Apple Forced to Pull Apple Watches from Shelves!

36:17culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com. Welcome back. So we slightly missed this news last week because I believe that it started happening on like Thursday, and we record these episodes on Wednesday. Yeah, pretty classic. Pretty classic. But Threads officially started testing Federation through ActivityPub. Those are words that mean things, I promise. It's a little complex. Effectively, what this means is that there is this idea of the decentralized internet where you can post on any platform and it shows up on other platforms. And people can like and comment and not subscribe.

37:01But they can like and comment. They can do all this stuff. And all of this activity through ActivityPub will show up on whatever platform that you're using. surprisingly Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are pro the Fediverse pro ActivityPub which I'm not sure if that's real or if they're just trying to do that to make it seem like they're more open and more for the open web but this is a pretty big deal because as of now they are testing it with some big accounts on Instagram threads so Adam what is his last name? yeah he's one of the first people that is fed versed through activity pub so you can actually see his threads posts on mastodon right now oh yeah and so uh there are other apps that are federating through activity pub like flipboard is now federating so you should be able to see flipboard comments and posts right on mastodon so this inter interoperability interplay of like the same content and engagement working across different clients and different sites right it's inter networking here we go yeah i've got some thoughts okay i mean my thoughts have always been like a little high level like zoomed out i'll give two one is look i've always been a fan of of cheeses of jack cheese and cheddar and all these others but I just can't get behind feta having its own universe damn I'm the dad I really wasn't expecting that here Marquez take my shoes so that's one that's a David joke and you just went for it I was so interested in the analogy I thought I was finally going to understand activity pub based on cheeses.

38:58Not at all. But okay, but number two though, seriously, I've always felt like one of the biggest skills of navigating the internet or being a creator on the internet is creating different things for different places and sort of being able to natively speak the language of different platforms. So if I'm on Instagram, there is a way that you can do Instagram that is inherently different from the way that you do Twitter and the way that you do threads. so if you give me the ability to log into one client and post the same thing everywhere i don't think that's better for me can i potentially answer this and you can tell me how wrong i am sure sure it seems like the majority of these things linking together are still similar content wise like mastodon threads and stuff are more like these like singular posts so like anything you would post on Twitter seems that it is not necessarily connecting Instagram into this, right?

39:55Or YouTube yet. We could have our 4chan posts on LinkedIn. Oh, jeez. Yeah. I mean, again, nightmare blunt rotation of social media. I look at it from the creator's perspective. I think the other end of that coin is when you do post in these different universes, the Instagram universe, the Threads universe, the Macedon universe, you don't own your audience as you move between each of these different places. So if I post and I'm going to abide by the rules of and I am posting in the native language of Mastodon and I suddenly go, you know what? I would like to take my audience over here to Threads.

40:33It is when they're separate, very difficult. And when they are connected, they feel like you already own your audience and you can just move them from place to place and they can move and they can use whatever place they want. They can be a Threads person. They can be a Mastodon person. they'll still be subscribed to you so that's the the bright side of that i think it is in your sense for creators and influencers potentially a negative in that way but i would argue 99 of the people using it are like people following you would rather be like i want to choose the platform and wish i can follow you and that's more user base than the people who are more worried about like where are all my followers splitting off into i guess i wonder how much of people's decision to use each of these platforms is based on the people there or the platform itself like when i go to instagram i'm there for instagram stuff and when i go to twitter i agree with that totally like i do think there's a totally different version like how you post on instagram versus twitter i mean instagram is where travis kelsey can post winning a super bowl twitter is where he can post about a squirrel eating bread.

41:44They're like totally different things. But like, I think in the sense of if people want to follow your Twitter, I don't want to call it persona, but the type of content you're doing on Twitter, then somebody might be like, well, I like the layout of Mastodon better, but I still want to follow Marques, even though he likes posting from Twitter. So then, am I right in that? It's more like the users and the followers sounds like such a stupid term, but like the people keeping up. Yeah, giving them. it's like am i gonna watch hockey on a samsung if hockey was only on samsung tvs do i want to be able to get the choice of watching it on lg tv right sure it also you know it leads to like a world where like and this is all hypotheticals right but like mark has you review cars so let's say like the guy hypothetically who owns your favorite social network also owns an electric car company that you gave like an unfavorable review and then he's like wait i don't want you on my social network anymore, you can still reach all the same followers who are on sites not controlled by this hypothetical person.

42:44Theoretically, this actually feeds into what we were talking about with a lot of competition because in the previous landscape where all of these companies could make Twitter apps, Twitter clients like Falcon and all these Twitter apps that we used to be able to use before the API tokens disappeared, that was sort of like everyone's making it an app because they have an open API, but it's all feeding into this one server base that Twitter operates. And Twitter makes the rules and Twitter makes the features and controls it. Exactly. So now it's like, you don't have, like right now, if you want to make a social networking company, it's probably the hardest thing you can possibly do because you have to gain a social graph, which is why Instagram threads was like the easiest one to do because you just unloaded everyone from Instagram.

43:29And which is why buying one of the most popular social media platforms and renaming it was kind of a dumb move yeah yeah but that's why like t2 didn't work because they weren't able to get enough people on it that's why uh blue sky is having trouble because they're having trouble getting people on it but theoretically if you just had this protocol you could make a social networking app and you already have everybody on it yeah you already have all the content so if it's just an app that has different features or a different layout or you wanted to have an API that like, or not an API, if you wanted to have a feature that only showed you hiking threads or hiking posts, you know, it automatically uses AI to like only show you hiking stuff or only show you this.

44:15Then you can have a lot more competition because you can just build an app and plug it directly into the Fediverse and you don't have to build your own social graph. It just already exists. I'm cool with that. I think that's a great idea because I'm going to inevitably want to use certain apps but with different features of a it's like having third party clients again like that i love that world right i would have used third party clients for everything but yeah the the hypothetical like fast forward into the future where every single social media company is plugged into the fed and i just post one thing and it's my linkedin and my instagram and my twitter like i don't like yeah yeah there was that meme that was going around a couple of years ago that was like me on LinkedIn, me on, um, yeah, it was always like me on LinkedIn, me on Tinder, me on Instagram.

45:02And it was like completely different personas. And there's a reason it's different. Yeah. And I think that's why, that's why it's so hard to have like new social media apps is because yeah, we are in the age of like mature social media. Like all the ideas have been taken. Like TikTok came along and it was like, Oh, that's actually new and different. Here comes 20 billion people, like short form vertical. All right, we're doing it. It's going to be genuinely really hard to come up with a new one because we have all these great ideas already but also there's there's like a reason why i post some things on one place and some things on the other place yeah you could probably still do that they're probably settings you could probably easily set up settings to say like i don't want posts that i make on this app to show up on other apps in the fediverse or like that i don't want to see other people's posts from other apps you could probably do that too yeah yeah yeah it's just like that's sorry that my my number one like sign of a talented content creator is they're able to speak the language of a native platform totally and i think to go on to a question i have in terms of people who are content creators using social media and what this could entail this might be another dumb question but i know nothing about activity pub let's say you post something on twitter and somebody follows you or on threads because it is going to get linked but somebody who uses mastodon follows you would you see numbers reflected on the app that maybe Marques posts from?

