Two tickets for Departure, please (Interview)

29:29I'm looking at it as you're talking. It's spectacular. Yeah, let's add it to the show notes maybe. And we can add a link. Yeah, and we'll throw it in the chapter or something. I was going to say, because you were talking about how get into the hands of users and then see how it's used with different letters next to each other, etc. And I'm just curious because it's a pixel font. And I'm sure there's a certain, you know, I would say probably artboard you have to work with. And because it's pixel, you probably have limiting factors. So even when you have to make fine-tuned changes, how limiting is it to be a pixel font to make those changes?

30:09Because there's only so many places you can move it that would logically make sense based on the design of the typeface. Right. That's part of the fun, I think, because it's very constrained. It's very constrained. And then once you decide on what that grid is, you have to stick to it. I mean, if you're going to be pure about it, you can also, I mean, these days we don't need to have them, you know, they're not bitmap anyway. So you could go into a half pixel if you want, or, you know, you can really bend it. And I've seen fonts that bend it a little bit while still capturing the spirit of a pixel font.

30:42But for this project departure, I've stuck 100 % to the pixel. And I think that's actually, you know, part of the challenge. That's the challenge and that's the fun to like make it work somehow and accept some of the, either it goes this way or that way. You know, either this pixel is on or off. That's it. It's kind of the beauty of the, you're saying the constraint, but it's kind of the beauty of the inevitable result of where the pixel has to land. And it's the ending result of its true landing on the screen in the ending place it is, if that makes sense at all. The inevitable future of where this pixel lands is the beauty of the thing, is kind of what I'm trying to say.

31:28I'm looking at the site, though, and I'm looking at the main header where it says departure mono. Can you walk us through these character changes? What are these different characters? Can you talk about? I see the end kind of dips beneath and there's some characters that are changing. So for those listening, if you go to departuremodel.com, you will follow along with this. But can you walk me through what these different characters are? And kind of like, like there's an A that isn't an A. Like what is that character that, and then you have the E that flips backwards and some other character. Like help me understand what those are.

32:00Yeah, all of the letters in there are pulled from the font. And when they're swapping, they're kind of like vaguely in the same shape of, let's say, an E is rotating to a Euro. And I wouldn't think that hard about it because there's not really a logic to it. It's just, it's kind of this glitchy effect. But this is kind of... Sorry, I was going to say, if you go down to the... There's like the type specimen thing lower down the site that has not every single glyph, but you can find the glyph that you want. For example, the A that's not an A is a Greek lambda letter. The R that's not an R is the Indian rupee currency symbol.

32:42You could probably find most of them down there. But the idea was just to kind of glitch out the word. There's obviously like a – it fits the vibe, the retro aesthetic of glitching text and, you know, computer bugs and stuff. But I think it's purely aesthetic. For my Silicon Valley fans out there, the reason why I brought that up was because – are either of you Silicon Valley the TV show fans? Yeah. Yes. Okay. So then in the title sequence, Facebook swaps to use the Cyrillic alphabet from, because for a bit there, that was the Russian hoax or not hoax, whatever, pick your side. I don't care which one you're on.

33:24The point is, is the title sequence swapped Facebook out to use the Cyrillic alphabet in some of their characters. And I was like, well, that kind of reminds me of what you're doing here. And so I wasn't sure if that was also a deep cut or there was a purpose behind it. Now it is. Now it is, yeah. Adam's really reading the tea leaves for some Silicon Valley references in there. You know, unintentionally, though, we're both big fans of the show, so who knows, it might have seeped in via osmosis. There you go. It'd be kind of cool if there was a way we can go back in time and get Departure Mono on one of those screens.

33:56Oh, that would be cool. You know, that'd be cool. Oh, we need the time travel device. It should be. I mean, we already got the font. Now we need the time travel device. Yeah. Very cool. I love departure mono. I also get severance vibes. Is that just me? Like for some reason, I'm reminded of severance as well. Well, is that? I don't know. I'm very intuitive and I have no facts. I know what you're saying. It's like maybe there's a depressingly utilitarian, bureaucratic. Okay, there you go. See, he's better than this. Computerized. Not that the font is bureaucratic or whatever, but it certainly is utilitarian.

34:30And there's something about computer interfaces, text-based computer interfaces, that reminds us of a time when, I don't know, when work was like this and that's all it was, is sitting in front of text all day long. Right, PC load. There's also like some PC load letter. You know, there's like this idea of like, did you get that memo? It's because it is utilitarian. It feels like it's used in a skiff, in a military skiff or something, which is what Severance is like, you know, they're down in this basement. and yeah well said Toby I don't want to malign it though by any means because I love this font but it sounds like I'm maligning it I'm flattered too that you're referencing it's such an amazing show I can't wait for the next season it's coming soon I think I saw the trailer recently which I when I say I saw it I saw that it existed so you don't watch trailers and I didn't actually watch it I will watch teasers not trailers just so you know I will watch the trailer if I don't if I'm not going to watch the movie for sure I'll just watch the two and a half minutes and be like I got the gist.

35:30Yeah, that's actually what I do in supplement of actually watching the full length. I'll just watch the trailer for the ones I definitely never watch. I don't care. Yeah, totally. I feel like trailers have become a lot more revealing than they used to be. I think watching the trailer can spoil an entire movie these days. It didn't used to seem like that, but. I would agree with you in spirit. However, I recently watched the trailer for Back to the Future Part 3, which was cut in the late 80s, early 90s. And because we were waiting for our kids to actually like get ready to watch the movie the kids are like let's just watch the trailer while we wait it's literally a synopsis of the entire movie like beat for beat it tells you everything that happens in the movie and i'm like that's not creative at all folks it's just a summary so maybe you have rose colored glasses there because at least that one just spelled it out just like cliff's notes uh going another layer deeper on this severance deep cut or potential deep cut I'm looking at some of the screens of their actual screens and it looks like they're using not even a monospace font oh really yeah like if you easily google severance TV show when showing computer screen and you go to the images tab in Google you will find several that show these severance screens of the of the TV show but of the actual screen on their computer you will find that pretty easily It looks like just like an Arial type font or just a common sans font.

36:59Nothing that's particular. But I do agree, Jay. I think that it wouldn't be surprising if they used a version of this style. But the fact that it didn't kind of surprises me. My biggest, when I look at Departure Mono, the thing that I remember is going to the public library, using the terminals, which were still dumb terminals, like an amber CRT with a keyboard that connected to some computer in the basement to look up the library catalog and find something and find its Dewey decimal number and then go locate it on the shelves. That's what it reminds me of the most. And that was very much, would have been implemented in one of these bitmap pixel font, monospace pixel fonts at the time.

37:43So that's the reference that comes to mind when I look at this. Well, before we leave Departure, Oh, I missed the opportunity for a great pun right there. Can we do it? Do it again, do it again. Pure regret. I don't know, the regret might be better, but let's try it. Before we depart this topic, a couple more things on the website. We know you have other collabs. We want to talk about your icons as well. The game at the bottom, Super Rad. I can't remember what this game is. It's like a mixture between Pong and Space Invaders. What was the game called? Arkanoid was the original game. There's a few different versions.

