677: I Accept the Battery Cost

43:20All right, let's do some topics. And we have to reenter Vision Pro Corner. And now I have a buddy. And so, John, did you watch both episodes of Top Dog? I did. I watched the dogs. I've watched the dogs as well. That's the whole thing, right? It was just those two episodes? That's right. I thought we were getting like a sample, but it was just two and done, right? Yeah, I think it's like a sum total of around 30 minutes, give or take a little bit, if I recall correctly. But yeah, it's about the, what is it, Crufts or something like that? Yeah, so CRU is like the thing in your code where you got like some old junky code.

43:51You said you got a lot of cruft in this code. It's CRUFTS. It is the world's biggest and oldest dog show. That's right. It takes place in Birmingham, I believe. And this was an immersive two-episode show about that dog show. And I know I've been through this a hundred times. Please just indulge me. 2D is, you know, your television. 3D is a rectangle that has depth. And immersive means not only is there depth, but you can actually look around and change your perspective, which you can't do in 3D. In 3D, you're just – Every time you say that, my bristle because it's the wrong – it's fine. Just go ahead.

44:26I am happy, John, for you to give me a better way. I know what you mean. I know what you mean. I would just phrase it in a different way. Well, I'll work on that. I'll take that as a homework assignment. But anyway, this was entertaining. I mean I am not dog obsessed. I really enjoy my dog. I generally enjoy dogs. as a point of order, but nothing about this. Like I don't watch dog shows. Um, so that I don't really care about, but this was to my eyes very clearly either directed or edited or both by someone who has only ever done 2d content and has no freaking clue how to do immersive content. And Marco and Ben Thompson, friend of the show have banged the drum over and over again that you cannot cut, or if you do, you have to do it extremely sparingly.

45:13We also spoke about this with regard to basketball. Generally speaking, I think that Marco and Ben are a little too far in one direction and that I think a cut here and there is fine. This to me was brutal. It was all the things that Marco and Ben are always talking about. It was a cut every few seconds. The camera moved a lot more than I think it should have because that's kind of, and I've said this before, I don't really ever get motion sick, but when the camera's moving, it kind of gives you the feeling. I really feel like this was basically a three. It was created and cut such that it was more 3D than it was immersive.

45:52Literally speaking, it was immersive. As I turn my head, I can see different parts of the scene in front of me. but in terms of the way it was presented, it was basically 3D. There was very little that was like fun and cool that you could get by just turning your head to one side or the other. And that was really disappointing to me because I really love the immersive stuff. And I keep banging the drum of like the Metallica concert was incredible. I thought the NBA stuff was incredible. And that you can look around and you have the time to look around and change your perspective and look at something that maybe the camera isn't wanting you to focus on, but you find interesting for whatever reason.

46:33This was none of that. And honestly, I was pretty disappointed by it. And by the way, the language I would use for this is small FOV versus large, small field of view versus large, but field of view in two dimensions, not just left and right, but also up and down. And yeah, I did notice that on this thing as well, because in any Vision Pro, you know, quote unquote immersive content, you can turn your head far enough where you see the edges of the thing. Just often the edges are just so, like the field of view is so large that you're looking at like half a sphere or a quarter of a sphere and so it's really you can turn your head way to the left way to the light way up way down you know you can see your feet you can see the sky um sometimes there are even 360 where the field of view is a perfect spear and there's no place no edge but usually there is an edge and this thing the edges top and bottom were real close like you could look up and down a little bit but you couldn't see the people's shoes and you couldn't see the boom mic that was inevitably hanging overhead maybe that's why they cut the field of view because and in that respect that's why you're saying that case that felt more like watching a tv show type thing because in a tv show type thing you can't look up and see the boom mic and you can't look down and see the people's sneakers you you just see what they frame and so this was much like that top and bottom left and right there was more freedom i felt like was it 180 left and right i don't know if it was 180 but it was it was pretty big maybe you know i don't know the field of view was pretty wide horizontally but narrow uh vertically um i i the cutting didn't bother me at all i thought the immersive uh environment was a good place to see dogs because dogs are cute when you can see them in 3d i would agree with that i think whoever made this is not very good at making a stereotypical reality tv show thing having watched a ton of reality tv like this is just a gimme man it's like a dog show there are personalities there people want that like you got to have you got to give people the the villain edit and the the hero and the underdog and you know you got edited together knowing how it ends to make it and they just it wasn't it was like they're not very good at their job in terms of making it sort of chewing gum for your mind kind of like fluff uh reality show like you don't have to be mean to the participants you don't have to make fun of them or whatever just develop drama and they try but it was so so yeah um the other thing i'll say is like the part i was most interested in i was hurt so much by their poor uh filming of it probably because they didn't have enough cameras which was the fly ball competition oh i know where the dogs have to run and get a tennis ball and run back i'd never seen that before and i wanted to see it and they wanted to show you the big dramatic finish and it's like you didn't you basically didn't even get it on camera i mean you kind of did but it was so far away it's such an awkward angle it's like this is not how you film a sporting event they also had a bunch of times where they had straight up 2d content and i thought that they handled it well it was kind of like projected onto like a screen i'm not doing it justice i actually talking about like when they they would have just straight up 2d content that they would show you you couldn't really move your head and change the perspective it was just 2d content presented on a screen.

49:18You're never changing your perspective. You're just looking at different parts of the image. John, just bear with me here, all right? Changing your perspective means you'd be able to see around the back of something that you couldn't previously see, but you can never do that. All right. You can't change your particular focus or field of view or whatever. You're just looking at different parts of the FOV, yes. Yes. Anyway, the point is there were moments, several moments, where they had just 2D footage because I guess they didn't set up the immersive cameras or what have you. Like for past years or just in the show?

49:42No, it was in the show. That's how flat it was that I don't think I even noticed this because they're like... And that's what I was going to say is they did it really, really well. It was presented in a way that it wasn't off-putting or anything like that, but ultimately to your point, and what made me think of this is that they didn't capture everything in Immersive. They whiffed. Oh, it's still very cute. Another thing that I think is interesting, I mean, you're a rant on the cutting. This is one I'm not sure if this is just that I'm not used to, but just be aware this is a thing you ever watch Immersive.

50:09In regular television or movies, they will do things like They will have the camera at varying distances to people. So let's say someone is sitting in a chair for an interview in a documentary. You'll see them from the waist up, and they'll be talking and sitting in the chair. And then for some dramatic moments, they'll have a close-up. And you'll be seeing them just like their head and shoulders filling the same size frame. That's common, a wide shot, a close-up of people or whatever. In immersive, because it's 3D and because you feel like you're there, you could reach out and touch them, it messes with your sense of scale.

50:42like they had this lady with like a a dog on her lap and it was like close up like maybe like from her chest up with the dog on her lap and then they cut back to like a more sort of like uh a shot where the person in the vision pro was the size the person really was so if they're five feet tall they look five feet tall in the vision pro and and suddenly the dog looked like way smaller because before i was closer to the dog but i just thought it was a giant dog because i had no way to like compare scale like you see this when they get close to people's faces it's unnerving because it looks like a gigantic dog or head or whatever really close to you it doesn't like you know it's just that i don't know if they can do the same thing with scale because when they go close up you don't think that person is huge you just know that they're taking a tighter shot but when you can see them 3d i kept thinking the dogs were bigger than they were until i saw them like walking around i'm like oh no that dog is the size of a rat it just looked huge because i was three inches away from it and it was in 3D and it felt like it was very strange.