46:22I actually don't know. I believe so. I would kind of assume so, but I just keep thinking about how, I don't know how marketing agencies are still so bad at working with creators and understanding engagement and metrics that now we're going to add potentially dozens of different platforms that can connect to one thing. They're just not going to have any idea how to gauge an audience of a content creator. Instead of being, we would like one Instagram and one Twitter, they're just like we would like one post right just the post the post that goes all your i mean how many people are following you how many people interact if it's on different websites does it leak into all other ones this is just proof that i have no idea what activity pub is no i think that's a fair question like how if there are unlimited if if it's truly open and anyone can build anything that plugs in and they're not all tracked across everything a thousand people follow you where are they tracked yeah why wouldn't they be attracted well it that's why i said it might be How will I know from my point of view, let's say I'm a creator who posts something, how do I know from this post that I just put out into the world, how many people total are engaging with it and from where?

47:29I guess that's my question is, would it, if you posted on threads and I replied on Mastodon, it would still be in the thread replies, right? So I just looked this up. Adam Aseri on threads and on Mastodon has the same amount of followers, 658 ,000 followers. And if you like click on that first post, is it the same replies on both? Yeah, it should be. It's got 14 replies on Mastodon. And there's like 300. And it's got 138 replies. So, I mean, they haven't built it out completely yet. They said they're like adding features and working through it. And they said it's going to take upwards of a year to actually get the full functionality built out.

48:06So theoretically, everything could, when it's built out, get synced across everything. All of the comments are supposed to get synced. All the likes are supposed to get synced. But I think right now, all that's happening is the posts get like cross posted, but they will they will eventually all be integrating. That makes so the fact that they have the same amount of follower. He has the same amount of followers on both platforms is actually, I think, good because I think that a lot of influencers will actually like push their numbers up a ton because they'll go to someone who wants to make a like do a YouTube ad and they have no followers on YouTube, but they have a ton on Instagram.

48:43They'll say, I have 800 million followers across all my platforms, but that's all Instagram. But they can tell someone who wants to make a YouTube thing that they have a lot of followers. you know it's it's easier to track if you can just say these are all of the people that follow me because the problem too is that like a lot of people follow me on youtube and instagram and i can't just say i have double the total followers because oh you can't so much people do people do oh yeah the problem though people do all the time and that is such a fake number there's so much overlap yeah whereas if there's just one universal number and you say i have one million people that follow me total at all across all platforms yeah which is like so that's great because it's for you you're able to have a big number but if i am the advertiser now think about it i want specifically the people who look at the images you post i don't have a video i want you to post an image well it's like okay 95 of those people are just there for the videos not see what i mean like you can probably have statistics for each site right you could say like instagram i have these people are engaging with this information like instagram will probably give you statistics of like the people that engage on Instagram.

49:46Yeah, there's going to have to be some amazing Thetaverse local statistics analytics hub. It doesn't matter because marketing agencies are still 20 years behind understanding any of this so they have no idea what's going on. There's going to be a lot of interesting local versus global analytics that's going to happen. On that cottage cheese verse or something. Here we go again. Alright! So yeah, hopefully that happens pretty soon, but it's good to see it finally start happening because when they launched Threads, they said that it was going to be federated and everyone got really excited. It's been quite a while since they launched Threads and now they're actually starting to work on it.

50:22They're actually following through with this promise which feels really good. Yeah, I wish Adam was here too. Not Missouri. Adam Molina. Yeah, he's like the guy. What? He's the guy. He's the activity pub guy. Yeah. Yeah, Adam is very into activity pubs so it's a bummer that he's sick today. Everyone wish Adam well. F in the chat. No. No, that is what we want. I feel like F's is like, they died. Yeah, but Adam is alive and well. He just doesn't want to get us sick. But are you saying he deserves disrespect? No, never. I would never disrespect Adam in any way, shape, or form. That's so F's in the chat, guys.

50:58That's true. Adam Mazari, on the other hand, Instagram for iPad. Come on. You can Fediverse, but you can't Instagram on iPad. It's so real. Just kidding. I actually think he's pretty awesome. Yeah, he's a cool guy. Okay. Let's talk smartphone awards. Let's talk that. Spoiler. we're going to talk about the winners if somehow you are listening to the podcast before the video thanks that's pretty awesome but we're going to talk about we're going to ruin the video yeah yeah that's fine not a single hot take in here none not at all every single one perfect pick globally accepted are we allowed to universal are we allowed to kind of like say if we had different picks i was good yes yes you are allowed to have your own opinion on the show despite the google lawsuit said you couldn't but now you are allowed to i'm free i'm free all right let's go down the list okay let's go on the list see if you guys agree wait is the wikipedia page updated already probably definitely let me check whoever does this is incredible how quickly they have this there's a new category yeah it's updated 2023 oh and the new category too that's so cool all right so this is the spoiler this is the first year we have a new category so We have an extra trophy, an extra award now to give out.

52:10So we'll go through these and let us know your thoughts. This is fun. I'm actually excited to see if you guys have other thoughts because let's chime in too if you have any. All right. Oh, yeah, baby. First, best big phone. I feel like this was the one. This wasn't necessarily a super easy one or hard one, but it's S23 Ultra for me. This is just a boring phone that does everything well at being big. Phones are like roughly all the same size as far as big phones now. like 6.8 inches is like the size of a big phone and this has a incredible screen it has all of the cameras it has two telephoto cameras it has a 5 000 milliamp hour battery it has multitasking features it has a stylus built in the stylus that's what i was just looking at everything yeah yeah so i i gave a runner-up to the oneplus open and honorable mentions to the find x6 pro and the rog phone 7 but i do stand by s23 ultra best big phone yep i kind of agree with that this one was a little bit difficult because it's like how do you define big when you have folding phones that exist.

53:06I agree. I think this was an argument I used to make with best small phone because I thought the flip in terms of like pocket size was small. Well, I don't want to cut David off. I was cutting David off. I want to say something I really like about that Galaxy S23 Ultra that makes it feel like a truly big phone is the bezels are insanely small on that phone. You look at that screen and it's just like you can barely see any bezel. It's like all screen. So from screen to body ratio on that thing is crazy. and it's not even like curved over the sides or anything to try to make it seem even more screen than it actually is.

53:40So would you say Samsung's the king at screen to body ratio? They're probably. They've been doing it for a long time. They always seem to have the high numbers. Screen to body ratio companies from in like China. Yeah. But it feels the best, I would say. Yeah. And it's also like it's a 1440p like LTPO, high brightness, high accuracy, like it's a great screen. It feels boring to give it to Samsung because one, their products now come out in January. So it's been so much time since it came out. That's also impressive though that they can pull off a win when they're arguably 10 months behind. One year old phone.

54:15Yeah, they're actually a processor behind now. They're already a processor behind. Yeah, I thought about giving out to the OnePlus Open which is a phone we'll talk about later. But yeah, Find X6 Pro is like, it's really close. It just didn't have the extra zoom. ROG Phone 7 doesn't have wireless charging. It does have much better speakers though. So I was just kind of like, This is the boring one. It just wins. Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. All right. Best compact phone. Best small phone. This is a funny one too because phones have been stratifying and all the small, perfect. All the small ones have gotten down to like a 6.1 inch screen.

