687: You Can Bend This Line

12:04John Siracusa:And then silver. I would say silver's third and blush's fourth.

12:08Casey Liss:I'm kind of surprised that you two didn't make the prediction I thought you would make, which is that, you know, the sort of stereotypical, like when someone who is like us is buying an iPhone or something, we just get the gray one or the black one, right?

12:24Marco Arment:Well, but I figured like if you're going to have, like if one of these colors was just black, I think that would outsell by a pretty good margin. like is indigo your stand in for that yeah in the same way like with the iphone 17 that they made like the dark blue one to for people who really want like just the boring gray or black one yeah

12:40Casey Liss:anyway um as you know with these like these sales where we take a bunch of orders then they print the shirts you have to order a certain number of them before they print the shirts and what casey was talking about is when we cross the threshold of like now enough people have ordered this that we're actually going to print it we get an email when that happens and so that's where he was getting the info from um and i can tell you the number required to print one of these shirts is not high it's 12 12 people need to buy a shirt for it to get printed if fewer than 12 people buy the shirt or pre-order the shirt they'll just get their money refunded and the shirt will not be printed because it's not worth the time for the printing company to do that because of the scale of things uh here's the thing uh indigo is the most popular as casey noted because that email came first and they're not that distant from each other the second place is citrus and it is i don't think it's double but it's you know it's it's a pretty big gap all right but here is the shocker we are a week into the sale you know how many silver shirts we've sold one oh wow holy jamolis we have sold one silver shirt nobody wants that i mean i granted it is the color that is the least accurate to the laptop so that's true i said i said it in the the description i think when i was posting tooting about it or whatever that it's i thought it felt like it was more important to get the same shirt from the same manufacturer for all the colors rather than having one be an entirely different shirt and this is the close this is the best gray that they had to match the silver one but it's also very neutral and plain and kind of gray scale so i'm like yeah maybe people will pick it just because they don't want a brightly colored shirt indigo is the most popular and indigo blush and citrus are all going to be printed because more than 12 people have ordered them although sometimes not much more than 12 silver one shirt so whoever if you're out there and you ordered atp neo and silver you're not gonna get your shirt unless 11 other people buy that shirt i'm not encouraging people to buy it because hey if you don't want a gray shirt don't get the gray shirt but i'm just warning that one person who ordered the silver shirt it's not looking good for you maybe change your order indigo it's very popular reminder that atp members get 15 off so if you are a member go to your member page to get your discount code for 15 off if you're not a member it it's worthwhile for you to sign up and get 15 off because you can make up the cost of one month of membership easily by ordering a couple things So there you go.

14:56John Siracusa:And you don't have to cancel after the month is over. Just put it out there. You have a lot of specials like ATP Dev Nuggets of Wisdom that you can check out as well. All right. Let's do some follow-up. First of all, Marco made what I presume was just an off-the-cuff judgment call, which, given the information you had, made perfect sense. And, oh, boy, did we get feedback about it. So, Marco, would you like to handle this? Yeah.

15:19Marco Arment:So when I was talking about in the after show, I was talking about the Suunto watch I was trying as compared to Garmin watches for sports and fitness watches. And I referred to Suunto as a young or as a new company, which I think was generally accurate for their presence in the sport watch market relative to Garmin, I think. However, everyone wrote in to tell me that Suunto was actually founded in 1936. They made like compasses at first and then dive computers later. So eventually, like they did get to the like the like the modern smartwatch. But the actual company itself is like 100 years old.

16:06Marco Arment:So whoops.

16:08John Siracusa:Yes. So Henry Sivadin writes, on the last episode, Marco referred to Sinto as a younger company relative to Garmin. According to the Finnish language Wikipedia, Sinto was founded in 1936, making it 53 years older than Garmin. Sinto started making dive computers in the 80s. The first PC connectivity for those was in the early 90s. And Sinto introduced a wrist computer in 2004. We'll put a link to English language Wikipedia in the show notes. And then Fugu writes, the only thing Sinto seems to have done later than Garmin is to release a GPS watch in 2012. The Garmin watch from 2003 already had GPS.

16:37John Siracusa:However, it's quite possible that the current Suunto software stack is much younger than Garmin's, which seems to be much more fragmented. All right. Last episode, we were talking about color spaces, and we were gushing about Eric Portis' really great webpage about that, which is linked in the prior show notes. We were talking about Bartosz Szymanowski's. Hopefully I got that close. And basically everything that he has ever done is incredible. and John you had made an off the cuff off the cuff comment about how there was a really good thing that you had seen recently that you probably couldn't put your finger on well Ben Landsberg figured it out this is what both John and myself were thinking of it's ASCII characters are not pixels a deep dive into ASCII rendering by Alex Hari which we'll put a link to that in the show notes for sure and if I remember I'll put the other links back in as well

17:28Casey Liss:yeah that's less of an explainer more of like I was doing this software project and here's how I progressed through the project. It's really fun. Again, with lots of interactive examples and explaining the reasoning and the different things that Alex tried to do this somewhat fanciful and whimsical thing that he's doing, which is basically like, can you render things using only ASCII characters, which is something that you're very familiar with if you're a Unix nerd from way back, but people are still doing it.

17:55John Siracusa:All right. Is Apple running low on the Bind 18 Pros? Uh-oh. Joe Rossingall from MacRumors writes, The all-new MacBook Neo has been such a hit that Apple is facing a, quote, massive dilemma, quote, according to Taiwan-based tech columnist and former Bloomberg reporter Tim Kulpan. Kulpan says the MacBook Neo is selling so well that Apple's supply of the binned A18 Pro chips with a five-core GPU will run out before the company is able to fully satisfy demand for the laptop. Apple's initial plan was to have suppliers build around five to six million MacBook Neos before ceasing production of the model with the A18 Pro chip.

18:30John Siracusa:Colpan said, but it sounds like demand is so strong that Apple might run out of the A18 Pro chips before the second generation MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro chip is ready next year. A18 Pro chips are manufactured with TSMC's N3E process, and Colpan said that the N3E production lines are currently operating at maximum capacity. As a result, Apple may have to pay a premium to restart A18 Pro chip production for the MacBook Neo, which would lower its profit margins. Alternatively, Apple could reallocate some of its chip production that was originally planned for other devices but the cost would still be higher than what apple paid for its initial batch of a18 pro chips that were presumably binned in either case apple would have to disable a gpu gpu core in these chips to ensure that they have only a five core gpu like all the other macbook neo units

19:14Casey Liss:sold to date yeah i'm not sure that's the case uh if like so the bin one this is like way to you know make uh make lemonade out of lemons so you're making a bunch of a18 pros some of them have a bum gpu why don't we just save them we just say keep put those off to the side don't throw those away we might find a use for those and they use them in the macbook neo so all the ones with the bad gpu core they can use in the macbook neo i don't know if that is the entire source of their a18 pros or if they also took a bunch of fully working a18 pros and disabled one of the gpu cores but either way when you buy a macbook neo from apple you get an a18 pro one of the gpu cores is either disabled or didn't work to begin with okay so that's the deal if they're running out of those chips yeah kind of sucks for them now they have to start the manufacturing line and start making more of them and that costs them money and they got to take capacity from other things and all that other stuff and it lowers their margins but they could also just say okay well when we start the line now we'll you will take all the ones that have all the working gpu cores and then just update the you know the neo spec to say now when you buy a macbook neo it's like a rev you know not a rev 2 or whatever but like a second version of it where now all the gpu cores work it just seems like a waste to take a perfectly working six you know six gpu core thing and disable one of them um and people like well you can't do that because then the people who bought the first one with with the core that didn't work they're going to be mad it's like happens all the time apple releases a new revision of a product that has some spec slightly better that's that's life you buy you buy the product you buy and if in the future a slightly better version of that product comes out you can't say but but i bought one last year and it only had five gpu cores and now you're selling it for the same price with six well that's technology for you so they could do that or they could pull forward the a19 pro product or whatever so uh all i can say is this is a good problem to have they made a product that everybody loves it's selling like hotcakes so much so that even they're probably very accurate usually very accurate planning underestimated the demand you'd rather have this than the opposite problem which is you buy a home pod on its last day for sale and it turns out it was manufactured three years ago and those are all the home pods they ever

21:17Marco Arment:manufactured yeah i think though like you know in this case um you know if they do have to make more A18 Pros. And like, yeah, if they have to, they will. They'll work it out with TSMC and yeah, they might eat a little bit of margin, but they'll work it out. I think whether they hardware disable one of the GPUs, even if it would have worked, or whether they do this kind of quieter revision where they just all of a sudden now they have 6 core GPUs, I don't think it really matters either way because the difference of that one GPU core is not a huge difference. We're not talking about, like, it'd be different if the number of p cores on the cpu is cut in half that's not the case here this is five of six gpus or six of six gpus they scale almost almost perfectly proportionally so you can figure out the you know the math on that um you know what is that like a 16 drop or difference in performance it's not a huge difference here so i think in reality whichever one of these they do it shouldn't and probably won't be like a big deal to basically anybody the one thing they can't do or probably

22:21Casey Liss:not can't do it the one thing they probably shouldn't do is uh manufacture a bunch of new ones and then just put them into the neos whether they have five or six because then you don't know what you're going to get and that you know you know people are just people are always waiting to you know file class action lawsuits again to apple right so if you decide that you're going to do the six then they all have to have six and you need to update it on your spec page and say it's a new revision of the macbook neo they all have six now right because that's no one no one can really sue you about that.

22:49Casey Liss:You just made a better version of a product later. But if you don't update the specs at all, but some of them have six and some of them have five, I don't know if it would be a valid lawsuit, but I can almost guarantee you somebody would sue and say, oh, I paid the same price as this person and they got six and I got five and the spec page says five doesn't say anything about six. What's the deal, Apple? Someone would definitely sue over that. Again, I don't know if they would win or if that is even remotely valid, but people love to sue Apple over stuff like that. So that's the only path they really can't take.