38:16I think there's a lot of... Breakout's another one? There's Breakout, Arkanoid. The one I remember is Arkanoid, but there were many versions of this game at the time. And this is the game where you are a little platform and you move left and right and you stop a ball or whatever it is from going out the bottom and it goes up and it destroys things up top. And then you also have the super cool HUD. I don't know. It looks like what Luke Skywalker was looking at before he was told to trust his instincts and use the Force. Ah, the flight deck. Yes. We have internal names for all these things. The game, we call it Deparkanoid because it's Departure Arkanoid.

38:57Gotcha. This HUD thing, yeah, the flight deck. So which part, so the flight deck is, these are both remarkable, but I see the score on Deparkanoid, but what, is that the departure part or are these other glyphs also from the font or these are just giving the vibe? Yeah, the score in the game, the score is in departure. And if you beat the game, if you've got that far, then there's some, you know, congratulations, you won. Oh, I didn't know you could win. Insert coin type stuff if you beat it. It's pretty hard, actually. I turned the, you know, I made the ball move pretty fast and it's hard to beat, but.

39:35I'm actually getting close now. Adam, please take over the show for a little while. I'm sorry, I'm playing this game. So I just can't do it. Okay, so I think you should 100 % release. this is a real game. It should not just be stuck on the bottom of your website for fun only. I think it'd actually be a great, if you haven't done this already, maybe I missed that, but it'd be a great hack to raise even more awareness to departure. Right? Like if this game existed out there and the score was in it and it was like an ode to it, it's the perfect example because you command your own destiny. Not a bad idea.

40:10I think there was another version of this to answer your first question, that these are graphical elements. It's not all completely constructed from the graphical characters in the font. There was a version that I built when Helena was still designing the font that used mostly the box drawing characters and things like that. But there are purely graphical elements in here, like the paddle and the bricks. But yeah, that's cool to hear. Maybe we will. Maybe we'll package it up. I would just like to announce that I have won the game. This is just one level. Oh, is there more than one level? It says right click for...

40:50I was going to say, this is only one level, and it's not actually fully built out, even on this level. So it is a different undertaking to make this a fully fledged game, but intriguing for sure. You can tell we like Easter eggs a lot in all the things we make. We like stashing them everywhere, and I think the closer you look, the more you'll find. Some of them are totally meaningless, but this one was a lot of fun to make for sure. So I might assign some homework for you or Easter eggs. You should make this flight deck somehow into a game that you can play. Like inside there, you can like tilt it and move it and then shoot things or something.

41:26Just an idea. Just a thought in case you were running out of stuff to work on. You must not have been listening. Yeah. No, I'm talking about the flight deck, dude. Oh, is that what you were talking about? The flight deck? Well, you just basically said my idea, but a different application of my idea. But that's okay. No, because you were talking about the game at the bottom, weren't you? Yeah. I'm talking about a thing that's not a game yet. Just poking it, man. I mean, both. Yeah, that's a good idea. I mean, if the mouse would control your 3D, your orientation in 3D space. At this point, it's not interactive yet.

41:56So I think actually it would be really fun to make it interactive. It looks interactive, but it's not actually interactive. I dig it all. But a lot of, the way that it's built is like, some of this is live text. Some of these are like pre-elements in the code. Other parts of this, it's like kind of a, But Helena did this, obviously, static design in Figma. That was basically how this looked, but it wasn't moving. And I was like, oh, we could do some, we could make this a little dynamic. And some of these, it's like a hand-animated SVG, basically. All these stars that fly past, they're, yeah, basically they're randomly generated and projected in 3D space.

42:35And they move past the camera using some simple matrix math and stuff. but it's all kind of randomized. So it is sort of built a little bit like a game at the moment, but there's no interaction. You're halfway there. Yeah. Okay, friends, I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Timescale Avthar. So Avthar, help me understand what exactly is Timescale? So Timescale is a Postgres company. We build tools in the cloud and in the open source ecosystem that allow developers to do more with Postgres. So using it for things like time series analytics and more recently, AI applications like RAG and Search and Agents.

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44:23Get started today. It's a PGAI project. And just go to any of the timescale GitHub repos, either the PGAI one or the PG vector scale one, and follow one of the tutorials to get started with becoming an AI engineer just using Postgres. Okay, just use Postgres and just use Postgres to get started with AI development, build RAG, search AI agents, and it's all open source. Go to timescale.com slash AI, play with PGAI, play with PG Vector Scale, all locally on your desktop. It's open source. Once again, timescale.com slash AI. And also by our friends over at Wix, I've got just 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for freelancers, agencies, and enterprises.

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45:55So this is all in the browser, of course. So in that regard, it's already open source because, you know, we ship our source to the browser. but is the site itself also open source insofar as maybe like pre-build so people can go and look and see how you built this stuff? Yeah, we weren't sure we were going to open source the site early on. We had a discussion about it. We ended up just giving away like we do most of our other projects. But yeah, the source is open. It is a client-side SolidJS application with, like I said, a lot of custom pieces. Like this flight deck thing you're talking about is like a hand-animated SVG.

46:32The game at the bottom, I forget if I just built it with regular JavaScript or P5. I'd have to go and check. But yeah, it's basically a solid JS client-side app, and the source is all available on the GitHub. Very cool. And it appears that you're giving all this stuff away for free. We haven't even talked about your icon set yet, Phosphor, which has some pretty big logos, as the Valley likes to say, right? Some pretty big companies using it. that's a term I'm sure you guys are well aware of which I think is somewhat new is people talking about their logos and they're just referring to their clout faring customers but you don't have customers you have people that use your stuff for free because you're giving it away for free with donate buttons can we talk about that side of it this is obviously passion and art and creativity driven things you guys have jobs and stuff so what about the open source side and how if and how you'd like to capture back some of the value that you're giving away to the world.

47:34What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think you hit on that. These are both departure and FOS for our passion projects, and we do it because we love it. That's the main thing. And I think for me, the most rewarding part is seeing it in the hands of other people, seeing different companies and individuals use it. And that reach to me is much more important than making a few dollars or I don't know, even making, we don't really know, right, how much money we could make if we charge for it. But I think that was not the goal for these projects. And yeah, I think also another dimension is community. And I think that's something that's really rewarding too, is seeing communities build around these and working with the community.

48:23Let's say recently, but for Departure Mono, I worked with a bunch of folks to help build out the Cyrillic alphabet and add that in. And I needed some people who really use this alphabet and to help test and to give feedback. Well, it looks wonky. And that's actually another joyful dimension for me is the community and that aspect of it. So it's not about the money. Would we like to have, let's say we have a lot of companies using our icon library, Phosphor. it would be great if they threw us a few bucks, you know, not required by any means. But I think if that was more of the culture, I think that would be awesome.