54:49Like the smallest, like the Pixel 7a is 6.1 inch. The smallest S23, 6.1. The smallest iPhone, I believe, is 6.1, corner to corner. So they're all not that small. and the Zenfone 10, which I'm giving like the clear head and shoulders win for best small phone is 5.9. 5.9, baby. It's actually reachable. Yeah. And it has a ton of features and it happens to also be an incredible phone. It's so good. It's like a physics defying flagship. Surprisingly good cameras, really surprisingly good battery life. Like very, very good performer. The battery on this is wild. It's an excellent all around phone and it happens to be the only reachable one.

55:28And it has something that the best big phone doesn't have, which is a headphone jack. It does. I still think that's crazy. $599. It's got an insanely fast processor. It's insanely good battery life. It's got wireless charging. It's tiny. I honestly think it's nearly flawless. That was my, yeah. And by the way, they're probably not going to make another small one. All the rumors are pointing to the Zenfone 11 Ultra. I'm really nervous. Zenfone 11, so. My, I mean, I've been using it since it came out, so. so several months yeah i love it my biggest gripe the ultra wide camera is not the best yeah um which i've just like been realizing more lately because i'll be holding lane in my arms and try and take a picture and i'm like oh that's not that great but yeah um but no i love it i i yeah i have like nothing bad to really say about it it's so good it's great can you show the mag safe thing on the back here it's just like this mag safe sticker so you can buy these things now I recommend this to everybody on their Android phone because then you can use MagSafe accessories.

56:29It snaps on. Yeah. It just 3Ms on. Yeah. My only gripe with it is it comes with this really great little thing that plugs into the USB-C and then has a guide to exactly where, but it's only for like popular phones. Oh, yeah. So like you'll do it on like all the Samsung phones. You can line it up perfectly. I had to place it on a MagSafe wireless charger and then like gently put the phone above it till it charged and then like press down on the phone. Oh, wow. You know what you need? Magnet paper. Oh, true. It would just look exactly like the sticker that's on it already. Oh, exactly. That would have been helpful.

57:06And then you could see exactly what the ring is and then move it over. They're like eight bucks also. Really? On Amazon. I'll have, maybe we can put a link. I first saw this, Dan Seifert from The Verge added it to his Pixel Fold and then now Alex has it on his Pixel Fold too. It's great. It's great. It's great. I gave an honorable mention for the best small phone to the Z Flip 5 for the reason you were talking about. It is able to fold down smaller and it has a tiny screen on the outside that is usable. So when you open it, it's still a 6.7 inch screen. It's a big phone again, but it has the ability to be small.

57:35So I gave it that. My counter argument against that is that I really like the Razer more. Really? I think the Razer feels a little bit cheaper, but I think it has a lot more character. Samsung phones to me feel like they have zero character. So I agree, but it's again kind of in that boring light where like I think the Razer has worse cameras, worse battery, worse software. Well, I like the software better on the Razer. And I don't know about, I didn't use battery long enough to know if it's a worse battery life. But it's got a terrible camera. The Razer in low light is one of the worst cameras I've ever seen.

58:07So I gave, I think like as far as flipping phones, like Samsung leads the pack. and again we're going to talk about foldables later but like just build quality and just the ability to be the best and have all the features seemed like that was that's head and shoulders above the rest like there's a couple folding up flipping oppos and flipping yeah huawei's but this was this is the one yeah so that makes sense all right next category best camera iphone 15 pro it is the best overall camera in a smartphone for me and you're this is coming from a person who shoots a lot of videos on smartphones and takes a lot of photos.

58:41And I think when you just look at photos, you can easily sway me off of this. Like there are others that take better photos. You could sway me to my honorable mention, which was the S23 Ultra with that 10X zoom. Crushes the iPhone zoom. 15 Pro Max even had a little bit of an extra zoom. But there are things that like... Yeah, there are others that do better low light that just have better photo features. Pixel, you could argue for all the AI features. But then video is a huge part of smartphone cameras too. and this always solidifies the iPhone for me because the video coming out of the iPhone is still so much better than all the rest.

59:17They added log this year. They added the ability to shoot to an external SSD this year. You can genuinely shoot excellent video on an iPhone in a massive variety of situations, which makes it the head and shoulders camera king for me. I think that all of the features they added for like log recording and all of the professional features, their USB-C recording to an external hard drive, all that stuff, i think that definitely definitely like makes it a lot better i will say though that i think that the dual exposure pixel thing they added to the pixel 8 pro this year made the video capabilities way better yeah you shot an autofocus episode on the pixel 8 pro i did and everyone was commenting like this looks really freaking good love the colors out of it the stabilization was a little bit shifty at times um but it was very sharp and had awesome color and i loved that about it yeah So, and the mics were pretty good too.

1:00:07I mean, I shoot more in, I need to shoot more in like less windy places to like really get a good idea of the mics. But I was using the background wind removal feature and it was pretty good. So it's good. It was good. And again, both of them need more manual controls. But if you ask me if I could only use one smartphone camera for the next couple of years, I'm doing iPhone 15 Pro. Yeah. Pixel 8 Pro did add all the manual controls for the photo mode, which was really dope. Love that. So, yeah. I do have a question here before you move on to honorable mentions. and I saw it on Reddit. People are wondering, when you say iPhone 15 Pro and now looking at some old things here, sometimes you said like the Pro and the Pro Max.

1:00:43In 2020, you only said Pro Max. Last couple of years, you've only said Pro. Are you kind of lumping them together? Because there is a distinction this year. Yeah, there is. Minimal, but the telephoto. 3 to 5X lenses, that's it. Correct me if I'm, the log stuff wasn't, is on both? It's on both, yeah. This one, I'm lumping them together. You're right, there is a different telephoto and I think they both are head and shoulders above the rest. So they get lumped together in that way. If there was a bigger difference between the two, I would pick the one that's better, which I think because of the extra zoom on the 5X on the Pro Max, you could argue that that's better.

1:01:15I think some people who just use 3X zoom would be totally fine. You could argue that's just preference at that point. Yeah, it's a small difference, honestly. Having shot with both, it's not a giant difference. Samsung has a 10X, like that's a big difference. These two, I'm just putting iPhone 15 and 15 Pro together at the top. Okay, so if anyone wondering, you're talking about both. or 15 pro and 15 pro pro yes pro and pro max yes yeah uh i gave the honorable mention to s23 ultra for the photo stuff and if you want to know the winners of the blind smartphone camera test after a few million votes yeah let's talk about that we've got them so in standard mode which was just a photo of me in front of the window in daylight the winner for all the masses was pixel 7a let's go second second place the phones always win i love it the a phone went last year too yeah it won last year as well yeah the the second place was the pixel fold and the third place was the one plus open so am i am i correct the pixel fold has the same sensor as the pixel 7 i don't think so i think they told me it was new sensors new but it's the same size same megapixel count okay same 50 megapixels my theory which has been true since the pixel 6 in my opinion is that google updated they keep updating the sensor size but that algorithm is still made for the smaller sensors and they have not updated the algorithm and so it's made for this small sensor world where you have to like do a bunch of noise reduction and all this other stuff so that algorithm like isn't very necessary for the larger sensors now which is why the smaller sensor pixels keep winning because it works better on the the smaller sensor pixels whereas the new ones i've noticed that like pixels can overexpose really easily now and like there's a lot of get a little hdre yeah a process a little over process sometimes they don't really know how to handle all the extra light you're getting from the bigger sensor it got a little more interesting in the other categories as well but yeah i was i was interested to see like pixel one two yeah not eight pro though just 7a and pixel fold which again smaller sensors interestingly so then we got to low light and the winner for the low light was iphone 15 pro for the masses that's kind of surprising that made a lot of sense to me yeah um again these are all full auto uh the second place was pixel 8 pro and the third place was pixel 7a wow again pixel dominating so pixel showing up as 2 3 but iphone 15 pro having the best of light photo it these for whatever reason i mean we took this on the roof with me in front of like the city background.