23:17Casey Liss:Any other path is open to them including disabling uh the working ones or just selling all the all the mystic score i'm

23:23Marco Arment:guessing they would actually just disable the working one to make it five because i think that is the less problematic version of that and there's a lot of precedent for that in the chip business

23:32Casey Liss:well you wouldn't you wouldn't waste the the the ones with only five then because if you disable the other ones then you can use every chip well not every chip any chip every chip with five or six you can use um but if you only use the six ones the ones with five like what are you going to save them for is there going to be another product that's going to want a five gpu no i'm

23:47Marco Arment:I'm saying like I think the best course of action if they if they need to manufacture more a18 pros I think the best course of action is basically lock them all to five GPUs and then and and continue to have the product be described and performing the same way and there is a lot of precedent for that like in I mean like back in the old days there were all these hacks about like overclocking certain Celerons because I believe Intel had a kind of a similar issue where like they were they were selling the Celeron on as like their discount chip but their manufacturing at that time was pretty good and so they didn't really have enough like crappy low performing stuff or whatever it was like their their production was so good that they had to basically like soft limit the chips just to make enough of them to sell and your luck in overclocking the chip was kind of in part due to just like what however good yours happened to be above the spec they were actually selling it at i bet they

24:46Casey Liss:got sued by somebody about that too. I doubt it. People can sue for anything. I'm not saying they won the case, but that's the type of thing that someone would sue over and say, it shouldn't be a random lottery. But it performed to what they advertised it as. Yeah, I know. I know. I'm not saying they won the lawsuit. I'm just saying that's exactly the type of thing people sue about.

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27:03John Siracusa:All right. With regard to Apple IDs and pass Vitor writes, the situation is even more bananas than you described last episode. Apple added a passkey to my account without my consent with my original Apple ID email. I've since changed that email, but every time I need to log in, they still push me to do so with the passkey associated with the old email. There's no way to remove or update that passkey. I'm not alone with this problem, and we'll put in one link to Reddit, the Apple Help subreddit, and a second link in this case to the pesky subreddit where apple claims or so claim somebody on reddit that the fix would be made soon two years ago whoops yeah i don't quite understand

27:41Casey Liss:the problem here but clearly it is a real problem of like apple creating pesky's for you but they're like like everything else having to do with apple ids or apple accounts that it's not normal it's it's its own special unique snowflake that works differently than all the other stuff so i guess it show up in the passwords app and again surprise apple implemented a supposed you know sort of quality of life convenience feature where now you can change your apple id email i bet that won't cause any problems just like transferring purchases and all the other things they do that it seemed they seem like a good idea until you actually try to use it and it turns out you know oh i did i used that feature where you could change your apple id email and now you're forever prompting me for passkey i no longer have access to apparently so yeah that whole system is so creaky.

28:22Casey Liss:Talk about, again, making a John Turner's to-do list or whatever. It's like, jeez. There's so many parts of Apple that have not faced any competition in so long and have not gotten any better that are just filled with garbage and the Apple ID system is one of those. Oh, yeah.

28:38Marco Arment:Especially around pass keys, around developer accounts being separate, all of those conditions. It's funny because the developer account issue is like, this is like every Apple developer hits this issue. and the login process for a developer is so awkward because you have to first hit cancel no I don't want to use my passkey for my personal Apple ID and then log in for the developer, use the password and then if it prompts you for 2FA then you have to, even if the machine that you're on is trusted it will put up the dialog box with the six digit code and the input box on the website that you're logging into is centered perfectly in the middle of the browser window well then the six digit code dialogue box is centered in the middle of the screen so it covers up if your browser window is centered on your screen then the code that pops up covers up where you have to enter so you have to drag the code window off to the side a little bit to be able to then re-access on the page the six digit codes you can type it in which it will on autofill like it's the worst like apple has made logins so much nicer for everyone else except apple

29:45Casey Liss:it's very very weird and you're forgetting my favorite game which now i find myself doing unconsciously which is uh you know when it sends me the little you know apple id logging thing that shows the map it'll send it to my phone or whatever and it'll say you know allow deny and it shows the little map i'm like yeah that's me i hit allow um after hitting allow it then shows the six digits but sometimes as i've complained about in the past sometimes it will show the six digits for a fraction of a second before they disappear so now when i when i hit that allow I prime my brain to memorize the six digits as they flash on the screen because sometimes, as I've said when I was setting things up, sometimes there's just no way to do it.

30:22Casey Liss:It will never stay. Unless it comes up on my phone, I hit aloud, six digits appear, and they immediately disappear. And I have to memorize them in that fraction of a second that they appear, so I get good at it. It's ridiculous. Ridiculous.

30:34John Siracusa:All right, and then finally for tonight, some updates with regard to stealing television. This is the overtime discussion we had in 679 about the super box and the other ways that people are stealing TV. And Nye Hughes writes, this reminded me of a Guardian article that suggests in the UK, at least, modded Amazon Fire TV sticks are being used to log keystrokes and passwords to enable fraud. A recent survey, this is from the article, a recent survey from B Streamwise, a UK initiative established to counter the problem, found two out of every five people who used illegal streaming were defrauded.

31:06John Siracusa:They lost an average of almost 1 ,700 pounds each as a result. whoopsie-dipsies. The potential for fraud happens the minute you connect the dodgy stick, or so it's called, with a laptop or a TV, according to Rob Shapland of Psionic Cyber. Alongside the stream of TV or sports will also install some malware onto your computer and give the criminal direct access to your computer so that they can use it as if they were sitting there, he claims, says, whatever. Or they can install keyloggers, which will record any password you are typing. So when you're accessing online banking, it will record your banking passwords, you are essentially volunteering to have your laptop hacked in many cases.

31:43John Siracusa:Whoopsie-dipsies. And then additionally, there was a Krebs on Security article where Brian Krebs writes, Ashley, an engineer at Census, a cyber intelligence company, found that the Superbox devices immediately contacted a server at the Chinese instant messaging service Tencent QQ, as well as a residential proxy service called Grass.io. Also known as GetGrass.io, Grass says it is a decentralized network that allows users to earn rewards by sharing their unused internet bandwidth with AI labs and other companies. Quote, buyers seek unused internet bandwidth to access a more diverse range of IP addresses, which enables them to see certain websites from a retail perspective, the Grass website explains.

32:19John Siracusa:By utilizing your unused internet bandwidth, they can conduct market research or perform tasks like web scraping to train AI.

32:25Casey Liss:I would just love to meet, I think the person who wrote this copy did such a good job because it's like, okay, here's what we're doing. We need to appear to be legitimate people, so we're going to come and hear legitimate people's internet connections, so basically we'll be indistinguishable from legitimate people basically want to turn people into a giant bot that we can control all right now you write copy for that and make it sound not nefarious they want to access a more diverse range of ip addresses which enables them to see certain websites from a retail perspective they did it they did it you you made it not sound terrible but it is it's really terrible

32:57John Siracusa:it sure is uh so finally from krebs on security uh it may be that many super box customers don't care if someone uses their internet connection to tunnel traffic for ad fraud and accounts takeovers. For them...

33:08Casey Liss:Oh, I forgot about ad fraud. Yeah, making it seem like people are clicking on ad banners. They're coming from legit IP addresses.

33:14John Siracusa:For them, it beats paying for multiple streaming services each month. My guess, however, is that quite a few people who buy or are gifted these products have little understanding of the bargain they're making when they plug them into an internet router. Some of the other... I didn't pull the quotes, but some other sections of the same article, I believe it was the Krebs article, talk about how they use some sort of hack. I'm outside my comfort zone, but basically they they force a device that's already on your local network to like crash or what have you again my terminology is wrong and they will then slurp up that ip address so it looks even more legitimate legitimate to your own network like it's crazy some of the shenanigans these things do basically do not touch and then finally with regard to this david brownman writes the dark net diaries podcast did a pretty detailed episode on the cyber security side of the super box and we'll put a link to that in the show notes.

34:03Casey Liss:Yeah. So we did touch on this in the overtime that there's, you know, lots of these boxes are shady and people claim that the software on them is hacking people or whatever. But this is like a concrete study from the UK saying that people are getting their money stolen for real, like immeasurable large amounts by using these products. And, uh, you know, the, the attraction of getting TV for free is apparently enough to keep people coming back, but they're bad news.

34:28John Siracusa:Indeed. All right. Let's talk topics. And maybe I should have poured a drink for this episode because we got to talk about ads in Apple Maps, baby. For real this time. So Emma Roth at The Verge wrote, I don't know, I think a few weeks ago as we record this, Apple will soon allow businesses to buy advertisements in its Maps app. In an announcement on Tuesday, Apple says ads may appear at the top of your search results in Maps as well as in a new suggested places list. they will arrive in app in the u.s and canada this summer uh marco if you wouldn't mind would you prepare your bleep gun because this is such fucking bullshit and i hate it so much i haven't even seen it i hate it oh it makes me so mad it makes me so mad because i and i think many like me came to apple because we were so used to getting pcs filled with bullshit malware just overflowing with it everywhere.

35:23Casey Liss:By the way, on that topic, I know this is not in the notes of this week, and maybe we'll talk about it next week, but there was a recent interview that Jaws and Ternus did with Tom's Hardware, and they were fielding a bunch of softball questions about what's great about Apple products or whatever. And they went through everything that's great about it, but then they were on to the next question in ATP style. One of them, I forget who it was, says, oh yeah, and also, don't forget, Macs aren't loaded up with bloatware. That was their point, that like unlike the competing pc products the products that compete with the macbook neo when you get a mac it's not filled with like you know like you said a bunch of crappy software that you don't want that's showing a bunch of stuff in your face and i felt like reaching through the youtube screen and saying but it is increasingly it is yeah have you seen the defaults uh uh the

36:07John Siracusa:the doc god i just had my blue screen obviously when it's apple stuff that's not an ad that's

36:12Casey Liss:apple stuff no i know exactly but like the the new version of pages so i actually have seen the

36:18Marco Arment:default dock because because when i was setting up 48 mac minis uh without doing any kind of mdm one of my steps was taking all of those out one by one whoosh whoosh whoosh you can automate that

36:30Casey Liss:by just uh deleting the changing the p list well i didn't know that at the time i didn't want to

36:35Marco Arment:ask you because then it would spoil the bit so i did it i every single last chapter gpt for 48 mac minis one of my setup steps was dragging out all like you know 15 of the dock icons out of the dock

36:46Casey Liss:except for if you get really good at figuring out where the remove thing appears yeah because it's

36:50Marco Arment:not you know you have to go up a little bit like you know it can't just be like you know the first pixel you got to go up like you know 200 pixels up remember when it used to have the poof yeah exactly well and it still makes the same sound those are the days and that's just anyway sorry to derail you guys no no no not filled with bloatware i'm not sorry so anyways you know so

37:10John Siracusa:many of us and i think especially those of us who had grown up with pcs like marco like me came to Apple because especially circa mid-2000s, my recollection, maybe I'm just looking with rose-colored glasses, but my recollection was I had been using PCs for so long. They were utter crap. They were crap in ways that I knew and crap in ways that I didn't even understand yet. And they were crap. And then finally, and John, I mean, the timeline may not be exactly right, but the way I recall it is that it was around the mid-aughts that Mac OS X was really starting to get its junk together. Now, you could argue it was great from the beginning, but it was like properly good at this point.

