cheap like you mentioned that it's their responsibility but like responsibility is not a thing that most corporations feel in any real capacity the only thing that keeps corporations behaving well is the fear that if they treat their customers badly their customers will take their business elsewhere and that fear is eliminated by getting big enough getting big enough and powerful enough you can essentially eliminate the fear that if we do something that annoys our customers they will go elsewhere i mean it's the same thing we always say about airlines like oh if you if you say you're never going to fly airline x again you run out airlines real fast because there's not a lot of airlines too much power in the hands of too few companies makes it so the feedback mechanism of market capitalism stops working and the companies can do whatever they want that annoys whoever they want because what are you going to do about it the other thing though is that when we're when we're trying to think of like you know what should help or what could help or what should be done here i don't think using like cell phone number portability as an example is a very relevant example at this level because the reason why cell phone number portability works is because different cell carriers are all providing the same service.

51:40It's a it's a it's fairly low down the stack in terms of what they're providing and they're communicating over standard protocols you know between themselves like between the phone network to to reach other phone numbers and route calls and everything. And yet they didn't want to do it. Well of course. I decided it was a tiny example. It's not like it's not like it's suddenly and now cell phones are fixed because we still have like three choices and they all suck right like it's the cell phone companies are in the exact same situation too much power in too few hands and it also has the whole infrastructure problem of cell towers and yada yada yada i'm just saying like an example of how companies will not do even the smallest thing unless you force them to do it by law and how things were actually worse before that tiny little law passed that allowed in this country you to take your cell phone to a different carrier that that's all i'm I mean, you're right that like because they're like essentially a commodity that it's but like I think that type of thing, no matter how common sense it is, will not happen unless you can somehow pass a law.

52:34And we seem in this country less and less able to pass any kind of useful law. And even that was like pulling teeth. Yeah. And so like in general, I don't think the solution is you should give people a way to export their data. You should. That's a separate thing. That's not going to solve this problem. That's, you know, that can help other things. that can help things like transferring accounts between countries. That's still messed up. That can help just basic backup needs, data export needs, privacy export needs. Well, I mean, it's not just export. You do something like a topic that will get into an overtime cable card where it's like a standard that everyone has to support for both export and import.

53:09So now your digital life is by law portable from one place to the other and then watch how everyone maliciously complies with that law. But anyway, there are possible solutions. But no, even that though, I don't think – I think that's a pipe dream. I think the idea, you know, people have often said, you know, social networks should be required similar to, you know, the number of portability. Like social networks should be required to let you take your network out to a different platform. That's never going to really happen because the platforms are different. This is the problem with anything that's like, let me take my stuff out and go somewhere else.

53:45Go where? To another clone of the Apple ID system? Like no such thing exists. and even if you think like okay what if i export say you know from twitter to threads or you know if you take the two similar seeming things even that the platforms are so different that what that would actually look like would be really weird and limited and not what you think not what you think and hope it would be um and and there of course everything would be challenged really like crazy because it's like you know then you're saying like does facebook need need to let you like access their network for free like so there's all sorts of practical and legal and and just technical issues with that i don't think social networks would be the thing that people care about it's more like you know my my family photos you know my email uh stuff like that and again it would only be in cases where they've banned your account and otherwise you would have no access to your stuff google by the way google takeout is a pretty good system they did this essentially on their own i believe there is no law enforcement to do this but google allows you to export all your data so does apple apple has their export formats not as good but but all these companies have some way to get your data out but those only work if your account is not locked the time when you really need them to work the time when you really need them to work is when they've locked you out of your account and won't tell you why that's when you need your photos right or again a way a guaranteed way to run the photos app offline without locking in and be able to see all your photos in your edits like i mean this is this is not a thing like i trying to make a law to say you should be nicer with people's data is like it's really it's not getting at the root of the of the problem here which is that this market is not competitive how can they get away with being this bad to their customers the only answer is the customers have nowhere else to go they can do almost anything to customers and release buggy stuff charge what they want you know screw them over and like no matter how many horror stories you hear like there's nowhere to go there's nowhere else to run it is a malfunctioning market the the feedback mechanism is not working and that feed mechanism is essential.

55:44Like it's much better than laws. Like we do laws when like, oh, you get so big, we now need laws constraining you because you're too big and people get all upset about that and have all these theoretical arguments or whatever. You don't need those laws when it's a bunch of smaller companies fighting tooth and nail for each other's business because they're intrinsically motivated or I guess extrinsically motivated to do better than their competitors to get customers to come to them and not, but then eventually you get the winners and the winners crush everybody else. And now there's two or three companies left and they don't have to do that anymore.