1:03:42I am dimly lit. A lot of HDR going on. You can see like a halo around my head in some of them. And they brightened me up, which was cool, but they looked a little weird. There was a Reddit post that somebody, the haloing was so bad that somebody was like, what's happening? Did this get messed up? It's like, no, some phones just are not great at doing. Yeah, man. When I imported them, looking at them all side by side, I'm convinced like two of them darkened the sky and brightened my face to make it more like poppy. Yeah, I just it looked cool in the moment, but it was like, that's not a natural looking.

1:04:14Yeah, that's not what I look like in that moment. Wait, David, why did why did iPhone surprise you for? Because the low light performance is like not generally something that Apple like hyper focuses on. But I think that their color in low light was better than almost everybody else. It had the most natural color. We only did three photos. So there's a ton of other variables that were not tested. I think if you had a moving subject, this would have been very different because some of them automatically did a long exposure for low light. Some didn't. The iPhone, I think, did a two-second exposure for this particular shot.

1:04:47Some of them were just like, bam, single shot, blast the HDR. And if you were, like, moving, that would work because I would be, like, frozen. But the iPhone would have me blurred. So there's a bunch of variables that weren't tested here. But for this me sitting still outside in the dark, pretty good. Okay. last one portrait mode which is just me cut out from a background normal looking shot the winner was the pixel 8 pro second place was actually the samsung z fold 5 interestingly and third place was the iphone 15 pro the portrait mode shots had the biggest variance between them all different focal lengths different cutout strengths different color characteristics lots of stuff going on yeah i think i also ended up with my winner being pixelate pro here but yeah pixel podiumed on every single type of test that's crazy interesting you know what's wild is that we tested 20 different phones tons of different manufacturers and the only three manufacturers that landed were google apple and samsung and the oneplus open grab the oneplus open right grabbed a bronze medal in there yeah yeah it's like watching the olympics where they're like dang it's the same five countries well the funny thing is like the these are the three companies that everyone that like everyone says like oh their cameras are not actually as good as they say they are actually these other companies are better but then they win the blind test this is as voted by you guys right this is not me and my winners this is i put them all up blind and you guys voted millions of times and these are the ones that had the highest elo ratings at the end for each category i picked the vivo for the uh there's a lot of time my vivo sneaks in there a lot my winners were a little different from this list yeah mine were really different i think my my highest standard was the one plus 11 oh weirdly i had a i had the uh um it's a fair phone five you did wow remember that i was a surprising one actually yeah also for anyone wondering why we didn't do a full video on this this year it's just like camera improvements are pretty minimal every year so like we found when we used to do the bracket style the video each year kind of was very similar but we still wanted to play the game because it's fun for the audience yeah So that's why this year the website was up.

1:06:58You just straight up got your results. There's no waiting till the end. And then we just tacked it into the smartphone awards. We do plan on doing a video either the next time we see a significant, big, interesting thing or probably like every couple of years where we feel like the camera improvements are getting exponentially bigger. Well, there's some big changes, big learnings, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. All right, a couple more. My value award, this was just a bloodbath. It could have been any one of like five phones. I ended up going with the one that, again, almost feels like it's too easy of a pick.

1:07:31It's just the bland, middle, everything you need, nothing you don't, A54. I think it launched at$400. I think it's like close to$330,$320 now. Samsung Galaxy A54 for those that don't know. Sorry, Samsung Galaxy A54. Awesome 54 is what they want to call it. Awesome magenta. Yeah. Literally, my analogy in the video was like, you know how someone asks you how your day is and you're like it's fine it's fine how's the screen it's fine how's the cameras how's fine fingerprint reader it's fine yeah yeah battery life it's fine it's the default skin of yeah of like it's the generic phone that you get and it's fine because like that's all you need yeah and it's everything you need so it's it's totally reasonable pick for most people to just live with that phone um so i like it i gave my runner-up to the moto g play which impressed me at 169 crazy and an honorable mention to the pixel 7a which is 500 now but did actually get noticeable improvements and it's a really good phone yeah i think the zenphone 10 is a great value that's a very good point yeah i do think value generally should stray less but 600 bucks for a phone that i switch from like very good pixels and yeah very happy with that's a that's a great flagship specs too yeah little stand over here yeah but you could buy three moto g plays i'd rather have one the the g is impressive because you are getting like a pretty big screen it's 90 hertz and it's like very usable because when you test i've tested some really cheap phones and when you go down in price they get slow and they get real bad software support and that one was at least decent at everything so i was happy about that um but you're right i don't know if i felt like there was like a cap to what i could give it no for sure i agree i agree like i wanted i don't know could i get well we did we gave pixels six and pixel seven twice best value because those were this year went up a hundred bucks on both of them yeah but previously those values were really they were up higher but they were super super worth it yeah for sure okay best battery award iphone 15 plus two-day phone there's not a lot of phones i can say that about and it's a 60 hertz phone and the other two phones that i mentioned if you set them to 60 hertz are also two-day phones yeah which are the rog phone 7 which had a 6 000 milliamp hour battery i believe and the zen phone 10 which if you set it 60 hertz is going to be a two-day phone yeah um rog phone 7 does not have wireless charging no zen phone 10 does not have particularly fast charging but it's still good i think it's 30 watts.