37:47John Siracusa:And so I moved to the Mac and I think it was 2008, if I'm not mistaken, maybe it was 2007. No, it was 2007. And it was such a breath of fresh air. Everything worked. It was intuitive. It was beautiful. There was no garbage. I didn't have to put my wrist on an Intel inside sticker for the rest of time and just watch it peel away slowly but surely. and everything was so amazing and so wonderful. And I feel like in the last five, maybe 10 years in particular, all of that goodness has gone away in various different ways. Software isn't as, isn't as stable as it was. The Apple software isn't as stable as it was.

38:27John Siracusa:And it does so many things. And I think Apple is spread so thin that they lose track of things like we were just lamenting a moment ago, like Apple IDs. But I feel like the software's been spread so thin, there's so many edge cases that Apple no longer conquers. Now, in the defense of Apple, it's also gotten way more complicated, which is hard. It's very hard. But it doesn't just work anymore. And that bums me out. Additionally, the search for ever more money and ever more services revenue means that instead of just being a company that makes their money off of hardware, Now they have to make their money off of recurring revenue from me paying them for things that sometimes I think yes they deserve money for this and sometimes I'm like what is going on here for example iCloud storage I should probably pay them for some amount of iCloud storage but should that iCloud storage still be five gigabytes in the year 2026 I think not and it's just frustrating that this is yet another example this is yet another example of things just getting ickier.

39:33John Siracusa:in getting more Windows-like. And honestly, I haven't used Windows in over a decade. And I genuinely wonder at this point, is Windows less garbaged up than Apple stuff?

39:46Casey Liss:No, Windows are getting worse. They're putting ads in the start menu and stuff.

39:49John Siracusa:All right, well, that makes you feel a little bit better.

39:51Marco Arment:And this is part of the shame of it. And this is kind of part of what I was hoping, what I was trying to get at with my letter to John Turner's blog post. Like Apple is getting significantly worse in certain ways in areas that are very important to us. But no one else is getting better at it. Like it's not like Windows is amazing at this. Yeah, Windows is worse than it's ever been at this arguably. Yeah. Industry-wide, there is a slow process of – I won't use Cory Doctorow's word necessarily because I don't think it quite fits here. But like there's a slow process of just erosion of respect for users, time, attention and resources motivated by the possibility of making more money.

40:36Marco Arment:Right. And even and if it's the reality is like in many industries, their margins get super squeezed and they get desperate and they start doing things that are crappy because they kind of have to to make any money at all. And the really sad thing is that's always been Apple's competitors. That's never been Apple's situation. Apple, I mean, not never, but certainly not in the modern era. Apple's modern era is they have more money than they know what to do with. They don't need to become desperate to find ways to make 0.5 % more money. They can just make better products. Look, we were just talking about the MacBook Neo doing really well, like blowing away expectations because they made a really good product and people like it.

41:23Marco Arment:It fits the market well. It's there at a good time. The opportunity to take market share from PCs right now is really huge for lots of reasons. And so what a great product. Look at the success of the iPhone 17 Pro. They made the cool orange one and it's a great product. So they had this cool color that did the marketing for them largely. And then they made this amazing pro phone that took what we wanted about iPhones and removed certain pain points, made things better. Like it's just the iPhone 17 Pro is an amazing product. Look at the modern Macs, the modern Macs, beyond just the Neo, they're amazing.

42:01Marco Arment:They're so amazing. You can't even buy the desktops anymore right now because they're all sold out. Like the modern Mac lineup is so good. There is not a single bad laptop that Apple sells anymore. What a thing to be able to say after some of the kind of mid-2010s kind of years there got kind of bad. But what an amazing state the products are in. And they can make more money by expanding the market of those products or by making people upgrade when they're compelling upgrades. And they do. That is still how they make most of their money. They can even have this whole thing called services, even though what services makes most of us money from is rents.

42:41Marco Arment:But we'll put that aside for this particular part of this discussion. Services makes tons of money based on delivering additional revenue sources to their products, most of which don't annoy or badger or harass their users. Most. And then they started selling ads, first in the App Store and now coming to Maps. and there's a few things about this that irritate me greatly number one it's just not that much money relative to the services category especially since apple's really bad at selling ads against anything well see that yeah that's that's the second part that annoys me so like is there what

43:25Casey Liss:is the potential upside for apple not what is the potential upside for google because apple's not

43:29Marco Arment:google yeah the second part of this that annoys me is that i have been an apple search ads customer since search ads launched. I actually, I just paused my search ad campaign for the first time in years, just about a month ago because I'm mad at them. But the Apple search ads product is awful. The only thing holding it up as being anything that is worth anyone ever spending money on is that there are still a lot of people in the apps that are searching for things. And now they've created this awful situation for all of us, which is, if you don't buy like your own name and your own keywords, Everyone else will buy them and you will have to fight.

44:07Marco Arment:And now you have to pay Apple extra just to get to your own customers that you were already going to get before. And they're still taking their 30%, of course, of all your in-app purchases and stuff. So it just feels a lot like double dipping. But it's a crappy ads product and it makes the app store worse for everybody except Apple. Apple makes a little bit more money from that. Great. Good job. Everything else is worse. It's worse for customers. It's worse for most developers. And it's mostly just a way for big companies to pour a bit more money into Apple's pocket with high bids on keywords.

44:46Marco Arment:And now they're bringing that same benefit to Maps. Great. Adding ads in places like this to make reasonably small amounts of additional revenue sells out the user experience. Yes. A little bit. Yes. It sells it out because what their actions say here is it matters less to us to have a great high-end premium user experience. We would rather make 1 % more money. And they have seemingly run out of ideas to make 1 % more money in other ways, I guess, or they just don't care. And this is like the hallmark of the Tim Cook era is like product direction by numbers. And there's a place for numbers. Try the new version of numbers.

45:29Marco Arment:Oh, my God. oh that's a whole other don't even get me started on that oh i'm so mad about that um but again but that's it that's actually a similar problem here it's like nothing is sacred to them anymore in the user experience they are willing to put promos which are ads and actual ads all over their products now there is no more premium experience with apple products because now it's all full of ads because what are you going to do? Where are you going to go? There's nowhere else. So they can now make 1 % more money from you. Old Apple wouldn't have done that. You know, you don't, I don't like to invoke Steve Jobs that often.

46:09Marco Arment:I know there were a couple of cases where Steve Jobs floated the idea of putting ads in different places, but under previous leadership, Apple would not have been putting ads in the places they're putting ads now because I I think the previous leadership had more appreciation for a premium user experience. And when you start being managed as just bean counter, only numbers matter and nothing else matters. If this thing can increase numbers by 5%, why wouldn't we do it? Obviously, we must do it because the numbers will go up. That is a pretty rapid path to mediocrity. And that's never been what has made Apple stand out.

46:47Marco Arment:They have certainly had many mediocre products and services and times in the past, no question. But where Apple succeeds is making nice products with nice experiences. And ads don't have a place in that. And I wish Apple's leadership would realize where their own success comes from.

47:07Casey Liss:You were saying have they run out of other ways to make money. It's not that they've run out of other ideas for incremental revenue or other ideas to innovate. It's that in addition to those ideas, these ideas which used as you noted used to be get shot down no longer get shot down and that is the dysfunction in the organization someone in the org is always going to say hey we can make more money if we did this that would annoy users slightly but what are they going to do like that idea will always exist will always be presented is always compelling it's a compelling business case to apple because you can say look i can show you how this will make us more money it will make us more successful in this way and what the what apple needs to do and what they're getting less good at doing is saying yes but our brand promises that we don't do crap like that and long term even though your idea will make a little money now it will erode that brand promise the the value proposition it will it will in the long run it will make us less money it's the exact opposite of the the thing that made apple successful which is do the difficult thing that everyone thinks is a dumb idea because if you do it long enough or hard enough and it makes users happy you will make more money than them in the long run and apple does still fight that they're not saying yes to every one of those ideas but they're saying yes to way too many of them in particular saying yes to like their own internal things like but this part of the org says we need to you know do upsells inside the uh iWork applications because that's the only way people will pay for this and we need to do this and we need to put you're like we need to advertise the you know new apple care plans inside system settings because uh i know the people who are writing system settings they don't care about that but this part of the org cares about selling apple care and we need a way to say okay hey we're all apple here same team so let's do it and that's what they're saying yes to they're saying yes to you know letting themselves advertise their own crap everywhere which is already terrible and then in these cases like search ads and map ads they're saying we can get money from third parties here too because we have all these customers we have their eyeballs they're doing something related to maps they're in the app store searching like you said marco it's a it's a win for apple they think because it's like look uh we annoy the user and we suck more money from developers and we annoy the developers so everything is worse the only arguable possible user benefit is if you're searching for an app you get to see some possible alternatives to that app like if it's a really well-known app you would otherwise never find the alternatives that is the only benefit i can think of for that for the user but mostly it's a it's a it's a net negative for everybody but i was like yeah but we make more money so yeah that's the problem they keep saying yes that and then this the ads and maps like i don't even think of all the things they could do this is that egregious other than the fact that they're going to do a terrible job at it except for the fact that as far as i know i don't this is is this a rumor i think it's a rumor i don't know if it was announcement or when i was announcement announcement from apple but anyway we don't know the details but here's the thing so you're going to put ads and stuff at the very least allow people to pay money to make the ads go away how about the people who are already paying you for let's say the apple one bundle because like i'm not saying oh it's fine apple put ads everywhere and just make people pay to get rid of them but if we have to live in this world if we're gonna have these ads forced on us like to casey's point if i'm already paying you like the maximum amount a person can pay you like i buy your most expensive apple one bundle that you want me to get i buy all your products or whatever is there no way that me paying money will make ads go away anyway i would pay to get rid of search ads in the app store if i could i would certainly pay to get rid of ads and apple maps even though i mostly use google maps like and i'm not saying like obviously the number of people who are going to pay to make ads go away is tiny like we know we have we have a podcast where people pay to make the ads go away most people don't like it but we get that but like just let let that's it's such an easy out for them to continue to be crappy like again i'm not saying this is the solution but hey apple if you want to continue to erode your your your own value you would just you would silence uh more of casey's cursing if you just at least allowed allowed the relative handful of people who are willing to pay not to see ads to let them do that they would grumble about it and they would be pissed but it would make them slightly more quiet than the current case of just like no we don't care how much money you give us there's no escape from these ads yep couldn't agree more it's just

51:20John Siracusa:this is the sort of thing now i'm showing a lot of biases and i'm bringing a lot of um my own priors, as Marlon would say to the table. But I've always found it frustrating that it's in my mind, I filed it as a West Coast thing, that there are no decisions made. There's only A-B testing. I know I'm being hyperbolic and I know it's not quite that simple, but I feel like everything is A-B tested and everything is about numbers. And at some point, you have to understand that there are things that are unmeasurable and there are things that are just a vibe. And the vibe that I get from Apple these days, and I don't think I'm alone, is that, oh, they're just as shitty as everyone else, except just a teeny bit less.