51:44Maybe that's just me having to get used to stuff like that, but it is a weird experience to not know the size of things because they seem like they're right in front of you, but they're not. It's just a picture on a screen with a big FOV. Yeah. All right, Marco, you did an experiment recently. Tell me about that, please. It's kind of an experiment in progress, actually. Oh, okay. I think this might surprise you. Oh, gosh. Me personally or just both of us? Well, okay. Just as – I'll try to make this quick. I decided kind of in like the Cortex yearly theme arena, this year I wanted to focus generally on efficiency in my life.

52:25Like there's a bunch of just kind of cruft I've built up over the years, friction I've tolerated over the years. that I'm trying to just kind of find inefficiencies and consider whether I want to keep them that way or not. I'm not like being ruthless, trying to cut every single efficiency, but just kind of be aware of inefficiencies. Think about them. Consider whether I want to make a change. And then if I want to, then make a change. Will you jump in for a second here? I'm thinking in my head, what inefficiencies does Marco have in his life? and I'll be honest, not a lot is jumping to mind. Like, you don't strike me.

53:04You're not the kind of person to tolerate inefficiencies. So I can't wait to hear. Do you have any ideas before he tells us what he's talking about? Casey, what inefficiencies are in Marco's life? Like, it seems like there's not a lot. I'm struggling. Like, there's more inefficiency in my life for sure. I feel like... I mean, like, I have two houses. Like, that's never efficient. But you have so much less stuff than I do. Oh, I don't think that's necessarily the case. Well, I've got nothing. Your life always seems like the model of efficiency to me. Oh, my God. Then yours must be a disaster. It is.

53:45I've seen the basement of the beach house, and I wouldn't say that there's unreasonable things down there, but in the basement there was a lot of things down there as an example. We're thinking of things, though. inefficiency is like every day I come home I have to do this thing because the knob sticks and I just deal with it and the lights don't turn on Marco doesn't tolerate that, he gets it fixed that's the kind of thing I'm thinking about maybe there's things in your life that we don't know about but your computer stuff and your technology stuff seems pretty efficient except the only thing I can think of is something to do with cellular and travel and hot spots and things of that nature of course your mind would go there Marco and I I mean, he can get rid of the Vision Pro, but he was the first of us to get rid of his Synology or just essentially stop using it because it didn't fit into his ruthlessly efficient technology life.

54:33You were giving me a lot more credit than I deserve for efficiency. Well, go ahead. All right. Let's see what you got. So this is – I'm looking at a bunch of different things this year. I mean, I'm looking at Overcast. Like, you know, just like the hosting stack of Overcast is pretty inefficient. Oh, okay. I should have thought of that. You're right. That is inefficient. Yeah. We've talked about that before. There's stuff there. I'm looking into doing more with S3 type things with Cloudflare, different things there that I'm going to look at throughout the year. I mentioned very briefly last episode that I was looking at some financial planning stuff and there was some inefficiencies in how I was managing investments and I've been working on those recently.

55:14um but one other thing that just has been bothering me a lot recently is how badly 1Password and Safari work together. oh you're still using one password so that's and i i started looking at like okay what should i just go all in on one password or go all in on apple passwords and you know because they've been kind of fighting each other for years now you should do one or the other for sure now something else has changed recently is that i've started using ai a lot i started using chat gpt i many times a day just asking small questions. Basically, where I used to do more web searches or asking Siri for things, I've been doing a lot more asking ChatGPT.

56:06And that's been going very well. Another thing that happened recently is Google Gemini got better. And when I actually compare factual answers where I know the correct factual answer between ChatGPT and Google Gemini, Gemini was getting it right a little bit more often. and there are certain things about Gemini that I don't like as much as ChatGPT but the sophistication of the model is hard to ignore. It is seemingly a little bit ahead of ChatGPT in a lot of things. Not in everything and it has its own quirks and annoyances but Gemini has been pretty good recently. And I also started thinking about AI and I'm like, you know, Google I think has a really bright future here because when you look at, you know, how these AI things are advancing and, you know, what's the next step?

56:58Well, the next step for ChatGPT is figuring out their business model and, you know, making their ad system. And, like, as you integrate more into things, you know, you need data sources, you know, you need deals with other vendors or, you know, things like, you know, business and directory providers, mapping providers, you know, different affiliate deals with everybody to try to monetize through that. If you want to be able to book hotels or whatever, you need that. I started thinking Google is in a really good position for this world. They had a bit of a slow start, but they make the models. They have their own in-house models.

57:36Okay, OpenAI has that too. That's great. Google has their own cloud infrastructure. Okay, well, OpenAI doesn't really have much of that. Google makes their own chips to run it. OpenAI doesn't have that. And Google has all these existing properties. They have data sources. They have the entire content of the web that they already have in their possession through means that most people don't want to turn off. And I know they try to separate it, but it's not that separate. They have Google Maps. And they recently just integrated Google Maps pretty well into Gemini. And so I was able to do something like I was in the city yesterday and I said, make me a walk.

58:14I want to walk about four miles. get me a walk through central park and that's about four miles somewhat scenic and it generated gemini generated this walk and it was stupid it was you know i asked for a four mile walk and it said here's a 3.1 mile walk and it made and i'm like hold on i asked for a four mile walk please make it four miles and it's like okay here's a 4.6 mile walk i'm okay well you know numbers are hard for them whatever but using google maps it showed me the route and then it said you can send this to your phone just to google maps and it had a link so i could send it to someone else walking with me and i could send it to i could save it if i wanted to and that showed me okay this kind of integration i think google has a really big edge here over everyone else that they have like all the integrations that they're going going to have with other data.

59:06I think they're going to really build a big edge in the near term and long term probably as well. One of the reasons why I was interested in sending the link to my phone from Google Maps through Gemini is for all these years, I've been bouncing between three different Maps apps on my phone. Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze for different purposes. Waze was my driving directions app because it's good with navigating traffic on Long Island. Google Maps I would look up business info and stuff like that and Apple Maps I would occasionally use for something else you know maybe like walking directions but Apple Maps drives me nuts on the phone in one particular way that when you have active direction following going on in Apple Maps it takes over the lock screen of the phone in a way that seems to significantly and reliably slow down unlocking the phone for me because it's like you unlock the phone so you can see like So you can navigate the map, really, and then you can extra swipe to go to the home screen.

1:00:08I can't find a way to turn that off, like the way Apple Maps takes over the home screen, the lock screen, rather. And so that actually drives me crazy when I'm trying to use Apple Maps for navigation. So that alone is a reason why I mostly didn't use it for that. And then Google Maps, I would look up businesses, and it has by far the best business data with like, find me coffee shops near here. And then are they open right now? What are their hours? Are they good? Give me ratings. Google Maps destroys Apple Maps in that. And Google also owns Waze, and so they have access to all the same traffic data.

1:00:40And so I decided this is ridiculous to have three different Maps apps, the year of efficiency. I'm going to try to use just one Maps app for everything. And the only one that made sense to do that with is Google Maps. So for the last month or so, I've been using exclusively Google Maps. Okay, so when I had Gemini generate me my Google walking directions, it was great. send it to my phone okay done and it was you know perfect it was there it you know i could pull it up instantly and it's a walking route through central park that had like six different stops and they all transferred perfectly and i could view it again like when i actually went on the walk like the next day i viewed it it was still there it would it hadn't like fallen out of memory or whatever like it the link still worked it was still sent to my phone it worked really well honestly and google maps for driving directions there's a lot of small ways in which it works better than ways i know this is a confusing thing to hear like the m5 max max you know um there's a lot of ways that google maps is a little bit better than ways not in every possible way but in most ways it's like a little bit nicer a little bit more advanced it's also a lot faster at everything.