1:10:09Yeah, it's decent. This is the largest battery ever in an iPhone, and I just couldn't kill it, and I just had to give it the award. It's that good. Real quick, looking at this list on Wikipedia, in 2014, your first year, you did not do a Best Battery Award. I've never noticed that. You also didn't do Best Foldable that year. That's true. Weird. But no, no, I like flip phone. Best Battery feels like one... Actually, funny enough, the categories have been exactly the same since 2014, except for that first year no best battery which seems kind of like yeah and i changed the design award the design started off as like best build quality and then it was and then i just changed it to craziest design and now it's just something design award really yes something that was a little outside of the box or which we're about to get into design so let's do that one design award this was actually it started off being the hardest one to give and then it turned out being the easiest one because i can't it's always like i can't give this to like a plastic phone i can't give this to a phone that doesn't have a headphone jack i can't give this to a phone that doesn't have like flats display and like all the things that we need a phone to have so it's end up it's going to end up being the boring one it's going to end up being like the s23 ultra or something i'll argue a plastic phone that could have been mentioned the fair i've got an argument for this one because the fair phone like design wise is designed to be replaced and stuff like that i'm not saying it should have won but that is a plastic one that does have a different design choice that should be applauded definitely a notable design and in that particular way it's it's interesting it's still a thicker phone it's still is it water i think it is water resistant but it's still compromised a little bit okay i'm not saying it should have went i'm just saying that like plastic shouldn't immediately you can do good things with plastic plastic revolutionary i did ellis's crumple phone oh best design award no it's 2021's iphone 12 mini baby listen okay listen listen listen listen listen okay i had to get the back glass repaired on this guy a little bit ago and i went to the apple store with my apple care you know um and it took forever it took like six hours for them to do this and uh so i finally came to pick up my phone and naturally i was like what was going on right uh and the technician was like i'm so excited that i get to sit down with you and talk to you about this he said first of all you have and this is a quote the collector's iphone he described this as the best iphone one could own and he said specifically it's because it is the strongest iphone apple has made since the x that is the word from the technician he said i just like that it's so hard not only is it so hard to break these things which i can attest to because I have no case and I drop it every single day.

1:12:56You did break it. I know you were at a repair appointment. That's what I was trying to like. That's so funny. But he was explaining that the railing and front glass of the 12 mini is so strong. It's almost impossible for even a technician to take them apart without completely breaking the entire phone. You know what's funny is that's why they changed the way that the iPhone 14 was made to make it easier to take the back off because it was too hard to repair. and it was costing them too much money. I think that was this year. It was all one piece. Anyway, this is all to say, greatest iPhone ever made in my hands.

1:13:31I would argue that the 13 mini is better because it has much better battery life. Well, if it's just the design award. But it doesn't come in purple. I have to disqualify them both because they didn't come out this year. Also, fact check, that was 2020 and not 2021. Oh, either way, this phone is pretty much brand new, so I think it's eligible. Ellis' iPhone 12. Yeah. refurbished one best design no i i gave it to the honor magic v2 right oh i forgot we didn't yeah it was incredibly it was just a physics defying phone again 9.9 millimeters biggest battery in a foldable just that by itself was like wait wait hold on 5 000 million powers um it's crazy it has the full triple camera array it has like all the the folding phone stuff corner corner outside screen great aspect ratio really really good design yeah so yeah shout out to them it's a folding phone which is crazy because next category is the first ever best folding phone trophy new new award for 2023 did you guys get tagged on twitter a bunch because apparently like six months ago we said yeah oh we're gonna do the new folding phone category when it happens say you can tell people you knew about this because of the podcast and i forgot we said that i just got a bunch of tweets like at me i was like what what happened we also said we'd pin the comment of whoever tweeted at us first oh oh so we need to good luck adam i did someone did say you know what to do and i was like i do not so thank you find the first person that tweeted that at us and we will uh we'll pin the comment for this let me try and find the first person you got this adam yeah yeah well it's the one plus open this year it's the best folding phone that came out this year it's the most complete it is a full flagship a total banger like the screens are awesome super bright super responsive super high-end specs great battery full-on cameras you saw it get that bronze metal it had really good cameras um and the software was actually really good a little bit of interesting new multitasking features with the way they organize the the different windows around the panels so if you made me pick a foldable to daily that's the one i would pick i would pick it by a slim margin personally over the pixel fold which i gave my runner up because that for whatever reason well i know why it's because it's the aspect ratio and size, the passport stuff.

1:15:46It's awesome to use it closed. Which is awesome, but it's a folding phone so I gotta open it sometimes and it's not as good open. So, that was my runner up and honorable mention to the Z Flip 5, both because it's the best flipping phone and also because it feels like Samsung's were the only ones that didn't have some sort of build issues, whether it's the screen or the hinge or something like that. Samsung's been added the longest and they're doing the safest design, which is why they didn't win awards, but honorable mention for being durable. Yeah. I'll say the Pixel Fold's interior to screen is pretty bad.

1:16:17Yeah, the bezels are pretty big. It's just like it doesn't look like it's kind of oily. It just doesn't look nearly as good as something like the OnePlus Open or the Honor Magic V2. OnePlus Open has almost no crease too. Yeah, it's very good. It's basically the same exact hardware as the Oppo Find like N3 Fold or whatever it's called. Yeah. It is the exact same hardware. Yeah, same hardware. Yeah. It's good, man. I really wish that Oppo kept making the small passport foldables that they stopped with the find n2 fold oh they stopped yeah i didn't realize that at least so far because they switched to a much bigger phone that's part of the reason i really like the pixel fold is because it's shorter yeah yeah so also alert slider didn't even mention that all right all right i also did a most improved award i kind of like this one just like what let's acknowledge the biggest delta between last year and this year and i ended up giving this one to the nothing phone too uh yes the hardware is slightly improved and it has like a a new curved back and better leds and more control over the glyph and stuff like that but also a big software jump in the whole rewrite they did with nothing os and now it's on android 14 with nothing os 2.5 and it has a lot of character and it has i message and it's got the blue oh wait no no wait sorry no no it doesn't no they don't have that anymore close but the phone itself deep cut yeah i mean that would have locked them into the spot for sure if they'd gotten that through but it doesn't have blue bubbles but it is still really good and I gave my runner up to the iPhone 15 because they've had lightning for a decade and it has USB-C this year that's crazy so there you go that is a big improvement must improve a lot of other phones are like almost the same as last year basically and like Zenfone 10 I'm glad it's almost the same as last year I'm not mad I'm just saying it's just slightly better in every way bust of the year the Solana Saga cryptophone now listen listen i hear you i'm not ignoring you i hear you there are a lot of people mainly on twitter mainly with crypto in their bio who have a lot of thoughts about how the resale price of this phone has gone up so much because you have to you got to spend like two grand to get one on ebay now did you know that yeah they're like reselling five hundred dollars because all the bonk and And all of the, what is the crypto?

1:18:33Klanosaurs. Klanosaurs that you get. And the free honeybee toy or whatever. No, no, no. It's called B-me-um. Get it right. All of the stuff that you get with the phone at the moment is very valuable. All of the limited edition NFTs and stuff that you get with the phone are actually quite valuable at this point. So if you didn't buy the phone, you missed out on a bag. You could have sold it for$1 ,000 on eBay. generational wealth here's the thing that doesn't make it a good phone also yeah it doesn't also on top of that we have always said that we judge these phones for this based on release msrp and things that happened at release right like yeah because there's a lot of times by the time we're into this people are like no the samsung phone's so much cheaper now the value should be this or my t-mobile gives me buy one get one free and those are great deals and bonk is cool that it's bonking off or whatever but like it did not happen when the phone came out and when we first looked at the phone solana was and we don't get to if anything did we shoot the smartphone awards already before yeah this spike happened we did actually yeah yeah yeah so the other thing is like okay this was uh it was a thousand dollars when it came out whatever then it was 600 bucks when i reviewed it but the the actual phone itself isn't good so this was let's let's just say it's a normal$600 phone it had a pretty solid build quality this is the thing this was made by the same team that made the essential phone one yeah and it was made of ceramic and it was heavy and it had the colored buttons and it had like a nice design it was like a fair phone but made of ceramic it was cool yeah true fingerprint reader on the back that's a throwback i liked it throwback design but then from that point on you got a worse soc you got a pretty bland uh display you got a 4 ,100 milliamp hour battery, which in a phone this big is not enough.

