Technical challenges of rendering transcripts in Swift UI

Oh, you got that colored bullet, Casey. Oh, it's so hard. It's so hard. You don't appreciate what I do to edit this document. Now what are you gonna do? Now are you gonna you're gonna style that bullet? What are you gonna do? Nope. I'm just gonna live with it. Wait, how do you Casey doesn't know? I don't know. Neither do I. Do you you're a Google Docs whiz, John? I'm not a Google Docs whiz. What I am is I am I am a uh a victim of decades of word processing programs that do not make this task easy. That's what I am Hey, so let's uh let's go into what I've decided to call immersive inlet. Let's just cruise right into immersive inlet. Yeah, you love it. You love it. It used to be a corner. What happened? No, because everyone uses a corner. I w I figured you were copying everybody else. Yes, and now I'm trying to branch out on my own. Well in the immersive world there is no corner. We have no boundaries, no attachment to physical spaces whatsoever. We're just floating Except for where the video ends. Exactly. Alright, so there is uh as we record this, it is Wednesday, the twentieth of May, 2026. On Friday will be the official debut of Real Madrid The Weight of Greatness, which is a 20-minute documentary about the I will call it soccer, you're gonna have to deal with it, uh soccer team slash club, Real Madrid , which uh I'm presume is based in Spain or something. I don't even know. I I don't like Ohio. I did uh I did watch this 20-minute documentary and I just wanted to briefly point out that A, I think it's worth noting whenever there's new immersive stuff, not only because it shows everyone the pace or lack thereof of immersive releases on Apple Vision Pro, but for the six of us that do have a Vision Pro, I thought it's worth mentioning for them as well. And what this is is like I said, a documentary about Real Madrid. I was talking, I was speaking with a friend of mine, uh Justin, who said that this is very kind of timely because I guess Real Madrid is like imploding at the moment. And this was all filmed, I believe, late 2025. Uh, they but tal k about, you know, the team and how important it is and the history behind it. And a couple of things I wanted to call out as highlights. Um they did a lot of like moving the camera, but they are getting better at doing it very slowly. Still gives me a little bit of like, ugh, what's happening? But it's better than it used to be. Still a lot more cuts than I think they need. However, there was one time where the ball was like uh on the right side of my field of view and it was kicked to the goal, which was on the left side of my field of view. And rather than whipping the camera around or like cutting to a different view, they just let you do the thing that you can do in a Vision Pro. I turned my head and watched the ball go by. Which sounds silly, but a lot of these immersive things, they're like cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. You know, they're all these, I guess, you know, sports uh directors or editors or what have you that are used to doing that all the time. Um, they at one point they showed what I think was a sped-up film, it but it was so preposterous. I almost wonder if it was CGI in the sense of in the scale of it all. But what apparently the stadium for Real Mad rid, it's it has like a turf that all this gray won't say turf, the grass, I guess can get like sucked down into the basement of the stadium. And the mechanism to do this is ridiculously large. And they just sit you, I guess on what I would call as a as an American football person, the 50-yard line or the midfield or whatever, and they let you look at this happening at probably like 10x speed. The scale of this, I cannot verbalize how big this was. And I think this is like such a great use of immersive video because you can look around and everywhere you look, you're seeing the entire pitch, field, whatever, like rising up what appeared to be like a hundred feet, way more than seemed necessary, which is why, again, I'm wondering if this was like all faked and I'm just ignorant and don't realize it. But it was very, very cool. Um and I also enjoyed, and they've been doing this more and more in different videos. They they showed a bunch of stills, and so it's like a dark room, like 2D stills, right? So it's a dark room that you're in, and they're showing a still dead center in your field of view, but they've done the like well, I forget the term for it on iOS, but the thing where they add depth to it, and remember everything is 3D, right? So it looks like these are 3D stills. And the other thing I really enjoyed, I've said this in the past, is they have like light coming from over your right shoulder, so it looks like there's a projector over your right shoulder or something like that. Um, which I thought was really neat. And then finally, because a lot of this was spoken Spanish, um, I believe, uh they they had subtitles, but what happens if you twist your head? Well, the subtitles were just a floating pane that followed your gaze, which I thought was really neat. Um but yeah, this is uh even as someone who does not particularly care about soccer, um this was very w very worth the 17 or 18 minutes of my time. And as someone who does love sports quite a lot, I this is a great uh example or investigation, I can't think of the word I'm looking for, case study, and how wonderful sports can be and how it can really bring a a group of a disparate group of people together. And I know that not everyone who listens to this program enjoys sports ball, but I do enjoy sports ball and this was a great like makes you feel good, kinda gives you, you know, gives you goosebumps about oh all of these people are enjoying something together and it was really fun. So uh Real Madrid, the weight of greatness. We will put a link in the show notes for the six of you that have a Vision Pro. You should check it out. I think it's worth your time. We have a new member special, uh, I believe on the episode I credited it to John, which was erroneous. It was actually Marco that brought this idea to us. So Marco, would you like to describe it? Yeah, so it turns out there's this movie called Her uh a long time ago that everyone saw except me. And you know, that that alone isn't anything new. But then what happened is people kept talking about it over and over again. And then the world that we live in started getting more and more like what I thought the movie Her was about. And so I thought it would be a good idea for us to actually watch it. Um and so we did and we talked about it. And I think it went pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. Uh this is a 2013 movie with uh Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson and it's all about uh falling in love with AI, basically, um, which in 2013 was reasonably far-fetched, but in 202 6, it's all too real. So I I really think the movie was very good. Um, it is not for young sters, and we talk about that on the River special. Um but it is very discretion is advised. If your discretion is very much advised. Uh it is a good movie though and I think the in the discussion was really interesting like Marco said and I really enjoyed it. So John, anything to add? Uh it was just it's very timely. Marco was good to think of it for us to talk about and is even more timely based on what we're going to talk about as the main topic of this show, as we'll see in a little bit. But yeah, it's definitely if you haven't revisited the movie, if you saw it when it was released like I did and you just haven't thought about it since then, rewatch it because you definitely look at it with different eyes today than you did in twenty thirteen. Very much so. All right, let's do some follow-up as we always do. Let's talk cut, copy, and paste with files in the finder. And the whole of the internet wrote to us to say, after you copy a file with command C in the finder, you can press or use the key combination command option V , which will move item here. This is in contrast with command v without the option, which will paste here. And so the internet wanted us to know that, and now we do. But we did say that on the show. Just to be fair. I know it went by quickly, but when Casey was reading like the the question from the listener, the the qu the the question contained uh that information by saying, I know you can do this and that or whatever and command option V was in there. So just y so you want you can't do command X in current versions of Mac OS, but if you want to move a file using a tortured version of the cut copy and paste metaphor, you can do so. You just command C to copy and command option V to move. I suggest not doing that. I am super against move commands because I feel like bugs in any bug during the process can leave you with a uh totally deleted file that you can't even get out of the trash. But people seem to like it. So if you want to do it, it's there for you. Alrighty. John, can you refresh my memory or perhaps you haven't talked about this, but refresh my memory with what's going on with your terminal in state restoration, please? We in fact talked about it last episode, Casey. You were there. Yeah, we're talking about like terminal emulators. It was like an ask ATP question, like what kind of what theme do you use for your terminal emulators? And I got into we all got into the whole thing of like d trying different terminal apps and stuff. And I had mentioned that one of the things that uh frustrated me about Apple's terminal, which was the app that I continued to use despite many alternatives that I have tried over the years, is I I've had sporadic luck with getting Apple's terminal to restore its state to the way I want it when I launched the app. I wanted to restore all my windows and all my tabs, because of course I do. And at various times, uh I've also gotten it to restore the current working directory of all the tabs to where they were when I quit terminal. Uh but, like that broke or like it it would work and then it would break, then it work, then it would break, and it's current in a broken period. And I was like, oh I was mentioning this because like uh third party uh terminal applications do better in that sometimes because they have more sane preferences and it makes more sense to me. You can just say yes, restore everything, and it's like great, it works. But terminal settings are byzantine and confusing. And so lots of people wrote in and said you should try X, Y, and Z. A lot of people wrote in to say, here's what I do, but of course all those people are using like they're either using bash because bash is extremely popular shell and it used to be the default on mac os or they'll say do this and it's with the current macOS default shell which is z h I don't use either one of those shells, none of those solutions are going to work for me. The the shell scripting in my shell doesn't look like uh those shells. It's totally different. It's a I I use TCSH. It's super old. No one should ever use it. Do not it's bad. It's old and it's bad. It's like me using PHP. Why do I use it? Because it was the default shell on the first Unix system I used in 1993. That is the answer. I remember that. You saying that. I really truly do. Yeah. That's and that's sort of that's what I use. But anyway, seeing people say here's what I use in ZSH, I was like, Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that that was part of the solution when I did this. And then of course I just googled for you know a z uh a TCSH version of the ZSH thing, like I'm sure there's an equivalent. And I found a web page and it's like yeah, you need to put this in one of your dot files. I go into my relevant dot file, and there is that code staring me in the face, which I'm sure I wrote 20 years ago in that exact spot. So uh yeah, I had whatever that was like i've got it this is it this is the solution i'll just add this to my oh it's already there so that was a humbling experience but then that did get me on the that did get me on the trail like well why wasn't it working? Why was it working sporadically? It turns out at some point, I don't know, let's say in the past five years, I made some kind of edit to one of my dot files that was silently causing certain code in it not to run due to like a a mismatch conditional thing somewhere in it because I had conditionals that don't don't ask it's complicated anyway . Or wasn't it was only running in the in the like the the first login shell now that anyway, it was complicated, but once I was on the trail, I figured it out. So I figured I would just at the very least document how you know what I got to work here. Not that anyone out there is wondering how do I get this worked in TCSH, but maybe just for maybe this is just for me, so that when I look for it later, I'll find this ATP episode and the uh the transcripts that we'll have by then. Um uh so here's the solution that we'll put in the show notes the code that's in my it's not in my CSHRC, but anyway, if you put it in your CSH RC, TCSH reads the CSHRC. Um it's just a bunch of stuff that basically says if you're in Apple termin al, um, before each command, run this thing and it's uh prints a bunch of VT uh VT100 escape sequences combined with some more modern stuff with a file URL and blah blah blah. That basically talks to the termin al and tells it what directory you're in so it can be restored . But it um and the interesting thing is I believe I'm not entirely sure about this. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the way the restoration works is that you tell Apple Terminal, yeah, restore the scroll back to what it was before. And when it restores the scroll back, because this these escape codes are in the scroll back, they essentially change the current working directory because they are text content in the scrollback that the terminal interprets as a please change this directory thing. I think that's how it works. Anyway, um the other part of it, and the part I struggled with the most, even after rediscovering this and even after fixing my dot files, was what do I change all the stupid settings in Apple's terminal app to be? And so we'll put screenshots in the show notes of that. The answer is: even though the terminal app lication can do lots of fancy stuff related to uh window and tab titles, you don't want any of it. Uncheck everything. Uncheck the working directory or document or path in both the tab and the window. There's two separate tabs. There's the tab for tab and there's the tab for window. Gracious. Um and there is a little thing, a little some blue text that says escape sequence that even if you didn't know about this, has a little tooltip popover thing that explains or tries to explain does a bad job, but it tries to explain the escape sequences that you need to do. Uh you guys can see that uh popover. If you read that, would that have helped you at all with this problem? No No, probably not.. Like in hindsight, now that I, you know, if I look at my dot file, because I'm familiar with escape sequences or back in the day, like I see what they're getting at, but nobody who doesn't already know the answer is ever going to look at this popover and get it. But at the very least, you could like copy and text uh copy and paste the text from the popover into Google and find better solutions. Anyway, that's how I got my stuff working the way I want it. And the way I want it by the way is this. I want my tab tit les to be settable by me manually. I have a command line thing that would have set the tab title by printing an escape sequence and never change, but I want the current working directory to be whatever it was when I quit the application. So if I have a tab title that says like home, but I'm not in my home directory, doesn't matter. That's reminding me that this is the tab that is normally in my home directory. And I may have changed out of it, but now if I want to go back to where it should be, I will go back to the home directory and blah blah. Anyway, that's the way I want it. It's a weird way to want things. Lots of people most people want it so that when you change in directory, the tab title changes to reflect the directory in. I don't want that. So if you want that, you can achieve that with various settings. But I I'm glad that I figured this out and now I have documented it at least in a podcast so that when I forget this in 20 more years and I'm still using Apple Terminal, I can look it up. All right. And then with regard to terminal apps for Mac OS with text based config files, I think you were lamenting this idea if I'm not mistaken. I I remember us talking about it. Yeah, I don't like it. Yeah. I don't like it. Alright, but maybe it's not so bad. Tell me why. Oh, everyone said, hey, yeah, text-based config boxes can be confusing. You know, to be clear, these are GUI Apple terminal applications for the Mac. They're GUI apps, but when you hit command comma for preferences, it opens a text file in a new text editor. And then you know it's just like a config file. It's like, all right, well, you kind of just opted out of the whole GUI thing there. And people like, no, it's not so bad. You just tell an LM to conf to set the configuration the way you want it. So you just basically decide, I want the cursor to be red, I want this, blah blah blah. And the LLMs, you know, read the documentation and understand the config file and set it for you. And it's like, I would prefer to have checkboxes. You know, like yes, that will sort of work. Although I can tell you that uh sometimes you