1:01:56Any kind of like, one of the downsides of Waze is if you ask for directions somewhere, it kind of spins for a while before it generates them. I don't know why this is different because Google Maps and Waze are both owned by Google and both seem to operate in most of the same data, but getting directions in Google Maps is almost instantaneous every time. That is not the case with Waze. I've used Waze for years. It isn't my connection. I know Waze is slow to generate directions and Google Maps is instant. Google Maps also had better voice search. It's better for like, oh, find me, you know, find me a charging station along this route.

1:02:28Like it's better for all of those things. So, so far, I'm very happy with Google Maps as my only mapping app. Again, it's not perfect, but I think it's way better than using three different apps for the same thing. That was not the efficiency I expected you to say. That's a minor efficiency, but I'm glad to see you drop down from three to one. Yeah. I mean, I occasionally will use Google Maps, although very rarely. And typically, if anything, it's for business information, like you had said. I almost never use Waze, but I'm almost never in places that have traffic. And I actually find that Apple Maps is good for me for 98 % of the things that I use it for.

1:03:04It was not good at first, for sure. But the last few years, it's been quite good. The issue with Apple Maps, again, besides my irritation with the way it takes over the lock screen and slows down unlocking my phone a lot for some reason, my issue with apple maps is the same issue i have with ways that if i'm going to only have one mapping app neither of those is good enough to be the one i get it you know because apple maps really falls down with business information i didn't even know it had business information i always use google maps for that it's just not even and it's not even like i know that's part of maps but like google has like reviews and like pictures of all the food and the menus and like that's a whole separate like product and it's like oh and by the way this point on the map brings up that info but apple i mean i guess apple has some business of over it doesn't compare but i i use google maps and apple maps and uh google for all the reasons that you said but um i use apple for driving because they they're they're much more attractive and larger for my old eyes viewing of the road and the lanes i find really helps although i will say that sometimes it makes me still makes me do very stupid things and i get angry at it and switch back to google maps so i'm I'm down to two, but I'm glad to hear that you're down to one.

1:04:14All right. So also in the same vein, again, thinking about the whole picture here, AI is a big deal and it keeps getting better and it keeps getting bigger and it's taking over what used to be web search for me. I realized that, so for my web search engines, I for years used DuckDuckGo. Same. And one of the things I got hooked on with DuckDuckGo is the bang shortcut syntax, especially for searching Amazon. So when you have DuckDuckGo, you can type in exclamation point A space and then whatever you want. And that's a shortcut to Amazon. You can customize those. There's a bunch built in. There's G for Google if you want to quickly jump over to Google search.

1:04:57There's bang eBay for an eBay search. There's a bunch built in. I mostly use the Amazon one a lot and occasionally the eBay one. And by the way, if you use Safari like I do, you can do that with a Safari extension where I just type az space and then a search in my address bar and does the same thing. Yeah, there's a few different extensions, some of which I found via chat.gpc. But yeah, there's a few different extensions that do this. But Safari also supports DuckDuckGo as a built-in search engine. So it's very, very easy to switch to it. In the last, I think, two years or so, I've been using Kagi.

1:05:31Same. I heard it on the talk show because the CEO has actually been on the talk show I think twice with John Gruber. And it sounded interesting to me. And I've been using Kagi for the last couple of years. And it's been pretty good. Like as a web search, if you actually want web search, you want to like find a review of a new fridge, Google is garbage for that. It's just it's been gamed like crazy. And it's really hard to find good info on Google. And part of that is because everything's been gamed. Part of that's also because there's increasingly less and less good content to find because the web is dying in large part due to AI.

1:06:10But also it was dead before that. It was dead because social networks killed it. so the web is really not in a great place right now content wise hasn't been for years and google hasn't really seemingly worked very hard on their web search in that time either so you know they it's not like they're you know without fault here but the web's in a tough spot and web search has therefore been really bad and that's part of why i have so much value these days in ai because it's just it's better at giving me information than web search has been for for many years so i've been using Kaki and I've been, you know, but I realized I've been less and less actually going to the search results page.

1:06:47Usually I'm using Kaki to just search Amazon. So I thought what, you know, maybe in the era of all of this AI stuff, I'm like, I'm trying Google maps. I'm trying Gemini. Why don't I just try using Google as my search engine again? What am I doing fighting all this? Like I fought, I fought against Google. I've raged against the Google machine for years for decades actually and why like let's give it a shot so i have switched back to google as my search engine oh i don't like that at all i never left although the ai search results at the top really annoy me yes i know i know how to get rid of them with the little yeah to be clear like the the ai summary on top of google search results is horrendously bad it's very bad it sometimes it's funny so it's so often comically wrong and when i say gemini is good that's not what i'm talking about the worst part about them though is because they are at the top of the google search results everyone in my life anytime they quote unquote look up something on their phone i have to ask them to just scroll past the ai search result i'm not like just i want to know the actual answer the ai search results at the top of google are hilariously bad they're so like i think google is giving ai a bad name with those i honestly think google should they should either make them use a better model which i know i kind of understand why they're so bad yeah because like the scaling of that it would be incredible right like they don't want to get like it's too expensive to give everyone a good ai search result but like i feel like almost like they should go back to the old days where they just had like canned responses to common queries that they would actually like look up and have like you know just the dumb old sort of like hard-coded if someone asked for this thing run this thing instead of just like oh chuck it to gemini but one of our tiny little models and it will give total bs so it just annoys me to the top you have to scroll past and i forget what the query parameter is that you can put into your google search query so it doesn't show that but it's just such a hassle because it's not so much me i can scroll past them it's everyone else in the world who now quote unquote look something up in their phone and they read the total bs it's the top of the google search results and i say no keep scrolling keep scrolling i really think google's doing way more harm than good for both themselves and for the for the perception of ai with those i mean but the well i was gonna say the good news but it's maybe not the good news but like as the cost of inference goes down presumably those answers will get better ish but i i will never accept them as the result of quote-unquote looking something up you didn't look something up you just took a stew of words that came out of a probability machine and read it back if you're going to take the if you take the time to type something into google look it up at a source so get some kind of source just source it from somewhere not uh the amalgam of all the words information run through a blender right so anyway tell us how you really feel john um so all right i'm trying out google as my search engine and so far i've i've i said it that way a couple days ago i've barely noticed any difference because i the first thing i did was oh i let me figure out a way to get my amazon shortcuts to work again um and so i you know there's these extensions um and then something else happened a few days ago I saw somebody filling out a form and I noticed their autofill worked a hell of a lot better than mine.

1:10:08Okay. Every time I place an order for something you know Safari will offer me like you know the fill the information and it's not good. Oh you switched to Chrome didn't you? Yeah that's what I was thinking. The autofill is a little bit better sometimes. I am trying Chrome. Oh my God. You're going to have an Android phone before the end of the year. No, that's definitely not going to happen. I'm not so sure. So that's the final shoe here, is that I have tried switching to Chrome. I'm only like a day in. You're becoming more like me. You're using Google Maps. You're using Chrome. Google Search. I've been using those things all along.

1:10:43So here's the thing about Chrome. Chrome is as annoying as Google has always been with Chrome, with the very heavy handing, pushing the logins for everything. And so, yeah, you know what? Fine, I logged in. I'm doing it the way they want me to do it. The same way, like, if you want to use Apple products, you can rage against the machine and not sign into an Apple ID and not use the app store. You can do it. It's just harder. And again, my thing here is, I have been fighting this fight for so long. No one cares. It's not affecting anyone but me. meanwhile when i see certain things the way they work in chrome look i've been using safari full time on all my devices for well over 10 years and i have to bounce over to chrome pretty often because whatever i'm using doesn't work in like some like you know oh i have to fill out like some state tax website thing oh it doesn't work right in safari first i try okay well what if what if I disable all my content blocker?