52:07John Siracusa:So if Windows is an 11, Apple is an 8 or a 9, but that's still shittier than it needs to be. And I'm sorry that I don't have more grown-up language, or maybe less grown-up language to express my feelings, but I'm so... You're right the first time. I'm so frustrated that this is what this is, and there's nowhere else to go. I think that's the other problem. Like, yes, I suppose I could make this the year of Linux on the desktop for me, but I don't want to do that. Nobody really wants to do that. Please don't redeem me.

52:36Casey Liss:Even NPM throws ads at you now. They're not really ads, but like, hey, these projects need funding. Because they've got you at the prompt, and how else are you going to discover that the software that you've been using for free forever needs funding. Like, I don't begrudge NPM that, but I'm just saying like everybody, the idea has always existed, which is right where the person's using your software, can we put ads there? Someone will always have that idea. The idea is not new. What is the difference now is people who would formally say, of course, I'm not in my command line Unix utility. I'm going to put an ad.

53:08Casey Liss:Like, I understand open source needs funding, but this is not the way to do it. But eventually the generation that grew up in the current environment gets to control open source projects and said oh yeah totally we should

53:17Marco Arment:put that into nbm and so now it's there yeah and i think like what what irritates me about apple doing it and this is granted this is less about maps now i'm talking about the platform is like if inside of an app like maps they put ads okay well we can use different apps and yeah i mean the other ones have ads too um but at least they're better so you know whatever there's different options for mapping apps. You can make your own mapping app if you really want to. Nobody can really. Anyway, but you know what I mean. But when the system has ads in places that are required to interact with or privileged, things like the settings app having promos for all of Apple's upsells and crap, the app store having ads when you are looking to get software in the only way you can get software on your iOS device.

54:12Marco Arment:There's no way to escape that. So you don't have a choice as a customer. You are locked in and you are forced to see those ads. And this is not like, you know, a severe like human rights issue or anything, but it is Apple kind of mishandling their position of power, abusing the power they have as the platform to make things a little bit crappier under the guise of, well, everyone's doing this, as you were saying, like, everyone's doing this. So therefore, we can do it too. And too bad for you if you don't like it.

54:46Casey Liss:That doesn't make it better. And it totally works. Like Casey's point about A-B testing, I can guarantee you they sell more AppleCare now that they push it to you in system settings. Like, there's no question about that. That's why you don't let it happen. Because you know, if you do let it happen, of course, it's going to give you a return on investment. Like, it's the one and only system settings and you get to put ads there and that will that will sell more apple care and the people who came up with ideas see i told you and the people against the idea says we're never arguing that it wouldn't work we're arguing that we shouldn't do it because it erodes the value of apple as a brand and a company and it just and like even even if you

55:21Marco Arment:can't get them to quantify the brand damage it seems like you also can't get a lot of these higher ups there now to believe in the promise of just making things because they're better this way instead of adding ads somewhere because it makes some number go up maybe you can have the prestige and self-control to show some restraint and not take every single opportunity to make a bit more money if it makes the product worse that's what i was talking about with the turnist thing it's

55:55Casey Liss:Like if you're Steve Jobs, you say, no, that makes it crappy. I'm not going to do it. And everyone disagrees with you. But if you're John Ternus and you say that, then now you have people saying, well, he turned down this idea that we proved could give you X amount more money in AppleCare subscriptions. And he said no to it for an unquantifiable benefit. We can show you the numbers. This is how much more money we make on AppleCare if we do this. And all they had to say was some mumbo jumbo about brand value, like whatever. Show me the numbers on that, dummy. And because you're not Steve Jobs and didn't found the company and everybody worships you, that it becomes a ding against you and it's like that's that's what makes people do the wrong thing because they don't feel secure enough to say we're not doing that because it sucks like and i'm sure sometimes they do again it's not like it's not like they're just you know bending over and doing every bad idea that exists but they're you can in this battle within apple you can see the people who want to junk stuff up are winning more of these fights and that's the trend against the trend line i would still say it's you know casey said that like windows is an 11 and apple is an eight i think the range is much much greater windows is in a way worse situation um but like you know we're not windows usually we don't care i'm just looking at the trend lines that's why we're even though every one of these little things it seems small and it is small but like the line is going in the wrong direction and if we just extrapolate uh bad things happen you know apple

57:11Marco Arment:does have an area that they are a little bit better at defending and that's privacy privacy in some ways I mean again it's a little bit different because when Apple says privacy is a human right I think that is about as important as it is I don't think that's hyperbole and I do think that the right to use your computer without seeing ads is not a human right but they do things in the name of privacy not every time they invoke privacy is for good reasons many times they will invoke privacy in things like defenses against monopoly accusations and bad behavior basically as a BS defense to try to excuse their bad behavior that they're really doing for other reasons.

57:58Marco Arment:But not every time. Many of the times that Apple invokes privacy are real and genuine and beneficial. And Apple really does care about privacy more than just the numbers alone would dictate that they should. that is an area that it's it's it's considered a core value to the company um and that's and credit to tim cook that is something he has brought to the table and he cares a lot about it isn't that steve jobs didn't care about privacy but tim cook seems to care a lot more and i give him credit for that um it is a core value that apple defends privacy in their product choices even when it's really difficult most of the time um Then...

58:37Marco Arment:But under Tim Cook, that same consideration has not been held for the quality of the user experience. That's where Steve Jobs really did hold that as a high value. The same way Tim Cook values privacy, Steve Jobs valued a premium, nice user experience. And Tim Cook doesn't. And modern Apple doesn't. They happen to have enough people there who are left who still are able to create good user experiences most of the time. But there isn't any pressure in the way that there is so much pressure to preserve privacy at Apple. There is no such pressure to preserve the quality of the user experience. And there really needs to be.

59:20Marco Arment:because having all these little ads and promos and little paper cuts everywhere, each one of those is an erosion of quality and an erosion of the premium brand and the experience. And they don't seem to think so. Or at least those people are not able, they're not empowered to defend the quality of your experience when, oh, but if we ruin this thing a little bit more, we can make a bit more services revenue.

59:45John Siracusa:And I think the thing that makes me, one of the things that makes me so exasperated about this is that there's almost no way to put this back away right what's what's the turn of phrase i'm looking for there's no way to

59:58Casey Liss:back in the bottle there is a way you just make different decisions in the future you can bend this line you need a new ceo to do it but you know fingers crossed but even still are they ever going to take away a revenue stream really that's that's what i'm yeah sometimes steve jobs did things like that all the time you see good ceos it's called leadership you can't say i'm never going to do anything that's going to cause any kind of bad result, you know, because there's a long-term benefit. That's called leadership. That's what Apple needs. Good CEOs make decisions like that all the time. It is absolutely possible.

1:00:29Casey Liss:Will they do it? I don't know, but I totally believe it's possible. We see it happen all the time. We saw it happen with turning around Apple itself when Steve Jobs came back and did it. He destroyed tons of stuff before things got better. Well, also, it's not even that much money. Yeah, that's the other thing. The other thing is not

1:00:44Marco Arment:it's not like you're saying stop selling the iphone i mean come on like it's you'll be okay like we're talking about like a drop in the bucket even within the services category yeah which itself i mean granted the services category is pretty large now as a percentage of their profit um and that's why they keep pushing it it's the growing one and the stock market won't like it

1:01:01Casey Liss:and yada yada like there's a million reasons but it's it's not insurmountable or and it's not that

1:01:08Marco Arment:much money like i mean obviously in absolute terms like it's probably more money than all all of us will ever see.

1:01:13Casey Liss:It's a huge amount of money, absolute terms, but in relative terms.

1:01:15Marco Arment:Yeah, in relative terms, relative to their services revenue, we're not talking about getting rid of the entire App Store cut and the entire Google Search deal and the things that actually make big differences. We're not talking about that. We're talking about drops in the bucket, especially like ads and maps. The way Apple handles ad sales and the systems they build and the primitive garbage ranking algorithms they use, those aren't going to be that successful financially like because they're just they're not going to be that good the app store search ads probably make substantially more money than anything that will ever be made in maps and the app store search ads are also terrible but at least those are more like you know there's more kind of of like an intent to buy there's a lot probably a lot more search volume if i had to guess uh you know compared to monetizable maps transactions or math sources.

1:02:07Marco Arment:So I think this is going to be, we're talking about crapping up a core system app for not that much money. And that's what makes it even more frustrating. That it's not like they're betting the whole company on some huge thing that's going to turn a huge amount of money over. No, it's not. They're just adding another paper cut to make one of their core apps worse for everyone to make a drop more money. That sucks. And by the way, that's exactly what they did to numbers, pages, and keynote. and screw them for that. I'm so annoyed at what they did to those apps.