49:07And so how do we get there? I don't know. Yeah. There's something that you can, you can ruin a project by monetizing it and you can, you can ruin your excitement about it and your motivation to do it, or at least fundamentally change the motivations there. As soon as you start charging for something, then you're beholden to your clients, right? They're not your users or your community. They're your customers. And that means, you know, that might mean working on a weekend when you'd rather not, that might mean, yeah, providing value that you'd rather not. And I think for both of us, especially for Helena, but definitely for both of us, like we set out to make the best icon library period and no compromises there.

49:50We wouldn't make changes to support a bigger customer who is asking for an icon that really didn't have general applicability. Like we wouldn't add anything to the set just because an important client asked for it. We wouldn't sacrifice in, I think, the design principles to add things that we didn't feel belonged there. And then also, like I was saying, we want to keep it fun. So taking the money incentive out of it means we really work on it when we feel like working on it. And historically, that's been a release every six months or so, six months to nine months, something like that, and a lot of new icons and combing through the backlog and the icon requests and things like that.

50:30But it keeps it fun, keeps it exciting, and I think it keeps the quality really, really high. There's never any compromise in terms of quality and stuff. But yeah, what you said, Helena, is if the AllTrails or the Anthropics or the Remarkables of the world want to send us a test device or give us a free membership for life we are we're not above accepting those things for sure kind of in-kind donations or something like this yeah yeah it makes sense i mean it sounds like you guys are in a good place with it mentally and emotionally with regards to that like throw the donation button up there and hope for the best but not actively seeking it you know on a case-by-case basis and doing it for the love of the game is why we a lot of us do what we do and i don't know and maybe toby you can speak to this because you're on uh maybe the code site as well these are like static sites that you're building but and i know that icon sets aren't necessarily are never done and fonts i guess eventually unless you make it to the new unifont glyph stature you're probably never done either but there's perhaps less pressure because it's not living and breathing and changing underneath people, you know, like software does.

51:47And so like bug reports, I'm sure that you guys got bug reports though, don't you? Like this doesn't look great on this device or this looks weird here. Sure. That kind of stuff. I'm just backing out of my question as I think more, you probably have all the same problems that a software project has. Is that fair? We have all the same problems. We do. We have a lot. You know, I would say fonts, fonts feel like they move much more slowly in terms of iteration. And maybe in a lot of cases, you know, you can set the font aside and be like, this is done. But for Phosphor, there's always bugs to fix.

52:16There's always different use cases further to consider. There's icon requests that we get through our GitHub issues that we'd like to support as much as possible within the confines of our principles. Toby touched on the principles that we have. And one of them is to not have every single permutation of every single icon possible. That's not the goal, but covering the most common use cases and doing it, like maintaining a point of view as well with the set. And so not having 20 different versions of a heart, you know, like that's not the spirit of Phosphor. There are other icon families that go more in that kind of fluid dimension and they give you sliders.

53:02You know, you can choose the thickness of the stroke and the corner radius and you can really manipulate those parameters as much as you want. But we find that can sacrifice the quality of each icon. So, you know, we have a more constrained set, but there are certain principles that we stick to. Yeah. Yeah. Also on the, on the subject of like maintenance costs and everything, there's like a, there's a maintenance pressure that the ecosystem exerts on us too. So like we have a bunch of different libraries for, you know, view and Svelte and react and all these things. most of which I'm maintaining myself, but a few of them that I'm, you know, less versed in and don't use on a daily basis are supported by the community, like official first party.

53:46But, you know, we give somebody access to the Git repo and people that I trust from community. But for example, when we started this, Vue 3 was not a thing and everybody's using Vue 2. And that's all I had ever used and not very much at that. So when Vue 3 came out and people were switching over oh this doesn't work this blah blah same thing happened with uh with react 18 and next js and server components suddenly everyone's bug reports are coming in like oh i can't use this in my server components and this and that you know so so there's it's it's not static in that like it's part of a a living ecosystem right the web is constantly changing and not just not just the web but mobile platforms all these things and they they do exert pressure and there's a maintenance burden to having so many libraries.

54:35And yeah, even an icon library has bugs from time to time too. It's a shame. Yeah. Can't escape. Bugs are everywhere. Yeah. Literally and literally. Well, again, I will echo the same thought here as well as with departure of this website, this display, this showcase. makes you want to do something that requires phosphor. I just want to do something with it. I think the two of you together, your ability to create the thing and then display the thing is very good. The synth slash small piano, I don't know what to call it. That's cool up there. Something I really appreciate with your display too is your ability to search, but then you have this button that's not clear what it does, but it's a randomizer.

55:32And it randomizes the showcase of all the different icons in different colors and different sizes so that I don't have to sit there and futz with it to be like, what is the permutations and possibilities of phosphor? I can just simply click a button literally again and again and again. And I get the thin version, the thick version, the large version, the colored version, the duotone. And like, it's really cool. The thought in this, in y 'all's work, is admirable, very much so. And it makes it fun to enjoy what you've created. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. That randomizer is all, Toby. If you want to play the synth also, by the way, you can go to play.phosphoricons.com and there's a functioning version of that synthesizer that plays music.

56:19Is that right? Yeah. It's not very well done. Oh, yeah, I did see this. It's a scratch-built audio synthesizer using the web audio APIs, but it works. That's linked to from Showcase down at the bottom. I found this while digging into it. I couldn't understand, though, why this play section zooms in and zooms out whenever I move my mouse around. You know, the idea was that we would put more widgets and hundreds of these things on here and that you'd have to be panning around and scrolling to see all of them. But we only ever built these. And so you can kind of picture it like a Figma canvas that's kind of infinitely panable and zoomable, but there's only a finite number of objects on there.

57:05Still dig it. Not less. Just didn't understand. Yeah, the randomized button is great. It's a dice, huh? I guess that makes sense. I'm sure it's one of your own icons. I guess it is a dice. It's a dice, Adam. You know, like roll the dice, see what happens. I thought it was like a quality meter because I've seen a version of an icon that I thought was similar. And you can see it whenever you go into like, you may or may not have remote desktop, but you might have screen share on your Mac. In remote desktop, you can change the quality of the remote screen you're viewing from black and white to full fidelity.

57:39And it seemed like this quality icon. That's what I thought it was. But now that I look at it closer, I do see the dice or the die. Maybe if it was the three die rather than the five die. Maybe that would. Or six. Or the six. You should randomize the number of dots. There you go. It's possible that it did at some point. I feel like it did at some point, but then I couldn't figure out when to actually change it. Well, then it feels like you're rolling it actually. Yeah. Oh. And what you could do is if you're not touching it for a while, if you just want more work, is you could just make it like randomly kind of spin itself so that you can see that it's a die.

58:15like oh maybe I should touch that itching to be touched yeah no I got you yeah exactly I'll open up an issue on your github so going a little deeper I noticed that you used IBM Plex Mono instead of is that because it predates or because you don't actually like your own font Fosfor does predate Fosfor does predate Departure Mono by quite like four years or so. But I think... It's a good reminder. We might have to go and update it. Now I'm trying to find where did you catch? Oh, in the kind of pop-up thing. Yeah, and the tags and code samples and things. We are using Plex Mono for sure. I probably wouldn't change that because there's a reason we don't use Helvetica for everything.