1:20:20Cameras were not good. Just straight up not good. And then the software is basically stock. They didn't add anything to the software experience other than the Solana features. The Dapp Store. The Dapp Store, exactly. With the developers of the Dapp Store. So I will add this asterisk for you. If you are a really invested Solana holder already. Or even into crypto. No, but it's like not even in crypto. You have to be like into the Solana chain. The thing about the app store too, is that you can't only use the apps on the Solana. You sound like you're hiccuping while saying app store. It's not like you can only use the apps on the Solana.

1:21:01So you can use them on any Android phone. It's just a curated list of apps. I mean, you get the seed vault. There were a couple of things that were built into the phone that were unique. The seed vault is cool. Which is why I will say, if you are like all in to that ecosystem, then that feature may push it over the edge for you to want to still spend$600 or I guess go to eBay now and spend$2 ,000 on a phone with a subpar display, subpar battery life, subpar cameras, and subpar software because you have that feature working for you. In which case, the runner-up is the bust of the year, which is all of the concept phones that didn't come out this year.

1:21:36You know who you are. The Solana phone came with a really cool USB cable that had a little switch that allowed you to do only charging or charging plus data still use that cable and they were selling it on amazon for like 30 but i can't find it now oh so oh so that makes it a good just kidding mvp yeah okay also if you thought marquez who doesn't talk about crypto at all was going to think this was like the greatest phone ever for someone who doesn't use crypto i just don't know what to say i try to give it a chance i try to like actually review it as a person who didn't have to spend the money i bought the phone no i didn't i got the phone sent to me and then i gave it a chance which i didn't have to and i really like started to use the phone for a while uh so that is my that is my l of the year uh and now we get to the w of the year which is the phone of the year the mvp i there's a bunch of ways to just to find this one i could just say it's my favorite phone of the year the most impactful the most well-rounded whatever but my phone of the year is the pixel eight google pixel eight and it's just it's a it's a nice graduation to finally like i think starting to hit the stride of what they intended when they started making pixel which it took a couple years we're on tensor g3 now we're on like this new third generation of of this this thing that they started doing but awesome screen much brighter 120 hertz ltpo for pro no the pixel a as well really 120 hertz yeah it's not quite as bright but it's still 2000 plus nits it's an awesome screen it's a really really good camera as we already know tons and tons of clever software features the only thing i don't like about it is the artificial gating of features from the pro phone right which is almost like not its fault like if that pro phone didn't exist then all these features would be on this phone too but honestly seven years of software updates kind of sealed it in for me i think that's an awesome promise and if they deliver i have no regrets about this being phone of the year there were some gates that were a little bit more legitimate like i did a lot of research into how video boost works and you actually do need a lot of ram to make that work so i think the 12 gigs of ram versus the eight actually did help it um but i think that a lot of the features were artificially gated so yeah but seven years of software updates is crazy yeah i did have some uh a runner-up which is the zenphone 10 yeah the nearly flawless zen i think that's my phone of years is unrun time personally it's really good yeah okay and then it's it's missing a few software features for me which i i still keep coming back to the pixel for yeah and then honorable mentions to the iphone 15 pro which is just a rock solid phone that finally has usb type c the s23 ultra being the boring one generation of chip old flagship that's still incredibly good and the one plus open that's foldable of the year yeah so that's my smartphone awards and the solana phone yeah not a single hot take in here i like i like the awards if you guys want to watch the full video and all the breakdowns and even though you already know the winners you can still sort of enjoy the lead up and the descriptions of each phone you can watch the smartphone awards we'll link it below but you know we should insert right now trivia i just want to say if this is not cheese trivia based on marquez's cheese answer before i'm going to be a little upset monterey jack It better be a Gouda question.

1:25:00Oh, it is. All right. Activity Pub, everyone's favorite decentralized social media network protocol. Blue Sky would like a word. The app protocol. But anyway, continue. Oh, right. Because they don't use. They don't use it. They have their own app protocol. But anyway, continue. I wonder how that's going. But go on. Go on. It's actually an iteration on an earlier protocol with a very similar name. was that similar name a activity pup b activity pump c shaktivity pub or d activity plum is shaktivity like shack the like chaquille o 'neal yeah i have explanations for all these i figure we'll save them okay cool okay i have my own explanation for the first one already for activity pup is it about dogecoin because if so you'd be right it's about wolf oh like the farm thing no like the fake app in the office where you send a wolf and it sends like to every single device that you have no unfortunately it's about dogecoin okay but we'll get to that after the break after the break bye are bonk and dogecoin connected uh no

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1:27:41We got a couple quick car stories because cars are tech, and there's some pretty good stories. First of all, Tesla says they are testing a wireless charging mat for your car. I don't believe you. Just kidding. I believe you. I just don't think that you're shipping anytime soon. So basically what would happen is Franz, the designer at Tesla, head designer, went on the Jay Leno show showing him the Cybertruck. And at some point, I think Jay Leno asked him about wireless charging and Franz said, oh yeah, we're working on that. We're working on that. Yeah, you just drive your car over like a mat in your driveway and then don't even have to plug anything in.

1:28:14It'll charge your car. I believe that you're working on it just like you're working on the Roadster, which just means it's not likely to come out anytime soon. Here's why. Wireless charging is not efficient. And no matter how much you work on the tech, obviously there are some physical limitations. The one other car, this should answer any questions you might have about how soon it could come out. The one other car that has actually tried and shipped this exact feature is the$3.5 million McLaren Speedtail. the mclaren speedtail is not an electric car the mclaren speedtail has a wireless charging puck that you can drive over or like slide underneath the car that is basically a slow charging like trickle charge tender for the battery in that gas car like the little car battery in there yeah because this is a car that's basically let's be honest sitting in mostly garages and not being driven much and people who own three and a half million dollar cars like that have a ton of other cars that they drive a lot and so this is a car that's just going to sit in your driveway so a lot of these cars come with slow trickle chargers and they thought huh this is a small enough battery that even if you get it slightly off center or don't drive quite to the center this is a good trickle charger you know that also makes sense because how expensive is that car millions of millions of dollars but then you don't have to have like the wire rubbing up on it all the time when you have to keep it plugged in in the garage now it's just free but yeah the thing about wireless chargers is and you've you can observe this with any phone we love the magsafe because it snaps it into place to get the exact alignment for ideal charging efficiency yeah but if you're driving your car onto it you could be to the left a little to the right a little you could go too far forward you could go not enough forward you could have your suspension too high something it just might not be in the exact ideal position and so you could draw hundreds of extra watts of power from your wall that don't go into the car yeah if you're just not quite on the right spot Also, that supercar that you were talking about, it's very low to the ground, which means it's going to be a lot closer contact to the inductive charger.