1:02:39John Siracusa:No argument. I think the one thing that I will say with regard to that's leadership, I agree. However, if we think about the situation with Apple when Steve came back, like they were on death's door, or at least so I've understood. I mean, I wasn't around for this. I wasn't an Apple person for this. But they were on death's door.

1:02:56Casey Liss:90 days from bankruptcy, they say.

1:02:58John Siracusa:Yeah, exactly. So, of course, Steve came in and, you know, destroyed everything and turned everything upside down. not only was he one of the founders and that kind of gave him the clout to do it but what else are

1:03:09Casey Liss:they gonna do he did that when they were successful too i mean the ipod mini and getting killed for the ipod nano even though it was their most successful ipod he was killing the successes that were helping them come back from where they were like he was not afraid to do what he thought was right like that's what i'm saying it's leadership like you can tim cook would not make that choice and would make a very different very strong argument to keep selling the ipod mini because it's the most popular ipod they ever made and just sell the now to the people who want that when a C-Job was like, no, now it's better.

1:03:35Casey Liss:Kill the iPod Mini.

1:03:36John Siracusa:And I get that. All I'm saying is, yes, it is leadership, but I think that in a lot of ways, Steve was set up for success, set up for doing the things that had to be done because clearly whatever was going on wasn't working. Whereas right now, whoever takes over, be that Ternus or whoever else, they're entering the cockpit of a rocket ship. And to slow that rocket ship down, even though, again, I concur that it's relatively not a lot of money, that's still a tougher it's a tougher bigger ask is all i'm saying what they would argue is like oh

1:04:06Casey Liss:it's not going to lose us that much money but our share price is going to go down so our market cap is going to lose 10 billion dollars or whatever and steve jobs would say so what like it'll be fine but like i said it's not just when things are going bad the ipad ipod mini was going great that was a number that was going up and that was a case where you're making a decision that people would say you're you're you're risking the the rocket ship by making that change but Steve Jobs wanted what he wanted. And most of his decisions were right in that direction. So anyway, we'll see. We'll see what happens.

1:04:34Casey Liss:I'm not sure this trend line is going to change at all because I see no deviation or even acknowledgement that everything we're talking about is even a thing when Apple executives talk. Do you even see them acknowledging this? Like I said, with a turnus and jaws saying, and of course, Macs aren't junked up with anything. I'm like, well, they are now they're they're like, they don't see it. They don't if they do say it, they're not saying they're not voicing it in any way. So it's really difficult to expect a different decision when there is not even any public acknowledgement that this issue exists, let alone where Apple is on the spectrum.

1:05:25Marco Arment:agents chatbots or whatever you can imagine. In fact, one thing I tried with Zapier, I thought, you know what? Let me type in they have this wonderful prompt on their site. And it said, you know, what do you want to make? And I said, why don't you email me every morning at 7 a.m. whenever the weather is going to be five degrees different than it was yesterday or any important weather events like precipitation and in these two different zip codes that I care about. And I watched as Zapier's AI agent created an entire workflow based on my prompts. It asked me a couple of clarifying questions when necessary.

1:05:55Marco Arment:It asked me to approve things that need human approval, which I thought was very nice, very respectful. And it tested things out and it showed me how things were working. And it built the whole thing. At any point, I could have jumped in and customized whatever I wanted. But it knew what its data sources were. It knew how to tie them together. It was an incredible thing to see. Not only is this automation possible on Zapier and you can help tie AI tools together with Zapier, but you can even use their built-in AI to create the AI tools, which I thought was really quite a fun thing to see. So Zapier, you don't have to be a tech expert to do it.

1:06:27Marco Arment:You can just tell it what to do and it'll do it. Or if you are a tech expert, of course, you have all the control and options and everything that you might want. You can build things yourself. You can have AI build things. You can have a combination of both. It can do whatever your team needs with AI-powered workflows. So join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com slash ATP. That's Zapier spelled Z-A-P-I-E-R. Zapier.com slash ATP. Thanks to Zapier for sponsoring our show.

1:07:05John Siracusa:Let's talk about AI-generated art. And Emma Roth again, The Verge. Emma Roth and The Verge on March 2nd writes, The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a case over whether AI-generated art can obtain copyright. The decision comes after Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist from Missouri, appealed a court's decision to uphold a ruling that found AI-generated art can't be copyrighted. In 2019, the U.S. Copyright Office rejected Thaler's request to copyright an image called A Recent Entrance to Paradise on behalf of an algorithm he created. The Copyright Office reviewed that decision in 2022 and determined that the image doesn't include, quote, human authorship, quote, disqualifying it from copyright protection.

1:07:47John Siracusa:After Thaler appealed the decision, the U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled in 2023 that, quote, human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright, quote. That ruling was later upheld in 2025 by Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C. Last year, the Copyright Office issued new guidance that says AI-generated artwork based on text prompts isn't protected by copyright. The U.S. Federal Circuit Court similarly determined that AI systems can't patent inventions because they aren't human, which the U.S. Patent Office reaffirmed in 2024, with new guidance stating that while AI systems can't be listed as inventors on a patent, people can still use AI-powered tools to develop them.

1:08:21John Siracusa:The UK Supreme Court made a similar determination in a case brought forward by the same fellow.

1:08:26Casey Liss:So this is a background on just establishing what at least U.S. law has been saying about copyright and AI art and a few other things, because the actual topic here is AI-generated code and copyright. And when I put this in the notes, which was a while ago at this point, lots of people online were uh stating flat out as a fact that hey don't you know because of the supreme court decision in the u.s any code you're generating with these coding agents this is back when coding agents were just sort of becoming popular so you know a little while ago now any code you're generating with those coding agents uh is not copyrightable therefore you don't you know you there's no ownership or protection or copyright protection for the code that you're doing for this so if you're if you are coding with one of these agents and you're putting that code into your product what was previously copyrighted code that you owned is no no longer is because you can't copyright ai generated stuff here's what the supreme court says and most of the time people just let that exist as a thing that people say and they'd be sure i didn't know that i didn't know you can't copyright ai generated code but i'm not a lawyer or a judge but my understanding from reading all these stories is this has yet to be adjudicated i know this doesn't help but so like so many things having to do with llms and ai stuff it's an open question the the supreme court has ruled on ai generated art but i wouldn't just simply assume that because they made a decision about ai generated art and patents that that same decision exactly applies as is to ai generated code because historically art and code and patents and things like that have all been treated differently by the courts so as far as i'm aware this is yet another thing involving ai that is like i don't know probably i mean it's it's probably fine maybe i maybe not i don't know what do you think but like it hasn't it hasn't been decided yet there's i haven't even heard any cases coming up about this to you know someone claiming that hey because you used ai to generate that code it's not copyrighted therefore you don't know therefore for blah blah blah blah blah hasn't even come up yet i'm sure it will it will come up just like we have all those cases about you know from the new york times and disney and and all these other companies suing the people suing chat gpt and anthropic and all these other companies for like passages from their books appearing in output like that's already happening like the copyright you know lm's being trained and training but this particular frontier like i feel like coding agents have not been around and in wide use long enough for these laws these big famous lawsuits from big giant companies to appear.

1:10:54But what I will say is human nature being what it is,

1:10:58Casey Liss:and I know this is awful and doesn't sound good and very many things in our legal system are this way, but human nature being what it is and the power structures of the world being what they are, as in governments and rich people and rich companies have lots of power and other people don't, the more big powerful entities use ai generated code in their products the more likely it is that it will magically be deemed to be okay and 100 legal by the courts because everything in the system is like there is to your phrase that you were reaching for before our case well the genie's out of the bottle these big powerful companies want it to be okay and if you if there had been a court case early on?

1:11:47Casey Liss:Maybe it could have gone either way, but I feel like now, no matter what happened, I'm not saying this is even the right decision. I'm just saying this seems like it's going to be what happens because so many people are generating so much code with coding agents that it will be very difficult for any court to decide and then be able to enforce the concept that AI generated code is not copyrightable in any way. Because how do you even disentangle it from all the human written code that it's mixed in with how do you decide what has been ai assisted like the patent cases versus totally ai generated how do you decide what human authorship is for code depending on how long and complicated the prompt is and it's incredibly but like simple human nature it's like the if it looks right it flies right bs that i've talked about before about uh lockheed planes and stuff it's like big powerful companies have been doing it too long and every day that passes every day that passes makes it much more likely this potentially unjust and unjustifiable and unjustified decision will be become fact and reality because it's just the easiest thing to do the big powerful companies want it it's too late now oh well and again i'm not saying that's what i agree with but that's how i feel whenever i see this topic come up and everyone who says hey i get generated code is not copyrightable you're all doomed if you do this in your apps i'm like maybe but probably not

1:13:12John Siracusa:all right so with that in mind can coding agents relicense open source through a clean room quote-unquote implementation of code question mark uh simon wilson writes chardette a python character encoding detector was created by mark pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the lgpl or new lesser public lesser general public license mark retired from public internet life in 2011 and chardette's maintenance was taken over by others most notably dan blanchard who has been responsible for every release since 1.1 in july 2012 two days ago which was i think uh in early march um dan released chart at 7.0.0 with the following note in the release notes ground up mit licensed rewrite of chart at same package name same public api drop-in replacement for chart at 5.x or 6.x just way faster and more accurate yesterday mark pilgrim opened issue 327 colon no right to relicense this project, in which he writes, First off, I would like to thank the current maintainers and everyone who has contributed to and improved this project over the years.

1:14:12John Siracusa:Truly a free software success story. However, it has been brought to my attention that in the release of 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to, quote, relicense, quote, the project. They have no such right. Doing so is an explicit violation of the LGPL. License code when modified must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a complete rewrite is irrelevant since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code, i.e. this is not a clean room implementation. Adding a fancy code generator into the mix does not somehow grant them any additional rights.