56:10they just do whatever they want they all kind of agree to kind of do the same things and like the meta the market disappears and it just becomes now we are government size entities being regulated by the actual government uh in this weird you know dance of billionaires while everyone else gets screwed yeah cool and i don't think anything is going to help in terms of like you know just take this and go somewhere else start a new account go and move to android like none of those solutions help and then after android ban you is where do you go where do you go then right these companies are too big and too sprawling and there's too few of them it's like like imagine if you live in a medium-sized city and you have like you know maybe one or two good airlines that serve your airport yes imagine that right like suppose you're served by like you know delta united and and delta bans you can you just not fly to most cities anymore well if you try to fly united that's correct because it never works well that's true but but so like that's the level you know what if your isp bans you in america most people have one or two broadband isps to choose from if your isp bans you what are you going to do maybe if you have a second one and and you know the second one would be a different type it would probably be significantly significantly worse for you because it would be like you know you might have to go back to like you know go back to some kind of oversaturated cable node instead of a fiber node or whatever oh god trigger warning yes so like there's lots of industries where you only have one what if your electric company bans you yeah those are usually government mandated monopolies so the isp one is a good example because lots of towns and cities are trying to do municipal broadband which is broadband owned by the city not owned by comcast or verizon or whatever and every single city that does that everybody loves it it's cheaper it's better it's faster you know who doesn't love that comcast and price they don't love it they lobby against it they pass laws disallowing towns and cities from doing that to say it's against the law for you to implement municipal broadband no you have to by law pay for the two choices that you have here and they because they know if there was competition people would never choose comcast like who would right it's just like people would not choose it because the competitors have better service at a lower price and that's how capitalism is supposed to work but when you get big enough and there's few enough of you you can make sure that doesn't happen by we've seen the success story i can just see the people in like the you know the confast x finney verizon boardroom saying we've been seeing all these feel good human interest stories about this little town in wyoming that implemented municipal broadband and everybody in the town has like five gig fiber symmetric and it costs them five dollars a month we hate that can we stop that somehow we're like with laws and the answer is yes yes they can because they have money to lobby the idea that we can just take our stuff and go elsewhere for companies of this scale that that's not a valid solution to a problem with your system having this limitation the problem it's like telling somebody like the united states has a lot of problems right now why don't you move to a different country like well for most people that's literally not possible.

59:18And even for the ones who it is possible for, that's a pretty big lift to move your entire life to a different country. So the much better solution for these companies is to be forced to fix them from within. It's like the best thing to do in the US right now is try to fix it from within because it's our country and it's where we all live, most of us. Sorry, everyone else. So the way to fix this problem with Apple's account system is not to say, well, we'll give you the tools you need to move somewhere else. No. The problem is for Apple to provide human appeals processes that work and that are accessible.

59:58And if they have to hire more people to do it, that's their responsibility at the scale that they're at in the monopoly status that they pretty much have or the duopoly status they have. That's the solution. The solution is they have to fix it. And if it takes legislation in various forms to do that so be it it would absolutely take legislation because they've evidenced they won't do this themselves they won't they haven't and they won't yeah yeah and like and i do think even despite all that i still think that part of it should be a new privacy law in the u.s that dictates what companies can and can't do with your data and what rights you have to your data which would include the ability to export it even if they lock your account even though that doesn't solve the problem i agree with you there it still needs to be there as a backstop because what what about when you go through the human review process that is mandated by law and is a kangaroo court and you and they just say no anyway if not you get to do a human review still then you would say okay but this law says i still get my data it has to be greater than just data access because it like again what if what if you lose access to like all of the purchases you've ever made on your apple account oh well that that's going to be a harder road oh i didn't even mention purchases because uh good luck getting that reversed because we have tons of laws on the book that basically say hey, you didn't buy those movies.