1:11:47Maybe it's my fault. Nope. Try again. And it still doesn't work because it just doesn't work at Safari. And you can make an argument for like, is this, you know, is this people not following the standards? Is it Safari not following the standards? Is it web developers not testing things right? And the answer is yes, it's all of those things. But my problem is that sites don't work in Safari sometimes. And I have to go redo the same action in Chrome. That's Apple's problem to fix. I don't want to make it my problem. and whatever the reason, whoever's at fault, it's Apple's problem. Why am I continuing to battle this unless there's really, really good value there?

1:12:22Okay, so if Safari's way better than Chrome in a bunch of other ways, then I'll take that. I'll keep fighting that fight. But whenever I pop over to Chrome to do something, I notice a couple of things. Number one, everything works. Number two, it's so fast at everything. Now, part of that is, you know, I think there's just fewer animations and stuff. It also still looks the way web browsers should look, unlike Liquid Glass. But, okay, everything in Chrome is faster. Everything. Opening and closing tabs is faster. Loading websites, for some reason, is faster. Everything is faster in Chrome and not a little bit.

1:13:03Switching from Safari to Chrome feels like when I switched from Intel to Apple Silicon in terms of performance. It's like everything is just baseline faster by a lot. And also, 1Password works a thousand times better in Chrome than in Safari. Logging into websites, autofilling forms, it's so good and so fast. I have been wasting years of my life typing my name and address into web forms that didn't autofill correctly. and filling out password forms because it didn't autofill my password or having to paste in my 2FA code because that didn't autofill. Chrome works so much better in those ways. And 1Password works so much better in Chrome.

1:13:52And it's all so fast. So that's what I'm trying. I'm trying Chrome as my default browser on my Macs. I downloaded the iOS version of Chrome. I don't know if I'm going to stick with that, but I wanted to give it a shot. No, don't bother with that. You're not missing anything there. Yeah. It's the same engine. That's the problem. Well, but there'll be other benefits if sync and everything are good, which I don't actually know yet. So, obviously, when you switch from Safari to Chrome and you're otherwise an Apple person, you're going to give up certain things. You're going to give up certain integrations.

1:14:27Now, one thing I've noticed is that Chrome on Tahoe has the autofill for messages, which is nice. I don't think I'm going to switch to Tahoe on my main Mac yet because I still hate everything else about it. But I was using it on my laptop that has Tahoe and I noticed that it did the autofill for messages thing. Because I think Apple added an API for that in Tahoe. So that kind of made me jealous of Tahoe briefly. The one biggest downside to Chrome, which luckily you're avoiding, is if like me you are an iCloud keychain user and not a 1Password user, uh the apple's keychain plug-in extension for chrome it's it's fine i understand why it works the way it does but there's some additional friction because of their you know understandably paranoid security where if you don't use it often enough on a particular site you have to end up unlocking it by typing in a six-digit code before you can do the autofill and that's a step you don't have to take with uh one password and that's a step you don't have to take when you're using iCloud Keychain in Safari.

1:15:30So there's a little bit of friction there. And then the other bit is if you've been using Chrome since the beginning, like I have and never stopped, you end up with tons of like stuff in Google's password manager and migrating off of that because it used to be you couldn't use iCloud Keychain at all directly within Chrome and then they made that extension. So some of my passwords were in Chrome and some of my passwords were in iCloud Keychain. And doing that transition has been a pain, especially since basically the most expedient way to do it is to not disable Chrome's autofill. so now i've got two autofills fighting in the same web page and i'm i'm slow i'm almost done with that transition but uh one password this is one of the the beauty former sponsor of the show whatever but one of the things about one password is that it is in fact cross platform cross everything so it is works in safari it works in chrome it's the same wherever you put it it's not like apple's thing which works way better in safari than it does in chrome yeah and so i at this point like so far my experiment with chrome again it's only been a couple days but so far i it feels amazing to be this fast and this automated in so many ways and to just have fewer problems and this this is what this is the kind of thing that i'm that i'm hoping to do more of during my year of efficiency of just like i've been doing certain i've been tolerating certain friction and and you know doing a lot of manual work and shuffling things back and forth and i know this isn't going to be a panacea like again like because i'm not going to have chrome probably on my iphone because it is kind of weird there but because i'm not going to do that i'll miss having like you know certain shared histories and things like i'm using safari on the phone but chrome on the desktop so you know i i know there's going to be a some additional friction there and maybe long term i will realize that's not worth it and maybe i'll switch all the way back to safari again but right now like the the initial impression of just having chrome as default it's just so fast and i'm looking forward to things not breaking as much or at all because i've just been dealing with so much of that i have a different name for your yearly theme it's the year of basic because you're becoming basic you're gonna use google for search you're gonna use chrome for your browser which by the way go look at any kid and like they want to use chrome as their browser my kids refuse to use safari because they've just grown up on chrome uh yeah you're you're you're using the things that everybody else uses you're not using duck duck go and coggy and sticking with safari you're just going to use google search and chrome and google maps the year of basic but in a good way in parentheses yeah because like again it's just i'm tired of fighting all these fights that don't matter to to anybody but me like all these years i've been raging against this stuff and you know what in the meantime like you know chrome has some downsides and google's really creepy uh and it used to have a pretty big battery cost on apple's computers well i think apple's computers are so good now that the battery cost you know i'll take it yeah the battery cost is still there it's safari is still better in power i'm sure but you know what if it gets me this much speed fine i accept the battery cost you know these laptops have great battery life these days i can spare a little bit to have to have some of my time back and so that I think like that's a major shift here I think AI is a big shift here and integrating Gemini with all your stuff I think it's going to be increasingly valuable I'm not going to switch Gmail or anything although I did briefly consider like should I start like forwarding all my email to Gmail so we can maybe integrate stuff there you're turning into me yeah you really are god help us all should try using an Intel Mac that's I'm not gonna I mean let's not be too ridiculous um so this this is where i am like and i i want to i think the ai revolution is blowing a lot of stuff wide open in tech and it's going to keep doing that as we were saying earlier and so i want to actually challenge my my assumptions that i've had for like the previous eras of tech my you know my assumptions of like i should avoid google because they kind of creep me out and i don't like the way they do some stuff it's like okay well you know apple has their own bs too you know none of the tech giants are particularly clean in that way anymore if they ever were.

1:19:33And so there are certain areas that I think, you know, deserve, you know, revaluation sometimes. And in the wake of like significant disruption, which is what AI is doing and will continue to do, that's a good opportunity to reevaluate some of your assumptions and long held habits and allegiances. And it's like, is this still best for me? Is this, are my assumptions still the case? And are the choices I made 15 years ago still the choices I should make today? or are certain things worth re-evaluating? And so that's what I'm doing. I'm heading into this year doing some of that re-evaluation and hopefully save myself a bunch of time along the way and hopefully making some good stuff for the show, whether it succeeds or not.

1:20:14Chaos is a ladder. Casey? Nope. Anyone? Nope. Absolutely not. I'm not asking you, Marco. Come on. Yeah. Anyway, chaos is a ladder and Marco's climbing it. What is that from, John? Game of Thrones. I've never seen it. No. Jesus Christ. All right, fine. I didn't expect Marco to see it, but all right then. We are sponsored this episode by Factor. Now, look, everybody tells themselves they want to eat better. Oh, I should eat healthier. I should cook more at home instead of getting takeout so often, etc. Look, I've been there. This is what I tell myself all the time. The problem is we don't have time to cook every single night necessarily.