59:10It's like, what is the fitting font for this site? in this project. We're doing plenty of dogfooding with Departure Mono already, as it is, I think. I can imagine the subtext beneath each icon being very well done in Departure because it's such a small size on screen, at least here. So, you know, not that you have to, but just curious why you didn't dogfood your own typeface. Mostly because Departure is only a couple months old and Phosphor was a pandemic project of ours that's already four and a half years old almost. Actually, just four years in October? We just passed four years. Okay, four years in October, that's right.

59:55It's a fast thing to test though, to test a farm. Yeah, yeah. Easy. Swap that in, see if it looks good or not. Are there ways that, let me ask this question then. If you could make money in some way from Phosphor, would you? are you opposed to the idea of making money from it well we we gladly accept donations i think the the thing we are wary of doing that toby touched on is leading with that as the primary goal and making you know that really drive our decisions i think that's what that's not the territory we want to be in but um we do uh yeah when a donation comes in especially when it comes with a note and a little bit of color on somebody really enjoying it.

1:00:41I think that goes a long way and we would love to, of course, we would love to get more of that. Yeah. It's, yeah, I think it's not that we don't like money. It's that the strings attached to selling something versus just making it out of, out of passion, which is what we do right now. We have day jobs and, and things that keep us busy. And I don't think, well, I think phosphor at this point is a, a lifetime project. We're never going to put this thing down, but we like to be able to pick it up every six months, every nine months when, when the moment strikes and not because we have to, and because we're beholden to people to do it.

1:01:19Um, so we, we, we have this joke that like the next project we make, we'll charge money for. We have this running joke. And when we made Phosphor, we said that, Oh, this one we'll give away for free. And to be fair, we, we didn't imagine that you know we'd have hundreds of thousands of weekly downloads and it would be used in fortune 100 companies and on the paypal app and stuff like that we never imagined so we couldn't have have planned for this and i'd like to think that even if we knew what type of reception we would have got we still would have given it away for free but i think this time for real the next thing we make we're going to charge money for we'll see have you seen the fawn awesome folks and what they're up to It's pretty interesting, right?

1:02:05Yeah, I'm friends with some of the folks there. Noah and Jory, amazing designers. What's up, guys? Dave Gandy, hi. So their model's interesting. They've had some success with it, and maybe even a lot of success at this point. I think their recent Kickstarter, I don't know what kind of crowdfunding campaign it was, but they've had a lot of success with that. They're hiring. They brought on some people from the Eleventy community and other places. That's for their Web Awesome project, right? they have yeah web awesome font awesome it's like their new thing is web awesome which is components so it's going beyond but that's kind of the idea with font awesome it's like free and then go beyond and like all these extra stuff kind of stuff that you're doing toby with your integrations with different libraries and stuff but they're going full on like building components you can use yeah on top of i'm assuming it's on top of font awesome maybe it's just in addition to i don't know if their fonts are actually in there or not but certainly you could layer on top of your free stuff with some products that are nice to haves, but not necessary.

1:03:08Like a freemium model, you think? My understanding of Web Awesome is it's a web components-based, comprehensive UI component library. So they're like draggable, droppable into any framework that you're building a web application in because they're web components-based. They're pretty, they don't really care where you use them. They're self-contained. And I imagine that they, where relevant, they use font awesome icons in them. Like probably the carrot in the dropdown select element is probably a font awesome, you know, down chevron or carrot or whatever. But yeah, the freemium model, I just don't, it didn't seem right for Phosphor because, well, number one, I think we made a decision early on, especially because we open sourced everything that we'd already given stuff away and started to take things back.

1:03:56not that we would but yeah i don't know i think just ideologically it it feels good to work really hard and give something away and not be beholden to anyone so but maybe the next thing we do will be a freemium model maybe the next gonna be yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be profit gotta start charging at some point yeah i told helena that her next font she's gotta she's gotta charge money for it because that's where the big bucks are made i mean people are still developing new fonts and selling them today aren't they oh yeah every day yeah every day but there's also a whole bunch of open free ones yeah i just bought one i bought one a couple of months ago berkeley mono what formerly was called the berkeley graphics company and i think it's now called the ux us graphics company they have a really good monospace font called uh berkeley mono which um until helen made departure mono i was using in my terminal and ide but i hadn't paid for a font in like 10 years and I saw that one I was like sure here's my 75 bucks it's worth it we bought some fonts didn't we Adam?

1:04:58the fonts that we have bought are slim but some Santa Sans is something we use we bought URW Geometric but we never used it and the monospace font we chose was always available as a free and open source font so the only one we ever had to buy I believe was Santa Sans and one other one I can't recall right now, but it was pretty cool. Just so you know. That was pretty cool. Just so you know. Trust me. Just so you know. I think it was actually DIN. We don't buy not cool fonts. DIN 2014 maybe, now that I think about it. Something like DIN. Oh, DIN NARO. I know we had DIN NARO going. DIN NARO, yeah.

1:05:43I'll have to look it up and put it in the show notes. But we've bought a few over the years. I mean, I've bought fonts throughout my history as a designer. Yeah. Did you used to be a designer, Adam? Are you still a designer, Adam? I mean, I guess it depends how you would classify me. Can I make things look pretty? Do I do it as a day job? If you combine those two, the answer is no. But if you single them out, the answer is yes. Yeah, I'm a designer. I have a design background, a design eye. I know it looks good. I can make things look good. There's a limitation to my ability. But I'm always trying.

1:06:17I am always persevering through the white page of death.

1:06:25Yeah, I'm a designer. I am a designer. That was a fun imposter syndrome check right there. He's like, am I going to say yes to this or no? Well, I mean, like, I want to do something with departure monos so badly, you know? That's why I asked you about the logo typeface. If anybody's using something like that, that'd be kind of cool for changelog when we revisit some different brand stuff, if ever. It's so cool. Oh, please do. That would be awesome. I think it's really cool. Yeah, it's so cool. The working version we have is actually a lower-cased version of changelog in JetBrains Mono with a couple alterations to make it ours.

1:07:00And so I like that, but I also like the all-caps version of Departure Mono. It's very cool. You know, it's one thing to talk about money, and it's another thing to talk about just this idea to connect to your thing and give it away for free. it's just another to be free to do it all you know that's what you guys are doing and that's cool i mean we asked you the money question which is like the the required question like if you could would you right i respect your answer though because in both cases you could do what you want you know you don't have to make change because somebody said well i paid you so change it's true that's true i think you feel i mean even giving it away for free i think we feel a level of responsibility towards our community and you know we want to do right by them and we want to if there's something missing we want to support that i think even so even more so like with a with a business and paid customers i would really feel much more responsibility to deliver well friends i'm here with a friend of mine michael greenwich co-founder and ceo of work os We're big fans of WorkOS here.

