Advancements in phone camera technology

Welcome to the VirchCast, the flagship podcast of vibe coding from your phone. I'm your friend David Pierce and my power is out. So it's Monday, March 16th, as I'm recording this, and uh I live in the Washington DC area where we are supposedly in a few hours from now getting some like giant generational storms, potentially even including a bunch of tornadoes. But the really fun thing is that the power is out several hours before it's even supposed to start raining. So it's just gonna be one of those days. We're doing super great. But this means that if you uh are watching this on YouTube, you get to see what my home office slash basement slash studio setup looks like when there's no lights and no fancy camera and it's just me talking into my MacBook because the verge cast goes on. Anyway, on this show, most of what we're going to do today is one conversation that I had recently with Paul Ford. Paul Ford, you might know, he's been writing about technology for a very long time. He also runs an AI technology company called A Board. Paul has been thinking about technology longer than most. He writes a blog called F Train that's been around for forever. He's also written for Wired and Bloomberg. If you remember that big Bloomberg business week issue called What is Code? That was like 40,000 words of just what is code. Uh that was Paul. Uh he's just a smart person to talk to about technology and is one of the people I have leaned on over the years to just try and think through where we are and what's going on. So where we are right now and what's going on right now is we are in a moment of huge change for how we interact with technology and in with AI in particular. Paul wrote a great piece for the New York Times opinion a while ago. I'll link it in the show notes, kind of reckoning with how he feels about that, both as somebody who loves technology but employs other people to work on technology and is trying to think through what it means for his business. We had a fascinating conversation. I I have been reckoning with a lot of the same stuff from a very different perspective. I had a great time talking to Paul about how he's thinking about and how he's using all of these tools and how we're supposed to think about all of this stuff going forward. We also have a verse cast hotline question about what's going on with smartphones and the stuff you can and can't get in the United States. Dom Preston, who was just at Mobile World Congress looking at all of the cool phones, is gonna help us answer that. All of that is coming up in just a sec. When we come back from the break, we're just gonna get right into my interview with Paul Ford. But first, I am gonna go once again call the power company and beg them to fix this before the storms come and it inevitably all falls apart aga in. Wish me luck. This is the first cast. We'll be right back. 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It's acid compliant, enterprise-ready, and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongoDb.com slash build . Paul Ford, welcome to the verge cast. Oh my goodness, David. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I have been wanting to do this with you for a very long time, and most of the reason we haven't is because I am horrifically bad at email. So I'm very happy this finally happened. I mean, this is not you being nice. We've actually been working on this. No, it's like a literal literal fact. That is actually what has what happened. Yeah. But it's great. You're you're busy, you got family stuff, you know. I'm also very bad at email. But thanks to AI, I am increasingly getting better at email. But we we can come back to that. Um but our timing turned out to actually be very good because you just wrote this big piece for the New York Times opinion section about vibe coding, in which you would say I would say had pretty complicated feelings. And I want to get into those complicated feelings, but uh on balance you wrote this piece basically being like clawed code and this idea of being anyone being able to write code is cool on balance. Is that a is that a fair description of where you land? I mean, I would never be a person who could identify something as cool. Like a s not it wouldn't give me that. What I I what I was going I mean, that is a fair assessment, first of all. Like if you your read of it is far more charitable than many people So this is what I want to talk about. Because there was uh we we experience this all the time, right? Like we we cover AI from a lot of different angles every day, all the time. And I am consistently amazed by the like trench tribal warfare that appears every single time we talk about AI. But you you experienced this in, I think, a particularly all at once acute way over the last couple of days. Tell me what this reaction has been like. Well, okay. So I knew I was gonna be in the paper and not just the paper like op-ed New York Times. This is where people go to scream. And like, uh so, you know, they asked. They I was, I was literally kind of walking down the street and and they they asked. And I was like, oh God, you know, I really didn't want do to it for all the reasons you're describing. Like it's complicated. It I would say also I'm a business owner, which of course most people see that and are like, oh, he's he's gonna talk his business. But if you read the piece, I I really don't. I I actually don't necessarily want to be in any way front and