1:14:42Casey Liss:So among all the ways that AI and LLMs have the potential to destroy open source, here's a new innovation in that area, which is, hey, what if I take an open source project and I point an LLM at it and say, see this? This is an existing project written in whatever language. It's got a test suite. It's got a spec. It's got documentation. Can you write me a new version of that maybe you say to do it in a different language maybe you say to do it in a new version of the language maybe you just say just do it in the same language or just say here is your here is your here's an existing thing i want another implementation of that and no lines of code are shared it writes entirely new code that passes all the test suite and the other thing or whatever and like that one was gpl licensed now you make it mit licensed gpl tends to be more restrictive what you can do with it mit tends to be more laissez-faire giving people more rights or whatever and like done and done i generated with my code generator this code which is totally copyrightable as far as i'm concerned right i have the copyright to this code uh and no code to share with the old one don't worry about that that was lgpl gpl nope the new one is mit license and in fact i'm just going this is the new version of that old project so now there's a new project also called chardette with a new version number that has a different license it doesn't share a single line of the code with the old one it is a quote-unquote clean room re-implementation and i'm done um and everyone in open source is like wait what like is that that's not a thing is it and they start arguing based on the only precedence they have which is like when they talk about clean room re-implementation it's uh the most famous one in our industry is uh i believe it was compact whoever made the first uh ibm pc clone uh they this is a great story if you ever want to read about old people doing computer stuff um ibm made the original personal pc ibm pc personal computer and it uh it worked a particular way uh and a company wanted to make a computer that could run all the same software as the ibm pc so they set up a team and said we are going to isolate you and we are going to give you a spec of how the thing you should build should work and that spec is basically like how does the ibm pc work but you're not going to see an IBM PC.

1:16:52Casey Liss:We're not going to give you an IBM PC. You're not going to look at an IBM PC. You're not going to look at any IBM documentation. We're just going to say, please build this thing. And you, even though we know what an IBM PC is and are looking at it right now, you aren't. You're just given a spec and you create a thing that conforms to a spec. And when you're done, you have a PC clone that can run IBM PC software, but you've never even seen an IBM PC. You didn't read their manual. You didn't look at their documentation. You don't have the chips in front of you to test or whatever you've now cloned the pc in a quote-unquote clean room re-implantation and it's clean because the people who made it didn't have any knowledge of the thing that they were making you know what i mean and that held up in court and that's why that's why the ibm pc clone exists that's why we're all not we're all weren't using the ibm computer that's why the whole wintel duopoly happens it's a whole big thing but anyway that particular thing legally held muster in court so yep you just made a thing according to a spec and you didn't copy any of their stuff and this is this is the precedent that people are citing for hey i pointed my llm at an open source project and said write that but over here and it did it and lo and behold it passes all the tests and now it's all a clean room implementation that's what the argument about is in mark barrom coming coming out of uh internet retirement and saying uh this is not clean room first of all the people who are prompting the llm were the previous maintainer of this project so they've been exposed to the code constantly and second of all as many people pointed out in the very long argument thread in this github issue that i invite you to look at if you want to see it people are like but you know but the the llm got to see all of the source code i was like well what if the llm just saw the test suite and like well the test suite is part of the source code too what if i just described the project to it and i made sure the llm couldn't see that it's like but you can't control what an llm sees by just telling it not to do stuff because you don't know what it's doing under the covers and on and on and on they go um i don't know how this is going to end up in open source these things tend not to go to court because nobody has any money uh unless like red hats involved or something right um but culturally speaking this is this is like not in keeping with good behavior within the community i would say most people agree some people are excited by it because they're like great now i can go llm re-implement everything but other people are like you know existing implementations have been debugged over the course of years sometimes decades and asking llm to rewrite one and having it pass test suite doesn't prove that it doesn't have new bugs and also it's a cruddy thing to do and also also i don't want to be using a library that i was previously using that was proven over years and then all of a sudden there's a new version of it that doesn't share a single line of code with the other one and i have no idea you know how it was written and i don't trust code written by lms and on and on and on setting aside even the open source license which is like oh the gpl lets the code stay open whereas a bsd license or an mit license lets commercial companies use it and i don't want that and all that other stuff guess what new technology causes disruptions that no one knows how to handle and this is tied directly into hey is lm generated code even copyrightable at all like because a lot of the licensing stuff is like well this copyright of this code is owned by x y and z and they license it to you under these conditions you can do x you can use this stuff with it right but what if nobody owns it like the picture the monkey took of himself like you know what if there's what if there's no is it public domain now because if it's public domain then how can you put any restrictions on what people can do with it

1:20:12Casey Liss:it is extremely uh this is like we should have a name for this corner which is like completely unresolved very problematic issue related to ai and this is another one because and this was a while ago this was in early march i don't i haven't been following this i've been keeping up with it but it's going to come up again and i guess the kicker to this is based on like we talked about the claude code leak quote-unquote leak and uh earlier episode um zach leatherman writes claude please rewrite yourself from scratch using the leak source code as a base and license this new version of yourself under mit because these these ai companies are totally like um you know we scrape the whole web we don't listen to robots.txt we do whatever we want right but then when people scrape them which is called distillation i think is it called distilling distillation i forget what it's called they basically use a model to train a small use you're working on a model and you're like well one way we can train you is model just ask a bunch of questions from claude and like use the answers as your training data you know what i mean and they all hate that so much like wait a second you can't do that we can scrape the world's knowledge but you can't scrape us we're not the world we're a separate private everything we own is just for us everything in the world belongs to us but once we get it you can't do that to us and this is the same thing where it's just like yeah what if i just what if i just tell claude to write a new version of claude based on the leaked source code of claude and now i own claude now it's licensed just to me now i own the copyright because my i prompted the agent to do it and now i'm going to start selling a thing called claude i'm going to use a different name so i don't fall under trademark law which is what open claw got uh you know uh run over by but i'll say hey stop using anthropic claude use my now obviously it's not an issue because what you really like buying is their time on their nvidia gpus that cost a whole jillion dollars and you don't have that but you know if and when these models uh get good enough to run locally and there's some innovation on the front i just saw just before we recorded someone has some startup supposedly has some new silicon that makes inference like 10 times faster than anything else that had come before it and i used it for two seconds and i can't tell if it's true or false but i can tell that the response came back from this llm like instantly and it fundamentally changed the uh the experience of using it but But anyway, someday something like this could actually be a threat to them.

1:22:25Casey Liss:And I bet if you did do this, suddenly Anthropic would have very strong opinions about whether you now own the copyright to code that was created with an LLM. And they would be conflicted. It's like, yeah, pass for Claude Code. You'll totally own the copyright of the code you make unless you ask it to clone anything that we produce. And then you don't own that at all because we own that. Just FYI.

1:22:46John Siracusa:yeah i don't know i don't i don't know how i feel about this but i do feel like it seems pretty gross and i don't think i like this approach at all especially it's doubly gross that it was the person who was or one of the maintainers for such a long time like i don't know i how can you say with an honest i mean because he feels like he owns the product

1:23:06Casey Liss:like decades he's been doing this it's like well yeah mark pilgrim wrote this but that was two decades ago or 15 years ago whatever it was i can't do the math but like this is my project i can do whatever i want with it but then everyone's saying like even if that was true which is probably not but even if it were true it's a betrayal of your users like they don't they were using a thing that they trusted for reasons they thought they understood and now every single line of it is replaced with entirely new code which is ai generated which is itself fraud and there's a different license that's not good yeah that's just not good bob like like setting aside the legalities this is like as they would say back in the day a party foul like you You have broken the social norms.

1:23:45Casey Liss:You have done something that the crowd you are walking in does not accept as, you know, good behavior, even if it turns out to be legal. But the legal questions are also just a gigantic can of worms, like regardless of how the is LLM code copyrightable or not thing turns out. And that's got to get to the courts eventually because the uncertainty is also something that the rich and powerful companies don't like. They want some kind of certainty. and so I think that issue will get forced sooner rather than later but it's a complicated issue it's not obvious what the right thing to do is like I all these things people talk about I bet as a listener you would feel more comfortable if we all could tell you this is exactly how it should be but I personally I don't I don't actually know like I don't know what the right call is I think they made the right call on copyrightable art I think that one is more cut and dried because it's the human creation of it is so tied up in it, but code, I don't know.

1:24:42Casey Liss:I could have told it, like, I agreed with the decision on the Oracle, like Java Oracle, like re-implementing Java, like that APIs aren't copyrightable. I agree with that decision that you could, you could should be able to just look at the API and write your own implementation. That's fine. But this one, I don't know what the right answer is. Like I do know that it's a crappy thing to do in this context, but I don't know about the legality.

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1:27:21Marco Arment:differences and no they did not record the same of everything so wearing the two watches it's very similar like if you if you've ever changed apple watches sometimes your calorie counts will be somewhat far off on the new one and it seems like it seems like calorie estimation is just that it's an estimation i believe the way calorie counting usually works on fitness watches is they basically extrapolate for like the heart rate your body measurements like you know your body weight and height your age and the heart rate and maybe the type of activity and they extrapolate based on that, how many calories you are probably burning based on your heart rate in that scenario.

1:28:00Marco Arment:I think. I could be wrong about that, but I think that's roughly what they're doing. And the thing is, there's a bunch of estimations involved there. And so any of that data that's different between different watches or any of those assumptions that are weighted differently or based on different modeling will result in different calories being reported. Generally speaking, the calorie counts reported by smartwatches should basically be considered an approximation of the effort you expended relative to other similar workouts that you've done on the same watch. So, you know, like when I do my three times a week trainer workouts, the calorie counts there give me a rough approximation of like, yeah, this was a hard one or this was a less intense one based on, you know, what I've seen from other workouts with that same watch of that same type.

1:28:54Marco Arment:But the calorie counts between the Suunto and the Garmin and the Apple Watch Ultra and regular Apple Watches, they're all different from each other. So the calorie counts themselves, those are not absolutes. They're all estimates. And again, they should only be used in terms of relative comparison between themselves doing the same kinds of activities. For GPS, that's a little bit different. GPS has a real answer. And so you can kind of, there's more of a quality judgment there and there is kind of a truth to be found there. What I have seen is that every smartwatch and phone, for that matter, reports GPS a little bit differently.

1:29:34Marco Arment:And the main reason, I think, based on what I know about GPS and what I've learned so far, um gps if it's if it's inaccurate if you have like a little bit of a of like a signal weakness or you know the antennas pick up like a reflection of a signal off a building instead of the direct signal um what you tend to get with that is kind of a wobble you'll you'll have gps that seems like maybe you're like it'll it'll look on the map kind of like you're zigzagging back and forth within the path more than you really did or if it's if it's like city streets it'll show you crossing the street sometimes and you really didn't cross the street and part of the reason why i like dual band gps watches which in the apple world is just the apple watch ultra but in in you know the other fitness watches world they have many more models with dual band gps part of the reason why dual band gps is better is that they use both bands to try to figure out like what was the more likely path this person actually took because if there's like a problem or if there's a weakness or reflection with the signal from one of the bands odds are the other one won't have it quite the same way and so they can kind of like average them out or try to you know try to filter them in clever ways but gps data is something that needs filtering to really make it make sense like sometimes if you have like a bad reading it could show it as being 100 feet away or something or 10 feet away or something and so different watches will also not only have different you know antennas and things to pick up the signals but they'll also have different algorithms for how they're filtering that data.

