How Lego’s Smart Brick works

26:32And I just, if they would make the noise for me so that I don't have to make the noise for my three-year-old. Is it that you're an adult or were you not making the noises back then? I was never making the noises. I like, I'm good at dialogue. Like you want to give me like a, like a long scene of all the characters talking to each other. I got you. But then it's like, do we need the ship to make noise? That's never been my thing. So if we could just solve that and I can get back to like the, the warring battles of speeches between the emperor and Luke, then, then, then we're good. That's all I need.

27:01Excellent. Excellent. We should, you should type out some dialogue for us, for my, for my battle scene with my kids. It'd be great. We can do that. All right. We got to take a break. Sean, thank you as always. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back.

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29:38Welcome back. So it's the beginning of a new year, and I think now is a good time to talk productivity. This is when everybody's doing New Year's resolutions. This is when everybody is trying to figure out new systems to be a little more productive and a little less nuts and just make everything make a little more sense. So I'm going to bring on Casey Newton, the editor of Platformer and my former colleague at The Verge, who is one of my favorite people to talk to about this stuff. Like me, Casey is always trying new apps and trying new systems and doing weird stuff just to try and make his digital life make a little more sense.

30:08And over the last couple of years, actually, as far as I understand, Casey has done less of that because he's found things that have started to work. So he's going to come on the show and he's going to tell me all the stuff that he's doing that works. And I'm going to tell him about all of the new apps that I've been trying that are making me crazier than ever. It's going to be very fun. I'm very excited about it. Let's get into it. Casey Newton, welcome back to the Vergecast. Great to be here, David. It's been a minute. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you. I'm excited for a new year to begin and to get things done.

30:38Are you like a New Year's person? Do you like do the like January 1st reset and try to become a better Casey every 12 months? I really am. Like for over a decade now, I've woken up on New Year's Day. I've gotten a big coffee. I've sat down with a journal. I've like looked back on the year that was and I've said like, what are sort of the big things I'm going after this year? And I have to say, I credit it with like actually getting a lot of things done over the last decade. So yeah, New Year's is really maybe my favorite time of year. Okay. That's awesome. So actually let's, let's just talk through that process first, because I have, I would say never once done successfully the thing that you just described.

31:17Um, and I aspire to be the kind of person who does that thing. So like, like literally walk me through that process that you do every year. You get a big cup of coffee. That's step one. Number one, big cup of coffee. Um, I mostly would do this in day one, the Mac journaling app that's so great. I keep a journal just kind of as a daily practice, which I think maybe we'll get into later. But this one, 10 years or so ago, I started calling this the annual board meeting with myself. And it would sort of be like, okay, self, let's take a look back at the past four quarters. I would usually have some things that I was trying to get done that year.

31:53So I would just kind of go bit by bit and say like, okay, Like, did we eat less sugar last year? Absolutely not. Okay, so we're going to give that one a thumbs down. But, you know, I want to, like, launch my own business this year. And, like, I did that, right? So it's kind of cool because, like, I'm not really a big believer in resolutions. Like, I'm not really someone who believes that you can just, like, use willpower to deliver you into the life of your dreams. I do think if there are two or three things that are big that you want to get done in a year, if you write those down and look at that list a lot, you will increase your odds of getting those things done.

32:33Yeah, it's like, what is the less woo-woo version of manifesting? It's like whatever that is, I think it's real. Maybe it's just actually manifesting. Maybe they've been right all along. um all right so you for years were the other person i know who i could convince to try any note-taking app or to-do list app or calendar app we would just send each other links to like increasingly niche products and we would both throw our entire lives into them for two weeks and try them and you have stopped being this kind of person and i have brought you here to yell at you about it because it's very upsetting well i i don't know how true that is because if you texted me at any point or if i just saw it in installer which i read every saturday morning It's my favorite time of the week.

33:15If you're just like, there's a great new note-taking app, I will actually just go download it immediately and see what all the fuss is about. But I have made a resolution this year that I think I have found the system that best served my needs. And so I am trying to stick with that system. But am I still gonna try a few things here and there? Probably, I buy it. So, all right, so the system is what I wanna talk about because I think, I both wanna talk about the system and I think the newest addition to the system, which is that you've sort of built a system that shows itself to you all the time, which I think is really interesting.