1:01:08You bought a limited license to those movies and yada, yada. We've already got laws surrounding that, and the laws are against us. So that wouldn't just be putting in new laws. That would be overturning existing laws. So you have multiple issues. You have your own personal data. Okay. You also have whatever purchases you've made to content and services on that account. Yeah, kiss those goodbye. Then you also have the potential of what if you have like an app in the app store or for Google accounts? what if you have a youtube channel on that account yeah kiss those goodbye too well right but but those had like that's lawsuit territory that like really well good luck with that lawsuit right and so again like so you have to like they can just snuff you out completely with some automated system for some you know theoretical violation that many people probably do but you might not have done what do you do those are tricky to deal with though like give the the youtube example like um like there is no uh competitive online video service where you can go like there's if you're off of youtube you're up right and so like right if you're out of the app store you have an ios app where the heck you're gonna put it right exactly so so it's exactly what all the countries are saying which is like okay well so that that kind of shows that apple or youtube or whatever has gotten so big that they can't just be treated like a regular company because if you're talking about just a regular company that's like small none of these things make any sense why would you know like just like this is not a problem just go somewhere else but like now you're so big that you are institutionally inescapable uh and a whole new set of rules needs to apply to you and everybody all the billionaires hate that and a lot of people think that's too much regulation or whatever but it's like the alternative is we are ruled by a tiny number of extremely powerful corporations and we're in some dystopian sci-fi novel and we're basically living that now and most of them are somewhat benevolent but see a twitter slash x to see how that can go awry real fast um so yeah it's like it's difficult because we're we haven't been in i don't think the world has been in this position many times except for like you know standard oil and the railroad trust or whatever and those were broken up by laws but it didn't take our country at least very long to say you know what we didn't need to do that's why did we ever do that what was wrong with standard oil it seemed fine anyway as long consumer prices don't go up it'll be fine and so we're kind of in the other we've swung way in the other direction and now every company can buy anybody that they want whenever they want and get gigantic and again that seems like it's fine except we like it's difficult to come up with laws that constrain companies when they're that big it's easier to not let them get that big but not letting them get that big is also kind of like anti anti-market capitalism is like well they if they get that way fair and square which they never get that way fair and square let's be honest but if they did get that way fair and square it shouldn't be illegal to be incredibly successful it should be legal to abuse that monopoly power and see all the court cases that have been winding through and are in various stages of uh falling apart but but yeah like that's like this this read this whole these situations google can apple id whatever always seem they're like like it's big mean cooperation uh consumer you know what was that what was that uh consumer protection agency that uh our country recently got rid of because it was costing big companies too much money like big companies take advantage of people all the time and there is a role in government to try to stop them from doing that um but things are going in the wrong direction but yeah this is not a like apple should be nicer apple will never be nicer unless something makes them be nicer and it's difficult to come up with a set of things that will make them be nicer sir.

1:05:07like to do that well. slides. And he's been very, very, very concerned that his school Google account will get cleared out in the summertime. I genuinely don't know if it will or not. My gut says it won't, but he's very concerned about this. The rumor in the school says it will. I mean, who knows? Yeah, exactly. The school rumor mill is very trustworthy. Right, right. The fifth graders know exactly what's going to happen. But anyways, and so he wants to make his own personal Google account, fair enough, where he can house some of these things. Again, totally fair. I go to make him a Google account so he can use Google Slides because that's what he's used to and familiar with.

1:05:46And yeah, he could use Keynote or something, but this is what he's used to. And I go to make him a Google account. Google says, yeah, that's all well and good. Give us a birthday, which I'm like, I don't really love that. And I immediately fibbed, but that's neither here nor there. And then, okay, he'd give us what what email address do you want? And I made up some email address that, you know, was some moniker or handle that he would want. Or I guess I should say I'd use the moniker that he made up. And the next step is, okay, scan this QR code so we can go ahead and get your phone number. I'm sorry, what?

1:06:20Yeah, yeah, yeah, we need your phone number because you can't make a Google account without it. Oh, wonderful. That's so cool. And it just got me thinking about when we were kids. It got me thinking too about when Marco and I, were kids and hanging out, you know, outside a very tiny lake in upstate New York, when none of this fucking bullshit ever happened, when you would just turn on the computer and do things like it was so much nicer than in a lot of ways, it was terrible in a lot of ways. It was awful, but in certain ways it was so much nicer and so much simpler there than I should say. And I kind of miss that.

1:07:02I, that's not to say I prefer it. It's not to say I want to go back there, but it just kind of sucks that in order for Declan to use the software he wants to use, which only exists online, he needs to create a Google account, which he cannot do because he does not have a phone number. And yes, I could like make a burner number, but then what happens for account recovery? And I believe if I recall correctly, I tried mine at one point and it was like, well, no, no, no, that's already used for a different account. You can't do that. Maybe the answer is to make him a child account, but then inevitably he'll be like neutered and gutted in some ways that's going to be inconvenient or whatever.

1:07:35I'm not really looking for a solution, but it made me think about how wonderful it was when the stressful thing about using a computer was how much conventional memory you had to play the game you wanted. It was whether or not you loaded the mouse driver in your auto exec bat and config sys. It was whether or not you had an IRQ conflict with your sound blaster. That's sounding great. I know. I was setting you up for this, John, and I knew you'd take the bait, and I was right. But still, it's just, in so many ways, that was so nice, especially as someone cutting your teeth trying to learn what technology was.

1:08:14And in a lot of ways, things today are so much better. Scratch is incredible. The internet is amazing. I wouldn't have a job, or at least this job, I should say, without the internet. And hell, the last several jobs I had were almost my entire career. The majority of my career has been something internet related. It's either been an iOS app that uses the internet or literally writing websites and working on websites. So I'm not saying necessarily that I want to go back in time. But it's an offshoot of the same topic. Like these gigantic conglomerates control everything. And there's no recourse if you disagree with them.