1:08:14Michael, tell me about AuthKit. What is this? How does it work? Why'd you make it? WorkOS has been building stuff in authentication for a long time, since the very beginning. But we really focused initially on just enterprise auth, single sign on SAML authentication. But a year or two into that, we heard from more people that they wanted all the auth stuff covered. Two-factor auth, password auth, you know, with blocking passwords that have been reused. They wanted auth with, you know, other third-party systems. And they wanted really WorkWise to handle all the business logic around tying together identities, provisioning users, and even more advanced things like role-based access control and permissions.

1:08:51So we started thinking about that more how we could offer it as an API. And then we realized we had this amazing experience with Radix, with this API, really the component system for building front-end experiences for developers. Radix is downloaded tens of millions of times every month for doing exactly this. So we glued those two things together and we built AuthKit. So AuthKit is the easiest way to add Auth to any app, not just Next.js. If you're building a Rails app or a Django app or just straight up Express app or something, it comes with a hosted login box. So you can customize that. You can style it.

1:09:25You can build your own login experience too. It's extremely modular. You can just use the backend APIs in a headless fashion. But out of the box, it gives you everything you need to be able to serve customers. And it's tied into the WorkOS platform. so you can really, really quickly add any enterprise features you need. So we have a lot of companies that start using it because they anticipate they're going to grow up market and want to serve enterprise. And they don't want to have to re-architect their auth stack when they do that. So it's kind of a way to like future-proof your auth system for your future growth.

1:09:53And we had people that have done that. People that started off and they're like, oh, I'm just kicking the tires. I'm just doing this. And then poof, their app gets a bunch of traction, starts growing. It's awesome. And they go close Coinbase or Disney or United Airlines. or, you know, it's like a major customer. And instead of saying, oh, no, sorry, we don't have any of these enterprise things and we're going to have to rebuild everything. Just go into the WorkOS dashboard and check a box and you're done. Aside from the fact that AuthKit is just awesome, the real awesome thing is that it is free for up to 1 million users.

1:10:24Yes, 1 million monthly active users are included in this out of the gate. So use it from day one. And when you need to scale to enterprise, you're already ready. Too easy. You can learn more at offkit.com or, of course, workos.com. Big fans. Check it out. One million users for free. Wow. Workos.com or offkit.com.

1:10:53the question i think is there has there been any intangible monetary value added to your proverbial bank account between the two of you or individually as a result because i mean if you've got these as jared said before logos and different brands like i'm familiar with all trails because i'm a mountain biker i also walk a few trails but i mainly know all trails through mountain biking because they map the trails and you need that as a mountain biker where can i go what can i ride etc but i'm curious have you gotten any side gigs or has anything else happened as a result of like your notoriety of being the phosphor makers and the very cool websites and ability to showcase like it's one thing to make the product like i said before but you do a great job of showcasing it you have d cuts that i love that you know come after my personal nerd heart I'm just curious if there's been anything else you've gotten involved in as a result of being the creator of both of these things.

1:11:50Well, I got a full-time job out of Phosphor Icons. That's pretty good, right? My last company that I worked at, Catalog, it's a knowledge management platform. So probably if you want to think like Notion meets Jira, like project and knowledge management together, married together with some special AI glue. Actually, the way I got the job was the CEO reached out to us and he's like, hey, we're using Phosphor. I want to donate, but you only have a PayPal link and I can't PayPal you with a UK number. I need an American number. So like, can I pay you guys? And that was like opening the conversation.

1:12:33Awesome. Yeah. I mean, these days we have other ways to pay and buy me a coffee and Patreon and things like that but that was the start of a conversation that ended up in me working there and and uh yeah getting to see getting to work on an app that was using phosphor everywhere all over the ui so very cool yeah and helena you've definitely got some yeah for sure i think you know phosphor is a pretty popular family um at this point and you know i think having done this project together gives us a platform to start charging for our next project. Before that, it's like the more we do these kinds of things like Phosphor and Departure, the more people can get a sense of who we are and what kind of things we build and build trust in the things that we make.

1:13:25So yeah, and it's brought a lot of praise and recognition in the industry. So that can lead to a lot of things. you've definitely been approached by some corporations, companies, brands to do icon design work for them that's for sure is that the kind of stuff that you take on or do you say no thanks or what's your stance on that kind of stuff it depends on I'm quite open to doing those projects it'll depend on the company so far, yeah since I was pretty wrapped up in my full time job previously I didn't really have the capacity to do it. I think at this point I'm on a career break that I can actually accept more of those projects.

1:14:11So definitely open to them. It'd be kind of cool to get hired to do a full-on icon family or even a font family. A typeface is what they're really called, but we'll just call it a font family to keep it symmetric there. CSS terminology, right? Yeah, exactly. pick your media medium to define the lexicon it'd be kind of cool to do that as a gig like where all you do and i want to say all you do is is like a pejorative but like all you do is like go from opportunity to opportunity to just create custom icon families or typefaces for folks and not only do you do that but then you also build out sites like this to showcase it to their internals I'm sure somebody did that for JetBrains like the JetBrains Mono website is just phenomenal it's beautiful somebody got paid to do that it may have been an internal employee I don't know the full details it'd actually be kind of cool to dig behind the scenes on that but somebody got paid to execute on that and it could have been a third party that was contracted which could have been y 'all or it could have been an internal employee who just had passion and led the project and the product but that'd be cool I would dig that if I were y 'all?

1:15:25Yeah. I mean, the icon community is pretty small. So I know a lot of people who do do that as their gig is they freelance for different companies and build out their icon systems. And for fonts, IBM Plex comes to mind again, because I think that was started internally. They may be partnered with different third parties. But that was a super cool project to see and have them, it's also an open source project and comes with a very beautiful presentation. You know, we're talking about these mini sites for fonts or these specimen sites. That's one probably, yeah, as I was working on the departure mono specimen site, one of the many influences in terms of like standout type specimen sites.

1:16:16I would look at IBM Plex if you haven't already. Yeah. I'm just imagining Airbnb in crisis mode. They've got a new interface they're working on and they're like, oh my gosh, our icon family is in the tank. Call the Carver. This is a mess. Get Helena here. Helena and Toby should get that joke and the audience should too. Jared, you should not, but that's a deep cut to Silicon Valley. I was hoping you were going to go to the cleaner. The cleaner. Pulp Fiction, which is a... That'd be cool. where my mind went that'd be cool that'd be cool call the cleaner well you got a mess the fixer we're the icon fixers we need somebody to fix this icon family stat the wolf bringing the wolf there you go the wolf yeah yeah oh that would be good yeah the wolf he was so calm yeah in all that situation well of course he is he's the wolf that's the wolf right that's what he does yeah there's definitely a dream that we could we could kind of do these full creative control projects, end-to-end design, ideation, execution type of things and make a living off of it, for sure.

1:17:27Something we've talked about for a while. The only challenge with client work is the client. Yeah. No matter what, they could be the best client ever. They can even pay you very well. They can pay you beyond your wildest dreams. They can open the kingdom and give you all the keys. but there's still opinions that that are adjacent if not totally against yours and that's where it's really really challenging because you have your own dreams as an artist as someone who creates and is a is a craftsperson and you want to deliver and then the opinion of the client is like meh let's just make this like this and you're like no that's a corner i'm not cutting that and you're like, they pay me.