1:30:14And I mean, maybe the Roadster could do this if it's close enough to the ground. But most of Tesla's cars are at least raised a little bit. So you're going to lose more energy if you have a two-star. It's a cool idea. I love the futurism of thinking about it. But with today's tech, it's an insane idea. That's all. The biggest gripe about electric cars is how long it takes to charge in the most, at the absolute best charging rate right now, plugged in at a Tesla supercharger, still takes a long time comparison to gas cars. So now, before we've even really gotten that to the best of its capabilities.

1:30:50At least this is home charging, right? True, but even home charging, if you're using, how long does it take to go about full on a 240 volt? Like an upgraded outlet. Let's give it the light. I have a 240. It charges at 11 kilowatts. So a couple hours overnight after a daily commute and you're fine. It charges about 30 miles an hour in my battery pack. So that's plugged in at 11 kilowatts. If I, I don't know the exact percentage efficiency. I'm not even going to try to guess it. Let's give it 10 miles an hour on a wireless. That's probably. That would be pretty good. But you're still going to pull the full power from your wall.

1:31:22You're just losing a lot of energy. Yeah, you're just wasting energy. So that's, that's tough. And like the grid can't really do that. They are definitely working on this. They purchased this German wireless cartraging company, Wife Furion, in July. Strange name. Dude, super weird name. Super weird name. Wife Furion. It sounds like an... Never mind. Yeah. Good call. But they sold the company, but they ended up keeping the engineers. So they obviously are working on the technology. They probably just want a proprietary version. Yeah. But yeah, I would love to see what they end up with, but I don't doubt if it's going to take quite a while.

1:31:58I bet. anything the roadster comes out before this yeah wait see i talk about your bet with sawyer merit on twitter just bet him that exact bet okay he said uh this is what like why do you not think it's coming out i'm like this is so far from today's tech so anyway he said never mind this is just stupid thing to say online what do you think this isn't coming out no i just don't think it's coming out any time soon yeah it's gonna be a long time you know it'd be pretty cool if your tesla had like brushes that could come out from the bottom or the top and make contact with electrical wires so that you can charge while you drive.

1:32:34You're talking about a bus? Yeah, then you can make the Tesla big enough for you and all your friends. And then it comes at a pre-planned time and route so you can drink. Oh, so self-driving. A bus. Self-driving. Okay. Wait, what? Here's a question. What do you think comes first? Good wireless charging pad? Public infrastructure. That can fit in your garage or a Tesla bot that can just plug your car in for you. Well, remember the early stages where they were testing that... The snake arm. The snake arm that would look for the part and plug itself in. Simone built one, didn't she? She did. Did she really?

1:33:13That's another thing where I feel like there were too many variables. Plugging it by itself? Yeah, the snake arm to plug into your car because again, parking in a different spot. I'm saying Tesla bot. People are lazy, man. Tesla bot can definitely deadlift a wire. Which one do you think will ship to real people first? yeah I think Tesla would ship the wireless car charger before Tesla bot but that's a whole nother take a whole nother take I mean Tesla bot's supposed to do mundane things at your home that you don't want to do so it can just meet me in the garage and plug my car while I walk inside and slam the door in its face and then it can break down all my cardboard boxes that I throw in the garage you can't be mean to Tesla bot everyone knows how that movie goes wait is this snake is that real the snake charger No, I don't think it ever happened.

1:33:59It's not a real problem. It was like a marketing. It was a marketing demo from 10 years ago, just like driving across the country was a marketing demo from 10 years ago. Yeah. Okay. Anyway. Okay. It's crazy. Let's see your brush of that. It's just like crazy that like, they're like, you know, Tesla, I think it's obvious. We have a little bit of a PR problem. People assume we don't have morally the right ideas. Let's have our charger embody the metaphor from the Bible for evil, a serpent. It's like, who? But nevermind. Continue. All right, well, we can move on. A couple other quick things. I think the last big domino has fallen with this NACS thing.

1:34:33The Volkswagen Group has finally committed to NACS in 2025. Volkswagen Group, meaning that includes Audi and Porsche. So, you know, Taycan, e-tron, all of those EVs. At this point, I feel like it's safe to say everyone who currently ships a battery-powered EV has committed to NACS. All the dominoes have fallen. there's definitely one and i can't wait to read the comment there's gonna be a comment and it's if you say it's the ram pickup truck that doesn't ship for another year and a half yeah if it's something else i'm missing feel free to let me know but lucid was like the second to last domino this is like all right porsche audi vw group is in all right the big dominoes are all in nacs is now the new north american charging standard period yeah so i mean to add on to that the society of automotive engineers actually officially announced nacs as a standard very recently last week which we kind of missed last week um after tesla released the specifications in 2022 that is a big deal because now the government is reassessing how they're going to allocate their 7.5 billion dollar ev fund which previously allowed any cs chargers but it had to also have the magic dock that allowed ccs as well now you don't tesla just did all this engineering to make the magic dock and now they kind of don't need to make it anymore considering all cars are switching by 2025 yeah and the original thing was because to get the government subsidy it had to be able to charge more than one type of car yeah yeah and who knows if that helps start this but also like tesla doing this i'm sure licensing it all out is probably making a boatload of well now that it's a standard i don't know if they are licensing it out because they opened they uh they released the specifications in november 22 i think at this point they don't care about licensing the port they have the most um network oil gas stations they have the most gas stations right and if you use like the tesla app and whatever at the gas station that means that they're going to make the most money like they've they've kind of saturated the market in a lot of ways and now they're just like we already have the biggest network let's just make money as the as the gas station yeah so and they're still building more yeah that one last headline uh mercedes i thought this was actually pretty clever i don't know why i like it so much i kind of like it mercedes is adding if i got approval to add a special new colored light to the car that indicates when that car is currently self-driving it's a turquoise colored light so there's all these rules i don't know exactly what uh countries this is going to be allowed in but basically you can only have certain like amber or red colored lights or white colored headlights on your car this is a new color they've gotten approval to add just for when the car is driving itself i kind of like it i kind of want to know why when someone else is i want to know when the car is driving itself and i don't know why i think i you know why you want to stay in an extra lane away from it no i want to just blow right past it and not even think about it like i think the the human driver is actually more likely to make a weird erratic to be aggressive yeah yeah Yeah.

1:37:47So if a car is like stopped at like a stop sign for way too long, I'm not going to beep because it's self-driving. I'll just drive around because the car is clearly doing something dumb and I'm just going to drive around it. It's just nice to know when it's messing up due to being self-driving. However, Mercedes does have a very good level four. Is it level four self-driving? They have pretty decent self-driving. I've tested. Actually, it was years ago that I tested it. So I haven't used it lately. A lot of people have said recently that the Mercedes one is very good. They do. Which is surprising.