1:08:53I don't want to give you a phone number. Well, you know what? Then get f***ed. You don't get a new account. Like, it's just frustrating. And what does an individual do about that? You just shout on your podcast. Well, and keep in mind, what you're doing is fighting to get your son into one of these giant silos where they'll have no recourse. Exactly. You know, you're right, which is the sick thing. Because these big providers are so powerful and so important that it is actually important for us to get an online identity and have a place where we accumulate our digital lives and communicate with everybody and do all the things that you have to do.

1:09:29Like to like, it's just, it's not possible to live in this world without like a, you know, in the modern world to try to get a job, to have, you know, some, some place of residence, some way to be reachable. And these days that means a phone number, which is probably a cell phone and probably an email address. And like just good luck trying to live in the modern world without any of those things. And where do those things come from a very small number of very big very important companies so it's not like you can say sorry Declan you'll never have an online identity because we're never going to give you a phone number and you're never going to have an email address and it's like that's not a tenable way to live in the modern world and you want your kid to have you know like well run your own web servers run your own mail servers like that's not tenable for most people get accounts on whatever you know the AOL Hotmail a Gmail a Microsoft account an Apple ID there's not too many of those things that are sort of reliable uh long-term places to have your online identity and so what you're trying to do is get him into the system that you know he needs to participate in not you know he just wants to mess with his like google sheets but eventually this is a these are systems that people need to participate in to live modern life and there's too few people controlling those systems so i feel for you but it's like you know you're you're uh you're failing to get him into the system that we're complaining about it because there's no other choice.

1:10:49It's the perfect example of there being no other choice. Yep. I mean, I can't run Google Slides locally, I think. I mean, maybe I can and I'm not aware, but... There's an offline mode, but yeah. Someone's probably ported it to WebAssembly and there's some web version of it somewhere. We are sponsored this episode by Guru. When you're working with AI, there is one thing you figure out pretty quickly. It's really good at giving you answers whether they're right or not. And inside most companies, the hard part isn't generating information, it's trusting it. You got docs over here, tickets over there, conversations scattered everywhere, and somehow AI is supposed to make sense of all that?

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1:12:40blah blah blah basically 83 billion is the total cost um netflix is saying oh this is going to be great it will offer more choice more opportunities and more value and by the way the more choice thing like it's hilarious in light of our previous conversation about choice because like how does giant companies combining to be even fewer giant companies produce more choice but what they mean is interestingly somewhat interestingly for this thing is like so you pay for netflix you'll have more stuff to watch which is a early signal that they're saying hey we're buying them they have a bunch of stuff we're probably gonna put most of that stuff in netflix because we're netflix and you pay for netflix and we'll see like i mean maybe there'll be like an hbo upsell or whatever but it's interesting that in the merger agreement they're like yeah this will give us more stuff to put in netflix plus also maybe there's like well you'll pay extra for hbo inside netflix who knows who knows but anyway that's that's a slight aside so anyways uh dominic preston at the verge writes, to get the deal over the line, Netflix reportedly pledged a$5 billion breakup fee in case regulators block the buyout.

1:13:40Netflix bid one out over interest from Comcast and Paramount, fresh from its own merger with Skydance, though early interest had been reported from Amazon and Apple too. And obviously there's still a bunch of regulatory hurdles they'll have to get through. The Trump administration says it already views the deal with, quote, heavy skepticism. Yeah. Well, that earlier thing was like, in case regulators block the buyout, why would regulators block the buyout? Yeah, that's funny. Why would that happen? So speaking of regulators, Paramount has launched a hostile$108 billion bids. That's, what is that, 25-ish billion roundabouts more than the Netflix one to snatch Warner Brothers from Netflix.

1:14:16But not really more because they want to buy more. So the per share price is actually lower, which makes this even more nonsensical. But anyway, Netflix isn't going to buy the TV stuff, but the Paramount bid is going to buy it. So even though the number looks bigger, per share, it's lower. So Paramount offered this$108 billion, blah, blah, blah. They're going to take the whole kit and caboodle, allegedly. But then things get interesting. So regulatory filings spotted by Axios, this is reading from The Verge, indicate that Affinity Partners, a private equity firm founded by President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is also part of Paramount's bid.

1:14:51Trump commented on Netflix's plan to acquire Warner Brothers on Sunday, saying the deal could be a problem and that he'll be involved in the decision to approve it. So, okay, so we know that Kushner's involved, which already gets me raising one humongous eyebrow, but who is kind of leading the charge? Well, it turns out to read this incredible headline from an article by Elizabeth Lopato on The Verge, Larry Ellison of Oracle's big dumb, of Oracle, excuse me, Larry Ellison's big dumb gift to his large adult son, which is incredible. David Allison is the CEO of Paramount Skydance, another merger.