just can't get what you want. Like lots of people were suggesting Ghost TTY, which I I I think installed that back when it was released, and I tried to get that's another one of the uh applications that I tried to get to look like Apple Terminal, but I could not get the title bar to look right. So I'm like, all right, all right, Claude and Codex, you take a crack at it. And they just told me to do things that I had already done that did not work. And so that was it for them. They could not help. Uh it could be that you just can't configure it the way I want, but um but anyway that's the suggestion uh I think that is not the path forward for a good Mac application talk about Mac asked application applications which we may someday talk about at length maybe in a member special this ain't it don't give me a text config file and tell me to use an LM set the preferences. You have to actually make a GUI for that. So I can click on little checkboxes and pop-up menus. You gotta do it. Sorry. Yeah I was just looking I use uh Visual Studio Code for uh tracking what becomes the external external show notes for the show, the things that are you know embedded in the the RSS feed. And it used to be that when you hit command space, it would drop you in a text file, basically say go, you know, go pound sand. Uh but now there is a very not native but large and voluminous uh preferences window in here uh so you can go and click check boxes and so on and so forth. All right uh we also got uh recommendations for fancy shell prompts in, including uh Adam Brown, who suggested Starship.rs , which I maybe I'm just a dummy, but I was failing to totally understand what the the pitch is here. It seemed like it's like a game Oh it's just the path and little else. I think actually fish gives you what branch you're in if you're in a git friendly or git aware subdirectory, but that's the first question about your prompt is you say, oh it's just the path and little else. Am I to assume that that path appears on the same line as your insertion point? Yes. Well now you're an old man because that's not what the cool kids do. Ah, my mistake. They use multi-line prompts which have existed for decades. And Starship.rs is a fancy way, you know, that it that people have encapsulated like, here's how to make a cool multi-line prompt that's aware of your git re get repo and this and that and the other thing, right? And Starship is just sort of like we've packaged that up for you so you don't like find tutorials and stuff like that. But the thing the reason I noted it is here is because I go to these things and they're like, yeah, we've we've got this cool shell feature. Look at all these fancy smart completions for this thing or whatever. And they never work with anything except for bash and maybe ZSH and fish. Right? This one actually says, oh yeah, and if you use TCSH, just do this. I'm like, are you kidding me? So kudos to the Starship people. I'm never going to use this because I am not a multi-line prompt person because I'm old. But if you like a multi-line prompt uh and you use uh ZSH bash fish tcsh apparently and who knows what else? Maybe the corn shell with a K . Uh yeah, it's it's you should check it out. So I did not try it. Uh I am not interested in it, but multi-line prompts are definitely a thing. And the whole point with multi-line prompt is your prompt can be as wide as your window because your insertion point is not there. And it can contain lots of fancy information. What branch am I in ? What files uh have been modified? What's the current date and time what is the uptime what is the CPU like people put so much stuff there. This one has like a special font that lets you put like your battery health in there like a little battery symbol with a part of the battery to be filled. Like it's anyway. I thought it was neat and I was excited that it used TCSH, so you can check that out. I am so old looking at the looking at the features of this and seeing how far this is from my like default bash shell prompt. Like oh boy. I remember when people first started doing this several decades ago when it became popular in my workplaces where I'd go to someone's desk and they would have a multi-line prompt and they're like, it's so amazing. You can do it they were just like rolling their own in bash or whatever. Like there was no packaged up stuff for it. I was like, uh nah I'm also very disappointed to learn now in Wikipedia that apparently Corn Shell has nothing to do with the band. No, it does not. It predates them substantially. Yeah. Oh, that's funny. All right. And then uh continuing in the uh terminal in shell area, uh Derek wrote in to say I just kinda came across this explanation of the inner workings of the terminal, which is the terminal, the TTY and the shell, which is in turn from the Linux field guide by Uros Papovic Popovich. And we will link all this in the show notes. And I know basically nothing about how all this works. So at some point when I have a minute, I'm gonna be checking this out too. Yeah, and I have a suggestion in that area, which is uh The Secret Rules of the Terminal by Julia Evans. Um it's one of uh her wizard zines. If you have never read wizard zines, it's wizardzines. com. Um, you should check them out. It's basically it's it's a reminder to me every time I see them go by, and I've purchased several of them. Every time I see them go by, that basically people learn in different ways, and if you learn in the way that it So it's basically like, you know, multi-panel comic strips telling you about technical details of uh you know, Unix-y nerdy stuff programming, parts of Unix, stuff like that. Um and it's not telling you like the basics, it's telling it's trying to get you at like to understand fundamentally how they work and also to like demystify the technical nerdy inner workings. But of course it's a it's a short they're short comic strip. So they can't it's not like pages and pages of text so it can't go into a ton of detail, but that doesn't mean it's surface level. It goes deep on a few specific things and tries to describe them in casual ways, but the things described it describing are incredibly nitty-gritty. So the secret rules of the terminal is like, hey, all that escape sequence stuff and the VT codes or whatever. It doesn't go into like an extensive 200-agep history of it and where it came from and glass teletypes and blah blah blah. But it basically says there's there are mechanisms under there, and here's how they work. And it gives you like practical advice and uh you know it basically lets you to know know where to look to to find to find out more information. It lets you know what you don't know and also uh sort of laser targets at a few specific things. So I think they're a great way if if that's how you learn, if you don't if you're not one of those people is like, I need top down, tell me just the broad strokes or, I need bottom-up. Start from the the ones and zeros and the bits in the history. This is somewhere vaguely in the middle. Uh, and I find I find them fascinating. There's tons of them on tons of topics. There's a great one on DNS. Um, there's ones on how Git works. Uh Julie has also contributed to the Git, uh, the actual official Git user manual, written substantial portions of it, I believe. So check out wizardzines.com if you haven't already there. The these zines are well worth the money. You can find lots of um free samples. She posts them herself on social media and stuff and free samples on the pages. And you can learn a ton just by following her and social media. And by the way, she's not this is not a sponsorship. She's not sponsoring this. This is entirely just because I think it's a cool thing. And it just so happened she recently wrote one about the exact weird nitty gritty terminal escape sequence. Like what is the relationship between the terminal, you know, the application, Apple terminal, the shell, the TTY, what even is a TTY . Uh, you know, like when you hit control C , what catches that keystroke and what chooses to take action on it? Uh, these are like terrifying questions if you ever ask them in an interview because nobody knows this stuff anymore because it's so old and it's all so steeped in history. But this will uh give you a handle on some of it. We are sponsored for this episode by Co-Typist. Co-typist is smart autocomplete for the Mac. It predicts your next words as you type in any app, and the AI runs entirely on your own machine. Now I tried out Cotypist to do this ad and I was blown away by a few things . First of all, I love the idea of a better autocomplete because it can save so much time and so much typing. Now, you know, auto completes in the past, I haven't used them that much because they usually are not predicting what I actually wanted to say. Co-typ ist is way smarter because it uses modern AI technologies, but it does it all locally on your Mac. So the suggestions are better than previous techniques, but also it's private. It's not sending your data to some cloud service to some big model to be trained on or anything like that. It's all local using the power of your Mac locally. So it's super private and it's super fast. And you're not hitting some token limits or anything like that. So here's how it works. You start typing and it's suggest, and you can hit tab to accept its suggestion or not. And it just goes word by word. So if you have four words, you hit tab, tab, tab, tab, you accept the whole thing, and it's saving you all this time typing. Now, if you don't want to accept a word, you just start typing whatever you were going to type and it in real time will update its suggestions based on what you're typing. So a lot of times you just type like the first letter or two of what you wanted and it figures out, oh you want this word instead and it offers that up next. So you can hit tab and accept that . So it saves you tons of time. Check it out. Because what you're getting is a faster version of you and what you're typing, not like AI garbage. It's actually what you are already writing just faster. Get a free thirty day trial of cotypist plus twenty five percent off your first bill at cotypist dot app slash ATP. That's cotypist spelled C O T Y P I S T. Cotypist dot app s lash ATP. Thanks to Cotypist for sponsoring our show. Then let's talk about Dropbox and other cloud, you know, syncing providers and ignoring node modules. It seems like this is the story that never ends. We've been talking about it for years. Uh Hunter Hillagas writes: Dropbox has a rule system that can be used to omit stuff like MPM output, et cetera. We'll put a link in the show notes to their uh document ation about this, and from there, ignore rules will not apply to files already synced online. These files need to be manually review removed from dropbox.com. Cool. Yeah, so I tried this. They basically say make a text file in your dropbox and here's the format of the text one. Like great, this is great. This will solve my problem because it has like rules, kind of like get ignore rules where you can basically say, Hey, any directory that is named node underscore modules, no matter where it is, just ignore it. And so I did that and I was like, oh, it didn't. And then it said, oh, well, the rules won't apply if the files are already synced. I'm like, oh, maybe I have to go to dropbox.com and like delete them. So because they obviously had they had previously synced. And I went to dropbox.com and they weren't there. Like, well, but did it work? And so I had kept doing a series of experiments. Basically, I would empty out a node modules directory, right? And when I emptied it out, you know, RM minus RF the contents of that directory, I would see in the little menu bar, like the you know, the drop box popover would be like spinning and if you click on it, you'd see a progress bar where it's like syncing, you know, syncing eighty five hundred files, right? It would go and this progress bar would go and because I just deleted eight thousand five hundred files. And the progress car would go and march along and it would be like done. All right, okay. Now I'll I'll put these ignore rules in. I try like every possible variation. Maybe I don't understand the syntax. Maybe I should try every vari ation. Maybe I should try an absolute path. I just tried every possible ignore rule you could put for like totally dropbox. You're gonna totally ignore this directory. And then I would run npm install and it would run npm install and it would it would create eight thousand five hundred files, right? And dropbox would show progress bar syncing eight thousand, but it wouldn't actually sync any of them, it would just show the progress bar, and I guess it would for each file it would say oh this file appeared oh that's on my ignore list oh this file appeared oh that's my ignore list but it would still take time it would still essentially delay the syncing of other files as it looked at each one of those files pres,umably, you know uh, drinking from the FS events fire hose, and just say, gotta ignore this one, gotta ignore this one, gotta ignore. And it's like, that's not what I want, Dropbox. I want you to just not touch them at all, or at the very least, don't tie yourself up and don't show up. And the progress war was slow. It wasn't the progress war when zip now it's so much faster like I timed the progress bar when I was ignoring them when I was not ignoring them and they weren't that different like it was in the margin of error both directions because they're small files and have a fast internet connection so this is a super weird feature. Like I left it in there. I'm like, all right, well, I guess I bother, I I don't need them to actually be synced, but it's not solving my problem, which is when I do lots of activity in node modules, the actual files that I want to sync have to contend with the processing of the node module files, and that still seems to be the case. And I'm using the non-file provider version, so maybe it's different for file provider, but I have to give a thumb sideways to this feature from Dropbox. Noted? Good to know . All right. And then uh speaking of Dropbox, you can also use what is the pr correct verbal pronunciation for this thing, John? Just Marco . Enum . Uh I say X adders or extended attributes. Zatters. You can use Zatters. Shatterans. Maybe it's shatters. Anyways, you can use X-A-T-T-R-S. You can use those things to tell Dropbox that a file or folder should be ignored. Uh Boz Mandalo writes, solving ignoring node modules and other folders from syncing on a Mac and this is a medium post. God help me, every time I open a medium post, I get angry because of the stupid pop overs and how hostile it is to reading, but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, this post is actually pretty good and talks about how you can accomplish this using And of course there's two sets of extended attributes, one for file provider and one for not file provider. And of course you have to remember to set them on the the files in Dropbox. It's kind of like the time machine ignoring thing. You can set uh extend attributes on time on files to have time machine ignore them. So now you need some mechanism to make sure every time you make a new node modules directory, you always make sure you set the correct X adder for your version of Dropbox on it. Yada yada, but just suffice it to say, there's you can do the X adder approach or the Dropbox rules file thing. All right. And then with regard to Time Machine, as we had just mentioned a moment ago, Paul Gal lo writes regarding John's issues with node modules and time machine have found that switching to P NPM helped a lot. PNPM stores all package files in a single content addressable store on disk and hard links them into each project's node modules. So identical packages across projects only copy only occupy space once. And this saves disk space and speeds up installs when packages are already in the store. For time machines specifically, the big win is that the project level node modules folders shrink down to mostly simlinks. The stored stealth, it still gets backed up, but it's only a single directory. Also, PNPM recently introduced more reasonable defaults to protect against supply chain attacks. This sounds very neat to me, but I'm always terrified of running anything other than the bog standard stuff in node, so I didn't actually try it, but uh kudos to them for coming up with a cool way to uh make things faster and save space. All right, moving completely sideways, the 20th anniversary anniversary iPhone's curved display is going to get better a year after the 20th anniversary iPhone is released, which this always cracks me up when we have news about like i current iPhone plus two or three or whatever. But nevertheless, Tim Hardwick at Mac Rumors writes, Apple's already planning a second version of the quote, four-edge bending display that is rumored to debut on next year's twentieth anniversary iPhone claims a new report out of Korea. ET News reports that Apple's planning a two-stage rollout for the new OLED display technology that the commemorative iPhone will use, with a more advanced version said to be coming a year later. For the 2027 variant, Apple will reportedly rely on an OLED technology that uses a magnesium silver alloy in a in the cathode layer. This implementation can cause image distortion and brightness loss in curved areas, but Apple is apparently willing to live with the compromise for the twentieth anniversary iPhone while more advanced technology scales. Apple then plans to address the issue in