33:47But let's just let's just back this all the way down. Like walk me through kind of the Casey Newton productivity system as it exists right now. Let me begin by saying that I think step one of designing a productivity system is trying to figure out your goal. Right. That might sound very simple, but different people have very different needs, which is why I think we actually have so much productivity software. Because so many builders out there think, this thing is not actually specific enough to what I want, so I'm going to build my own thing. And we all benefit from being able to try those visions.

34:22So what do I need in my life? Well, I want a journal. I have just found that if I can wake up in the morning with that cup of coffee and sit down and just kind of clear my brain and say, here's what I did last night. wait, here is the story that I'm working on today. Here is the thing that is stressing me out. If I can just write that down in a series of bullet points, it just makes me much calmer and happier throughout the day. A few years ago, David, as you know, we saw the rise of these apps that just created a daily note for you. And I just love this approach so much because you wake up every day and it's a blank slate and you can just start and you can clear your head.

35:01So that is step one of my system. So this is the what's the book? I think it's The Artist's Way. Do you know this book? Yes. By I think the woman's name, I think, is Julia Cameron. And her whole theory is the morning pages, right, where it's basically just like sit down and just write out literally every single thing that is inside of your brain until there is nothing inside of your brain anymore. It sounds like that is very much like the system you've adopted here. It is. And, you know, the real like hardcore artist way people will say you have to do it in longhand. Like it has to be, you know, like on a legal pad or whatever.

35:31And I'm just like, that would drive me insane. I can type so fast. I actually can empty my brain in like 25 minutes. If I had to do it in longhand, it would take me three and a half hours. I would just, I'd be like, my brain's empty. I don't care. I'm over it. Absolutely. Okay. So that is phase one of my system here. And you do this every day. The first thing you do when you wake up or sit down to work or whatever is just brain dump into some place. have I missed a day here or there? Sure. But for the most part, like, yes, I do do this. And in particular, like if I'm on vacation, for example, like then I go extra hard at doing this because I want to remember like every cool thing that I, you know, did when I was cruising around Tokyo or whatever.

36:13So that's step one. Step two is I need a simple task management system. Now, imagine there are going to be some folks listening to this podcast who have very intricate task management systems. If you are a person who has a lot of recurring tasks in your life, for example, you might need one of these like Ferrari systems, like an OmniFocus or something. I have found in my life that Todoist is probably like the best of the available options for me. But recently, Capacities, which is the app that I use to write my journal in, added this simple task list functionality. And so now what I do, David, is I use the template for this daily note where I have my journal and I can put in a live query of any open task that I've added to capacities.

37:04I can also add tasks right there. To me, this goes hand in hand with writing a journal. You sort of finish your journal entry and you remember, oh, I got to reorder those contacts, right? I have to like check in with my colleague about this thing. I'm just going to put it right here in my daily note, which I know I'm going to be coming back to. so candidly i've been sort of flip-flopping a bit between to-doist and this but for a lot of those like just kind of um like jog your memory type of tasks that you want to make sure that you see or it's something that like you're dragging your feet on because it's like so tedious i found that capacities is a great place to put it so that way phase two of the system i have my to-dos right underneath my journal and we got a stew going okay so this makes it seem like most of your day-to-day life lives inside of Capacities at this point?

37:50It's the thing that I am flipping back and forth from the most because I am a writer. And so what I really need my productivity system to do above and beyond just reminding me what tasks I'm doing is to help me make sense of things. Like that is a big part of what I see as like my job in the world. I try to make sense of what is happening. And Capacities, it just turns out, has a bunch of features that I've been able to use to do that. Yeah. So let's talk about some of those, because I think I mentioned the sort of showing the system back to you thing. And I think you and I both had a very similar moment with Notion, I think at some point last year of starting to use Notion's agents to actually sort of poke around inside of the databases that you were making.

38:34And there's something remarkable in that, that it's like, I can just pour stuff into this that I think is interesting and then ask this database of things that I think is interesting questions and that there's something very powerful about that. And this is like the big new idea in productivity, right? Like the idea that you should just have a place with all your stuff. And then AI's job is to help you find and summarize and make sense of and make connections between all of that stuff. But the thing you found in capacities feels slightly different than that and maybe less abstract. Like what is the system?