1:15:23That's why CBS was giving in to our criminal in chief's demands to do what he wanted. Otherwise, he would block the merger and they wanted the overlords wanted the merger to go through. So they did what he said and allowed CBS to be taken over by, you know, people who aren't reporting. anyways it's our just if you're wondering what's going on in the united states have you ever seen an organized crime movie that's how our country runs now the president has things that he wants and has friends and if you don't do what he wants he will do what everything in in his power many things that are not in his power technically speaking to punish you for it and uh him and his son-in-law and his friend larry ellison all really want paramount to buy warner brothers but netflix wants to buy them and warner wants to sell to netflix but oh your merger needs to be approved by the government and the government now exists as a single person of donald trump and he wants his friend's big large adult son to have this company to play with so he can ban cnn and make sure people never say mean things about his dad it's just it's so sad it like it would be comical if it wasn't so like real and sad so i'm not sure how this is going to turn out in any sane world uh they would take the they've agreed to sell to netflix netflix is technically offering them a higher number uh per share uh it's terrible that these things are merging but warner brothers has been run by a person who has no idea what he's doing and has been screwing up that company which is like well whatever like again i don't like to see big companies merge notice there's no talk of like oh we shouldn't allow this merger because it's bad for further consolidation the entertainment industry no everyone's fine with that it's just a question of who gets to control it all because eventually instead of having 17 billionaires it'll just be three and they'll all be related.

1:17:02Cool. Awesome. Yeah, so then Gruber had a take on it, which we'll link in the show notes. And additionally, CNN's Brian Stelter reports that Netflix was prepared for this to happen. Today's move was entirely expected. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos sat on stage at a UBS conference just now waving off Paramount's hostile play for Warner Brothers. What is the D in Warner Brothers? Discovery. Thank you. Discovery. We have a deal done and we are incredibly happy with the deal. We're super confident we're going to get it across. Warner Brothers, like Warner Brothers. They were, wasn't it like a Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner and then Warner brought Discovery.

1:17:36Like these are already giant conglomerations that have been passed around but they're just condensing even farther. It's so, it's just a hideous shambling monster filled with ancient and valuable IP and a bunch of executives who have no idea what they're doing and just want to, just looking out for themselves. Yep. There's been a couple of, or maybe it was just one, but Jason and Mike on Upgrade had a really good conversation about this. I don't remember remember if it was a couple of days ago or last week. There's also a bunch of additional stuff that we'll put in the show notes. But my understanding is it's not great that Netflix is potentially going to be buying one of these big entertainment companies.

1:18:13There's a lot of consternations to what is going to happen to the movie studio portion of Warner Brothers. Netflix is currently saying, oh, it'll be its own thing. But let me tell you, having lived through a couple of mergers, and John, you've lived through more than me, I think anytime somebody buys something else and says, oh, it's going to remain exactly as it is forever. That's a lie. That is a bold-faced lie. That never happens. And I don't think anyone wants to keep it exactly as it is now because nobody is happy with it. The only silver lining in this entire thing is that currently there is probably still more competition in the streaming video market than there is in, let's say, the cell phone operating system market, to give just one example.

1:18:50There's less competition all the time if we allow these mergers to go through, but netflix thus far has mostly been motivated by trying to do things that make it appealing to customers and that includes like making the ad supported tier because a lot of people would rather just have ads and pay a lower price or whatever but as they gobble up more and more companies pretty soon they'll reach that size where it's like well we own so much media like when netflix buys disney then we have real problems because disney already owns like everything and warner brothers has a bunch of really old stuff and netflix has got some stuff on its own Like we cannot have two entertainment companies for streaming video and movies in this.