the 2028 iPhone by transitioning to next generation transparent electrodes. Apple will reportedly switch to indium zinc oxide uh cathode materials, and because IZO is more transparent, it should reduce distortion, uneven brightness, and heat issues around the curved edges when enabling even narrower bezels. So this is relevant to Marco wondering whether the twentieth anniversary phone would be like the twentieth anniversary Mac and be like a one-and-done special model, but if they're planning a second variant the next year, it seems like they're at least at the very least, if this rumors to be believed, hoping that uh the curved screen is not a disaster and it turns out that people mostly like it, and eventually all phones will look like that, but we'll see. All right. So long, long time ago, I w I don't know, it was like ten, fifteen episodes ago, uh, Marco was talking about reminders and had some very reasonable gripes about it. I don't even remember what iOS version we were on. I think it was 26.something. Um, and at the time, the whole of the internet, the same entire internet that spoke to us earlier, wrote in to ask if Marco had tried the alarm style reminders. And we'll put a link in the show notes to what exactly this means. This is a uh post for Mac rumors that explains how you can set alarm-style iPhone reminders in iOS 26 iOS 26.2. So Marco, were you aware of this at the time or perhaps now? Have you messed with this? Um at, the time, I don't think I I knew about it. I do know about it now, and I have messed with it because I am building an app that, you know, at least so far for myself, but I will probably end up releasing it at some point. Um, but I'm building an app called Tentatively Reminder that I've mentioned on the show before. And it reads and writes the reminder's database. And I had what I wanted to make sure of, like, how how much of the built-in reminders features am I covering and how many of those features would my app either you know have to re-implement to support them or how many of those features are not even available in the API for me to detect or set. So therefore will I clobber those features on those reminders if my app edits them? And the alarm reminder uh is one of these, one of the latter things where the reminders API does not contain anything about the alarm reminders whatsoever. If you edit those in the API, if you edit their alarm objects at all, um those just get blown away. I I have not used them but i you know except in testing but I did find in testing an alarm reminder is exactly what you think it is. It's a reminder that at a certain time makes the iPhone alarm function happen. So, you know, it's it'll it'll break through do not disturb, it'll you know it'll make noise no matter what. It's that kind of thing. So I suppose there are reasons people would want that. You know, that's it's a it's a big world. But but I can't imagine a reason why I would personally use that. Um I like rem I like reminders and I like alarms. And I think for m in my life those are two separate things. So I am now aware of these. My reminder app will not and cannot support them. And uh and I I don't really see a need for them myself, but I I'm I'm sure people like them. Yeah, they were suggested to you because uh this was so long ago when you were talkinging about why am I mak a reminders app for myself, why am I unsatisfied with current solutions and it was like, Well maybe this will solve the problem. I think you were talking about like how a reminder will come up and you'll dismiss it and then forget that it existed and everyone has suggested do and blah blah blah. And that's right around when alarm reminders are coming out. Then and people were thinking this will solve your problem. Like these are harder to ignore because there are literally alarms, but you don't want it. No, well, because the reality is here's what I would do. I would hit okay or sno oze. I would be angry 'cause it like you know made noise. Um and then I would forget it again. Now I think you have a I think you have a swipe now, don't you? You can't just hit a button. Yeah. Now they do like in when you test one of these out, um, it does have a different dismissal UI than a regular alarm does. Um, it has like a live activity and it's a whole it's a whole thing. You have to like, you know, tell it that it's done. So it is a little bit more involved so I can see why people suggested it to me um but it's not for me all right and then this all uh was t spoken about a long time ago like I said, but you were very confused and justifiably. Oh no, I was not confused. I was angry. Okay, fair. Uh you were angry about the way that snoozing works in reminders, and Rob Howard wrote in to say the labels in particular. This is what this is what drove me nuts because so to recap, the problem was, you know, I've been using reminders forever, uh, because this is how I get anything done. And the notifications for Apple Reminders uh would say things, you know, it would be like 8 a.m. and I get a reminder and I would go to snooze and it would say remind me this morning. It's eight AM. What it is this morning. So it turns out those actually mapped to exact times they just didn't want to say. Exactly. So Rob Howard writes in the snooze options and reminders are actually pretty consistent, but Apple being Apple, you have to figure it out for yourself. Uh remind me in the morning means it will go off at the next 9 a.m. Remind me in the afternoon means it will go off at the next three PM. Remind me this evening means it will go off at the next six PM. Remind me tomorrow will go off at the originally scheduled time, but tomorrow. So Rob writeses, yes, this do mean if a reminder goes off at 2 57 p.m. and you say remind me this afternoon, it will go off three minutes later. Yeah. This like and can I just say morning being 9 a.m. and afternoon being 3 p.m. Your California's showing Apple. Yeah. Very true. Uh, all right, and then with IO6, IO why do I keep saying IO6? iOS 26.5. There we go. We got there, everyone. Uh, there were a bunch of changes around this, and Ryan Christoffel writes for nine to five Mac. As discovered by Aaron Paris, Apple has updated the language for its snoozing options in iOS 26.5 to make very clear what time a reminder will pop back up. For example, here are the snoozing options I saw this morning in iOS iOS 26.5. Remind me at one hour, remind me at 3 p.m., or remind me tomorrow. Additionally, Ryan writes, uh, the second option changes based on the time of day. So you'll see the three p.m. language change if it's not currently morning. Or for example, in the evening you'll see an option that snoozes until tomorrow at nine AM. So was that so hard, Apple? It only took what, five, six years? I don't know how long these options have been this bad. Much longer? Like it's been so long. And like you just you just wonder like the original you know, they came up with this maybe in the first version of reminders that had this feature and they said, Well, what should the text say? And it's like well we don't want to be so precise and people are might be picky about it. So let's just say morning, uh, afternoon, evening and, and tomorrow, we'll just pick times and it will be fine. And how many years does it take of literally billions of people using this feature and all of them having no idea what these things no one would guess the behavior because the behavior is bad and doesn't make any sense. And you would think like after the years and years of confusion, they would like, why don't we just say when it's gonna I mean, we have limited options. Obviously it might be better to have more flexible options and I know there's a way to customize it. You can go into it. like Like there are but we're gonna give some quick options. Why don't we just say what they are? Remind me one hour. Remind me at three PM. Remind me tomorrow at nine AM . See was was that so hard? And by the way, look, I you know I'm a very humble person. I'm taking full credit for this. Yeah. We did a podcast and then uh uh two weeks later, uh iOS 26.5 fixed it. Well, because I've been complaining about this for months, and no, I've never heard anybody else complain about this. And I've complained about it very aggressively for the last couple of months. I've complained about it within my household. That's for sure. I mean look, the whole world has been subject to these terrible labels forever. I'm sure people have complained about it just idly to themselves.. But But yeah I th because this is like my one of one of my reasons for making my own reminder app was that those snooze notification options drove me so nuts because I just never knew what they meant and it would always seem like again it would be like you know uh it would be 230 p You'd have to pause and think about it. Like it just has like a it's like a thinking hitch, you know? Right, exactly. Um so I I am still happy that I'm making my own reminding app because I'm finding lots of other nice little customizations that make my life that make it work the way it fits me. Um and I don't know if anybody else will ever use this app. I do plan to release it as I said, but I'm making it to fit me. Um and it's it's pretty opinionated in certain ways as a result to surprise nobody. Um so we'll see about that. But anyway, I'm glad to see Apple is may is like kind of like swallowing a little bit of their like design purity pride and just giving us like concrete options that tell you times so that this so it's more predictable. I don't think it's design purity. I think it's neglect. I think no one has even considered the badness that has existed for many years because it's just like, well, we're not working on that feature now. Why would I ever look at it or think about it? And like I'm sure Apple employees were annoyed by it too, but it's like, well, that's not in the schedule, it's not what we're doing, it's not prioritized, and it just takes a certain amount of like can we just actually uh any human being ever to look at this and find the one obvious problem and fix it? And it's like especially in this case, it's not just a matter of changing some strings, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not a huge change. I mean, I know it's gotta be localized and everything, but like on the scale of a company the size of Apple, I feel like this change would does did not need to wait the vast number of years that we had to wait for Yeah, it's one of those things like I I think you're right. It is I think it is most likely the result of neglect. But there's so many areas in the common system apps. Um like I believe I was it John Gruber was just talking about like how like the the contact But you look at you know all of Apple's built in apps, like the ones that the ones that kind of have like not a lot of attention, like contact is a great example, um, certainly reminders , um calendar I would say. Notes seems to have a pretty good amount of effort, but like the other those other ones, they it just seems like much of the time they have a staff of literally zero people on them. Maybe in like in as Apple is you know considering its you know certain leadership changes and restructurings and things. I would love one thing I would love is just like a little bit more of an ability to multitask. And they already look they have a lot of platforms, they have a lot of products. Like they're they're multitasking way better now than they used to, but there still seems like there's so many areas of their products and software that just go years with seemingly no one touching them. And we've actually heard from people inside that that is literally the case, that like certain things have like literally no staff. Or there's like one engineer who solely by themselves manages like sixteen different system apps that are all point one five people on it. Right. Like that's we've heard multiple times over the years that that is literally the the situation for a lot of these apps, that there there really isn't anybody working on them because it seems like you know for whatever reason the internal structures that that is where the intent the incentives you know that's what they create um is that kind of situation and I would love for for that to change over time because like imagine imagine how much better the basic system apps like reminders and calendar and stuff like that. Imagine how much how much better they could be if they had even one full time person each. Whose only job was to make that app better and not by implementing the new feature of the month, not by adding AI to it, but instead, you know, the whatever the existing functionality is, find the parts of it that didn't work so well last year, fix the bugs, speed it up, blah blah. I and and in this case, like in the case of contacts on macOS, I almost wish there were zero people on it because whatever fraction of a person did mess with contacts for Tahoe just made it worse. Like it's almost worse to like understaff it and then require them to make changes to like liquid glassify it like the contacts app got worse in Tahoe it is uglier it is harder to use and it has either the same number of features or fewer features de,pending on how you look at it. That's not good. Like it would have been better if they just left it untouched. But it would be even better if every year got a little bit better. Like we like to, I mean, this is weird because I don't I don't know the economics of everything works, but we like to think of like these apps like, well, if that was an indie app, the indie would be busting their butt every year to keep up with the OS changes and to implement new features and to fix bugs and to find the parts that their users are confused about and improve them and blah blah blah. If you had a solo indie developer for every app. Would that break the bank at Apple? Because that's how we conceptualize it. But that's as you just point out, Marco, that's not how they do it. They don't they don't put one indie developer per small app on each OS. I guess because they just think that's a poor use of resources. And I would argue that it would be an amazing use of resources if everything got better everywhere every year in small ways and then you have a separate team on like okay well the big feature this year is you got to do Apple intelligence integration. That would be separate from the single indie app developer who's just there fixing bugs, improving performance, and finding the parts of the app that are confusing and making them less confusing. Yeah, like you know, you look at something like I saw um Flexibits and uh who makes Fantastic Howl just celebrated I I believe their fifteenth birthday. Look at something like Fantastica. It's like this amazing calendar app that's that was made I don't know how big they are now, but it was certainly originally they were a pretty small company. I think it was like you know just a few people. You know, that's an amazing app, tons of amazing features , loved by so many people, really hits so many needs better than Apple's app. And that's that was made by like a few people, you know, forever ago. I believe the same company, don't they also make um card hop? Is that their count their contact app? I believe that's right. Um also it's like a a better contacts app. You know, that's that's another big thing. Look at how many people make, believe me. I'm as I'm finding, just as a quick aside here, I've been trying to come up with a backup name for my reminder app because I'm pretty sure Apple probably won't let me call it reminder. Cut trying to come up with a name for a to-do app in the app store in twenty twenty-six only a few of them. It is comical. Like every name is taken. Or I I'll go down like a a like a route in my head. I'll be like, like I was driving home the other day from picking up my kid and I oh let's see what about an app that helps you remember um what what animals help you remember? Oh elephants oh I just reinvented Evernote. No one's ever thought of that before. Yeah, like literally every idea I have, it leads me right into an app that already exists. As it turns out there are many reminding and to do in productivity app. You gotta use the uh you know the passphrase password strategy and go with you know correct horse battery staple because as you add more words they're I I mean honestly, that's what I'm gonna have to do is like, you know, some kind of just like totally unrelated word or word pairing, you know, that you know, one of those hipster brands like oak and moss or whatever. You know, just something just totally non sequitur words because everything is taken. Or you could go the Amazon approach and just put like a random collection of consonants with nowhere near enough vowels in there and just go with that. Yeah. All caps. Or you could do the Alexa Pro approach and just prefix everything with your name, Marco reminders. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, anyway, that's that's that's I I hope they just let me call a reminder because it's such a good name. They won't. They won't. No, they definitely won't. And they honestly probably shouldn't. But l it's I understand why that's gonna be challenging. Also you shouldn't craft that either. That's also a bad name. It's a terrible name, but also an amazing name because that's what it does. It reminds you. It's a great name. It really isn't Marco. I love you, but this is the reverse of the aliens movie with the dollar sign for the S. You're just like, what if reminders, but take off the S What if I make a magazine and call it the magazine? Drop the the. It's it's cleaner, right? Or maybe that's the answer. The reminders. Yeah. That's what you gotta do. The reminders The reminder. It's singular. I like that. Actually, that's true. Yeah, the reminder. That's so that sounds like a bad Jason Statham movie. He doesn't track people down, he just he just sends people notifications. Do you want to be reminded again this afternoon? Oh my gosh. We are sponsored this episode by Claude. I've actually used Claude I think seven or eight times today so far. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. So today I was using Claude in a number of different ways. First, I was using Claude code. Now this is look, you've probably heard about it already, let's be honest, but it runs in your terminal, it reads your code base, and it can take on tasks like writing tests, which I love because I don't want to write those myself, refactoring code, or here's what I use it for a lot, debugging. And you don't have to be hand holding it and walking it through every step or copying things and pasting things back between different windows or everything. It's all right there working in your code with you. I have found clawed code can really help me figure out edge case bugs on things. Like some algorithm I've written that like I, you know, I was trying to align the ad break uh detection for overcast so so the transcripts would line up with different ads inserted. I I got the algorithm mostly right, but Claude Code found some edge cases and it fixed them for me. And I was able to review all the codic changed. It wasn't that much code, but it's still and it made a bunch of tests for me. It was amazing. I love using Claude Code for stuff like that because it's a the debugging partner and the very diligent tester that I've never had. And it it does it all for me. So I strongly recommend check out Claude. There's so much else you can do with it. That's just one example. There's so many great reasons to use Claude. So for problems worth solving, get started with Claude at Claude. ai slash ATP. That's Claude.ai slash ATP. And check out Claude Pro , which includes access to all the features that I mentioned, Claude.ai slash ATP. Thank you so much to Claude for helping me out and for sponsoring our show . Hey John, why does everyone hate AI? This is a topic that Diverge has been covering a lot lately and, uh and they're covering it for a reason. Like it's it's the Zeitgeist in particular. There's a couple of events that happened recently that are just adding on the pile here. But I thought we would just go through some of the bullet points. I will preface this by saying, um, I mean we're gonna talk about other people's opinions because this is a lot of like surveys and what other people, mostly Americans, think about it, okay? Um, and people have their reasons and they have their opinions or whatever, and you can't really argue with their opinions, it's what they think. It's interesting for us to talk about because we'd be like, why do we think they think that? And that's what I'm sure we'll discuss. But I'd say for myself personally, I think there are a huge number of what I think are extremely valid reasons to hate AI. Despite what we all talk about, all the things that we like about it and the things it's good at and the things people do. We just had the last episode of the overtime about non-app developers making apps and we've got so much feedback from other people doing that. Like just because good exists doesn't mean it's not also bad exists. And then the question is, okay, given the world the review of the world, like obviously the things that loom large in our mind as developers is like we're talking about development topics, which happens to be something that this AI technology is actually pretty good at. But that's not the only thing people are doing with AI. And and and then what about the people who aren't even using it at all, but just have an opinion on it based on what they experience in the world and hear about? So that's this broader topic. So I I even though this is opinions of other people, and even though we have talked recently about the useful or fun things that we're doing with AI and the particular nar row realm of programming, which I think is I I don't know. Maybe maybe this is a narrow view because I'm just a developer. In my opinion, it's the thing that AI is the best at. Like LMs are the best at, maybe. But maybe I'm wrong because I just have a narrow view. But either way, the world of AI is so much bigger and lots of people have negative opinions about it, as we'll see. Righto . So Pew Research did a study and wrote a post about it. How Americans view AI and its impact on people and society . We'll put a link to this and a bunch of different graphs in the show notes. I'm gonna read out some bullets that John has extracted from that post. Fifty percent of U.S. adults are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life. This is an increase uh uh which is up from 37 to 50 uh in 2021. So a lot more people are saying, uh, I'm not so sure about this. Additionally, about half of uh US adults say AI will worsen people's ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships. And that let me remind you about our member special. Uh the vast majority of U.S. adults think it is important to be able to tell the difference between AI and human-generated content, but few feel confident that they can. When I was reading this and when I was preparing for the show this morning, I read that line and felt like, I don't think I'm terrible at figuring out what's AI and what's not, but I wouldn't say I feel particularly confident about it. So I I'm right there with it. And decreasingly confident as days pass. Yeah, very much. Yep. Absolutely. All right. About half of US adults are highly concerned that people's ability to do things on their own will get worse because of AI use. The majority of US adults rate the risks of AI for society as high, fewer rate the benefits of AI as high . And finally from Pew, young adults are more likely than adults 65 and older to say they've heard about interact or or interact regularly with AI. So that makes sense young people using it more. And again, these are just people's opinions. You don't know how informed their opinions are or what their opinions are based on, but this is just what they're thinking and feeling. They're thinking that it it you know, it seems like it might cause people to be de-skilled is the word that they're throwing around these days for this , um, and that it's making things worse instead of better, and that the downs the potential downsides are are not as good as the potential upsides. And again, it's you know, if you were in this industry, which we are not really, um, it would be worth thinking about why people have these opinions because part of the problem, part of the angle of the verge has been taking on this is like, um, oh, but they're wrong. They don't know X, Y, and Z. And it's like it doesn't matter that they're wrong if they're wrong, if even if they are wrong, it matters that they think this and they're thinking this for a reason. Like they're not coming up with these opinions out of thin air. They're just so consistent that there's something happening in their lives related to AI that is giving them these opinions in vast numbers. And it just gets worse. But anyway, with young people being uh more likely than older adults to say that they've heard about interact regular or regular regularly with AI makes total sense. Like, yeah, young people are more hip to technology. I'm sure uh young people are probably much more uh into AI than older people. Well, they use it more, but right. So The Verge, as you said, have been have been banging this drum for a while. And so a post from the end of April of this year, Janice Rose at the Verge writes, far from the stereotype of lazy young people looking for shortcuts, Gen Zers have had some of the loudest and most detailed objections to generative AI use. Their attitudes also reflect a much wider backlash against AI and the tech industry in general, which has recently resulted in a nonpartisan movement against data centers across the country and threatened both CEOs and politicians supportive of Silicon Valley's AI frenzy. According to a recent Harvard Gallup study, 74% of young adults surveyed in the United States said they use a chatbot at least once a month. At the same time, 79% of those surveyed by Gallup, quote, expressed concern that AI makes people lazier. And 65% said that using chat bots quote promotes instant gratification, not real understanding, and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way. And in a more recent Gallup poll, Gen Z's opinion of AI tools hit a new low. Only 18% now say they are hopeful about the technology, down from 27% last year. And only 22% say they are excited, down from 36%. The number of Gen Z workers who think AI's risks outweigh its benefits has also increased over the past year by eleven points to almost fifty percent. I think the deltas are important here. This is from April twenty twenty six, this article. So it's not as if like the like these the the the headline is here is young people are moo using AI more, they hate it more. Like AI use is increasing. Like we all see that young people are using it more than old people, and year over year, more young people are using it and they're using it more. And over one-year gap, they went from 20% saying they're hopeful about the technology, which is already not great. That's last year. And then it goes down more to 18. Only 18% they're hopeful about the technology. Pfft. That these are rough numbers for the public perception of AI. Among the group that is you would think would be the most receptive to it, young people who are using it more than other people, but they super don't like it. The fear that chatbot tools will lead to a permanent loss of critical thinking skills ranks high among the wor ries held by young people about the technology. It's also backed up by data. A recent study from the MIT Media Lab found that EEG scans of the human brain show decreased activity in people who have been writing essays using AI tools. Other research has found that this pro cess, known as cognitive offloading, has a wide range of negative impacts on humans, including diminishing people's skepticism and their ability to discern truth from deception, leading to heightened manipulation and weakened democratic decision -making processes. The fact that so many young people are well aware of these dangers, even as they make use of the tools, shows that they aren't buying the hype of AI boosters like OpenAI Sam Altman. There's one other explanation for Gen Z's stance on AI tools that isn't measured in data points. AI use has become culturally toxic, and many young people, like their older counterparts, won't admit to using it out of social shame. Yeah, this is one of those things where like if speaking of Sam Altman and OpenAI, and we'll we'll get to them, I'm sure, as we discuss this a little bit more, but like for the people in the industry who are announcing products and giving speeches and doing interviews about their current technology and the promise of their future technology and everything, it's really easy for them to not have their finger on the pulse of what the world broadly, what what impression is the world is broadly getting from their tech? Because at this point in their growth, it's like we need to get funding, we need to scale, we need to fiercely battle with our competitors, we gotta have the best model, we gotta add this feature, we gotta do this thing. And it's easy for them to also focus on the realms where they've got customers, they're collecting money, people love it, like the coding agents and everything, and uh anthropic and clawed code and all their government contracts and the battles that like there's so much for them to focus on. It's easy in this stage in their development to not really be thinking about, but what does everyone think of us? Because it's uh it's almost like not relevant to them. And they just assume, well, you everyone loves technology. And like if old people are scared of it because they're like, oh no, it's gonna, you know, do something bad, it'll be fine. The young people will pick it up or whatever. But like, I feel like the older people and the industry people are failing to see what's happening as evidenced by two coincident ally very recent events where some adults totally did not, as we say, read the room uh in a catastrophic way. So 404 media reported both of these stories on May 11 , speaking to graduates of the University of Central Florida, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at the Tavistock Group, told graduating humanities students that AI is the next industrial revolution and was met with thousands of booing graduates. So this is this is such a weird like phenomenon. Like as far as I'm aware, this is not a like a hot button political issue where students arranged a protest because they knew the speaker was coming and was gonna say this and we're gonna protest because they're talking about like I don't know, some some like selling arms to people or whatever, and they're gonna protest against right that like it's not like uh you know we we uh the group of students are against this thing. You invited a speaker who's about this thing and they're gonna come here. If you watch the video and listen to the audio, it seems to me to essentially be a mostly spontaneous thing where a couple of people who are against AI started booing and then everyone just joined in but they're like you know what yeah screw AI and this person to be clear like I don't like I don't think they were an AI booster they were just mentioning it offhand because they're like this is a thing I'm gonna talk about it's a new thing in technology and these are graduating kids and they're probably like they didn't give it a s probably didn't have a second thought to their offhanded mention of AI as like it's an up-and-coming thing. Like everyone agrees with that, right? And I'm giving you a commencement address. Like like I don't think anyone would have flagged that as are you sure you want to say this in your speech? Because it seems so undangerous to people who don't understand how AI is currently being perceived and received by the public. And so they get up in front of a bunch of students, and you can see the speaker like cheese just did not expect this. And so I feel like it was a genuine response. It was essentially spontaneous. The booing grew because it tapped into something that people were feeling but not saying, and the speaker was like, what the what's going on? I didn't think this is not a controversial section of my talk. Right oh, and then so again, that was on May 11th. So May 17, former G a Google CEO Eric Smith Schmidt was booed throughout his commencement speech at the University of Arizona for his praise of AI. This comes just a week after another commencement speaker who also AI mentioned AI was booed at a school in Florida. So there's a lot of reasons to boo Eric Schmidt, to be fair. Like 'cause but just I mean, this is one where you know the guy's gonna come and he's gonna talk about AI. So maybe these people were prepared and obviously they probably saw the video on the internet of the other person being booed, but the kids are like yeah we should do that we should boo them because we want them to know we don't like what's going on it's not we we are not hopeful about the 18% of us are hopeful about the technology that's a low percent. So don't talk about it. We don't want to hear about it. We don't want to hear about your stupid AI , even though they're all using it and like it they realize it is like a thing, but like they don't like it. They're not happy about it. And I think probably Eric Schmidt was surprised that they shouldn't have been because, again, there are many reasons to dislike him. So maybe he should have expected to be booed, but this was just uh such an amazing uh coincidence of events uh where and I I just met to my son's commencement address where there was no boo ing by the way. But mentions of technology and things that got reactions from the crowd is a good way to gauge, you know, how are the kids feeling about what the industry is doing? And they don't feel good about this. Yeah, seemingly not. And then uh Joanna Stern has recently left the Wall Street Journal, is that right? And started The New Things. And there is a post about this that she put up today, as well as a YouTube video, which we will link in the show notes as well. And in there, uh they she apparently talked, I don't know, John, you were the one who took a look at this. She talked to a recent UCF journalism grad. Is that right? Yeah, it was just like, let's grab one person who's a student of who'd recently graduated and talked to them about how they feel as AI to give like a human face to this type of opinion. You can watch as like a YouTube short or whatever. This is just an excuse to link to Joanna Stern's new thing that you should uh subscribe to. I the domain is newthings.thenewthings.com. I think the actual branding of the newsletter is new things with Joanna Stern. But anyway, uh if you want to see what she's up to, you can subscribe to her newsletter again. Not sponsored. I just think she's a fun person to watch and she makes fun content. Additionally, there's things like uh the AI friend necklace on the Daily Show, which I I d haven't seen the Daily Show in a long time. I I know their uh reporters are you know obviously