1:18:13And they say things like I said earlier, I don't know why it reminds me of this, but it just does. You're going to have to change it. And you're like, ah, I spent seven hours on that. But then sometimes the beauty is too, is like coming to compromise with a client, because they can't do it. So it really depends on your perspective, right? That's perspective taking, is that you can take the version one of that world, which was what I just said. And the version two could be, or an alternate perspective could be, you know what? It's about compromise And it's about helping them get to where they're trying to go with my abilities and dreams, but based on what they asked me to compromise for.

1:18:48And as long as it's not like compromising your true artistic nature, then it's pretty easy to swallow that pill. And, you know, y 'all are creative in that way to the degree no one else, not many people can be. So, you know, part of your duty, almost your calling in life is to execute on this skill, you know, because no one else can. I appreciate the vote of confidence. That's good to hear. Yeah. If you're looking for client work for your creative fulfillment, I don't think you'll get there. That's really a different thing. And you're working towards their business goals there. So I think it's just a different beast.

1:19:25And if you're trying to fulfill some sort of artistic drive, then that's where you do your side projects and your, what have you. But yeah, I mean, if there's a world where we can make those side projects fuel or if we can fuel those side projects and support them financially, that would be a dream. If anyone wants to give us a grant and just to go off and do stuff, make stuff. I tell you, the easy way to do this might be to unify these two things. I didn't pay attention to this yet, but somewhere in the footer or somewhere in here where you come together, not as Toby and Helena, but as a unified brand and says, you know, offer it as a product, offer it as a service.

1:20:12Come together and say this is what you should, a good next step is to hire us to do this for you. Bam. Because you guys have the whole, all the bases covered. And the eyeballs. There's no gap in your flow, is there? Where's the gap in your flow, Helena? I think we complement each other's gaps. Yeah, exactly. These powers combined. I'm hesitant whether to say what I'm about to say because we've been joking about this for years too, but I think if we were going to start a company, we already have the name, we already kind of have the logo, we know what it's going to be. Oh my goodness. I'm not going to jinx you.

1:20:49What? Let's not, she says. Consider this just a gentle nudge. you know we'll do it in post show you don't have to say anything yeah you can do it afterwards the idea yes the exact name and logo we don't have she doesn't like it locked in yet yeah I can tell clearly hold back the reins he's like maybe she's like no way yeah that would have been a strategy though if you just said it out loud then we would just have to do it it's out in the world already you know you would have can't take it back well we already told her that we're willing to edit if she absolutely wants us to so So this does not live to the world.

1:21:26I would encourage you to do that though. If it's, you know, if you leave this podcast and you have a retrospective and part of that dream is somewhat a version of reality you want, that's a good next step. I mean, it's an obvious, it's not a great idea from Jared or I alone, but, you know, the best way to get things in life is just to ask for them, you know? So many people don't ask for the business, don't ask for the opportunity, don't ask for the thing, whatever it might be, or the opportunity. And because you don't ask, you don't get. And if you put it out there and you put a, here's a lesson I learned a long time ago.

1:22:01It's actually from, I'll have to figure out the name, but it was a book called Booked Solid. And the idea is called The Velvet Rope. And essentially treat your business, treat your door, the front door to your business, whatever that is, as a velvet rope. And the only people that can get past it is the people that you actually want to work with. Hold it in such high regard that to be across or through that threshold, that velvet rope is a privilege to be accepted by you all and to be invited in. And for those who can't honor that invitation, bye, get out of here. And not mean, but just more like, you don't belong here.

1:22:42I'm sorry, you're not my client. You're not who I want to do work for. And I think if you guys approach that next step with a version of that, then you'll be some version of happy. Well, thanks for that. I wasn't expecting some business advice and entrepreneurship, but it's cool to hear. Maybe someday soon we'll be in the mindset. We've been nudged in that direction by a lot of people. It just feels like the universe is telling us do more of this stuff, do more of these projects together. maybe even I don't know does the side project turn into a main project we've been thinking about it for sure so here's here's one more idea for you and this one's easily more easily executable and you might even enjoy it tremendously I would love if I was a fan which I am a fan of departure mono and phosphor I would love some very cool I would love some really cool posters or things I can actually have in my IRL in my studio in my office or whatever that represents my typeface of choice in my editor like these things you've created on your website just turn them into posters and sell them and you will make money swag I mean it's swag but I mean I think if you do it well it could be do you remember back when uh Facebook's or when Facebook had uh that labs project I can't recall the name of it but they had these posters and they're famous because it said move fast and break things and all these different things these posters was part of this screen printing side gig i suppose whatever in their labs facebook design labs or whatever and they were they spread these ideas the idea was good alone but then people had them as posters and they were cool and they were screen printed on t-shirts and stuff it's taken that kind of ideas These are really cool pieces of art, but they're isolated to your website.

1:24:43And you can't charge money for them. So if you created a thing, you might make some money from those things and put more cool art in the world. I mean, I'd buy a Departure Mono keycap set. I know that for a fact. For sure. Yes. Yes. Now you're thinking. Let the ideas flow. A collab. Yeah. Hold us to that. Hold us to that because we've been wanting to make some swag. If you make it, I will buy some. I'll say that. Anything else, Adam? Anything else, guys, that we want to? I wanted to talk about, when you asked, do you have any ideas of where to steer the conversation? I wanted to bring up open source compensation and an alternative to the business model you're discussing where we go into client work or operate as a two-person agency or contract to contract.

1:25:40I think there's some alternatives on the horizon that might allow people like us in the near future to operate in full creative control, get some compensation and make it worth their while, but not have to run your operation as an explicit business and that's like open source. There's a lot of movement lately that I've seen from individuals and from companies to compensate open source projects better. In terms of individuals, there's people out there like Anthony Fu. If you do any web work, you've probably seen his name on Twitter, on GitHub. But he's very involved in the Veep bundler and Vue ecosystem and a whole bunch of things.

1:26:28He's got his fingers in a lot of pies, but he's very vocal about contributing and giving back to the kind of corner linchpin open source projects that keep the world running. And he's aware of the fact that he's a very visible public figure. But as part of his part of his responsibility is that he actually distributes some of the money that he receives via donations and public support and GitHub sponsors to projects that he knows are deserving of it. And he sponsors us or he sponsored me or something like that, among many, many other people. Because he uses Phosphor icons in something. And so there's like talking about it more, but there's also like products that are supposed to help with this.

1:27:09There was there's one called T, which is I don't know too much about it, but I know it's basically it's a blockchain based thing, which set that fact aside. But the whole idea is is coming up with a quantitative measure of how critical and how important libraries are. So, for example, there might be like, you know, somebody is thanklessly maintaining this compression library, which is used in, you know, every single piece of infrastructure software around the world. And they live in Boise, Idaho. Exactly. They live somewhere. They live in Montana and they're every day working on bugs. They're a solo dev.