39:08Yes. The thing that I've been doing is a little bit different. So, you know, I have a kind of loosely defined beat. I'm very interested in like the intersection of social networks and democracy. I'm increasingly interested with how both of those things intersect with AI. So every morning, as I'm, you know, looking at my journal, I'm also looking at one of my favorite websites, Tech Meme, a news aggregator that has all the day's biggest headlines in tech. And they have a site that just sort of lists all of their the links that they've uploaded to the site in chronological order. You should know that I was going to sort of ADR in you saying theverge.com right there.

39:42Just that's fine. Shout out to TechMeme, but you know, it's okay. I go to theverge.com every single day as well. I love the Verge and I'm constantly adding stuff, you know, into my database from the Verge as well. But I'll cruise through TechMeme and I'll literally just copy paste into my daily note. It's like, okay, huge new meta scandal. Great. Huge new X scandal. Great. And then after I paste in all the links, I'll just tag them, right so it's like you know meta and crock i can also do like a slightly more conceptual attack right so like as we're recording this a lot of people are really concerned about this ai bubble that we're in so sometimes i just see a story that i think that's a bubble story you know this is a story about us being in a bubble i'll just link bubbles right and then over time this just starts to like accumulate into something kind of interesting right i can like um if meta is in the news or i'm writing a column i just jog my memory just by clicking on that meta tag and i'm like What's been going on with them recently?

40:40I've been doing this for five-ish months now. I can't tell you how many times just by clicking on that tag, I'm reminded of something that I'd already forgotten. It's so powerful to just be able to quickly go back to those headlines and summon those things. So let me just pause on that really fast, because I think one of the things I hear from people who get into this space is the inevitable mistake that everybody makes is putting way too much stuff into their system. Right. And you're like, it's the thing everybody does with like Readwise and all of these Kindle highlights and stuff that the idea is you should just put absolutely everything that you encounter on the Internet into the system in some way.

41:20And then it will sort of magically make sense of itself. and everybody over indexes on that and then goes, oh my God, I have this giant database full of stuff I only kind of tangentially care about. What is any of this actually doing for me? And then you delete it all and start over. What are you actually putting into the system? Is it just like a bunch of links that you read and think are interesting every day? Are you downloading TechMeme into capacities every day? Like what is the right balance for you there? So there's like, there's a more personal answer and there's a more professional answer.

41:50For just the system and capacities, I'm just saving things that kind of, I don't know, strike my curiosity as I am browsing. Like I said, there's just kind of a handful of big overarching narratives that are taking place in tech at any given time. There are a few of those that I'm interested in. And I'm just looking for stuff where I'm like, I want to keep tabs on this. Like, for example, as we're recording this, prediction markets are on the rise. And I think they're mostly horrible. right? But like every day, I just see two or three more stories about them that kind of speak to the fact that they're being used for insider trading and like sort of other unsavory behavior.

42:30So I just want to have like a running list of those. And it might be the case that they never materialize in anything, but I now just have it set up where with like one click, I can see everything that ever interested me about prediction markets. So, you know, I do try to be judicious. Like there's a lot of tech meme headlines I'm not saving into this daily note. It has to be something where I think I may want to revisit this at some point. I will also say I am probably saving too much. I could definitely save less than I do. But the second thing that I would say to your question, though, David, is you can't just save the links.

43:04There has to be the actual thinking step. And so that actually is the next step of my system and where I think I've actually started to move into something maybe a little bit more unique. What is that thing? So last year, I read a blog post by a guy named Andy Matushak. I've cited his work a bunch when I write about productivity. I think he's one of the most interesting thinkers in the world when it comes to this stuff. But he had this idea called blips. And blips are kind of like spiritually similar to this practice that I had been doing of saving links. Like for him, it was sort of anything that might eventually turn into something more.

43:42What do I mean by something more? Well, maybe it turns into a blog post. Maybe it turns into like a project around the house. Maybe it turns into a Halloween costume, you know, like who knows? But he found that there would be all these little like threads in his life and he could like write them down somewhere. But like that wasn't enough, you know, because of the point that you made, David, like we're always just sort of writing down little ideas and they always just sort of disappear into the ether. And so Andy works on an app where, just as like a proof of concept, this is not available in the App Store, where you could write down these ideas and then whenever you opened the app again, it would resurface them to you with like maybe a question.

44:24Like, you know, have you thought about this recently? What does this idea remind you of? Is this maybe connected to this other thing? And so him and a friend were basically working on this just as like a fun project between the two of them. And I saw this and I got so jealous. I was like, this is like a thing that I want, right? Like, so like, can I build my own version of it? So a cool thing about capacities is, and very nerdy apologies, but you can create custom object types, right? So like they have, you know, like templates for like a book, for example, or a person. So like the person object type has form fields where you can put in an email address and a phone number, right?