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1:22:50agent and OpenAI's codecs. Agents can search documentation, explore file structures, update project settings, and verify their work visually by capturing Xcode previews and iterating through builds and fixes. In addition to these built-in integrations, Xcode 26.3 makes its capabilities available through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that gives developers the flexibility to use any compatible agent or tool with Xcode. I have not personally had a chance to try this. I've been busy trying to get ready the next release of Call Sheet. But John, you've dabbled for quite a while, right?

1:23:21Yeah, well, so first of all, I think it is notable that Apple has rolled this out in 26.3 of Xcode rather than like saving it up for a big reveal of WWDC because they see the writing on the wall, which is everyone is using these things. It's not just because they saw that I was using it last week, but like, you know, like people have been using these things for months and months. Oh crap, they got Syracuse. Yeah, that's right. By the time it's like AI penetrating to the boomers, it's like by the time I'm using it, really apple's behind the times that they're not integrating and they had like the ai coding assistant and their models and stuff like that but everyone is using things like cloud code and has been for ages and it's like why is this not integrated with xcode and we've heard rumors about that for ages i mean one of the original ai rumors just like that anthropic apple is doing a deal with anthropic to integrate claude into xcode or whatever anyway they released it it's here uh i've tried it uh it's nice that they are it it seems it makes them seem nimble it's nimble for apple i'm not saying it's nimble because it's not because they're behind right but it's nimble for apple to actually roll this out and it more or less works and i wanted to try it so they i i i'm still on an xcode 26.0.1 because of the tahoe icon issue where that's the last version of xcode that will let me have the new icon the new os and the old icon on the old os before apple broke it and refused to fix it so uh i installed 26.3 on one of my development machines the one that's running tahoe in fact um and i wanted to try it out and the problem i gave it was um i can't use the tahoe icon on tahoe and the old icon on old os's uh fix that for me this is your hot spot yeah and so i i tried claude code on it and claude code said oh you know you can't do that and here's why i'm like i know i know claude code but i want you to try and see what we can do and i went back and forth for a while it was heroic it tried a lot of things it was like writing python scripts to parse the assets.car file and doing all sorts of stuff and we tried all sorts of whereby we i mean it and me just like telling you what to do or all sorts of stuff the integration with xcode is pretty good like it is you know i've only used the command line cloud code but i know that there's lots of gooey stuff out there like the the new codex thing from open ai and anyway uh the integration xcode in a sidebar it feels kind of cramped but it's like it's fine uh cloud code can do lots of stuff in xcode but not all things occasionally you would say hey put this as a new build phase copy this build script and it was had nice affordances for like you just click on and it will copy the full contents you're not like dragging out you know but but it couldn't it couldn't add a build phase itself it needed me to copy and paste the shell script into the build phase and do all this stuff so i was like oh that's that's kind of cruddy but whatever anyway it failed they couldn't get it to work so i'm like okay next up let's try um the open ai's codex um and for claude again i was using whatever that expensive plan i have now and for open ai i forget which plan i was using but you get to use the good model you get to use 5.2 um and i tried with codex and it said the same thing oh i just look this up and that's not a thing you can do and i said i know i know it seems like you can't do it but let's find a way and i went back and forth and basically i rubber ducked with it a lot because you know when you're explaining rubber ducking is when you're facing a programming problem and you explain it to a rubber duck rubber duck's not going to help you but the act of you having to explain it makes you you know verbalize things that you hadn't thought of before and so me with rubber ducking i'm typing into the prompt like i know it seems like you can't do it but like look xcode 26.0.1 does it the app is on the app store right now if you download it it has the tahoe kind of tahoe and it has the pre-tahoe i'm not like i know it's possible just because the version of ac tool the command line tool they came with all versions of xcode after 26.0.1 can't do it the old one could so whatever it's doing let's do that here and i'm going back and forth with rubber duck and i was like wait a second why don't i just take the assets file with the icons in it from the version i built like from the app store version from the version i built with 26.0.1 and copy it into my git repository from my app and just say hey add a new build phase when all the building is done your final step before code signing is to chuck out the assets.car that you just built with xcode 20 26.3 and replace it with the one i just copied from my app store build and so that's what i told them to do i had rubber ducked it i'm like this is terrible and stupid but it should work and then rather than dirty my hands doing it i just said to codex here here's here's you know slash application slash switchglass.app slash blah blah blah that asset star profile put it in my git repo make a build phase and blah and by the way codex can make build phases by itself codex didn't ask me to do anything codex seems to have much deeper hooks into the mc i don't know if it's mcp or whatever it is but they has much deeper hooks into xcode where it never asked me to do things myself it's just like i can make a build phase i can do this although codex was so needy with like asking permissions and no matter how many times it said always allow always allow always allow there was always another prompt coming so these things are a little bit fuzzy but anyway uh codex did this for me i now have a terrible hideous workaround and of course if i ever want to change my app icon i have to do it in xcode 26.0.1 uh and you know yes i have filed a feedback against this as an enhancement request asking apple not to be this dumb we'll see if it ever gets fixed but in the meantime i use the coding agents i think for a first implementation in an rc it's pretty okay um lots of people are doing even more impressive things with it but i was happy to see that it served its function both as you know a thing letting me try these integrations but also letting me rubber duck with it because i think that is actually one of the roles i mean casey you talked today about talking to it as like kind of a co-worker but rubber ducking is another thing that co-workers are good for they ignore you they have their headphones on they're just nodding politely but you explaining the current thing you're fighting with can make you realize oh what am i doing why don't i just copy the good file out of the apps on the app store now and check it into my repo done and done that is a very weird way of going about this but when you don't have a whole lot of other choice it makes sense yeah it's terrible like to be clear it's hideous like it's i should never have to be done but you gotta do a lot of hideous things in tahoe and then the other the other angle on this is uh so uh kyle hughes uh posted a graph i'm not sure where it came from but his wording on it was 2025 was indeed the dawn of drop shipping apps as the prophecy foretold uh i'll put a link in the show it's a drop shipping but it's like by making it easier to become like essentially a merchant online where you don't have any inventory and you just take orders and then take the thing from somebody else and make it ship to you i did increase the number of people selling things online well the graph is how many ios apps have been released per month and you can put a dotted line on the graph where like agentic coding arrived and the line's going up much faster than it was before like before it was basically flat and now it's taken off and it's not shocking because if you put a coding agent to xcode and you can just type words in the sidebar in english and get an app out of it and you can totally do that uh yeah there's gonna be more stuff submitted to the app store probably more junk but uh it's a concern for all of us because it's not like app review was uh particularly uh it's been reasonably speedy compared to the bad old days but like this increase is not going to help things yeah i mean i think this is this is the least of our problems in terms of that's apple's problem but yeah yeah i mean i think the area of like how much is agentic coding going to affect you know both us as developers and also the software environment on the iphone those are huge questions and i think the answer is going to be uh it's going to affect us a lot in both ways it already is affecting us a lot that's the that's the thing It's already happening.

1:30:58Yeah, this is happening today. And we didn't even cover the whole ClawedBot, MaltBot, OpenClaw thing. There's so much happening right now driven by AI that it's hard to even hear about it all, let alone try it all or become proficient in any of it. We're in such high motion right now. But will software developers like us, will we even be that necessary going forward? Or like, you know, what will junior developers do? Like maybe you have one senior developer, you know, controlling a bunch of agents like that themselves are controlling a bunch of agents. Like there's so many ways this can go. But it's looking like we should not underestimate the capabilities of these systems for the foreseeable future because there's so much that they are already doing today.