comedians and whatnot, but were the other two numbskulls on this was were those actors or these real honest people? That's great that you have to ask that. It was so unbelievable. I I thought they were real people and then it was so ridiculous. I was like maybe they must be actors. So yeah we we talked about the friend necklace on a past episode, I believe. It's one of those like pendants that goes around your neck that's gonna be like your AI friend. Um I'm pretty sure the people they're talking to are the actual like, you know, founders or whatever or representatives of this company and they're just obviously it's comedy shows, so they're making fun of them saying, Why don't you get a real friend and stuff like that? But like the fact that you can make a comedy sketch out of this, I mean obviously the product is ridiculous, and these people should not have gone on the show, but they they thought probably thought it was worthwhile for the free publicity, even though they're mercilessly ridiculed through the entire thing, but like stuff like this where there's some company that somehow got funding that thinks, you know, your friend should be a thing that hangs around your neck and we're gonna make that a product and make all these ads for it. And then they become comedy fodder on the daily Show to just rip them a new one and say, Let's laugh at these people. Now, that's not, you know, again, people's opinion and what currently gets laughed at now doesn't necessarily say what things are going to be successful in the future. I'm sure you can find probably things from specifically from the Daily Show where they took some new technology and made a very funny sketch about it, and that technology later went on to dominate the entire culture, and we all love it. Um, but where we're at right now is the the get get the start founders on the daily show and mercilessly mock them for what we perceive to be their extremely silly product and their as you put out, Casey, ridiculous statements about it, ridiculous overblown statements about it, because that's where we are in the hype cycle for this. Yeah, that this video was incredible in both excellent and not so excellent ways. Like it was just astonishing. Uh and then relevant but it but tangentially related to all this, uh Americans really, really, really do not like AI data centers in their area. Uh, we can point to our friend Stephen Hackett about this. Uh, but there was a Gallup post that came out recently as well. Let me read from that. Seven in ten Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half or 48% who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor. This March survey is the first time Gallup has asked about data center construction. In the same March survey, 53% of Americans say they oppose building a nuclear energy plant near their area, far less than seventy one percent opposed to data center construction. Said differently, people are more enthusiastic about nukes nuclear energy than they are about data centers. Since Gallup first asked the nuclear power plant question in 2001, the high point in opposition has been 63%. So they've been polling about power plants , not you know, not that not a lot only back to 2001. That was what? Twenty-five years. All right. Yeah, exactly. For twenty-five years they've been polling about it. And the most opposition they've ever gotten in their twenty-five years of polling about nuclear power plants was sixty three percent oppos ed. AI data centers aren't 71% opposed. But if you give people a choice, would you rather have an AI data data center built near you or a nuclear power plant? People are going with nuclear power plant. And I know that's weird for the rest of the world because the rest of the world has nuclear power and we basically abandoned it after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and everything and setting the side the you know, again, reality versus perception. The perception in this country was no thanks to nuclear power. And so I think we have to like three mile aisle on something like 100 in progress nuclear power plants in the United States were just basically canceled because it was essentially public sentiment was like, I don't care about the facts, I don't care about how much you tell me about how safe it is. No, I don't want it. Uh and data centers, as far as I know, have not sprayed radiation anywhere now. Although maybe the one near Stephen Hackett is uh because that's run by Elon. But yeah, maybe not radiation, but it's certainly a lot of they're crow certainly causing a lot of pollution as they burn a whole bunch of natural gas to get quick power. Yeah, and and dirtying the water and taking resources and stuff like that, right? But um but yeah, people don't want and you could chalk this up to like NIMBYism, which if people aren't familiar with the phrase is not in my backyardism, where it's like, oh, I'm fine with whatever, but I don't want it in my backyard. I want it somewhere else. Like everyone you know, everyone likes the idea that uh you have garbage pickup and people come to your house and take the your garbage away, but they don't want where their garbage goes to be next to their house. They want it to be out of sight, out of mind. And so maybe people would be okay with the idea of data centers could exist somewhere, but when it comes time to build one near their house, they're like, no, and again, for lots of really good reasons. Like Marco pointed out, um, a lot of them are being built uh hastily with uh I mean, I don't know if it's just the Elon Musk one, so that's what we hear about because of Stephen Hackett. Like we're gonna build this huge data center to get enough power for it. We're we're just gonna install a bunch of essentially like I just think of it as like outdoor grills, but like basically like natural glass natural gas burning engine generators, and we'll just install dozens of them and just pump natural gas into them and spew into the atmosphere all of their exhaust to generate the energy that we need for our data centers. And there's all these rules like well, you, can't do that there. You have to have a permit for this and you have to have an environmental impact study and you have to have this and you have to have that. And Elon says, What if I just do it? And what if I just pay off all the local politicians so they let me do it? And that's bad. And then there's no the noise, the noise of the generators and the noise that you think a data center doesn't make any noise, not when it has all those things that you know. So and the the water pollution and everything else. So yeah. And and I do wonder, like this was something Ben Thompson said when they were discussing this topic, there's like, well, if we told them the data center was for Netflix, people would be would not be opposed to it or not be as opposed to it, because people like Netflix and they have a positive opinion of Netflix and a negative opinion of AI. But I don't think anyone would really want a Netflix data center new them either if it was behaving in the same way as the AI data centers in terms of noise, pollution, and all that other stuff. Um and because our government is bought and sold because of our terrible, you know, our terrible system of government has led to a system of government where if you have a lot of money, you can pay off local politicians to ignore uh, you know, the people and instead just say, well, they're just going to give us so much money and they're gonna help me specifically get a lot of money. And with this money I can convince you to keep re-electing me because uh money equals the my ability to convince you to re-elect keep re-electing me and there's an infinite supply of money going in here so I actually don't care that you can't get uh drinking water out of your uh faucets anymore and I don't care that you can't sleep because of the noise, and I don't care that they're spewing pollution, that I don't care that we have rules against it. Money . So that's kind of the situation we're in with the data centers. And does that make people like AI more? No it does not. Yeah, it the I think the energy question is is obviously the biggest one 'cause, you know, the AI dentisters are basically limited um by only two major resources, uh NVIDIA chips and energy. And the you know, the more energy they can burn, the more capacity they can have and the more money they can make. So it I think in the long term, what we've done is we've created a very strong financial incentive to make cheaper energy. And what's amazing cheap energy? Renewables. Solar and wind. It's really, really cheap, especially over time. And it has a very, very, very low carbon footprint compared to almost everything else that we could possibly come up with. Um and it doesn't have the risk of radiation and meltdowns like nuclear and w the having to deal with waste and having to buy all of our fuel from Russia and things like that. And so there's all sorts of amazing benefits and huge incentives to get lots of solar and wind built for data centers. And in the long run, that is probably happening. But in the short term, they're imp atient and greedy and they're just burning a whole bunch of natural gas. So they're not doing any favors for our carbon footprint, they're not doing any favors from the environment, they're not doing any favors for trying to I hope the long term goes towards renewables because it again, it just makes a ton of financial sense long term. But short term, we're not seeing that to the scale that we should be seeing it yet. Trevor Burrus, if our if our government system actually reflected the will of the people, this would be like logically speaking, this would be the absolute perfect opportunity for every local municipality where that someone wants to build a data center to say, sure, you can build any data center you want. It's got to be 100% powered by solar and wind, renewable, non-polluting things. But we'll just pass a law that says that. If you want to make a data center here, we're fine. This is the rules. You can't you can't take any of our water beyond what limits we set. You can't the only energy you're allowed to use is solar and batteries and wind and whatever other things. Like you can make the rules for it, right? And it's like wouldn't that be because you know, you want like we want the financial, we want the tax base. Like there's all these reasons where like it's not entirely bad to have a big new industry in your era, although data centers do not employ a lot of people and there are a lot of other ancillary downsides or whatever. So like balance the equation, right? If the people were given a chance to to vote on something like this and actually elect representatives that reflected their will, you would never let them like, oh yeah, just do whatever you want, set up as many polluting gas generators that are already against the law, and just do it and, you know, promise that you're gonna like currently Stephen's talking about the water treatment plan. Like, oh, we're gonna use water, but we're gonna install a water treatment plan and blah b blahlah , but just don't do it because nobody can stop you, right? Because that like there's a disconnect between the obvious win, what you're talking about, Marco, which is like this is a thing that doesn't exist yet. I know it's so hard to convert things that are currently using fossil fuels to renewables, which we should be doing anyway. But of course our actual current government is our actual current federal government is vehemently opposed to that and is outlawing and adding fees to all renewable energy and paying companies to not build wind turbines. We're all screwed over here. But anyway, local governments, like this is you have they had you have them over a barrel. They have to build it somewhere. And if everybody is against it, require them to be clean renewable energy. Like there's like it's just it's so mind boggling. But of course that's not how it works. How it works is uh you know money talks and uh the the will of the people walks and so they just and another the other thing that Ben came up with was like what if they just said they would give uh everyone who lives near the data center money? Uh, you know, a a cut of the uh the revenue or profit or whatever going through the data centers to just pay them off and uh Gruber link to the like uh Alaska, the state of the US state of Alaska has this thing where uh oil revenues are shared with the citizens every year from some long ago agreement. So every resident of Alaska gets like fifteen hundred bucks every year as like their cut of like allowing the oil industry to be in Alaska. Um and so if you're gonna build an AI data center uh and the people in the town are like gonna try to vote it down or whatever, what if you just told them every one of them will get a thousand dollars uh check every year for the thing or whatever? And that is like it it kind of reminds me of people like selling their organs when they're desperate for money. You can pay people to do things that are not in their own interest. Like that's one of the most sort of like devious and not very nice things to do because if you offer the entire population, you'll all get a thousand dollars. And in exchange they all get cancer and die in 15 years? They'll all take it, but it's not the right thing to do . Like it is the worst b like I wouldn't I am not in favor of, hey, just offer people ca offer people cash to do a thing that's going to harm them because people will make the wrong choice. And it's like, oh, it's a paternalistic, just let them choose what they want. But like that's not that kind of incentive is bad. It's the same reason you can't pay someone to vote for someone else. Like, why not just allow it? I'm sure I'm sure in a few years we'll be allowing that too. But it's I believe it is currently illegal to pay someone to vote for a particular politician, right? If if if they could, it would be a much more efficient use of uh all the the money they funnel. They would just pay everybody to vote for who they wanted, right? But this is basically the same thing. Like we'll just give you money and everyone just wants I just need to pay my bill. That sh that thousand dollar check that I'm gonna get today, it's all I care about. I don't care that you know this is going to pollute the water or do some other harmful thing that's going to harm me 20 because that's just not how people think. So I think that's a terrible solution. And I think the actual solution is the people who are supposedly self-governing who like vote for what they want, don't let people build data centers that do bad things. Force them to you have to do X, Y, and Z. You can't make this amount of noise. You can't do this. You can't do that. And if they don't want to build there, have them go somewhere else. And the somewhere else will also be populated by people who are also don't want their houses to be polluted and have noise and all of this stuff. Um so this is just another highlight area of our dysfunction. And I have to think that like because there's this huge boom in data centers and, I think there's an article. I forget I have a link to it, but uh there's also like the speculative boom of phantom data centers where people get in line with like the regulating bodies to like pre-purchase the right to make a data center, so they're next in line to get the electric company's electricity for their data center and they don't know if that data center will ever be built but it's important enough to sort of save their spot in line at the cost of a few million dollars just in case it gets built so the boom looks bigger than it is because it's just like a speculative market on potential that it's just all just signs of a bubble, like all the stuff going on. But either way, there's definitely a lot of activity here. But how many people in the U.S. live near a new potential AI denow center versus how many people in the US have experienced AI in any form? And so I do feel like the data center thing, although people are very opposed to it for lots of good reasons, is just a tiny fraction of the larger anti-AI sentiment. And I think it's worth thinking about and discussing why does everyone have such a negative opinion? I think most of it probably not based on experience, but based on what they hear or what they like feel. Why is every one upset about AI, especially the people who don't actually have never actually used it in any appreciable amount? I mean, it represents a a lot of unpleasantness, a lot of discomfort, a lot of uh threats to people's livelihood, uh a lot of theft of what people have made. I mean it there's there's so many reasons. I mean like the it it you know for obviously like, you, know, those of you out there who who hate AI are um very aware that I tend to use it a decent amount. Uh I'm not an AI hater at all. But that does not come for free. In the same way that like, you know, I eat meat , but there's a lot of ugliness in the system that brings me meat. And and I I kind of, you know, I'm I'm accepting that by eating meat, but I also know I maybe I shouldn't do a whole lot of that or you know , uh maybe I'm better off not knowing some of the details. Um that's kind of how my use of AI is. It's like, well I'm choosing it's it's a bunch of trade-offs. I'm choosing to use it um despite some of its kind of ugly realities of of how it came to be, um, because I think it does provide value. I I'm willing to accept those downsides. But you know, look at what we were just talking about, energy generation. We accept similar