45:03You can also create your own. And so I just created one called Blips that was just basically like a plain vanilla object type. But I thought, this is where I'm going to store all of the ideas like the ones that Andy is writing about, including, for example, we're in an AI bubble, right? Right. And and so in each of these blips, I will go in and as new stories appear or as I just read other things or have thoughts, I can open that blip and I can write down a quick sentence or two and just kind of flesh it out into into something more. um like an example i'll give you is that last year there was just this amazing run of like meta scandals that people mostly ignored by the way you know but it was like uh you know the chat bots are like like having sensual role play with children and almost 10 percent of the company's revenue comes from scams like just ludicrous stuff and also they had like rewritten their uh you know content policies to allow all this hate speech and so i just started this blip like that was basically called like meta is in moral freefall um which is like an idea that is not really captured by any other like system i have like i didn't really want like a tag for it i wanted like a place where i could flesh that idea out and so i started doing that and then as these new scandals would pop up i would just be like okay i need to orient myself like just remind me the other stuff that has come out about this company this year boom i can go into my blip and i can see it.

46:33So that's the basic architecture of it. But then of course I had to set up another step to make sure that I would actually see these things. And that step goes into your daily note, right? Like this is, this is the thing where it's, it's just occasionally showing you some of those things in the note. This, this is sort of the grand finale of my productivity system. You know, this is, this is the prestige. I think I would say if I were a magician, but using capacities, I created a live query for these blips. And I said, just show me five of these at random. And so every day I've written in my journal, I've added my links, I've added a to-do or two, and then I get down to my blips and I'll see something that's like, actually, let me just like look right now.

47:16I'll just see what's on my note today. I have one called OpenAI is a Weird Company. This is interesting. And this was a column that I wrote. And it was just like about all the weird things that happened at open ai sort of like after sam altman got fired and he like got brought back um and i would just sort of add to those i actually think increasingly they become a more normal company that was a column that i wrote recently i was like sort of like the weird era is over so i probably need to like retire this blip because it served its purpose um i have another one though called online dating reshapes society in invisible ways i've always thought this I've never written the column.

47:53I'm still kind of like gathering string about it. And there's not that much in it. But you know, I do have a dating tag. And basically, as stories pop up on TechMeme about dating, I just tag them. And like, if I open up that blip right now, I can see that there was a story about how dating apps are sort of like pivoting to Asia because like Americans are totally fatigued by dating. So as I look at these, I don't see anything that belongs in this blip. But now at least I've like revisited it and I've reminded myself that this is something that I care about. And this is such a like classic productivity thing.

48:30Like people call it spaced repetition. They're like it is it is a thing in the sort of learning and academic fields that works. Right. Like have something that is periodically shown to you again is a very powerful way to learn and retain information. Yeah. And again, like I have an objective that keeps me magnetized to this system, which is that I write three columns a week. So I am always desperate for something to write about. And so I need just a lot of input to like stoke the fires of my brain and give me ideas to do something. And before I built the system, I'm like just relying on like the RAM in my brain.

49:09One of the reasons I wanted to have you describe it is I do think it works even if you're not sort of forcibly putting that all into some output three times a week. Like I think about a lot of people come into a year like this with some vague desire, right? Like I want to, I want to lose weight. I want to learn piano. I want to, I don't know, go to the moon, like whatever. And I think a thing that I've discovered is that along the way to one of those things, you encounter all of this information, right? Like one of mine a few years ago was, uh, I want to learn music theory. Um, my, my great shame of high school is like, I'm a perfectly serviceable singer, but I can't sight read at all because I just never really learned music theory.

49:49And so I didn't make the cool choir because I couldn't sight read. And so ever since as an adult, I've been like, I want to actually properly learn music theory and how to sight read. And I would sort of in fits and starts go like find resources and do stuff and explore things and then immediately forget all of it and forget where it was and never find it again. And I slowly started building a library of like, this is a video I watched about this thing. I read this thing about this thing. I should read this thing about this thing, even though I never do. And very slowly started to build something that is actually like a useful resource for me.