1:19:24It's not in this. It's it's depressing. But, you know, it would be even more depressing is if David Ellison gets it, because at least the people running Netflix have some clue about how to be the entertainment industry. And their qualification is not. I'm the large adult son of a billionaire who's friends with the corrupt president. Excuse me. I learned today as I was doing research for this. David Ellison was briefly an actor. He was even in a movie with James Franco, if I'm not mistaken. I'm sure he got that acting job all on his own. yep i'm sure he did based on his talents as an actor like so many l.a hollywood children of hollywood stars right anyway there's a lot of links in the show notes that john has been kind enough to assemble and i put in the show notes for you um but it's it's just a mess it's just a mess and this is this is capitalism today this is america today it's just it's and this is the complete lack of any kind of regulation of companies merging with each other like warner brothers discovery aol time warner at &t owner like just so many they just they're they combine they're incompetently run they disaster strikes and then the people just want to get out and sell like that's the whole reason like the cbs takeover by all the right-wing people cbs used to be a television network for old people let's be honest but like still trying to be just a basic television network and right-wing people like well what if we owned it and made them only say nice things about us and that's so that's what they're doing and how did they make that happen the people who own that whole big blob of stuff had mismanaged it and they wanted to get out and they wanted their money and they're like we want to have this merger happen and the president said well we're not going to let your merger happen unless you do what we want and they said okay fine we'll do what you want why because the billionaires needed to get their money because they would never be able to survive the rest of their life they just don't have enough money like what we need this merger to happen why do you need this merger to happen because we need the money you don't need the money but they like they basically they sold out instead of fighting they said no we just we'll do whatever you want just let this merger go through yay the merger goes through and then they installed barry weiss as the head of cbs news so this is the world we live in again if you don't know who these people are for a be glad and b if you want to learn there will be links in the show notes it's just everything's garbage everything's garbage and and i guess that's how we're ending the show tonight so yeah i mean like the main story in the show of like being locked out of your apple account and not having access like it's got a silver lining because i have like i guess a happy ending but like i said this is one of those things where even where it even where the ending is satisfying oh the person got their account back you just like that doesn't make me feel any better like this should never have happened or been possible and no one listening to this is comforted by that because they're like well at least you guys have a podcast where if one of you guys gets their account locked you can complain about it maybe several will hear you what about me out here who doesn't know anybody and can't get john gruber to post on daring fireball about my account being locked this i'm sure there's thousands of people who this happens who have no recourse so that's why even though it turned out well in this case it almost makes me feel worse that it turned out well because it shows that the only way to get any justice in this type of system is to somehow gain get enough notoriety and fame to raise the level where some executive notices that their company might be doing something wrong and they do a pinpoint one person fix and i go back to sleep yep uh everything's everything's trash so happy holidays everyone thanks to our sponsors this episode squarespace guru and notion and thanks for our members who support us directly you can join us atp.fm slash join one of the many perks of membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic every podcast you can get another usually 15 20 minutes worth of us if you were like i just can't get enough of this show i need more of what just happened here you can listen to atp overtime by joining atp.com slash join this week on overtime our topic is our state of tv and cord cutting and streaming services we're gonna go over what what we're doing what we subscribe to how it's going you can join us listen to atp.com slash join thank you so much everybody talk to you next week.

1:23:29Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t-m-arco-r-m-n-s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-s-siracusa it's accidental they didn't mean to accidental Check Podcasts So long Okay, so I have a classical code-related problem that I was curious to get your you guys' input on. I was working on something. I had a little bit of a race condition for something I was working on.

1:24:46Is that like being a little bit pregnant? I've got a little bit of a race condition? Well, it's fair. Virtually unique. Like, I had, it doesn't even matter, really. I had a situation where two completely different classes needed to tell each other that something had happened. So one of them, if I recall correctly, and it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but one of them was what I call my purchasing manager, which is to say my kind of front end to store kit two. And shoot, I think the other one was my user settings class, which is my front end to user defaults. if you're not familiar with it.

1:25:22So basically that is the thing that manages payment and in-app purchase and whatnot, and the thing that manages your preferences, right? And the two of them really don't know about each other, generally speaking, and really shouldn't know about each other, generally speaking, but for reasons that are not pertinent for this conversation, one of them needed to inform the other that something had happened. Things you shouldn't understand. Right. And so what I wrote written in our internal show notes was, how do you get two completely different and disconnected classes to talk to each other gracefully?

1:25:55And why is the answer notification center, which is the answer that you typically use on iOS and perhaps macOS. But I don't love that answer. And I was curious if you guys had any tips or tricks that you would advise. And for those who may not understand, notification center is, you two are going to be offended by this description, but it's kind of like a bus. that you can, not a beep beep bus, like a bus in a technology sense. Insofar as it's a messaging bus where you can drop a message on this bus and people can choose to listen to it. That's kind of an oversimplification. But it's like you shout out, hey, something has happened.

1:26:35And if somebody's listening, great. And if nobody's listening, no big deal. And that's generally speaking how people solve this exact problem. But it's like, how do you send a letter from one address to another without knowing what those addresses are? That's also not a great analogy. I can't think of a better one. It's a broadcast.

1:26:59One class can vend an API and the other class can do a publish-subscribe mechanism or a delegation mechanism. But that would require at least one to know about the other, if not bidirectional. So what you're saying, So the function Notification Center serves as like one class can post a notification. The other class can listen for that notification. And neither one of them has to know anything about the details of the other as long as the notification itself is documented and known. And notifications. So what makes this a hard problem to do in ways that programmers can swallow with modern sensibilities is that what it requires is globalness.

1:27:47Yeah. And programmers today hate anything being global and with ample reason. Like in many cases, you don't really want global state or global protocols or global actors and things. I don't mean actor in that way. And to be clear, when Marco says global, what he means by that is everyone can touch this piece of information. And that's generally speaking a real bad code smell. It's one of those things where you look and go, I don't love that at all. And not just everybody can touch it, but also depending on how you do this, it's very easy to get into a situation where you decrease or eliminate modularity.