trade offs there. For most people, at least some portion of the energy that you use uh or cause to be used is generated in polluting ways, fossil fuels, carbon generation , um, you know, possibly poisoning groundwater at some point. Like so in all across all of modern life, we have to kind of make those decisions of like, all right, we're we're we're going to choose to use something for the value it provides us or for the needs that we have, even if it has negative downsides. And that can be thing that could be from all all the way from choosing which food to eat, uh choosing what stores to buy things from , you know, choosing how to get from place to place, all the way up to whether we use AI and how much and in what contexts. There's a lot of unpleasant realities to it. And different people are going to draw those lines in different places. Uh in in in the exact same way that different people draw those lines differently for things like whether they eat meat and whether they drive everywhere and stuff like that. Like we're all gonna have different tolerances for that. We're all gonna have different priorities and we're gonna have different options. You know, for a lot of people , using AI tech is amazingly enabling. It has massive upsides in lots of ways for things like learning new languages or operating in an environment where you where the language is not your primary or first language. There's lots of accessibility amazing benefits to AI tech. Like so many blind people are finding that the meta Ray Ban glasses with the cameras in them are amazing because they describe the world around them while keeping their hands free. Because blind people often will have a cane or a dog in one of one or both of their hands. So hands-reef glasses that describe the world to them using AI are life-changing. There's all sorts of amazing uses of AI. Many things that we didn't necessarily call AI in the past are also made better by it. So for instance, like dictation, like this like the whole, you know, overcast whole transcript thing, it uses a model on the phones that is by most accounts an AI model, although it's a pretty small one, it's because it runs runs locally . Um but you know the the year before that was announced it was called machine learning. Like it but AI, quote AI took this feature that we already had and made it a lot better. Uh so there's all sorts of things like that. You know, if you know one one of our sponsors this episode is an AI app that helps you type with autocomplete style suggestions that runs entirely locally on your Mac. There's all sorts of versions of quote AI out there, and I think they have different downsides and different impacts and different kind of bitter pills you have to swallow. Obviously the one like the the major flag ship models that are running in giant data centers and and those data centers are powered by natural gas that's polluting Tennessee. Like that's that's pretty bad. But you know when you scale it down, it seems like it's a lot less bad. And so I think everybody has to kind of figure out like where they where they land on on that. Like how much how much of that kind of externalized badness are they willing to tolerate and for what benefits to them or the world? And that's that's a tough question. Aaron Powell My my read on these and again this is just based on my interaction with regular people and how much they seem to actually know about AI is that a lot of the reasons that I the a lot of the problems that I see with AI, a lot of things that we've discussed in the show are not in the minds of these people at all. You hit on some things that are in their minds, but also you hit on a bunch of stuff that I just never see reflected in opinion polls for regular people outside the tech sphere. For example, and you know, going helping themselves to all the world's data to train their models. We've talked about that endlessly on this show. That is not seemingly in the public consciousness. It's in the tech nerd consciousness, it's in the content creator consciousness , I don't see it in any of these things. Like it is not like for if you're gonna do like a survey of US adults, it's just not gonna come up in an appreciable percentage because only I feel like tech nerds content creators and and maybe lawyers are have have any interest in that. But it is a huge thing that is again still mostly unresolved in this country, and many lawsuits continue to wind their way through. Doesn't come up, right? Um the data center stuff, people who are near data centers sure super duper hate it, but I but there's so few of them compared to the hundreds of millions of people who live in the US, I feel like that's still gotta be a small percentage. The good things that you all talked about. Some people probably don't even know about half of those good things because why would they if you're not super into the tech and keeping up with the latest stuff, you'll only know about it when it reaches the public consciousness or if you know someone who is vision impaired who's using the meta . You know what I mean? But like we know about the stuff because it's like tech nerd stuff and we're thinking about it, but it's not offsetting most people's opinion about these things. And so I'm looking at this and I'm always thinking, like, what is it that they don't like? And the things that they list here, that I pull out these bullet points and there are a few other ones, but I feel like it 's the the biggest one for me has got to be AI is gonna take my jobs because everybody cares about having a job, you know? And whether it's gonna take their job or not, that is in the air. And it's not in the air for the hell of it. The people who run the AI companies cannot shut their mouths about how many jobs AI is going to replace. And I'm going to say that's not a winning message. Yep. Yeah. I mean like setting aside whether it will actually happen or not or whether it is happening or whether people are just using it for cover because lots of things are like, oh everyone's doing layoffs and they'll just they'll just say it's cause AI is replacing the jobs because it's the current cover for it, but they were gonna do those layoffs anyway because they overhired during COVID-19 lockdown. And like there's all this BS, but it doesn't matter. Like the point is that is, I feel like that's gotta be in the top handful of reasons why people don't like it, because whether they know anything about it or not, whether they use it or not, whether they think it's useful for them, like no matter what they say, but also I'm like you said, Marco, I'm afraid. I'm afraid for my job. I don't know what this means for me. What does this mean for me, for my job, for my career, for my literal entire career. And you don't have to be a programmer to do that. No matter what your job is, someone somewhere has said something that has filtered to you, or you've seen some news story that's like, I'm gonna lose my job. So, and I just, you know, and then so getting to the executives who are out there saying, because that when they're saying this again, they're not talking to the American people, as we would say. Who they're talking to are VCs, tech nerds, and like, you know, utilitarian techno-futurists who don't care if the world burns and just want to make money or whatever. That's why they're saying it. They're not saying it because they because they don't know people won't like it. They say, I'm not talking to you, American people. I'm talking to the next people I want to invest in us because executives love the idea of we have to pay for all these employees. Can we fire them all and not have to pay them and still do the stuff if we pay you a fraction of that? And and the AI executive' likes, totally, yeah, in the future, you'll be able to fire all your I mean that was the whole pitch with like self-driving cars. Uber was like, yes, we won't have to pay drivers anymore. The cars will drive themselves. We're gonna save so much money. Maybe we'll even be profitable someday. Think of all the people we can help you fire. Right. Like, and who is the audience for that message? It's not the Uber drivers. They don't want to hear that. It's it's the executives at Uber, right? Or the people who are investing in Uber. Like, and so there's this little world while they're talking to each other and saying things that they're just talking to each other, but like it's so big, like the rest of the rest of the the world overhears them and say, wait, what? Like it filters down to them eventually. And what they hear is not encouraging. And then of course, like the young people are like, they're using it to cheat on their homework. They're they're being forced to use it in their first jobs. And they're like, is this gonna replace my job? I don't like using it in this way. I don't like that people cheat on their homework with it. Um, I don't like using it to write, which is the the analogy I always tell my kids, which I heard online somewhere, and I probably repeated on the show, is that using AI to write something for you is like sending a robot to the gym to lift weights for you. It's missing it's missing the point entirely. Like especially for school assignments. It's like, yeah, I go to the gym and work out every week. So yeah, I send my robot there and he lifts weights every week. It's totally missing the point. Anyway, people like don't and then they're afraid. Like, am I going to lose the ability to and everyone? You know, am I gonna lose this ability? Like, whether or not this is a real thing, because whatever people are studying it, they'll figure it out, blah blah blah. And this probably has analogs and fast, you know. Setting aside what the reality is, people feel like I have a skill. You're telling me I can use this to not have to use my skill anymore, my skill will atrophy, and it's like infantilizing and they don't feel like well okay well that I'll pick up another skill and it's like and they look over at that other skill and some executive is saying yeah our thing is gonna do that too. It's like well well then what the hell? Right? And then I think the other thing that maybe this is getting more into tech sphere, but maybe not based on the recent uh OpenAI versus uh uh Elon stupid trial of their little slap fight that they were having about whatever. Um here's the thing about the the prominent executives in the AA industry, Elon Musk being just prominent jerk in our country and our world, right? Sam Altman, uh Dario, what's his face in um a day? Uh yeah, in in Anthropic . None of these people I feel like inspire the general public in literally any way. And and in the trial versus OpenAI and Elon, they were having trouble finding jury members who didn't already hate Elon. And this is just a jury pool. This is not tech nerds. This is not people who have a grudge against Elon. This is just like the pool of jurors. And everybody they were getting was like they all come in with the established opinions about Elon and they hate him. And it was tough to pick the jury. And I think the judge was at some point that says, look, you can't exclude people because they don't like him because we'll never fill the jury. People don't like people don't like you for a reason. That's it is what it is, right? And and like all these executives, like to the degree that they're in the public consciousness at all, they seem to have nothing to offer. They don't produce things that the public really wants, like, you know, oh, you made a, you know, Steve Jobs makes the iPod on the iPhone. Eventually, you know, people didn't notice when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, the iPod, but eventually, lots of people had iPods and they like them. And so that's the iPod guy. I have an iPod, I like the iPod, and there's a new iPod, and it's even better. You get a positive opinion about this Steve Jobs guy that you're hearing about because that you f put in the file card in your head, Steve Jobs iPod. I like iPod. There's nothing like that. For even the people who use chat GPT all the time, like it's it's a technology where it's like, hey, hey peons, have the free version of chat GPT. It's okay, but obviously all we care about are the ones that we get to charge people a lot of money and coding models, and you don't care about that. And then, like, there's all the negative stories about that and all the negative aspects of cheating on home market having things written for you and taking your job. So even that product that thousands and milli millions millions of people are using, I don't think they're coming away from it with the same positive vibes that they get from an iPod. And so all these executives are like they're not talking to me, they're not inspiring people. In fact, some of them are really terrible people, and even the ones that aren't terrible are just like uh you know, Sam Altman, whether or not he's a terrible person, does not come across well in any events that have happened in his life in in any capacity, working or personal in the past many years. Like I just feel like and I don't want to go dwell too far into the executives, but I just like I always wonder when I see these trials and these people I don't want to get into the it was the Elon Musk suing because he's sad about that he didn't get to control open AI and the thing got thrown out because of statute of limitations or whatever. But like but during that trial, they had all this discovery and you hear all these interactions of all these people and they just all sound like the worst people. Like the worst people you 've ever worked with like they're dishonest shallow stupid don't they don't seem to have it's like you it makes you wonder like wait why are you why are you in charge of anything? Why are you rich? Why like why? Because, like, if you talk to Steve Jobs, you'd be like, this guy seems to have a passion for technology, he seems to have good taste, as evidenced by the things that he says yes and no to. Um , he's very enthusiastic about the next whatever he's introducing. And you just don't see that any of that in any of these people. I mean, Elon is just like he doesn't care about anything. He's just a nihilistic walking raw nerve of id or whatever. Um I think I think what you're looking for, John, is colossal piece of shit. Yeah, like but like he's just a bad person just in general. But then like Sam Altman, it's like, so is he like super knowledgeable about AI? Not really. Does he have any particular ins ights about the future or the the the present? Not really. Does he have any particular skills in this area? Not really. Is he particularly charismatic and people like hear him speak and are inspired? No, not at all. Uh is he like does he have integrity and honor? No, absolutely not. It's just like what like what is there to make people the the ambient sort of AI radi I don't use radiation, but the sort of the ambient AI atmosphere. If you're not into technology and you're not really paying attention, but things about AI touch your life from mass media and your personal interaction with things, what is there to give you a positive impression? So I am not surprised that everybody hates it. And I think it's a reflective of the state we're in where nobody cares that they don't like it because it's like until the bubble bursts or until we have consolidation or until a winner is declared, we don't really have to pay too much attention to what people think of us because we've captured the government because they'll do what we want and like it's a corrupt state and we don't have to worry about local regulations and like we don't we don't have to care about what people think of our things until and unless you know we the the the top companies are at each other's throat and some winner emerges and then maybe someday someone has to make a profit on something and we'll all figure it out and it will come out in the wash. But by that point all the people at the top of all these things will be rich and moved on to other things. And I feel like that's where we are, which is like an industry with tons of money and we think tons of potential in certain areas that nevertheless has huge downsides and extra negative externalities that either people don't know about or don't care about or they're just, you know, pushing off into the future and saying, la la la, we're not gonna worry about that now. I'm sure it will sort itself out. And it's just it's a sad state of affairs. Like and uh you know, I I'm glad the verge did this story because it it definitely tapped into something that I had been thinking about this, which is like in my personal life using these coding models to do things, despite all I know about the negative parts of it, I can see I can you know I can see the promise of that technology. It's so clear to anyone well versed in the art of programming the promise of that technology. And also the the concern about it. It worrying about taking people's jobs and what does this mean for the future of people's jobs. But that is such a tiny, such tiny corner of the world of AI. It might as well like like and I think if I was these companies, I would just concentrate entirely on that corner because it's the proven thing that works and people will pay for, but you know, whatever, I'm not an executive. Um, but the whole rest of the world' likes I don,'t care about coding model. I don't even they don't even know that people are using it for that. They just assume AI does everything and and they don't like it. And that and I didn't even touch on the whole like fake images and fake video and how people are upset about that, and just I don't know. Reading this whole thing has made me depressed. Not because I think the technology is hopeless or cannot do anything, but because the way the technology is being used by the people who control it has so far been really, really bad. And Apple its use of technology of this particular technology has been they're doing a poor job too, but for different reasons. But but at the very least, the things that Apple do is doing, I don't think thus far are contributing to the negative impression, other than them advertising features that didn't exist, obviously. Um, but everybody else, all the big players, open AI, anthropic, uh meta with its stuff, are just making things worse every single day. And I don't see how they're going to turn that around until and unless there's some winner and emerges that company is forced to try to be a real business. data from hundreds of data broker websites at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. So there's the databers out there. 