50:17And then eventually can share with other people if I want to. But it's also just every time I encounter something related to this thing, even if I'm not actively doing it right now, putting it somewhere that I know where it is and can go back to it winds up being really valuable. And I think it's just a hard behavior to do, which is why I think the way that you've done it, which is basically make that capture step really simple, is really smart. Because it's like if I spent an hour like beautifully curating a Google Doc with this, I've wasted that hour. But just to pour stuff into this and be like, show it to me sometimes strikes me as really useful for almost anything.

50:48I really like your example because I think it does speak to how this system can be used by folks who are not doing my exact job. Like what I have done inside my journal basically is to add a space repetition module that helps me with a thing that I care about, you might care about something different. Like it would be cool if your journal had a site reading music module in it somehow. I bet you could probably hack something together. Honestly, that would like be pretty cool. So yeah, if there's something in your life that's like a skill that you're working on or like a problem that you're trying to solve or like you just know in like April, you want like a really cool Halloween costume and you want, you don't want to sort of leave it to the last minute, I think you can put one of these like blip like systems together and just let it jog your memory a little.

51:41I mean, like, heck, like put a Christmas list on it, like in April and just like, you know, and look at it in July and think, oh, you know, I think I actually know like what I want to get like for this special person this year. So yeah, it's like, it's like you want to like create these systems that just like give you give your brain a helping hand. I think if I can just like use metaphors. Yeah. And I think that is also kind of the answer to the next question I was going to ask you, which is what is more valuable to you about having all of this in your capacities as opposed to just like going and doing a tech meme search twice a week?

52:12But I think that's the answer, right? There is a certain amount of work that you've already done that comes back to you every time you look at the list. That's at least my experience with that stuff. This has been one of the big productivity lessons that I feel like I've learned over the past like 20 or so years that I have been focused on is that I am always just wanting to develop automated systems that like do the thinking for me. And that's why I keep striking out is because I'm trying to prevent myself from having to do the actually valuable part. And like, as I feel like I have been refining the system, I have been having to like protect the valuable thing.

52:54Like you have to create the opportunity to think and to write and to like say what is in your head. Because if you're skipping that system, like you don't actually have a productivity system, you just have a list of stuff. Yeah. I mean, and I think that is kind of the holy grail problem that frankly, so far I've had no luck with. And I'm curious how it's felt to you. Because I think about you and I have both used tools like Mem in the past. We've both used Notion with its AI stuff. There is just this run of AI tools that the promise is not just all the stuff you described, but it's actually one sort of big, giant intellectual leap beyond, which is actually we will make unexpected connections for you.

53:34You put all this stuff in and we will make the magic happen for you. And I will tell you, I have never once had that moment of that being like, oh, you saved this thing, but then you saved this thing that you thought was unrelated. But David, it's not. That has never happened to me. Has it ever happened to you? Like what are the conditions by which you're able to make that happen. So you're mostly right that the tools we have today generally don't do this, except that I have absolutely taken two stories that are interesting to me and shown them to a chatbot like ChatGPT and say, do you think these things are related?

54:10And sometimes it just gives you absolute nonsense, but sometimes it will identify like a similarity there or help you flesh something out. You know, this happened to me recently. It was a couple months ago, and I wanted to write about another one of these meta scandals from their year of moral freefall. And it had to do with scams. And so I was like talking with a chatbot about it, and I was like trying to figure out how I thought about it. And it was like, oh, by the way, do you know that there's actually an active lawsuit about this? And there was actually just like a ruling last week. I was like, thank you.

54:43Like, this is what I want out of an AI tool. It's like I had not heard this. This was not a lawsuit that it hit tech meme wound up being like super pertinent to what I was writing about. So I do think LLMs can do that. That's fair. Yeah. I mean, I think there's just a really interesting delineation there right between or it's like, what what is what is me thinking? What is me thinking with assistance? And what is me not thinking anymore? And I think we're all at a point where no one knows where that line is. And we're all over all sides of it. And it's like, I think so much of the AI chaos is that we have not, no one has yet drawn those lines in a way that makes any sense.

55:19Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that that line changes a lot as the models get more powerful. Like, you know, I am someone who likes using software, period. And so, like, of course, I am enthusiastically using AI systems. Like, some of them, like, truly feel miraculous to me. But yes, I have also gone too far. And I have found myself in that moment of like, I am asking this thing to do all of the thinking for me. Like this, like this feels horrible. So yeah, I'm trying to stay away from that. Real quick, before I let you go here, I also want to talk about Claude Code. Because you and I noticed the same thing, which is that everybody spent their holiday seasons.