1:28:25Oh, now I need a second one of these things. oh but you can't have a second one because they all talk through this one you know notification center using a set of name messages and if any you can't have two of them like if you had some kind of interface where you're like now i'm going to instance a second one of these and connect to a different server with it oh but when it sends a message that a thing happened the other one sees it too because there's one message bus so now okay i'll give them different message buses i'll prefix their message names and it's like you're not you've no longer had it be self-contained testable modular composable in that way and maybe you don't care lots of apps eventually have to say look this is my app i'm not going to have i'm not going to clone my entire app to be next to itself in memory at the same time although many people have thought that and then found in version three that they need to do exactly that so that's the other smell of the globalness is like the the singleton-ness right the people don't like globals for good reasons and some good reasons people are afraid of singletons because every time they make one three years later they're like damn it i wish this wasn't a singleton yeah yeah but but i think though there are times when global messages and singletons are the best tool for the job in reality and it's one of those things that programmers so easily overthink and try to you know add complexity to get out of when it's not necessary so you know some examples like and this isn't quite as pure as notifications but like you know in overcast i have some utility classes that do things like manage.

1:29:54They have combine publishers. Yes. Yes. Because this was before we had async sequences, which I still don't really understand fully or frankly like. I use them. They're nice. They're fine in some cases. I don't think they're a great overall replacement, but they have some advantages. Anyway, so I'll have a class like my reachability class, which basically will post. it'll publish to a publisher in a singleton you know, ocreachability has a singleton, ocreachability.shared and it will publish isOnlinePublisher so anything in the app can then you know, subscribe to ocreachability.shared.isOnlinePublisher and then that thing will get notified when the internet connection becomes online and it can do things like start a sync operation or whatever and so that's, so when you have In this case, that's a global object.

1:30:50But the global object, singleton, the global singleton is representing the state of the system, which is a global state. The system is either online or it's not. And so there are opportunities that you have in programming where what you are trying to convey, respond to, interact with is something that is global to the process or the device or the installation of your app or whatever it is. There are global things. And so it's okay to write global code to deal with them much of the time or all the time. and in the case of notification center and you know like the kind of global bus of passing these messages that are just distinguished by their string names I don't think there's anything wrong with that for a lot of use cases now granted the API can be a little bit unswifty and you know it's not ideal not type safe there's strings oh no right but and it's trivial to make it type safe also and I think that is fine when your problem is what you describe which is two totally different classes that don't know about each other, that maybe can't import their modules and can't even reasonably do that.

1:32:07They want to pass global messages within the same process. The tool for that is Modification Center. And I don't think it being old or it not being particularly Swift native is a reason that you have to somehow come up with some kind of different solution. That tool exists and it works great for that purpose. It is not the best tool for every purpose but it's a great tool for that purpose so i think the answer is notification center i don't know if it's a i don't know if that was the first thing i would reach for because like i don't know the structure of your app but the two things you describe things managing user settings and things dealing with store stuff like i have to think in the hierarchy of stuff that you already have connected as the sort of the object graph or the responsibility graph of your thing there's surely something that is apparent of both of them you know what i mean like like like there's if you don't want to use i mean no vacation center is fine like it doesn't matter it's a bit it'll be fine but like probably the first thing i would have reached for is like what is the common parent for these or like in in swift ui often like is there some environment injection that's happening above that they can all see or something like that you can get into trouble real fast there because that environment is like it's like globals but we won't say the g word so everyone will be happy with it it's like okay all right very true um but like but yeah when you have a bunch of objects like this very often there is there is some party they can see both and they can you know they don't need to know about each other but they all know about the parent because they're talking to it anyway or the grandparent or whatever it all boils down to the same thing in the end like maybe if you had performance concerns you didn't want to use notification center or a direct call through to a grandparent thing or a common api would be fine i think the only place i use notification center is um because it does if you're talking about the same api it also works across processes like because i i use it to make front and center and switch glass talk to each other um oh interesting i i didn't know that i presume it's the same thing maybe it's different on mac os actually now that i think about it you have to be like because of app store blah blah you got to be in the same app group and there's all these restrictions on and everything like that but it is essentially a free local like i don't even know i honestly don't even know if it's like using unix sockets under the cover like as in like um not internet sockets yeah sockets like i honestly have no idea how it's working but that's just the kind of api i want you send messages the small messages between apps and it's very fast or whatever but within my app i I always tend to, you know, I don't go the full Java route of like dependency injection.