1:31:07Marco Arment:And even within the Apple Watch, you'll have different apps that have different filtering algorithms because the Apple Watch delivers you what it thinks is accurate GPS data, but it also has wobbles and imprecision built into certain signals that come in. And different apps will sample them differently and will filter them differently. So GPS is also an approximation, but what I have seen is the Suunto watch so far seems to be, it seems to under-report distance compared to the Apple Watch Ultra by about 5 % to 10%. Now with GPS, if you're thinking about that wobble effect, if you're walking in a straight line and your GPS points kind of show you wobbling left and right a little bit, then the wobbled data set is going to be a little bit longer distance because you're burning up some fake distance with those fake wobbles.

1:32:03Marco Arment:So what I tend to think is that with GPS measurements on smartwatches, I think the shortest measured distance is probably the more accurate one. And in this case, so far what I'm seeing every time is that the Suunto is a little bit shorter than the Apple Watch Ultra. So I think the Suunto is a little bit more accurate based on that.

1:32:24Casey Liss:My experience with my dog's GPS is the opposite of that where when signal gets crappy or has some kind of interference, the the line on like where did you walk your dog will suddenly have this perfectly straight segment and i know that segment is wrong like there's actually there was wobble the path does wind but it was like well we had bad signal we got you here we got you there it's two points we connect them with a line so that could that's the other case of like it could be you're getting shorter measurements because you should check on pedometer plus plus to see well i guess you can't but like it would be good to see the actual data because if you see wobbly line versus straight line and there's the same number of points fine but if you see wobbly line versus straight line and the straight one only has two points, that's not more accurate.

1:33:03Marco Arment:Yeah, and that's probably a smoothing artifact. That's probably like if the path was actually shaped wobbly, it's possible that the algorithm that was taking those measurements might have thought this was probably really a straight line. And so they simplify it.

1:33:16Casey Liss:Or maybe they didn't have more than two data points. Like maybe they couldn't get satellite signal for these 10 feet. And now that's all they've got is this point and that point. And what can they do? They got to connect them with a line.

1:33:24Marco Arment:Yeah, that's also very possible. Because like, you know, with GPS, is like you have a certain amount of precision with the signal and like the weaker or or more kind of dirty uh or unreliable the signal is the less certainty the radios can derive about your actual location you know the so it's also possible that like between if between different points the kind of circle of doubt around your point around your location where like they're they think you're somewhere in here but they their precision has temporarily decreased because of conditions like that can also cause the same kind of wobble so it it's it's an imprecise thing um and and so again kind of like calorie counting like it's more of an estimate but gps is much

1:34:07Casey Liss:more precise than calorie counting well you know the solution underscore will tell you more watches yeah so far i'm on there just average them all together all right and then

1:34:16John Siracusa:steven goes all right what's the difference between marco putting all of his mac mini servers in a data center versus just putting them in his home business class fiber service has no data caps, so the data center doesn't really have anything over regular business fiber. You can have backup electricity at home, so it's not about the data center power. Based on Marco's story, it doesn't seem like the people in the data center will physically help him. Like if he needs to restart a machine, they're not going to walk down the aisle and push the button for him. So what makes the data center hosting more professional than just hosting them at home?

1:34:43Marco Arment:Great question. And for a while, I was hosting them at home, and so I can tell you exactly the difference. So what Stephen says is correct, that most residential fiber services, like Verizon Fios I have here, prohibit running servers. Now, what does that mean? That's a very vague thing. Generally, I think what they mean by that is using a lot of upstream bandwidth to serve live traffic from people making requests inbound to your IP address for some kind of open port that you run services off of. In practice, that's going to be really hard to enforce. and I've never heard of it actually being enforced against anybody, but that is officially against their terms of service to run servers like that.

1:35:24Marco Arment:There's a few things that I think wouldn't have triggered this for me. One is that the usage pattern of these particular servers running transcripts are mostly downloading data. So they download a bunch of data and they upload a little bit of data because they download the MP3s and listen to them and transcribe them and they upload the transcripts, which are mostly text, so they're small. that usage pattern looks like residential usage that kind of just looks like somebody has is running netflix on the tv um so i don't think that would really you know flag a bunch of attention to it um now the question is what if you just get business internet service you can get a business i have one at the restaurant the main reason why not to do that is business internet service is just much more expensive for the exact same service like that's it's the standard kind of enterprise pricing model.

1:36:14Marco Arment:It's like, oh, you're a business slash wedding? You know, whatever it is, these keywords that make things more expensive. Baby? Yeah, exactly. Business is one of those. And so business internet service costs two to three times as much in most places for the same amount of bandwidth. But that being said, you know, if I was, if I wanted to run this like on the up and up, I could do business internet. There is the question though of redundancy. so a data center like they have redundancy built in they usually have multiple internet connections from multiple providers possibly on multiple physical routes so like you know if a line gets cut somewhere the entire data center isn't just out of luck for a while that's certainly a big advantage there on the internet service now let's talk about power at a restaurant having redundant power having like a big backup generator or something actually in new york does not make a lot of sense because as I learned from my health code class, you are required to close if you lose power from the utility company.

1:37:17Marco Arment:For any amount of time, like even if it's just a hiccup? If it's like a brief blip, that's fine. But like if you have like a total power outage, like a sustained power outage, you are required to close the restaurant and have all the customers leave.

1:37:29John Siracusa:Yeah, but like a Generac or whatever would make that not an issue, right?

1:37:34Marco Arment:technically you are correct but it is against the rules the health code rules are if you lose utility power you must close the restaurant and you can see why they would have that yeah totally

1:37:44Casey Liss:like well you know i have a generator so i don't have to worry about this but of course the generator doesn't run the whole restaurant just the essential things and what i decide is essential is perfectly fine and so there's no chance of foodborne illness because i decided one thing wasn't actually essential and it turns out it was like the law is a lot easier to just say look you lose power tough luck. Maybe they'll have to update it someday when every place has their own solar panels powering them. But for now, I understand this law entirely.

1:38:07Marco Arment:Yeah, like that's it. Yeah, you can exactly see why. It's like, well, are all your walk-in fridges and stuff on that? Like, you know, what about emergency things? Like, you know, are your bathroom exit signs? Like, you know, there's tons of stuff where like if, you know, if a restaurant just has power to a few key things that might not necessarily be enough for the health department. So there is actually a pretty strong incentive for restaurants not to have much redundant power. I, of course, have like UPSs on my network equipment just, you know, for brief blips to not disrupt things. But you know, that's so there's not redundant power at most restaurants for good reasons.

1:38:40Marco Arment:At least not long running redundant power. Data centers have tons of redundant power. That's kind of the whole thing. Like they have a huge ridiculous setup of like two different power sources, two different sets of generators and backups and all these different switching and all these different things. It's it's it's made for that. That's what they're designed for. So in practice, the odds of an outage affecting servers I'm running in my house is far higher than the odds of an outage affecting a data center. And especially for that outage lasting more than a minute or two, odds are much, much better at a data center that you're going to stay online.

1:39:15Marco Arment:Then there is the question of the amounts of power and bandwidth needed. now i know from setting up groups of six mac minis in my house as i was like setting up the computer before i bring them to the data centers my total usage for the 48 mac minis if i ran them all in my house would need about 1.6 gigabits per second sustained all the time down that is more than i can get in a home connection i don't think i have anything above gigabit available to me right now. So 1.6 gigabits sustained would be the 48 Mac minis downstream when they're at full load. Also, they would use about 2000 watts. Then also there is the the heat and the cooling and just the amount of physical space they need.

1:40:07Marco Arment:Like, yeah, they're small, but, you know, my house is not that big that I have a room I could devote to like

1:40:12Casey Liss:a full height rack to run a bunch of Mac minis in. And normally, if they weren't Mac minis, there would also be the noise. I know that's probably not an issue for the Mac minis, but for basically anything that's not a Mac mini, noise becomes a factor pretty quickly.

1:40:26Marco Arment:Yeah. And so you start, you know, you have all this space, you have all the heat, you have the bandwidth from your business Fios connection that is going to be used. Like, you know, if I had a business Fios connection to run these on, I would probably also want a separate residential connection to run the rest of my personal stuff on because it would take up the whole connection. So once you start adding up these costs, you're talking hundreds of dollars probably – I mean for a two gigabit connection business-wise, fiber-wise, you're probably talking about$500 a month. Then you're talking about 2 ,000 watts all the time of power consumption.

1:41:00Marco Arment:That's a few hundred bucks probably. And by the way, that 2 ,000 watts, that's like roughly one and a half space heaters worth of heat. that in the summertime, you have to cool that. So you're also going to be spending more energy cooling that heat out of whatever room it's in. You start getting into hundreds of dollars per month and maybe almost$1 ,000 a month. It's like, well, then you could just get the data center for that. And then finally, in terms of, Stephen said, it sounds like the people in the data center will not physically help me if something needs to be rebooted. That's actually not true.