55:57And by everybody, I mean all the nerds who live near you in San Francisco, spent their holiday seasons hacking around on Claude Code. And that I think if you were to pick a single, tool that is the most exciting thing in AI right now in terms of like actual honest to God product market fit doing all the stuff that we have been promised about AI. I think it's CloudCode. Just real quick, catch me up on your own experience. You wrote a thing about making your website with CloudCode. Yeah. How did that go? What was it like? I've had this Squarespace site forever. The hosting is now up to like almost$200 a year.

56:34it's basically just a business card there was a time that i like spent hours wrestling with like squarespace templates never could really get anything that i felt like was particularly cool so i thought for my first real cloud code experiment just by myself i'm gonna just type into this box hey make me a new website like give it kind of like a fun cyberpunk aesthetic um you know i wanted to like promote my newsletter promote my podcast go for it and david i swear to god like in less than an hour, I had a website that made me so happy that like, not only did it like complete the task, but it was so thrilling to me what it had done that I immediately started to brainstorm like, what else can I do with this website?

57:12And so like a day later, I put a blog on it. Like there are a bunch of new, like just fun widgets. It's like, here's the last song I listened to on Spotify. Here's like the book that I'm reading. Here's the weather in San Francisco. Just this morning, somebody was like, Hey, like my, my website is like kind of in a dark mode. and somebody who follows me was like, it'd be really great if your website had a light mode. And so I was like, Claude, can you make a light mode? And sure enough, it coded up in like eight or nine minutes. So now you can go to my website, cnewton.org and it will just respect your system settings and you'll either see the light version or the dark version.

57:47I've been making websites for more than 20 years. It has always been hard for me. I am not a technical person, okay? It has always been a struggle. And I have been so jealous of people with these websites that have these animations and these cool UI effects and, you know, like it turns your mouse cursor into something else. I have that website now. I did not write a single line of code. I have no idea how anything that you see on my website is happening, but I can tell you I made the most important parts of it in an hour without even really trying. Holy shit. How does it feel that you don't know how it works?

58:19This is the thing I struggle with with a lot of this. I don't pretend to understand how, you know, WordPress works, which is where my own, personal website is. But A, there are lots of professional people who do. And B, I could sort of like Google around and figure it out. And I'm probably not the first person to ever have this problem. And fundamentally, we're all sitting on top of like a very similar code base. You've built something that might in theory be completely unrecognizable to anyone who has ever written code in history. And neither you nor they know. Does that feel weird that this thing is so opaque?

58:52Here's the thing. I think we know. We know how HTML works. We know how CSS works. Whatever you're looking at on my website, it's HTML and CSS. It happens to be, you know, conveyed in a way that I could never like recreate myself. Now, you know, listen, if I were like coding the like, you know, critical infrastructure for like the United States nuclear arsenal, then like, yeah, I would want to get real specific about like how the various things work. but like to me this is just like an uh an exercise in a creative expression right like i mean like this is the stuff that like got me into tech in the first place i wanted to express myself i want to stake out like a little patch of land on the internet and like interact with other people right so like ai truly has like brought me back all the way full circle to the very first thing i did when i got to college in 1998 which was to make a website but like it is just it feels so much more fun now because and I cannot say this enough you just type in the box what you want and then it does it yeah I mean this is I think the funniest thing to me about Claude code is I think we're at a moment now where part of the problem is that it doesn't seem like it ought to be able to do what it can like that thing you just said where you just type a couple of sentences and it will probably do something passable I think is real and I think it is that's relatively newly real.

1:00:11Yeah. But it feels like it can't possibly be true. And so like I've had experiences where I'm reluctant to try something because it's like, well, there's no way that's going to work. And learning that, A, I should just try and be the penalty for not trying or for trying is pretty low. Even if it gets it wrong, like it's fine. I've I've I'm nowhere. That change is so meaningful in figuring out, like, I can just ask this system to do something and it will probably do it in a relatively functional way. Young people are going to be so good at this because they get to start with it fresh. We had the horrible experience of using Siri and Alexa, which is a decade-long story of nothing ever working the way that you hoped it would, right?