1:34:24You build up this tree of things that all don't know about each other, but they all have the things they need to do their work injected into them from above. And that just, I mean, there's a reason that that's like a joke. And I guess probably some people who are still working in Java like it, but I think the industry generally agreed that's too far. If you don't know what dependency injection is in Java, be glad. But it's basically a way. Hold on. There, as with all things, there are times when it makes sense and there's a, there's times. Yeah, but they went overboard, which is like, I mean, to make like to Marco's point about globals, like at some point, everyone always has to have them.

1:34:55That's true unless you're writing libraries. And I think a lot of the Java stuff was like, we're writing libraries. Everybody's a library author. And so they'd make all these frameworks where it's like, we don't know the things that you're going to use to assemble these. So first build this thing and inject this thing into it and say, okay, you're going to use this for this and you're going to use this for this and you can use this for this. okay now you are going to be the thing that this thing uses for this and it's just like to before you can do the first thing you have to assemble these lego pieces all of which are interchangeable which is great for testability but it's like man like i just want i just want to do put up a window and say hello world on it and i've assembled this tree of 8 000 objects and i mean anyway i don't know if you squint i would say environment object and swift ui is dependency injection environment object is much kinder and gentler than all the stuff that gets injected for a lot of the job that's more of like an api design issue but like again within an individual small app like the you know just an app that is not like enterprise scale distributed across thousands of systems you know or photoshop size app or whatever that's when i say you know talking about a small app within something like that yeah like everybody's always going to end up having some kind of global state somewhere um and as long as you like know where it is and keep a handle on it and you're pretty sure it's not going to screw you over later or if it does screw you over later it's not that big a deal to you know turn it from you know whatever dot oc reachability dot shared turn it into an instance of that object that gets given to one of the super grandparent objects of all the other things in your object graph like i i don't think you need to beat yourself about about too much my only advice would be do you need to reach for notification center or is there some common ancestor that they can talk through if it's too inconvenient for the ancestor to talk through then don't do it like i don't think there's anything wrong with using notification center unless it's a performance issue.

1:36:40But other than that, that's... So it's funny you bring up, you know, the whole grandparent thing, because when I was doing this and I was reaching for notification center, I realized, wait a second, I already have a function or two in the purchasing manager that takes an instance of user settings as a parameter. So purchasing manager is aware of the existence of user settings anyway, which means past Casey was either a genius or an idiot, depending on how you want to look at it. Well, I'm passing it as a parameter. You've only got one purchasing manager in your app, and you only got one set of settings.

1:37:14I would imagine the purchasing manager might need to look at your settings because there might be settings that are relevant to the purchasing manager. But either way, it seems like the purchasing manager could be instantiated with access to settings or use a singleton for settings or whatever. It's like Margaret was saying. How many composable sets of settings do you expect to have? Yeah, no, that is fair. But the moral of the story, though, is that I realized, oh, wait, one of them already knows about the other. User settings does not know about purchasing manager, if I recall correctly. Actually, I'm not even sure that's true, but it doesn't matter.

1:37:44But I can tell you for certainty the purchasing manager knows about user settings. And so then I thought, OK, well, somewhere I'm building both of these objects, just as you were saying, John. And I went back to, you know, the grandfather of the grandfather, if you will. well i mean i wasn't really suggesting that you thread down references to each other i was suggesting is that there is something that is managing both user settings and the purchasing manager and that thing coordinates the behavior not that you shove user settings down into the purchasing manager and they know about each other directly but it's just like you know composability you're responsible for this tiny region you're responsible this tiny thing that above you is the thing that's responsible for the larger region it uses you two to do its job it's it is like dependency injection only you're not it's not injectable pieces you're just statically assembling the tree of stuff but whatever yeah but either way the point is it ended up being easier than i thought but i just i thought it was an interesting discussion that the three of us could have because i i didn't know if there was some you know architecture astronaut approach that i wasn't aware of to solve this problem oh there's like seven just like seven astronaut approaches but i think we're saying you probably don't need to reach for them in this case yeah like like space architecture astronauts are have infinite possibilities it also does not mean you should use almost any and again those patterns are much more appropriate for people designing libraries and frameworks because you can't know how people are going to use them and if you make decisions like i just saw something about user default saying like if you if you set up user defaults with a suite name and you configure default values for settings defaults for defaults um but you set it on the suite name you're also setting it for everything that's not the suite name unbeknownst to you and of course undocumented so when you pull you when you create a user setting without a suite name and you try to get a value it's like well it looks like somebody already said it no you just already said it when you said the default for the suite name because they don't whatever singleton they're using they don't divide it up by names by suite namespace for the defaults and it's undocumented so when you're a library author you got to be real careful about that because that you can't make those assumptions like well there'll only ever be one of these And, you know, that comes back to bite you.

1:39:43But for an individual app, you should know how many of each of the things there are going to be in your app. You're not vending your app's code as a library for the entire world to use.