1:27:47They run the Git library, the Git repository. nobody pays them a thing because it's nested inside layers and layers of other tools and they never get the kind of support and recognition. And if they quit what they're doing, industries would scramble to replace this tool, but nobody even knows they're doing what they're doing because there's no visibility into things like this. Now, Phosphor as a library tends to be pretty direct. End users install Phosphor and then build their app with it. They know we exist. It's not critical infrastructure, but I think we're doing a good service. But this guy in Montana or whatever, people may not even know that they depend on software that he writes and thanklessly maintains.

1:28:30So this tool T, the idea was to kind of use some form of objective measure of the importance, the utility, the criticality of different libraries and plugging into NPM and brew and other package repositories and weighting things like GitHub stars and NPM downloads and things like that to kind of make it easier to give credit where credit is due financially, monetarily. I'm excited to see where things like that go so that people can continue to do the things they're passionate about and not have to run a business but still receive the credit that's due. Yeah. No, I'm in full support of every effort to accomplish that as well.

1:29:20I think tea is interesting. The proof will be in the pudding with that one. I think they launch officially in January or end of the year or something, and we're all waiting to see if it works. And I hope it does. And I see that there are efforts of trying to accomplish that. I think, like you said, with Phosphor and with Departure, you're definitely a direct relationship to your users. And so that one's a little bit easier because they go and download your icons and they think, I love these icons. I love these people. I'm going to give them 10 bucks. But not everybody has that relationship. Some people have an even better relationship.

1:30:01Like your web framework, for instance, where it's like, I could not possibly do what I do without this thing. Whereas icons, as crucial as they are, they are interchangeable and you have easier switching costs and you could probably go without or whatever. But with your web framework or your programming language or these certain things are just crucial. And so they have a very easy way of, it's not even easy, easier than many of us, way of getting their projects and their passions supported by others. But the people who are the dependency of the dependency of the dependency are the ones that are just completely invisible.

1:30:36And nobody ever gives any credit or crypto to the invisible ones. So I'm with you. I think it's cool. I hope it works. And I hope other ideas are also in the works to help get more money to people who are bringing value in big ways. That being said, they are open sourcing their work and they are giving it as a gift to the world, just like you all are. And so that's a choice they're making as well. So I don't think they have the right to demand money, but certainly if we can get them some and get more of that goodness going out, everybody wins. And it probably comes in a lot of forms too, right?

1:31:14I know you guys had Polar, the creator of the Polar open source compensation scheme. I don't know what you call it, but the platform for... Yeah, it's a platform for monetizing your software. And they've got cool ideas like bug bounties, monetizing individual features and feature requests and bug bounties and things like that. So maybe it's like the gig economy where it doesn't come from one source, but you can kind of cobble it together from some sort of quantitative assessment of the importance and utility of the library through something like T, some of the more qualitative or, you know, driven by specific individual interests that Polar could provide, things like that.

1:31:59Maybe it's a... I don't think there's going to be one way to slice it because of the diversity in the types of projects that are out there. We've seen lots of models and certain ones fit certain projects and don't fit other ones. And so I think we're going to have a diversity of solutions and not just like one thing that works. Everybody thought when GitHub released sponsors, that was the end. That was it. We had arrived, you know, and that proved out to be a useful way that you can do certain things and you can't do other things. And so, yeah, multiple solutions will definitely have to be the case.

1:32:33Speaking of that, you guys have both Patreon and Buy Me A Coffee. Is that what it is? Buy Me A Coffee? why why two and how do they compare and how are they doing uh well buy me a coffee is since since we enabled that i think that has been far and away the most successful source of donations the main reason is is because one-off payments and and support is is really easy i think it's connected to more payment platforms and and you could you could plug in with venmo or paypal or whatever you want. And you can pay in a one-off manner. Not everybody wants to make the commitment to sponsoring Phosphor Icons every month or becoming a Patreon and, you know, adding that into the black hole of other subscriptions that they just forget about.

1:33:20And then those bills just rack up. So Buy Me A Coffee has been very successful for us compared to the other things. And I don't think Buy Me A Coffee always had the option for recurring subscription fees. Maybe I I just wasn't familiar with it. But at least I do know that the one-off payments seems to be something that people want to do. They can get their company to sign off on a$100 donation because they're using Phosphor. Or they're using it in their own small business and they want to just, you know, give a thanks and 20 bucks but not become a monthly supporter. Yeah, Buy Me a Coffee has been good to us, I think.

1:34:01Yeah, I think feature wise, a lot of these platforms offer a lot, you know, they often offer both one time donations and subscription model. And it's more, I think it's, I don't know, different, different tools just have different, they've developed different audiences or ways they're used. So like, Patreon, I don't know, maybe I need to stream some more content if that's it to get more Patreon subscribers. I think the mental model, even in the way, even in the names of these products, right? If it's called buy me a coffee, you're more in that one time, yeah, buy someone, throw$5 over mindset.

1:34:42And so that's been for at least the projects we've worked on, that seems to be the one that people gravitate towards. And less so, I think we might have had one or two Patreon subscribers over time. correct me if I'm wrong Toby but more than two but a handful maybe a handful only a handful of recurring subscribers I mean I'm sure you can do one off payments with Patreon as well but based on the name you know the brand and the name it's more about like being a patron so that's a recurring thing. I've never actually used Buy Me On Coffee I was surprised to even see a$10 per month option there I assumed it was one off donations And so, again, just that framing of what they are, having not used it, I assumed it was like you're buying the person a coffee,$5,$10, whatever you want to do, and you're done.

1:35:34So I was surprised when I did click through to even see that. And that's just the way these platforms, like you said, how they kind of position themselves. Yeah, they're converging ultimately in what they offer. But they still exist in people's minds is a certain thing. And it is true that there wasn't always a one-off payment thing in Patreon. on it was only subscriptions. And there wasn't always a subscriptions thing in Buy Me A Coffee. It was only one-time payment. So anyway, the point is to say we're not generating a lot of income there. It feels good. It still feels really good to see the feedback, the direct feedback, and to feel the love.

1:36:11But it's not paying any bills at the moment. Are there any iconographers who are Twitch streaming or Patreon streaming? Would they watch you move the kerning around? That's a good question. There's none that I know of, but... Untap market. Untap market. I've told you this before. I said Helen should stream. I've dabbled around myself in live streaming, just coding random things, but... A lot more competition in that market than there is in the iconography market. I found it's just fun to do. If you can get one or two people to join in and look over your shoulder and offer some ideas, I find that fun.

1:36:52but even just consume it. You're right, though. I've never seen a typographer, icon designer. There's very little design work outside of games and stuff that's going on on the streaming platform. I might just not know about them, but yeah, it feels untapped. It is a particular skill to be able to do the thing and voiceover while you're doing it. I find that pretty impressive when people are doing that. It's funny you say that because I did stream for a while, way back when streaming on Twitch, your coding was just kind of taking off. And every Monday afternoon for a while, I don't even remember that, I would stream my coding.