1:00:49Like, there's a reason why we have no confidence that any of these things work. It's because they didn't. So yeah, it's like the thrill of using this stuff right now is just finding how many cases it does work. I did one more project I would love to tell you about because I did it today. Please. I went into CloudCo today and I said, I would like you to export every article I've ever written in platformer and then i would like to be able to query it like just sort of ask questions i want to say like show me everything i've ever written about the meta oversight board or like what have i said in the past about grok and get like a good answer to that question and david it made it in 10 minutes and now i can just go into the terminal on my mac and i write platformer and then i just ask whatever question i have and it looks across more than 800 stories that i've written over the past five years.

1:01:36Like dreams are coming true in the terminal, people, in 2026. Yeah. So do you have other ideas? Like as you've been playing with it, has your brain opened and you have a long list of Cloud Code projects coming for your own productivity life? Part of me is wondering like, what can I build in Platformer that might be useful or might just like sort of look cooler? There's a bunch of like Fediverse related stuff that I haven't done because I haven't wanted to touch it. But now I feel like I actually probably just could have Claude Code, like, you know, complete the process of like federating platformer and, you know, like setting up some accounts.

1:02:13All right, well, as you come up with them, you're going to have to, maybe we should do this again in 12 months and you should - I would love to. Keep us up to date on all the stuff you're doing. All right, Casey, I have actually like ironically a bunch of new apps that you should try. We'll talk about that some other time. Wait, I'm very excited. You know I love to try an app. I know you do. You do love to try an app. And right now I'm trying to to do list apps that I think you will find fascinating. So I'll send you some links, but we'll talk. Please do send them to me. I want to ruin my life.

1:02:41Sounds good. Thanks, buddy. All right. We're going to take one more break and then we're going to come back and take a question from the Verticast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Rubrik. A lot of companies are deploying AI agents now. They're automating tasks, handling workflows and making decisions. But here's the thing. Sometimes they mess up. They might delete the wrong files, make changes you didn't authorize, or just go off script. And when that happens, you're stuck trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Unless you're using Rubric Agent Cloud.

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1:06:35All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, you can call 866-VERGE-11. You can email vergecast at theverge.com. We absolutely love hearing from you. There's always a break at the end of the year where we don't get that many calls, don't get that many emails. Everybody's like, you know, doing stuff and hanging out with their families. I miss all of you terribly. Please call with all of your tuck cushions. What weird stuff did you get over the holidays that you can't figure out how to use or set up? We want to hear all about it. Keep them all coming. Send us emails.

1:07:01Send us phone calls. This week, we have an email, and it comes from Jacob in Slovakia. Jacob says, I recently started reading a bit more and picked up my old pocketbook 626. Even though it's more than 10 years old, I don't see a reason to upgrade. Since you guys at Verge are such e-reader connoisseurs, what are the reasons to upgrade? Some killer feature if I don't care about comic books? Thank you and have a great holidays. I love this question because I think e-readers are one of the most fascinating types of device because what you do if you're a company that makes lots of devices is you are sort of relentlessly designing reasons for people to upgrade, right?

1:07:36You have to do a bunch of sort of straightforward things. Chips get better, cameras get better, software gets better. You can do all of this stuff, but you run the risk in a strange way. If you make your product too good, you cost yourself a lot of money and you cause yourself a bunch of problems because you've made a project that is so good that people don't need to upgrade. This is a problem the iPad has had over the years where people keep their iPad for like five, seven plus years. This is a problem Kindles have had for a very long time. To be clear, when I say problem, I mean problem for the people who worry about the sales numbers at these companies.

1:08:13This is the best possible technology outcome. And I think a thing I worry about right now with a lot of technology is that what you have is a lot of companies building things that don't last anymore in order to make them, quote unquote, technology, right? Like your smart fridge is not going to last as long as your dumb fridge did because it requires a bunch of software that needs updating. It requires a bunch of chips that are going to go away. That stuff is bad. Products that last a long time are good. And I think e-readers in a lot of ways are one of the products that has been most successfully built to last a really long time.

1:08:45In large part, that's because an e-reader doesn't need to do that much, right? Like have a decent screen. Battery lasts a long time. It's not a particularly technologically intensive thing. So even really old chips are going to turn the pages on your book pretty quickly. So these things last a long time. The story of having a decade old e-reader is not unusual. I know a lot of people who do. I would say in general with your e-reader, if you are happy with it and it still works, you don't need to upgrade. It's a reading experience thing. It's like not a huge change, even going from the oldest generation you can possibly think of to the very newest one.