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So take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me, now at a special discount for our listeners. Get twenty percent off your delete me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP at checkout. The only way to get twenty percent off is to go to joindeleteme.com slash atp and enter code ATP at checkout. That's joinedelete me dot com slash ATP code ATP. Thanks to delete me for sponsoring our show. You know what's funny about all this is it makes me think about um this band, this this duo that went storming into popular consciousness like a month ago, maybe a little more. Uh Angine Angine Despotrine. I probably butchered that pronunciation. Sorry, French people. Uh but uh well, and actually uh uh the Quebec , I believe, because I'm pretty sure they're Canadian. But anyways, this is a two-person duo that dress es up in paper mache like headdresses and black and white um polka dot uh costumes. The guitarist it plays a two-headed bass guitar slash you know regular guitar. They have the most ridiculous costumes. They play microtonal music, which I guess is, you know, hey, let's take uh notes between regular notes and play those, which in Western music is extremely unusual. This stuff is so weird and so like almost off-putting at first because it's so different. But I I've been going deep into this band because I'm just fascinated by it. I can't wait to see where this is going. I cannot wait. Well so so the reason I bring this up well were either of you two at all familiar with these . No, I did look at the video. And I I it didn't I can tell you that watching the video multiple times did not help me in determining where you're going. So I'm I'm fascinated. I'm I'm riveted. Please, please continue. So here's here's where I'm going with this. I think it well I've I've been going deep on this band, like I said, and I was it's very popular to have like musicians roll uh record like reaction videos to the to this one particular performance, them on uh KEXP. This is like a half an hour video, and uh you're not gonna offend me if this music is not for you. When I first listened to it, I didn't . And then I listened to it again and I was like, Well, actually, this is kind of cool. And I kept listening to it and I was like, Oh, actually, this is very good. The reason I bring this up is because one of these reaction videos, I couldn't remember which one, so I can't link it, but one of these reaction videos to this this band said, you know what this might be in a way, like the popularity of this band and the band itself might be? Is this strikes you or strikes me anyway as something that is so deeply weird and honestly kind of fed up that this is not something that an artificial intelligence would ever create. And part of the draw of this band is that it's so weird and so up that that an AI would never come up with it. And that's uh arguably that's why so many people are drawn to it and interested in it and loving it because everything about it on paper is wrong. I mean even if you're if you're maybe we'll put a link in the chapter art, maybe we won't, but one way or another, if you look at these people and these ridiculous costumes with extremely phallic noses. Like everything about this is weird. And yet I find joy in it, perhaps more than anything else, simply because it's weird, and it's not just another form letter with a bunch of headings punctuated with emoji, which by the way, we got one of those from our school principal a couple of weeks ago. And as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh, yep, that's chat GPT right there. And I think that it's it's just so weird and so delightful because it's so weird. I think that's definitely the moment in time we're in where we mentioned before, like people uh uh you know are afraid of not being able to recognize AI step and and uh and aren't sure that they're able to do so. But there is be given the negative sentiment, especially about content generated by AI and all that entails and everything, um, I think there is currently a sentiment that like the reaction against that. What if what like you said, what is the opposite? What is the opposite of me seeing the clearly AI generated form letter from the school? Because I want to run in the opposite direction of that. I want to go to something that is clearly human made and all this other stuff, right? And that's definitely kind of the moment we're at and the backslash we're at. Uh back uh what's the word I'm looking for? Nackshake. Backlash, yeah, right. Uh but the you know, things change so quickly that I'm sure uh the you know the moment will change and like the the danger of this type of thing is like that's the thing this I always hear this when people talk about you know a computer could never do X. I've been hearing that my whole life. Like don't say what a computer will never be able to do is gener ally a bad idea. But today, you're probably right that you know the reason people can recognize AI stuff is people are, you know, amazing intuitive pattern matchers and being exposed to enough AI generated stuff with current technology that generated it, you start to say, Oh, now I can start to recognize it. The more you see it, the more you're able to recognize that. But of course things change and the AI changes and they start producing different things or whatever. And there's nothing that says in some many years' time that AI wouldn't produce things even weirder than what a human would create, because who knows? But like that's that's the the state we're in right now is that people who are exposed to a lot of this stuff can identify it. And the the the amazing thing about our brains is very often it's difficult to articulate how you know it's AI generated. Like you you highlighted the emoji and the headings or whatever. Um but like yes there is a certain sameness to it because the pool of training data has a lot of overlaps and the way these models manifest what they've been trained on, you know, has some sameness to it. But like it's just sort of like this intuitive sense. But for the fake videos and stuff of like is this AI generated or is it not? Set it setting aside things where it's like a fantastical thing that could never happen, where you're like, well, that's AI generated because that doesn't seem like a real thing that could happen. Just like an AI generated video of a everyday thing is rapidly approaching the point point where even the most the the person most well versed in it could not tell on first viewing whether it's AI generated or not. And I feel like that's going to be true about a lot of things going forward. But that doesn't change where we are right now. And where we are right now, I think you're absolutely right is that people are seingek out things that are the farthest away from what they don't like. Whether that means reconsidering their potential future careers to a place where they think, well, AI's not coming for this job anytime in my lifetime because it's just, you know, we're not there yet, or they seem safe for a while, or changing how they think about, you know, what things they want to do in their life. That Marco was talking about the choices we all make. People are changing those choices based on what they see as this new thing in their life that has upsides and downsides. And previously, you know, before the stuff existed, it's that wasn't they had to think about at all. But now suddenly there's this thing that exists and it has very big downsides and potentially very big upsides. And I have to now suddenly make decisions about that. You know, am I going to contribute to this open source project that accepts AI generated code submissions? I'm picking things in the nerd circle because this is the things I see. But like it's very similar to am I going to go to Walmart because I don't like how Walmart behaves, but also I don't have a lot of money and Walmart is the closest store to me. Right. Right. Am I going to fly somewhere, even though it uses a huge amount of fossil fuel to fly. Yeah. And like and this is this this is definitely falls into the uh carbon footprint trap, which is the uh the c the concept uh the energy companies came up with to make individual people feel guilty while they continued to do systemic things to destroy our planet. Um like the individual response, like you're not going to cure global warming by like using less water in your shower, right? Uh but systemic rules that say all new power plants that are built can't burn fossil fuels, that will save the planet . Not I'm going to use a little bit less shit. And I'm not saying don't conserve, don't recycle, don't blah, blah blah. But the idea that individuals with individual consumer choices are the are the thing that's going to save us is a fiction put out by the large companies that actually make a difference because they don't want to be regulated, they don't want to have to pay taxes, they don't want to have to change, they don't want to be, they don't want to go out of business. They don't want to disappear. You know, all these reasons. And I think that is true of AI as well. Whereas the idea is like if a bunch of individuals refuse to um refuse to work on open source projects that allow AI submissions, then AI will go away. And individuals can make whatever choices they want, but I don't if if your goal is to not have AI code uh, you know, uh being submitted to open source things, your individual choice to participate or not in open source projects is probably not going to make that happen unless you're super duper famous and important as a developer or in charge of a really big project. And the same thing with like, you know, I'm not going to um watch a TV show where I know they used uh AI to in in the uh in the script writing or whatever, like setting aside your ability to actually accurately know that information because there's, you know, who knows what's actually happening. It you know, it it's much better to instead say that we should have rules about like creative content and ownership and we should come up with laws involving what is allowed to be used for training data and what are your rights if your training data is used in a thing. And you know, the the writers' guilds and everything talking about systemic things are are currently trying to come up with rules for like human ownership and human authorship and what things are allowed to be eligib le for like awards and Oscars and credits and residuals and all this other stuff, because they actually do have organizations that in theory are there to serve the needs of the create certain narrow creative communities and certain industries. But whole swaths of the rest of the US public do not have any collective bargaining body or anyone looking out for them. And you would think their their ability to vote for representatives would help. But again, see previous conversation about their vote not mattering because the only thing that matters is money and given a certain amount of money, you can convince people to vote for you. So we're kind of in a bind here with this, but I'm hoping things take a turn for the better if and when we see the I love when they use consolidation as the it's like the the gentle phrase. When we see the consolidation in this industry, which means winners, some companies win, some companies lose, some companies big fish eats the little fish, and we're left with hopefully a smaller number of companies that are better um incentivized to actually do things that people like. Because right now that is not any of their incentives, and it shows and it shows. They they are doing things that investors and people who want to fire people like, and everyone else hates. Alright, thanks to our sponsors this episode, Cotypist Claude and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at ATP.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in overtime, we're gonna be talking about Google Book and the I believe it's aluminum OS . We're gonna be talking about that in overtime. Join to listen, htb.fm slash join. Thank you, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research, Mar co and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental. Accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into Mastodon , you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L I S S So that's K C Lis M A R C O A R M D N T Marco Armin S-I-R A-C U S A C R accusa it's accident al accident al I spent the whole day doing a very nerdy thing. Ooh. I love this. The the current version of Overcast transcripts. It is basically ri it's rendered as a giant V stack of text nodes in Swift UI. Now I can't believe that even works. Same. It does. And yeah, inside of Scrollview. Um so it works. The reason it's done this way is um first of all, you know, it was reasonably simple to code up. The entire app is Swift UI, so I wanted to stick within that. However, for transcripts to work and to like follow along with the text, you have to be able to set the scroll position to as the as the content is playing to scroll to certain specific text nodes in it. I saw some good articles about that recently. Right. So that and and that can all be done on Swift UI, and it is being being done on Swift UI right now. The problem is to do that, you have to load all of those text nodes and render them all. And that is not great for performance, and that's why if you have a very long episode loaded, especially if you're on an older iPhone, if you tap that mini player, there's now like a half second delay before it actually opens up. And that's because it's rendering all of those text nodes before any part of the now playing screen can sho w. Now, programmers out there are probably saying, why aren't you using things like lazy vStack? That's a great question. The problem with lazy vStack is that that scroll behavior doesn't work anymore. Because lazy vsta ck does not know how tall each paragraph thing of text is until it's rendered. That's kind of why it saves so much time. Um, so lazy v stack does not actually solve this problem for me. It doesn't work for this for this use case. Using list you can kind of do so, but it basically there is no good way for me to do this in Swift UI. So I had the idea this should probably be a web view. Now, before you get mad and say web views are terrible, I have a proven history of making good web views. in my apps InstaPaper was entirely a web view. Basically, you know, the main content of InstaPaper, reading the articles, was a web view. Overcast has used web views since the very beginning to render show notes. If you currently look at show notes on any overcast you know installation, that is a web view. Uh if you look at you know of the feedback page, the all the other like static pages, like the privacy policy, those are all web views and overcast. I know how to make good web views. It's a decent amount of work, but but it's it can be done. And over time it's actually been made easier. Um so I I realize this the a web view will solve this because web views are made to render very long content, um, to render them off the main thread, which Swift UI cannot and will not do, and to be able to jump to different points in their scroll hierarchy in a performant way and to know where those points will be. Do you remember when we had the past discussion when I was dealing with the the one complicated view in hyperspace? Oh yeah. And I couldn't and I couldn't get the performance because it's like a table view and I was doing the Swift UI and it was just too damn slow for the re f mo a lot of for for a lot of the reasons the market just said, like the pre-comutping. I youf have I have like a hundred thousand, I have things even longer than transcripts, or maybe not because it's a really long podcast, but I and then I was like, Well, why can't I get this to perform well? And I tried to do the Coco way, and that was faster with app kit, but it was still seemed slow, and then it' likes, screw it, I'm gonna make it a web thing. And remember I had those demo web pages. Um I feel like and I don't know that was like last year sometime. Um I feel like that has come back again, not just because Marco's talking about it in his app, but there was a uh article I read from the seventeenth of Ma y by Artim Lonko . I don't have to pronounce the last name. Uh, where the title is Native All the Way Until You Need Text, which is basically going through the similar thought process of like, so I've got an app and I've got a lot of text. I'm gonna, it's a Mac app. I'm gonna use NS