1:31:47This is an area like I personally I feel like I'm way behind because I have not yet used much AI coding at all. I haven't done any of the agentic stuff. I've only been like, you know, asking the chatbots for code snippets here and there. Like, you know, today I was writing something for Overcast today and I was like, oh, I have like this set of data here and how do I write me some Swift code to take this set of data that I have and make it into this other type of format. And it's like, oh, well, the algorithm you want is called this and here's an implementation with Swift that uses generics. And I plopped it right in and it was great.

1:32:19But even that, like, is this just like me typing in my name in a web form? why am I wasting time copying and pasting Swift code that is generating into my project and integrating it myself when I could just be using these agents to say just make this feature work and I don't think we're that far from that even for very complex things we're there already for a lot of simple stuff and this stuff has just been born basically like we're so early into this and it's this good already this is getting better rapidly and it's I think we are in a real inflection point for many industries, including our own.

1:32:56And I don't know that it's necessarily super destructive, but it's certainly very different. And we, again, we've got to get on board or be okay with being abandoned. Yeah. And comparing this, I know it's the same underlying tech, but comparing this to the early optimism about how LLMs are going to lead us to AGI. the real ai the thing that used to be called ai before we took the term and perverted it you know you know like how 9 000 you know human level intelligence like all we need to do is add more parameters and the experience with like you know open ai going from chat gpt you know two and three and four and you know going up is like well they kind of have plateaued and how good those things that you can talk to work it seems like that's not a direct path to agi but the coding engines using the same underlying technology we're not asking them to be how 9 000 we're asking them to do one very specific thing which is write code and they are getting better at that kind of like how fast lms are getting better between gpd2 three and four like they're in that phase now maybe they'll plateau out as well but we are in the upward curve of coding agents uh they are getting rapidly better much faster than the oh ask me a general question and i'll tell you something and hopefully it's not total bs right because i think again i say it's because code uh you know it can tested itself like you you can't do that with facts you ask something and it gives you well here's a plausible answer but is it right it can't help you with that right but code you can run it you can write tests against it you can iterate on that until the tests pass you know what i mean and there's tons of code out there both open source and whatever you know like code is tractable in a way that general intelligence is not because you immediately run it and see if it does something Whether you're running it or the agent is running it, you can tell to a much higher degree whether it is right.

1:34:49And I think that is helping these agents increase much more rapidly than currently the sort of like, I'm just a chatbot, you can talk to me. Like they seem to not be getting better as fast. Certainly they're not getting as better as fast as they were between chat TPT 2, 3, and 4. I feel like we're in that phase now. So I don't even know how good these things are going to be in like 5 to 10 years unless this curve levels off. But right now it's not leveling off. it's getting better like every day seemingly so it's an exciting technology yeah and and again even if it is already leveled off and even if it never gets significantly better than how it is right now it's still amazingly useful and is changing everything like and yeah and it will probably keep getting better i mean i i think i would bet that it's continuing to get better but yes it already is useful but like i talked a lot about this in the directives i just recorded yesterday like it is a skill to know how to use this just like it is a skill to be a senior developer that leads a team and talks to junior developers that's not it's not a given that people will be good at that and it is work and it is difficult it's just a different kind of work and so there are people out there who are currently way better at using agents to get work done than other people like i'm just playing with it just because it's fun like but i i recognize how much of a novice i am at playing with these things and that it is in fact a different skill than having an actual human team and it's definitely a different skill than writing the code yourself And these are all important skills.

1:36:11And I don't think any of them are going away, going away. But don't think, oh, now anyone can do this because you can talk to it. It does make it open to more people. But the skills required to use an agent well are actually fairly difficult to master and require lots of expertise and are not sort of evenly distributed through the populace. So it's really just more of a change in who might excel in a world where most coding is done by agents. But it's not easy. And I don't think it will actually be the case that it, you know, depresses salaries or whatever. But I do think, you know, again, like the Industrial Revolution, lots of people will lose their jobs and then people they'll die and new people will get different jobs.

1:36:52And it's going to be disruptive. It's going to be harmful and disruptive. And if done carelessly, it's going to cause a lot of problems. But I think it is it will eventually be seen as progress, hopefully done in a way that is more humane than the Industrial Revolution and maybe also more humane than the PC revolution and the Internet revolution. It's moving so fast, it's hard to tell for sure, like how much of an impact this will have to how many things. But so far, like that estimation, as we learn more about these and as we use them more, that estimation is going up, not down. Yeah. Like it is very clear this is changing more than we think.

1:37:31This is reshaping a lot of industries, but it definitely is reshaping software development and using it like which I'm saying it is its own skill. It's it's like the birth of Google, speaking of which, like the birth of Web search. when web search became a thing in the 90s if you were good at using web search you had like superpowers and imagine how that translated to almost every part of life when no one else was using web search that much and you were the nerd who knew who had access to the internet who knew how to use web search and maybe even were like the person who got good at using like search operators to actually find better information before google got rid of all those yeah right but but like you know in the early like that was that was a superpower and eventually then that power became you know everyone had it and if you were like the one you know neophyte back then who was you know anti-computer wait is that neophyte what's the other one no that's not neophyte the other the opposite yeah you're trying to think of luddite but that's a bad rap but it's got a bad rap and they were mostly just arguing not to uh to have reasonable labor laws but anyway that's that's it turns out oh okay well if you were like you know anti-technology or ignoring technology throughout the 90s and 2000s and you missed the entire internet revolution you could have gone on living life just fine many you know millions of people did but they were increasingly being left behind by that world we are now in the point with with ai we're like around like you know 1999 nine in terms of search engines on the internet.

1:39:08This is booming and it's radically changing a lot of things. And you can get good at it and you probably should get into this world because it's already changing a lot. It's going to keep changing more and more stuff. And you don't have to. You can just ignore this, but you will be left behind. You are being left behind already. soon like most of the workforce is going to be young enough that they don't care about whatever copyright things you might be you know worried about they don't care about whether ai is sometimes wrong or whether it's making stuff up i hope they care about that please but they're but sorry like i think i think uh being uh correctness will still always be a measure somewhere otherwise these planes are gonna be falling out of the sky and we're gonna be an idiocracy pouring soda on our plans we might have some challenges in that area like that's but but look like you know it don't we have didn't we have the same challenges with web search yeah i know i i think this is definitely more there is there is more of an upside but there's also more of a downside in web search like in terms of a skill it's not the it's not that difficult of a skill whereas this is more like learning how to use photoshop where photoshop this is amazingly powerful tool and if if you learning how to use photoshop to its fullest potential makes you extremely valuable but there's a lot to learn like i know like one ten thousandth of photoshop and already i have more skills than most people i will meet and someone who really knows how to use photoshop photoshop made them incredibly powerful and there's a lot to learn and i feel like coding agents are like that where there's a huge depth of stuff to learn and the problem with coding agents is they're changing every single day so if you waste your time becoming an expert in some particular coding agent like all your skills are going to be obsoleted tomorrow but it's just like learning photoshop 1.0 and then 2.0 then they had layers you're like what the hell is a layer like in the early phases of powerful tools there is an advantage to learning to harness them to maximum capacity but expect your knowledge to be trashed periodically because things are changing so fast yeah and that's that's gonna be the case for a while but like this this train is moving like this is where things are and will be going for the foreseeable future and so and i and like look, I am very often slow to adopt new technologies.

1:41:22And I recognize that I am behind in adopting AI coding. I'm like two months behind, but I'm behind and I need to get on that. Again, if you want to keep working in this business, this is it. It is going to be a lot of skills that we're going to have to develop. All of us old people who grew up without this, we're going to have to do a lot of relearning. The same way when the internet came up, a lot of People had to do a lot of relearning who were already doing things a certain way for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. You're a graphic artist before Photoshop. You're like, what the hell? None of my skills seem to transfer over.