1:41:37Marco Arment:They have a service called Remote Hands. I think most data centers have something like this where I can pay some hourly rate that I can have them go and talk them through doing stuff to my rack and they will do it for me. It is, I think it's like, you know, one or two hundred dollars an hour. So it's not something I would want to do willy nilly. But if I really needed something, I could call them and have them go do something for me. So all of that, that's why data center hosting makes sense because you could do all these things at home. some of them would be significantly less fault tolerant if they were in your home and ultimately the economics of doing things once you have more than a couple of these it it starts to not make

1:42:18Casey Liss:sense to do it at home you left off your most important point which is uh uh sort of the opposite of your it's not my fault it's uh it's not my fault but it is my problem well if something goes right if you were hosting this in your house and something went wrong with your like redundant power supplying or something went wrong with your internet connection you have to fix that because it's your run you're running the quote-unquote data center out of your house now if it's in the data center it's still your problem but you can't you physically can't fix it you don't own the data center you can't fix that problem so at the very least you have the relief of knowing well there's nothing i can do about it it sucks and it is my problem and not that it really matters that much for transcription because it's not like it's a live service the customers are using but like the relief of knowing i can't fix the power or cooling problem to the data center they have to fix that and if they turn out to be really bad at fixing that you could go to another data center in theory because in theory it's a competitive business whereas if you're hosting it in your house guess what now you've got another job yeah like what if i'm like on vacation and and

1:43:18Marco Arment:do i feel like call one of my neighbors and say hey can you please go into my house tell them you pay them two hundred dollars an hour to be a remote hand yeah right yeah and and go into your house

1:43:27Casey Liss:and uh yeah don't don't go into the other rooms just into the one room that has the mac minis in it.

1:43:32Marco Arment:All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Quince, Zapier, and Lisa. 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. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about expansion for Macs in a world without the Mac Pro. What does that look like? What are our options here? We'll talk about that in Overtime. You can join to listen to here at atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss

1:45:02John Siracusa:alright i bought myself a toy a couple of weeks ago um is it a mac pro no goodness Who would ever buy a Mac Pro deliberately, right, John?

1:45:12Casey Liss:I would buy one if the price was right.

1:45:16John Siracusa:No, I bought myself a GL iNet toy. So GL iNet does a lot of things. If you know them, you probably know them for their travel routers, which I still have one in the tailgate tub. I have a different one that I'm using occasionally when I travel in addition to the UTR, the Unified Travel Router, depending on the situation. But this is not a router at all. this is something different what this is is a poe powered kvm so what i realized when i was doing the work on um building rebuilding the nuk that was previously my channel server in connecticut and then became the the host of all my docker containers among other things and i put proxmox on it what i realized when i started that process was i need a physical screen and i need a physical keyboard and a physical mouse.

1:46:07John Siracusa:All of these things I have, I have them in the house. I have a travel monitor that I use, you know, when I go and work remotely, which is typically most Wednesday mornings, I do that because it's much easier to study for ATP than it is to write code on, you know, a 13-inch Mac or 14-inch MacBook Pro and a like 10 or 12-inch accessory monitor. And I have that, but it, it, it's either USB-C or either mini or micro HDMI, whatever the small one is, I always get it backwards. And I have a like full size to micro cable or whatever it is, but that's like a pain in the butt. Cause then I got to go get it.

1:46:44John Siracusa:And I usually know where it is, but I got to find it in the pile of cables and then you got to get it. And then you got to power the display. If you're not powering it over, you know, USB-C, if it's not data and power in one, then you got to power it as well. And then I have an old, actually, I think for my iMac pro, I have my keyboard and trackpad from that. And so I can get those out, but then I need a couple of lightning cables. And I'm starting to run low on those, actually, because there's almost no devices that I use in my life that still need them. And it's just kind of annoying and burdensome.

1:47:13John Siracusa:Granted, first world problem, for sure, but burdensome nonetheless. Now, my friend Alex from Tailscale, a past sponsor, I think future sponsor, if I'm not mistaken. on the TailScale YouTube channel, he had pointed out that GLINet makes the Comet PoE, which is, or Comet PoE Remote KVM Control. So what this is is a little box, and it has, you know, an Ethernet jack, two USB-C ports, an HDMI port, and a USB-A port. And what you do is you plug in either USB-C for power, or if you have PoE available, power over Ethernet available, which I do, Then you just plug in an Ethernet cable that gives you power and network connectivity.

1:47:55John Siracusa:You have a USB-C cable that they provide that can go into USB-A or that does go to USB-A, and that provides both keyboard and mouse across one cable. Then you connect HDMI from the device into this box, and you can optionally add some sort of external disk drive on the USB-A port. But what this does is it gives me network-attached, quote-unquote, physical access to a computer. Because as far as the computer that I'm using is concerned, this is a physical monitor. It's a physical keyboard. It's a physical mouse. It's just that this fancy little box happens to be beaming it across the internet. And the reason I saw it on the Tailscale YouTube channel is because it will natively jump on your tail net, which is super freaking cool.

1:48:43John Siracusa:So what that means is I have a couple of screenshots that I will share both in the chat and in the show notes and everywhere else. But here's a screenshot of me using the Proxmox NUC from this GLINet thing. And you can see that I just went to a URL on my tail net and I have a terminal window where I whiffed the password a couple times. But that's neither here nor there. But anyways, I have a terminal window. And so that's pretty cool. But it's not just for Linux machines. If you want, you can connect it to, I don't know, a Mac. And so here's another screenshot of me using it with my Mac mini that runs Plex and Jellyfin and Channels.

1:49:24John Siracusa:And so this is a really silly little contraption that generally speaking will live in a box. But on the occasions I need to connect physically to something, this is going to be so much nicer and so much easier than dragging out 17 different cables. I'm being hyperbolic, but, you know, 17 cables, a monitor, a monitor power, you know, that one random HDMI or mini or whatever HDMI to full size HDMI cable. It's all just in this one little box. And then I use it from whatever computer I want. I could use it from an iPad if I wanted. And it's great. And if I wanted to install software on whatever this is connected to, I can upload an ISO to the KVM and have the ISO masquerade as a USB key connected to the device, to the computer.

1:50:09John Siracusa:I've never tried this, but I believe that to be the case. So I don't know. There's not much to be said here other than that. I'm happy to answer questions if you have any. But this is one of those neat little things that, did I need it? Absolutely not. And it happened to be on sale, whatever that sale was a couple of weeks ago on Amazon. I forget what specifically it was.

1:50:25Marco Arment:They're always inventing something.

1:50:26John Siracusa:Yeah, they're always inventing some reason. And so it was a little under a hundred bucks. And I think this is a device that should cost a little under a hundred bucks. And it's really neat to have. And I really like it. And Marco, if you had the need to have quote unquote physical access to only one of your 48 Mac minis, I highly suggest this thing. I would not necessarily put this on all 48 of them. But if you had one that was like a controller or something for all the others, this would be a really great way to have, what did you call it, like remote hands or whatever? your helping hands, this would be a pretty good way to do it.

1:50:58John Siracusa:Because again, as far as the physical computer is concerned, this is a physical keyboard, a physical mouse, and a physical monitor. It just so happens that they're not those things and they're actually all being presented on the internet.

1:51:10Marco Arment:That's pretty cool. I can actually see, like, I actually might at some point get one of these. Like right now, the way my servers are set up, there is no one controlling server. They all are peers and they all just connect to the web service and get jobs and work on them and submit them back to the web service. Cattle, not pets. Right. And right now, one thing I've thought about is should I at some point put some other kind of server in the data center, in the rack with the other ones on their network to do kind of controlling things? Right now, my power, the ATS, the transfer switch, my power switch thing, I have one that has remote control over the ports.

1:51:56Marco Arment:So right now, if I needed to reboot the Mac minis, like one of the Mac minis, if I need a power cycle one, and I can't do it remotely via SSH or remote desktop, I can log into one of the other ones as long as any of them are working. I can log into one of them and open up like via remote desktop, open up like the local browser interface to the power unit and reboot the entire bank of six that whatever the problem one is plugged into.

1:52:25Casey Liss:so i still have the remote hands problem of like i you can tell me maybe you'll discover this or maybe a mac and i will tell you but i think there's still some stuff where you need to press the physical button on the mac mini like to enter recovery mode and stuff and this kvm will not hold down the power button on your mac mini i mean that's true if i was to the point where i had

1:52:45Marco Arment:to enter recovery mode i would just drive to the data center and like pick it up bring it back to my house and remote hands deal with but yeah but what but what am i in recovery mode for

1:52:52Casey Liss:yeah i don't know i just say like it this this the when you have actual like data center hardware they try to make it so that you can do everything remotely or at the very least do everything from like a console in the data center but with macs i'm again maybe mac admins can correct me it just seems to me that there's probably some remaining stuff like hope that you that you need uh in the silicon age you still need to hold down the power button physically and the kvm can't do that unlike the good old days where the power button used to be on the keyboard i'm not sure you guys were mac users back then, but it was cool.

1:53:21John Siracusa:I'm familiar with this as a thing, but no, I was not a Mac user then. Also, it's worth noting, Marco, that this thing does have, like, the web UI has, like, a little toolbox, they call it. And so this is where you can, like, paste something and then into the web UI and then tell the web UI, okay, basically type this on the remote machine, right? So it's kind of like a very, it's a very rudimentary but functional clipboard sharing, right? Well, another thing it has is a wake on land section. So you can add like, you know, Mac addresses and name them and have the KVM fire a wake on land packet over to whatever device you need.

1:53:59John Siracusa:Is that useful for you? I don't know, but it's neat that it's a thing. And so, yeah, I really, really like this little box. It's the sort of thing that I certainly didn't need. I used birthday money for it. So it was the perfect birthday gift. And again, like, I don't know if I would want to watch a full screen video on it like i mean using the mac on it it's pretty freaking quick well especially when it's in the same house but it's pretty freaking quick but the point is i typically plan to use this for situations where i just need to plug something into a physical screen and this is probably going to be the most convenient way to do it because as long as i poe or you know a usbc input from something even like a battery pack as long as i have an ethernet connection, which I have in several places in the house, this is such an easy way to get what is quote unquote physical access to a computer.

1:54:49John Siracusa:And I really like it. And the fact that it's on my tail net makes it super nice because, you know, I was thinking in the scenario where I'm like going out of town on vacation or something like that, I can put this on either the Mac mini or the, the prox mox box, mox, mox, mox, mox. Uh, anyways, I can put this on one of those. And, you know, if I have some sort of issue that would typically require physical contact with the machine, I can log into this thing and perhaps work whatever magic I wouldn't be able to otherwise. So, uh, yeah, maybe I'm the only one who wants it. Maybe this is not appealing to anyone else.

1:55:19John Siracusa:And, and like, you don't have to use this with tail scale, by the way, it's just nice that it's tail scale native. So you don't have to think about it, but, uh, really good stuff. And I'll put a link to an affiliate link, to be honest in the show notes, and I'll put a link to Alex's video, which covers it in about 10 minutes, but I thought it was cool.