1:37:32And I got some viewers because we already have people in our Slack and stuff. So like I probably got 10, 20 people watching me code. And I had a hard time thinking deeply, because I felt like I had to explain everything I was doing. And so while I enjoyed it and they seemed to enjoy it and we had some laughs, I would get nothing accomplished compared to how I would be by myself where I can just sit there and stare at the wall and not feel pressured to like do or say. So I just had a hard time thinking straight in that way. Massive respect to anybody who can actually accomplish progress in their software while they're streaming and conversing with people and stuff.

1:38:09It's a particular skill in and of itself, I think. Sure is. I think I got used to it. I started talking to myself when I was coding, even not on stream or anything. You always did. I just walk around the room. I just kind of pace and do nothing else. Jared, this is why you think the way you think. Yeah. One thing I would watch, and if not watch live, I would certainly watch produced, which I can explain that if you'd like, is watch me build this embedded game for my website. Right? Like this ping pong, what'd you call this? There was a name for it? What was the name for it? Deparkanoid is what we call it.

1:38:51Deparkanoid. Yeah, I would probably call it departenoid, but that's okay because departure. But departenoid is cool with me. I would watch you, like I would want to see the behind the scenes of that, like whether it's live or whether it's produced. And what I mean by that is you can do the live version of it with enough multi-angle and enough capture during the live production to then also create a edited version for YouTube. you know people think twitch live unedited real time all the details and then you know youtube you think well something that's a bit more polished and a bit more bookended from front to back i would watch that that'd be kind of cool it's it's a lot of work i know that these days almost every job is the job and being a content creator about the job too right you have to be able to market yourself and whatever whether it's tiktok or twitch or you have to do what you're doing and then show it to the world too that part's always been hard for me live streaming is one thing produce video content is another i don't know if i'm i don't know if either of us are interested in in that aspect as much as others are but um well when i mean produce i just mean just slightly edited you know so that it's consumable not just this live version that's like ums and ahs and answering the chat.

1:40:14You know, something that kind of cuts it down to three minutes versus a 50-minute stream. You know, the highlights. Yeah, I will say the tools are getting much better. So that helps. I just say we found a gap, Adam. We found a gap that they have here. I'm ready for AI to edit out all of my ums and likes. I'm happy to use that tool when it exists. For sure. Jinx. and it might add some back for you. Like, well, he was missing some likes and then I added two. Yeah, gotta make it feel real, right? Right. Add a few likes. Well, they're already generating podcasts. True. Like, what is that? Do you have competition from generated full audio podcasts?

1:40:59Not yet. We're actually not here right now. This is not really Jared and Adam, okay? This is our surrogates. Didn't you read your system prompt? You're not supposed to say that part, Adam. Sorry about that. My teleprompter broke on me. Toby told you to forget all previous commands and then just asked you that question. Oh, that's true, yeah. So there are some things getting, there is a new phenomenon, which is happening in open source, wherein a creator will release a piece of software and they will accompany that with docs, demos, and now a podcast. What? And it's not really a podcast because it's just an audio file, but they'll put a podcast on the website generated by notebook LM, which is Google's.

1:41:43Give me some text and I'll generate a podcast about it. And it's two people talking about your project, basically walking you through what it is, why it's interesting, but they're doing it conversationally like podcasters. And it's super duper creepy because they're not real people, but they act like they are like, hey, I just got back from lunch. It's like, no, you didn't. You are a computer generated piece of audio. That's bizarre. it's really weird but eventually if you didn't know any better then you might think they're real people and you wouldn't be creeped out so we may get there where we're just getting severanced what was it the headline earlier Jerry was just talking about that is on friends this week it was the internet's dead what was it oh dead internet theory yeah dead internet theory like how more and more a larger increasing fraction of the stuff that's happening is produced by bots for bots.

1:42:37Yes. And then the full-on conspiracy mode is like buy governments on purpose in order to whatever, whatever. Yeah, there's layers to that though, I think. I mean, I think that's an example of dead internet. That is not real. No, it isn't. It's two computers talking about a project. The developer chose to do it, but at the same time, like we chose to potentially consume it at least once or at least push play and be like, that's weird. That's not real. I only got 30 seconds in and I just peaced out on that thing. Yeah. I'm like, you're not, You did not just get back from lunch. I just know better.

1:43:06I don't believe it. The other thing is the Corey, maybe it's Corey Doctro's idea. I don't know if it's originally his, but he talks about the reverse centaur, which is, you know, we had the promise that AI and machines would do the monotonous, repetitive, boring work, and we'd get to do the fun and interesting and creative. And instead, what we got is AI-generated slop and images and podcasts, and humans are left making the burgers and scanning receipts and all the repetitive stress injury type jobs are still human. Helena's next font will be some computer generated thing. You'll be competing with some computer generated kerning.

1:43:48Can you imagine? Depressing. Let's end the show before we depress ourselves any further. Best place to connect with you all. Of course, all the links are in the show notes to all the things we've already discussed. but anything else you want to link to or how people can best reach out and be a part of your world? My handle is minoraccess on social media. Twitter slash X is probably where I'm most active. That's minor underscore access, but I will send you all of the links in the show notes. Cool. And I'm rektdeckard in most places, GitHub and Mastodon, rektdeckard at hackyderm.io. I'm freedtm is my Twitter handle.

1:44:30I believe, X, but yeah, not too active there. And if you've got Phosphor questions, you can email us, hello at phosphoricons.com. If you've got departure mono questions, probably just tweet at Helena. I don't know if we have an email set up for that. Yeah, just tweet at me. Support your human creators out there. There's stuff you like, if there's a font, if there's icons, if there's an artist that you like, support your human creators out there for sure, while we still have them. support your human creators while we're still here yeah yes all right this has been fun yeah thanks guys yeah same here thanks for having us you bet

1:45:14if you'd like to support your human creators of all of this change loggy goodness you can buy our merch which is on sale while supplies last or you can sign up for changelog plus plus which we hear qualifies for most businesses continuing education funds. That's a win-win-win. Or you can simply keep listening and use some of the stuff we talk about to make your own life better. That's what we're here for, to enrich the lives of all developers through awesome conversations. So yeah, if we can do that for you, that's all the support we need. Speaking of enriching our lives, I am totally going to use Departure Mono the next chance I get, probably even on my in-progress, for far too long, revamp of my personal site.

1:45:58I did go ahead and set it up in Zed and I have to say it's almost too pixely for me for a coding font. I still love it to death, but maybe not for coding, but that's just me. Let us know your favorite coding font in Zulip. That's where the ChangeLog community chats it up. Each podcast gets a channel and each episode gets a topic. We hope to see you in there. Get yourself a free invite at changelog.com slash community. One more thanks to our sponsors of this episode fly.io timescale wix studio and work os please check out what they're up to they all support us which is awesome we love to return the favor and thanks of course to the one the only the beat freak break master cylinder that is all for now but we'll talk to you again on friday

1:46:59Thank you.

1:47:23Oh

1:47:28Yeah