1:38:14I would like to try that. so there's gonna be cars out there self-driving all the time when i see this i feel like it semi reminds me of stickers that say like student driver at which then it makes yeah well if it's like the baby on board one it's like i wasn't gonna crash into you anyways but i'll be extra careful around your student driver though yeah the student driver one might actually prompt people to like i've seen have you ever seen where it's like a student driver parked at a red light and they're just ready for the horn and the millisecond it's green they just lay the horn on and like oh man people and don't ever do this this is extremely dangerous but people mess with student drivers and i'm very scared of people messing with self-driving cars and accidentally committing vehicular manslaughter driving by the mercedes with the blue light on throwing your coke at the cameras it's very scary that do not do any of that but yeah i'm but maybe do it a little no i know there's a lot of people who mess with evs and i don't think i want to see people messing with well the evs that are self-driving and that are obvious now they're like super there'd be like a waymo with like 12 yeah sensors on it so like yeah people throw stuff on people literally put cones on the nose of the car just to troll it and it stops the car in its tracks like that's already a thing that happens so this isn't going to change that it's just this is an extra layer of you're in a neighborhood and you're about to cross the street and you look to your left and you see a car coming and it's got the blue light on maybe i'll wait an extra second for that one and most people will not know what it means i would Just in case.

1:39:39Pro tip, always wait the extra second when there's a car involved. Well, if you see a person in the front seat going like this, but if you see a person who looks like they're looking at you, but they're clearly not controlling the car, it's good to know that they're not controlling the car. Or they're asleep. So that's all. That's a headline I thought was interesting. I like being overly cautious. Have you ever seen a car coming, and it's going to make a turn where you are, and it's blinkers on? I always wait to make sure they make the turn. because the chances that that person might just have a blinker on and blow past the turn or decide, oh wait, I'm not turning here.

1:40:12And then you start making, yeah. Jersey, we have the opposite problem usually. There's no blinkers in Jersey. Exactly. By law. They just make the turn. They don't ever indicate. And it has to be over two lanes every time. I was behind a person on the highway today on the way to the studio who drove, she drove in the left lane with her right blinker on for over a mile. And then when she finally changed lanes, she put her left blinker on to turn to the right lane. Her controls are inverted. And then I passed her and she was on her phone. Australia. It was unbelievable. I used to just, that's New Jersey for you.

1:40:44I lived in Philadelphia for many years, which is on the southern border of New Jersey for those unfamiliar with the geography. And in Philly, we refer to something as the Jersey slide. Because when you have to drive into Jersey to do something, a Jersey slide is when someone merges three or more lanes at once without their signal. Yeah. Nice. Because I need to be in the fast lane until the exit. No, no, it's the opposite. It's always people going from the fast lane going, there's my exit. Yeah, that's what I mean. I want to be in the fast lane. I'm not going to lose time on this. All right, enough Jersey talk, guys.

1:41:18I know this is in our bio. That was a stagger of good car tips and bad car tips. Pick the good ones. Anyway, let's do trivia. Let's do trivia. It's been a long episode. Oh, yeah. Welcome back to trivia, everybody. You've got two banger questions today, if I do say so myself. Question number one. As part of all The Verge's awesome coverage of this Google lawsuit, Chaim Gartenberg covered a secret Google program intended to butter up and keep developers in the Play Store. What was this program called? By the way, Chaim is at Google now, which is ironic. It's funny. your report on Google and they're like, did I read an old article and not?

1:42:05Yeah, he probably this is from 2021. He's probably covering it in 2021. Can you read it one more time? I forgot the question. Oh, you know what? This is actually part of the Epic lawsuit. No, this is the same lawsuit. I forgot that. I don't. It's part of the Epic lawsuit. Yeah. Okay, I was right. It's all Play Store. Sorry, I got Oh no, it sounds like you're pencils down. No, come on. Don't know the question. We were yelling at each other. Yeah, okay. That is going to stay in the episode because that is useful context. I should have looked at the date when I was writing this trivia question. I'm a great person, by the way.

1:42:35Yeah. What's the question? Okay, Google had a secret program and the goal of this program was to keep developers using the Play Store instead of letting them pull an Epic. So what was this program called? Marquez, I'm giving you... Till right now. Now. Right now. I'm wrong anyway it doesn't matter alright let's flip them and read anyone Project Hug I said Project Hug which is the correct answer I said Operation Grilled Cheese because it's buttered up oh mine doesn't even make that much sense Operation Sweet Tooth I like that too that's a good answer All of those could be real Google programs, too.

1:43:29But yes, Project Hug was what it was referred to around the house. I believe the official name was the Apps and Games Velocity Program. Wow. Yes. Very stealthy. Question two about ActivityPub, everyone's favorite decentralized social networking protocol except Blue Sky, apparently. It's actually an iteration on an earlier protocol with a very similar name. Is it A, ActivityPup, a decentralized proof-of-stake protocol that mined the cryptocurrency meme coin, Dogecoin? B, ActivityPump, a reference to a decentralized protocol being an ActivityPump, which feeds an ActivityStream? C, Shacktivity Pub, an early investment venture of Shaquille O 'Neal started off the hot 2010s hype of Facebook.

1:44:26Or D, Activity Plum, a full social network platform which used Purple as a visual distinction from its main competitor, Twitter.

1:44:42do we need time to think about this i feel like we all wrote our answer right yeah we already i did are we all confident oh wait no i need to add another partez is taking a artistic license i did some art on mine all right well uh why don't we flip and read them

1:45:03who wants to go first we all said something different okay no i did same as you. No. Okay. Yep. Okay. I said... Wait. No, yeah. Sorry. For those... Marquez wrote the letter B, but it's a dog wolfing the letter B, which is A. Activity pump. Right, but I wrote B. Okay, I also wrote B. Activity pump. Yes. Activity pump. I'm so good at being wrong. It's like when you write brown, but you write it in brown. Or shake your head yes and say no. See yesterday, he spelled it S-I-E or something. I did plump. I like that idea. Alas, that would have been cute. But no, it was activity pump from pump.io. I wrote, I did a guy pumping his hand.

1:45:50Oh. A lot of fingers. That's five. It's just five. So that brings our scores to Marquez with 19 points. David also with 19 points. Oh, here we go again. And Andrew also with one. He was gone for parental leave. Give him a break. Give him a break. Oh, sorry. I read that wrong. 13. You carried too many ones. You carried six extra ones specifically. Isn't this what happened last season is that Marquez and I were tied and then I just totally got destroyed. The points mean nothing. Or maybe I was above. The final score was like 400 points. Yeah. It's all about multiplication, baby. Yeah. Well, that's been it.

1:46:38Thanks for listening with us. Thanks for tuning in. And I hope you have a happy holidays. We got more stuff coming for you, but obviously it's all holiday themed and related or actually end of the year themed and related. So stay tuned for that. Until the next one. Catch you later. Peace. Waveform was produced by Adam Alina and Ellis Rovin. We're partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music was created by Veen Sill.

1:47:26Yo, I... Where are we going with this? I had my music on Shuffle yesterday. Uh-oh. And Hey Ya from OutKast came up. And that's the first time I really listened to the lyrics of this song. It's depressing. Wow. Yeah. Wow. I don't think I know those. This song is sad. Most AI coding tools generate sloppy code that doesn't understand your setup. Warp is different. Warp understands your machine, stack, and code base. It's built for the entire software lifecycle. from prompt to production. With the powers of a terminal and the interactivity of an IDE, Warp gives you a tight feedback loop with agents so you can prompt, review, edit, and ship production-ready code.

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