1:41:55I know that I use all these papers and tracing things and X-Acto knives and tape. And like, you want me to use a computer? What? Yeah, but that is where we are. Jump in because this is it. Like, this is not being put back in the bottle. And if you think copyright or moral arguments are going to save you, I'm sorry. I have bad news for you. I don't think that's going to happen. You know, there were also copyright concerns over web search engines, because in order for Google and other search engines to index content, they have to read it. And that's making a copy, even temporarily in the server's memory.

1:42:31That's making a copy. And this was litigated. Whether or not it was fair use to make a copy of copyrighted stuff from a web page to just read it from a program, from either a search crawler or even a web browser. You have to make copies in memory to do anything with anything. That's copyright violation at the purest form, and that had to be litigated. Guess what? Technology won. Like the massive, massive utility of technology won out over nitpickiness over copyright law. And I think the same thing ultimately is going to happen here. I mean there might be a slightly bumpy route to get there. But copyright is not going to kill AI.

1:43:13AI is here and the value, the utility is so high. You're not going to be magically – nothing is putting this genie back in the bottle. Nothing is going to save us from this. Well, you really have a lot more faith in our judicial system than I know. just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it won't become law in this country have you not learned anything well there's a lot of money behind it don't worry there is but still even that's not a guarantee anyway i i'm not as i i don't i don't agree that it's the the same situation and i think we do need to make some adjustments for reasons that we've discussed on past episodes but i just don't know how it's going to turn out because trying to use like logic and reason to predict what laws will be upheld in this country has not worked for decades and it's really depressing.

1:43:56All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Gusto, Factor, and Masterclass. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. It's usually about 15 to 25 minutes of one more topic for the show that we just, it kept falling down the list and we didn't actually get to it. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about apparently Apple is rumored to be making basically an AI pin. We're going to see what that's about. And we're going to talk about that in overtime. You can join us to listen atv.fm slash join.

1:44:32Thanks, everybody. I'm going to talk to you next week.

1:44:52wouldn'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 Antimarco Arment S-I-R

1:45:39We have one of our favorite segments, which is let's make fun of Tesla and Elon Musk. Because Tesla is killing off the Model S and the Model X. This is from TechCrunch from a couple of weeks ago. Tesla's ending production of the Model S sedan and Model X SUV, CEO Elon Musk announced Wednesday during the company's quarterly earnings call. The company will make the final versions of both electric vehicles next quarter, he said, adding that his company will offer support for existing Model S and Model X owners, quote, for as long as people have the vehicles. Another quote from Elon, it's time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end with an honorable discharge because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy, he said.

1:46:18so if you're interested in buying a model s and x now would be the time to order it sales of both models have flatlined in recent years despite interior and exterior refreshes along the way tesla has faced increased competition in the luxury ev space from legacy automakers as well as upstarts like rivian and lucid motors also their ceo is a complete piece of shit which might have something to do with it a little bit well i mean in the case of the s and the x though like what the what is the s from 2014 is that like i think 12 20 2012 2014 like in the car industry that there are generations of cars usually numbered like whatever generation of hondo car they're on and a generation will last multiple years but not over a decade well they had like a half generational update or two right but they just like they were like i guess we can just keep making the model s forever and the answer is no you need and i know they did like tweaks and they're the current model s is very different from the previous one but not that like within the car world it is the same generation it is it's i know they've changed so oh they've changed so much like they change all these different pieces of the chat but it's like it's kind of ship of theseus like i know they're a different kind of car company but the point is they didn't keep up with their competition so the model s was inarguably the best electric vehicle ever created when it was produced and for years it was that and then it just didn't keep up with everybody else and still it was really good for a long long time but it just didn't and everyone else got better and better and it just stayed the same and got worse in ways when they got rid of the stocks and all that crap or whatever um and so like oh now now we have to bring it to an end well if you rolled out a new generation of model s maybe your sales would increase but as you pointed out there's there are other factors here the main one being elon musk himself so whatever well also like you know so what i mean look i owned two model s's and models s uh they for the time especially they were amazing cars but that was a you know that my first one was 2016 it was on a lease got another one i guess 2019 or whatever they were amazing for the time and they really did do what what elon said he was setting out to do early on which was like advance electric vehicles basically like for like make a big splash and force the rest of the industry to start electrifying their vehicles they succeeded they did that and that was in very large part due to the Model S.

1:48:35But that was a very different time. This is a very different company now, a very different world, a very different competitive landscape. Elon is a very different person now compared to how he was in 2016. He successfully lobbied to get the$7 ,500 tax credit for electric vehicles eliminated, which I'm sure really helped his company. Good job. They probably already passed it with the allocations. Once you sold a certain number of vehicles in total as a company, yours wouldn't apply anymore. I think they were still getting it in some way. But anyway, if he cares about advancing electric vehicles, getting rid of that was stupid.

1:49:07Yeah. But, I mean, God knows what he cares about these days. He's gone a very different direction. But, you know, when the Model S came out, it was, you know, we had to justify EVs' high prices somehow. And so EVs were all, like, these high-end luxury cars. Like, the whole reason it's called S is he was ripping off the Mercedes S-Class in terms of, like, market position. because it's like the battery was so expensive you had to make the car like 100 grand and so it's like okay well how do we sell a hundred grand car we'll make it compete with the mercedes s-class or at least we'll position it that way in practice it was you know a fairly inexpensive car interior on top of a very expensive car battery with an amazing drivetrain um you know they they somewhat succeeded with with the competition um but what really set the company you know on fire was um you know kind of two things the model three which radically changed everything and you know elon promising all this like self-driving robo taxi stuff that has kind of not quite really ever made it and may someday possibly yeah anyway but now evs are there's so many evs in the market now from everybody else.

1:50:22And they're not only the super high-end$100 ,000 cars anymore. Now they've come down in price, including largely Tesla's own Model 3 and Model Y. And where Tesla has driven their product line was towards volume and towards lower prices, which they do. They're very competitive in that area with the Model 3 and Y compared to the rest of the market. They are very competitive. But what they've done is they've stripped down, they've decontented their cars to bring the price lower and lower and lower. And meanwhile, dealing with their own profitability along the way, and that's been kind of a roller coaster.

1:51:05But the first Model S that I got was fairly luxurious. It had a lot of luxury features. It was like the highest end Honda interior quality. with a really amazing drivetrain that beats supercars. It was very lopsided. But it was a very nice car. Over time, as they've gone with the higher volume models, the models 3 and Y, those were a lot less nice inside than the S and X are. And then when they redid the Model S to add the stupid half steering wheel and other things, they kind of gave it the same treatment. They kind of decontented it. They took a lot of stuff out. They simplified or whatever.

1:51:47but it made it actually feel like an even cheaper car over time as tesla has become more about just selling the biggest volume of the cheapest evs that they can they've totally ignored the s and the x and maybe that's because the market has too i don't know the the current model s is not nearly as nice as the old ones uh tesla is not nearly as nice of a car company um they're they're really no longer that luxurious of a car company and certainly elon himself and his politics have have taken a lot of a lot of the damage out on the company and so now it makes sense like as much as it pains me to see that the model s a car i used to love a lot um is gone or it's about to be gone i hardly ever see them on the road anymore the new generation i've i've hardly seen any ever so it does seem like nobody was buying them it does seem like most people were just buying the model 3 and y and also tesla has changed as a company so much that they no longer care to even be a luxury car maker making you know a hundred thousand dollar sedan so it is a shame but i think that the era for that car has passed and the era for tesla to make that car has passed and now Now, other companies have made a bunch of really good EVs.