1:09:19That said, if you buy a new one after having a 10-year-old pocketbook 626, which is actually kind of a cool thing. It has some physical buttons. I didn't know about this one. It's a fun one to look up. It's also called the Touch Lux 3, which, you know, sure. There are a bunch of upgrades that you will get moving up in time from one of those older devices. The big one is the screen. E-ink technology. has still not gotten to where, you know, you would hope that it would be, which is like unbelievably high resolution, perfect color, incredibly fast, all this smoothness, like just as good as OLED.

1:09:54We're nowhere near there. But since the device that you're using, Jacob, which was 212 dots per inch, we've gone up to 300, which doesn't sound like a huge increase, but is. And just the actual sharpness of the letters has gotten meaningfully better. It ironically hasn't gotten meaningfully better in a number of years. We've been at 300 for, I think, a decade now. And there is not a huge reason to go vastly further than that. But 300 is a nice number. And it is noticeably sharper than what you've been using so far. So that's one upgrade you'll feel. Another is that instead of having a micro USB port, it'll have a USB-C port, which is also a big deal.

1:10:33At least for me, the biggest challenge with Kindles for forever was that I either had to remember to bring a separate charger, even just on the off chance that they died, right? Like these batteries last a long time, but they do die eventually. And you would run the risk of, okay, it dies. And I just don't have the charger with me because it's the only thing I own that has a micro USB charger. So if you get, say, a new Kindle, they all have USB-C. That's a really nice, just quality of life upgrade. It just becomes much easier to charge the device when you do need to. You get more storage, 16 gigs instead of eight, which is frankly kind of whatever.

1:11:03More storage is good. Another reason to upgrade is that you might get Bluetooth audio so you can wear headphones and listen to audiobooks with some of these devices. That's a nice thing and a reason to have more storage, but I think that's a relatively niche e-reader use case. The other thing that I would say, and I think this is the one that actually matters, is just speed. I've talked to people even who had, say, five-year-old Kindles who got the latest Paperwhite, and the just sheer speed and smoothness of it feels like a gigantic upgrade. You feel the page turns differently. It actually sort of feels like it's moving with your finger instead of like you tap and then you wait and then it registers and then it turns.

1:11:46There is something to the kind of immediacy and dynamism of these new devices that feels a lot better. Again, does that meaningfully change the sort of minute to minute reading experience? No, but it is also the sort of thing that once you try it, it becomes very hard to go back. So as with so many gadgets, I don't recommend trying a new one if you're committed to sticking with your 10-year-old one, right? Because you will notice all of the little tiny increases in even just basic things like chip and display technology that make it feel better to use. So I think one of the cool things about e-readers is that let's say you hold onto it for a decade.

1:12:21Even though there haven't been a lot of sort of device-to-device massive changes, add them all up and it becomes something meaningful. So I think if you were to buy a new device, either like a Kobo Clara Color or what you get from Amazon these days with the Kindles or even like a books device, it's gonna feel better. It will be a noticeable upgrade. It will be sharper, it will be faster. The apps will work better. If you do something like a books device, you can also run other Android apps, which brings a whole new kind of life to this e-ink world that you've been in for a while. So it will be better.

1:12:53But if you pull out a device that is 10 years old and you say you are perfectly happy with it and you said in your email, I don't see a reason to upgrade, don't upgrade. You just don't need it. And you should consider it an enormous victory that this decade plus old device still works, still has all the stuff you need and still just does the job it is supposed to do. There's not enough of that in tech. And there are too many things that feel like they are slowly dying or quickly dying, frankly, in many cases. And you can look around your house and it starts to feel like a lot of things are going to be out of date very quickly.

1:13:26Hold on to the ones that aren't. So keep that pocketbook 626 as long as you possibly can. And then when it breaks or dies or the software goes out of date or the DRM falls apart such that there are things you can't read anymore, go buy a new one and know that it will feel like a great update. I hope that helps. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you, as always, for watching and listening. Thank you to Sean and thank you to Casey for being here. Tremendously fun episode. It's very fun to be back. We're back in normal VergeCast season. Like I said at the top, this is the new year and we're back at it.

1:13:58Glad to be here with all of you. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday to catch up on all the stuff that's been happening. There's been all this crazy open AI news that Neil and I haven't even talked about. So much going on. Lots to catch up on. We will see you on Friday. Rock and roll.

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