TextView. It's gonna be great. And I can even use TextKit 2, the modern Apple text layout thing, and goes through all the pain of trying to do this and eventually saying, you know what? If you've ever got a bunch of text in an application, just use a web view because and like he doesn't go into the detail on this, but like I feel like it is explicable because if you think about how getting back to how many people Apple has on certain teams, how many people do you think are actively working on uh NS text view and text kit and the native text controls. Even in Swift UI, how many people are working on the specific problem of text layout in Swift UI versus how many people, how many person hours have been put into web rendering engines in the past several decades? Exactly. It's it's not even close. Like the world has been highly motivated to put just an astronomical amount of person hours into web rendering engines. They are amazing. Like they're just so good and so fast because there was so much competition and the web is advancing so much that you're like, oh, I want to use native because that's going to be faster. Well, I'm not sure that's entirely true. And it turned out in my case that uh eventually when I wrangled NS Table View, it became like essentially infinitely fast and it works the way it's supposed to because AppKit is amazing if you once you get it working right. And WebKit did eventually show limits. I forget it was around like two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand rows sometimes it would blank out. But considering WebKit was basically brute forcing it and not like reusing cells in the same way because it didn't like uh AppKit was able to do it because I'm I'm literally telling it through the API, yeah, reuse the cells, here's the data, blah, blah blah. Whereas WebKit is just like, I just see a bunch of markup, man. I don't know about cell reuse. This is not being fed by a data source. This is just a giant text file that I need to make something out of. So all this is to say is I am a hundred percent with you, Marco, that web like using a web page for this is like switching from a technology that like five people have worked on a little bit over the past few years to a technology that like thousands upon thousands of people have worked upon for literally millions of hours and continue to work on and continues to be maintained and gets more featureful and more powerful every single year. So fully endorsed. Yeah. And and the and the funny thing is, so as I was researching different options and everything, thanks helpfully, helpfully with the use of AI for some of that research, um I quickly realized that wait a minute, the next feature so you know having transcripts out there, I I want uh there's like three major things that I have to do next. Number one is improve the alignment around DAI, which I'm I'm currently I think I thought search was gonna be number one. No. No number one is improved DA DAI line because the transcripts are wrong for a lot of podcasts. So that's wrong schmong. But the good thing is I my current thanks. My current uh test flight beta, I think I made pretty pretty great progress in that, also. Thanks to AI, found finding that edge case bug in some of my code. But uh anyway. Um then I wanted to fix this performance problem because it is pretty embarrassing. Um because also keep in mind like uh when the highlighted text changes in Swift UI, there is some like which happens, you know, as you play, whichever paragraph is highlighted changes. Now I'm not changing the overall dimensions of the text by like by setting it to bold, maybe, because that that's and that that's the reason I'm not setting it to bold, because that would then like reflow everything below it. But Swift UI still has to do a decent amount of diffing and computation whenever anything in the hierarchy changes to see what changed and what do I need to reload and re redraw? And it's probably doing more redrawing than it needs to do. So that's causing performance problems, plus this like, you know, this initial load performance problem. But then my number three thing on my hit list is everybody is requesting some ability to select text and you know do something, copy it out, whatever. You can't really do good text selection inside a series of Swift UI text nodes. That's what that RTM article talks about, I think. Yeah. So the reality is, literally doing my next feature request of having any way to select text will already require me to have switched to a web view anyway. Because web views do that. Like if you want to have arbitrary text selection that you can select part of one paragraph into other paragraphs and have it cross boundaries of nodes and everything, but not select entire nodes. You basically have to use a web view. Like they're that that is by far the best option. I think text selection and web pages is awful and I fight with it all the time, but at least it's possible. That's the difference. Like if you're saying, hey, but if you're trying to select text is I'm I'm selecting text and web pages all the time for the purposes of building the show the internal show notes for this thing. And it's so bad when you're like, oh, why is the thing jumping around is not letting me select this? And do I have to use the inspector and blah blah blah? But at least you can do it. And for the easy case, which I would say the transcripts of an easy case, which is paragraph after paragraph of text. There's no intervening floating ads or sidebars or header graphics or like we're like none of that is there. So for just that case, selecting text from a webpage works like a dream. But in Swift UI, as you noted, their current the current state of their selection technology, especially if you are essentially doing a series of views one for each paragraph and you want to select across them is not great. And by the way, it's not just Swift UI. If you try to use any of the other native t uh controls, it also is fairly tricky. Yeah, you have the same And it's like I don't want to become a framework engineer to work with the type system to do this. I just I have some text. I want to lay it out. I want to allow people to select it. And I can't believe you go into the top three features and still haven't mentioned search. But eventually, somewhere on your list is search, and you know what? That's really easy to do on a web page too. Quote unquote client side with JavaScript. I type a string and it can jump right down to it and it can highlight it. And this is like web technology 101, and it's so easy to do, and it's super fast, and you don't have to worry about it losing the offset and putting you in the wrong like the thing with the the scrolling apis we'll put a link to that one in the show notes I found the article which is uh it's from the nil coales cing uh blog about uh the sad sordid history of Swift UI APIs for programmatic scrolling. And I can tell you, even the most advanced current one still has tons of jank. So still so bad. Just just talk to the people who made Tapestry Icon Factory, which is a giant timeline app, and the amazing Herculean effort they had to do to even hack UI kit to get this the way they wanted it, to have it be stable and to be able to know where they are and go to offsets. And Swift UI, forget it was not even close to being able to do it. So this is a hard problem, but you know it's not a hard problem? Jump to a DOM element. Yeah. There's multiple ways to do it. They have animations. You can say where where on the frame it should be or you oriented. Like yeah. So and it's fast. And yeah. That's the thing. Like there' theres's really no significant downside because as you said, like this stuff is so fast. Yeah, it can be implemented half acidly, but if you if you do a little bit of work to polish it, um and and you know to to prevent it from being a crappy experience, it doesn't take much work to get there, honestly. Um that's that's what I was working, but that's not actually the super nerdy thing that I was that I was talking about earlier. That's just the the framework within which I had to do the super nerdy thing, which it is. As you know, from my transcripts, I have those little music notes. Um, and I have at the top that little banner that says the transcript will contain errors and has like a little guy falling. Um those are SF symbols. I use S SF symbols all over my app. This is Apple's you know icon library and they're all over the place in my app. How do you get SF symbols in a web view? Yeah, have fun with that. I just pas ted SF symbols into my source code today. Yeah, you can do that actually. Um because I had like a string, I was adding app intense, and you know you have to pick like the SF symbol like string name, and I'm like I'm never gonna remember what that string is. Copy paste. Now I'll remember what it is because it's next to it in a comment. Yeah. So cause yeah, because like in the in the SF Symbols app and you right click a symbol, you have different options. One of them's copy name. Um one of them's also just copy symbol. Because they are just glyphs in the font, but they are like special private glyphs and they're kind of difficult to access programmatically and you know, especially in a way that Apple would actually allow in the App Store. Um and so there really isn't a great way to get SF symbols into a web view. But there are some hacks to do it. And now my web view in Overcast, long ago, I many, many years ago, um when podcast ad companies started trying to insert tracking pixels into show notes, Overcast uh basically made it so that external images and stuff like that will not load . Now, how do you do this in a web view? The web has a thing for that. It's the content security policy. So Overcast WebView has very, very strict content security policy in it um such that only like you know basically like the the web view content is is heavily filtered for show notes because that's being externally supplied. It's untrusted HTML. So it is being heavily filtered and then being rendered into a context where it is super locked down by content security policy. So that way nobody can sneak anything into there that's gonna like track you without you knowing. That's why I don't load external images by default and I put those giant placeholders in and saying do you want to load images from soand so dot com? And you have to tap each one each time. That's why. It's to avoid all that tracking and everything. And so I had this whole like you know, local resource handler that serves external images through a lot of you know protection and and checks and everything like that. So how do I get SF symbols in there? This sent me down as a rabbit hole today. Um that first I'm like, all right, can I somehow export an SF symbol programmatically as an SVG with vector data? So I can just put it in because I'm gonna I don't want to look I don't want them to look crappy. Um and the answer is basically not really. Like there's a few different methods that both you know blog posts and forum posts and eventually LLMs uh have told me about, and they all basically either don't work or have such severe limitations and downsides. Um, one even like like Claude generated me an entire PDF to SVG converter to like first render this into a PDF graphic context and then you know export it to SVG, which would have worked, but doesn't work because of the way they render the symbols. They're not they're not vectors, actually, like in that context. So there's all the it I tried all these different ways to do it. Eventually what I had to do was I have in my like custom URL resource handler through my content security policy stuff, I have an endpoint URL that I can hit that will render the SF symbol to an image. The JavaScript that interprets those nodes in the source file first checks their size with CSS and like dynamic JavaScript, you know, stuff like that. So it reads their reads their size and read reads their font size around them and reads their um font weight. Because obviously as of symbols, they they will react to different font weights. So if you have like in a bold line, your symbol should render wider, you know, thicker uh line weight than than in a regular line. So all that is being done client side and with JavaScript, it's basically seeing where is this being used. Uh it passes that to the backend. The backend generates the the image of the thing, but then it uses this weird CSS trick with shadows or something so that it matches the color of the text around it. Because that's what that's how it works in Swift UI. Like when you use SF symbols, you can use them like in text and they work with the text. They are the text size, they flow with the text, they inherit the text color and the weight, etc. I built all of that today with like the craziest JavaScript hacks and CSS hacks and a little bit of help from my friends in the LLM world. Um, but I finally got it working. I it took me all day, but now I have SF symbols in a web view being able to be called up in a secure way through my content security policy, any symbol, rendered on any size text, with any color, with any font weight. And should I have done all of this? Definitely not. This made this was a terrible use of my time, but you know what? I work for myself and I can do stuff like that as a result. And I chose to waste my day doing that and I feel great. And so I'm glad I did it. Is there a reason you couldn't just specify use the system fun and just show the FS symbol you know what I mean? I've I've tried that not today. I tried that a while ago and it didn't work. I forget why. I've never tried it. I'm just wondering because I know like obviously you have the the advantages you have going for is you know the web rendering engine is web kit and you know you're on a platform where SF symbols exists and you know you can specify the system font and CSS. So that would have been a way less work. I thought you were you were gonna end up going to is you ended up making a image with data URLs with the data colon and then like just the uh the you know base 64 encoded content of the images that you wanted that you were serving up. But you know what you did with images will also work. I just think it's funny that all of this was because of the How many symbols are you using? Um right now? Uh well Yeah, like three. I mean I like I could have I could have just X but so what I but I also like the reason I wanted to make this generalizable. F ofirst all, obviously I'm a programmer. Um but but and I work for myself. Uh second of all, I have a mechanism to put like announcements in the app, like remotely server-side, so I can say, like, hey, here's what's new. And I wanted the because I use SF symbols all over the interface, I wanted the ability to include them in those announcements to be like, tap this button, and then in parentheses, show the icon of that button to get to this new feature. So I want I wanted them to be generalizable, but also safe so that you couldn't just do that from like show notes and do weird things in my app. Yeah, you might have done is guaranteed that uh the upcoming WWE C -and-we know a lot of people have wanted to export uh symbols as as SVG and now you can do it. Yeah. I I don't see that happening. But yeah. I I I wouldn't be surprised because I a lot of people the problem you're describing I've seen people asking about and trying to do for a long time in it because for all the reasons you said that SSMs are this weird thing where they're like they're really cool convenience for people writing apps for Apple's platforms, but they're also not images, but they're also not fonts really, but they're you know, they're animated and can react. Like they're they're this weird thing. And people always just want to right-click one on the app and export it as an SVG. And they're like, why can't I do that? Well you can do that. Like you you can you can export vector data oh, can you from SF symbols? So the one way I've done that in the past is um i in paint code like you know my my uh wonderful programmatic drawing app that I use paint code but sh I I don't honestly it's I think it might be abandoned. It's been awfully quiet recently, but um in paint code you can export text as vectors. So I just paste in I do the copy symbol thing and paste it in and then I just export I just like convert that convert that to a vector and then now I have a vector. Um but that only works like one by one. But some some SF symbols are animated and you can't really do that. Uh maybe can SVGs do animation? Uh probably that's they're they can do like all webkit inside of them. They're they're it's it's one of those like dramatically overspected technologies that you can do way too much in it. Yeah. You can't you can copy as SVG right from the SF Symbols app I just did it. Okay, there you go. Yeah that that's that's how I made my wonderful icon that you loved so much for um for the haunter map. The SF symbols weren't the problem with that icon . Everything else about it. Where they're placed, what color they were, what color the background was, which symbols you picked, how big they were. Gracious. It's just so funny to me. Like I I'm not trying to m say you did anything wrong. I mean you you nerd sniped yourself and then you accomplished what you set out to do. But it was only a day, right? All of this for th what is two or maybe three SF symbols, at least how it sits right now, that that really cracks me up. But what if I want to change them later? Exactly. I already I've already put the XKCD uh 974 in the chat. Yep. Standard protocol. Of course., sí, sí