1:53:10We no longer need Tesla to address that market, which is good because they're not going to. But now, if you want a luxury electric sedan, you have lots of options now. And lots of them are very, very good. So it is the end of an era, but I think that era kind of ended up a while ago. I think it's a great business plan to just switch to low margin products and volume. I mean, that's the reason people have diversified product lines is you want to fleece the rich people with the high volume, with the low volume, high margin, fancy products, even though most of the cars you sell are the cheaper ones.

1:53:43Right. That's a reasonable model. But yes, sedans, nobody likes them. Car companies just stop making them entirely. The Model X should have been great for them, but they had to do the stupid Falcon wing doors like SUVs are popular. Big SUVs are popular. Big electric SUVs are popular. Right. Why is the X not successful? A, they didn't update it and B, stupid Falcon wing doors. Yeah, the X was very expensive. It was always a bit of a range sacrifice compared to the S. But it is baffling to me that Tesla still doesn't really make the most popular kind of car in America. Yeah, the Y is as close as they get, which is like a small SUV.

1:54:18Yeah, the Y is in the ballpark, but not that much in the ballpark. But the Y looks like an inflated 3 instead of the 3 looking like a shrunken down SUV. Yeah, they're a little bit old school in that way, which is one of the reasons I like the S. but the x that was just a fumble that's the that's their own fault they they fumbled that themselves by demanding those stupid doors and it's just it's just too weird and for people and so even even their their entrant in in a fairly popular segment which is like expensive big suvs for rich people they've screwed that one up somehow too and yeah but if you don't update your products for a long time it's like not updating the mac pro and then complaining nobody buys it like there are a lot of things conspiring to be a problem this but like the idea that we're only going to sell model threes and just go cheaper and cheaper like and don't forget about the roadster remember that which was announced i think i have a note in here somewhere how long ago the roadster was announced i'd forgotten oh i i'd forgotten about it um yeah i don't we do have a note on it later but it was it was eight years ago that presumably will be at a very expensive luxury car if they ever ship it as well um so i don't know what they're doing we should continue with with uh the story because there's a few other tidbits to to talk about uh tesla's future in a post-S and X world.

1:55:23Yeah, so their most recent earnings, this is reading from The Verge, in the quarter that ended in December 2025, Tesla reported a 3 % decrease in revenue and a staggering 61 % decrease in profits over the fourth quarter of 2024. So you want to sell more low-margin products, you say? Mm-hmm. The earnings report comes a few weeks after Tesla lost its title as the world's best-selling EV company, China's BYD, which sold 2.26 million vehicles last year. Tesla reported selling about 1.6 million vehicles in 2025, an 8.5 % decrease year over year. Additionally, from the earnings call transcript, Elon said, I really think long-term the only vehicles that we'll make will be autonomous vehicles with the exception of the next generation Roadster, which we're hoping to debut in April.

1:56:06Sure you are. As you mentioned, this was revealed in November of 2017. To be clear, I only had one child when the Tesla Roadster was announced. You could have put a deposit down eight years ago on a car that still doesn't exist. yep michaela did not exist in november 2017 she was still cooking and this that's when the roadster uh was announced and to be clear they didn't just announce it they showed a car that looked like the roadster driving away really fast so they had something on four wheels that moved but it was obviously not the car that they intended to sell and i also think it is not going to be inexpensive like the model 3 if and when they put it out also it's hilarious to hear elon being like oh everything's going to be autonomous because as we're about to find out, they're not doing well in that department either.

1:56:49Any day now. Shocker. Any day, it'll be the day. Tesla's own robotaxi data confirms a crash rate at about three times worse than humans. This is Fred Lambert at Electric. New NHTSA, what is it? NHTSA. Is that right? Yeah. Crash data combined with Tesla's new disclosure of robotaxi mileage reveals Tesla's autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher than human drivers. And that's with a safety monitor in every car. According to a chart in Tesla's Q4 2025 earnings report showing cumulative robo-taxi miles, the robo-taxis experience roughly one crash every 55 ,000 miles. For comparison, human drivers in the United States average approximately one crash every 500 ,000 miles, according to NHTSA data.

1:57:28Waymo has logged over 125 million autonomous miles and maintains a crash rate well below human averages. Now, it's worth noting that not everything gets reported. So when I said a moment ago, human drivers do one every 500 ,000, that's crashes that are reported. And so there's a little bit of like thumb in the wind math. But not every robotaxi thing gets reported either. Well, fair. But Fred Lambert did a little thumb in the air, thumb in the wind calculations and said, yeah, basically robotaxis are three times worse than anything else. Additionally, and we'll talk about this in a second as well.

1:58:02I don't remember if it was this article or the next one we're about to bring up, but they noted as well that whenever Tesla has a robotaxi accident, they basically redact everything. Whereas Waymo's autonomous vehicle reports will say the Waymo was traveling at five miles an hour north on First Street and then impacted a pedestrian or whatever the case may be and has extremely detailed reports, whereas Tesla's are hidden behind, oh, this is ND8 or whatever the case, something like that, like corporate secrets, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, they're very, very shady about it. Super shady. Waymo's safety record reading from the New York Times in December of last year, Jonathan Slotkin writes, When compared with human drivers on the same roads, Waymo's self-driving cars were involved in 91 % fewer serious injury or worse crashes and 80 % fewer crashes causing any injury.

1:58:50If Waymo's results are indicative of the broader future of autonomous vehicles, we may be on the path to eliminating traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality in the United States. while many see this as a tech story i view it as a public health breakthrough yeah waymo's approach to this is like the exact opposite of tesla tesla has been promising the moon for years and years and failing to deliver and doing stupid things and waymo has been so incredibly cautious and careful over so many years everything has to be totally controlled roads map down to the smallest millimeter just to roll everything out slowly do everything slowly and carefully because the most important thing is to not hurt people and to not be unsafe and yes they clog traffic in san francisco and stop emergency vehicles and it hasn't been all perfect but like there i always get the impression that waymo is trying as hard as they can not to screw up and i get the opposite impression from tesla which is they're trying to say we're here we've done it full self-driving your car will be making money for you while you sleep and we'll just keep saying that for the next decade please give us money and by the way we're taking lidar out of the cars because i i think that's a good idea but i'm stupid so it's not shocking that like robo taxis like he just wants there to be a robo taxi and they put a human safe driver in every car and they're still three times worse than you like this is just he like i this is one of the main reasons that i will never buy a tesla is i do not trust a company with that person at the head of it because every instinct he has and everything he wants his company to do is the opposite of what i want in a thing that i put my life into right i understand like they have at various times been good cars and may be good cars but like his incredible control of that company it filters down into all levels like every story you hear about the terrible fact the terrible racist factories which you know in hindsight should have been a big sign about him um and like the things he makes people do in the assembly lining buying a brand new car and finding parts of it held together with zip ties and the removing lidar and saying cameras are good enough and promising self-driving and it's just like i don't want to be anywhere near that with my life or anyone else's life uh and then waymo like i'm i'm not sure what their path to success is there but everything i read about them is like they're always doing a little bit better than they did before and they're trying to be as safe as possible and i'm glad to hear that their stats show that they are actually exceeding human safety in the in the scenarios where they choose to drive which again are still very limited but like that's appropriate like that they're not saying it'll drive drive your this car will drive you across country while you sleep like waymo doesn't say that because they can't do that and they're being careful and i hate elon musk i will fight you for which one of us hates him more