center in this story because it's so toxic and the people on every side are either in denial or have these weird utopian visions. But I'll be very very, frank, and people can believe this or not, I felt an ethical responsibility to describe what I see as the biggest signal change to come to technology in a really long time and what it's doing to the industry that I'm associated with and that I care deeply about, which is code and sort of the tech and software development industry. Here is what I know, and here's what I tried to describe in the piece. Whereas five years ago, doing a really complicated, let's say, XML transformation and keeping the recursive nature of the data structure and I'm just sort of like jargoning for a minute, but like sort of like doing things where I could um that are really complicated about traversing a data tree and putting that into like a CMS and blah blah blah was really, really hard. And so I wanted to do it for a personal project. I started and I couldn't complete it. And with Claude Code, I could complete it in about a month. Like it wasn't instant. It was a really hard problem. It required a lot of like I had to do all sorts of stuff that I hadn't done in a long time. But it was done and I was able to put it on the web and and I'm doing things with it. So it's sort of like that wasn't there five years ago, even though I really wanted it to be. And that's such a big deal given how much of our industry is or not industry, our world is code driven, that again, I I kind of felt an obligation just to say it out loud as simply as I could. Yeah. Well, and I I am curious about forget even five years ago. I mean, six months ago, I think. You, like many people, seemed to feel differently. I mean, you've been working on AI stuff for a long time. You uh, I think are are a person with pretty established bona fides in this space. Like you you also wrote four hundred and seventy thousand words called What is code in Bloomberg that like you know I read two thirds of like I assume everybody else did. Yeah. And uh I You missed the centerfold. Look, I I read Business Week for the Pictures, just like everybody else. We all do. But you also seem to think that there is something happening kind of right here and right now, not just in the in the sweep of AI history, but like right now. I have a funny right now. I have a funny sort of counter interpretation to a lot of people, and it's because I've been watching it so closely. Um, Claude Code. I've I've been using it almost since it came out, and before that, I was using a tool called ADER that's a lot like Claude Code, but used ChatGPT. And we've been building at my company, we've been building up from these technologies and using them and sort of trying to create in some ways more stable versions of what they do, right? So very, very close to it. So what happened in November of last year was suddenly Claudelog C code could solve a lot more problems than it could before. And that couldn't that was two things. One is they released a new version of Opus, their very smartest, their smartest in quote model, right? And that was 4.5. And so that could do some new things. And it was really cool. But ultimately, in the scope of LLMs and what LLMs can do, it was really just an incremental change. It wasn't like this huge step change. It was just kind of better along a lot of different angles. So not this like radical AGI moment, just uh like, hey, okay, we made Opus a lot better. But then they figured out how to create a software product on top of that that managed your prompts and kind of looked at your code in a certain way that was really tightly coupled to the LLM. And in some way, and I I think because I'm talking to this audience, I can get away with experiencing it this way. I feel it's like the first true LLM-based project. Like that was that was them saying, okay, this is how this works and we're going to make this thing better. But the reality is we can get so much value out of it if we just put all this code on top of it that manages it for you so that when you prompt, it does a certain number of things and looks at your code base, and now suddenly stuff is kind of um happening in a more structured way than we used to be able to do before. And once they kind of locked that down, they started to make that incrementally better and incrementally better. And so you see sort of two forms of acceleration. There's the really big LLM, which is kind of actually slowly getting better at this point. It's it's huge, so slowly getting better can be really meaningful because it it kind of has an enormous amount of knowledge in it. But the product can move really, really quickly because that's just code. And it doesn't require some huge processing run. And so those two things lined up in November, which I think is also why everybody was able to catch up so quickly, like OpenAI. So we're seeing the product era come for LLMs around this field, around the field of code. And that is a very big change. And that's not really something I could get into the times. It's just kind of too much for civilians. But that is the warning that I really kind of want to put out there. But also I think that's the opportunity like, hey, nothing that dramatic changed. They just made something on top of it. And that did change the world a little bit. We should pay attention. How did your own relationship to coding change. I mean, you you you tell the story in the piece about like prompting Claude C ode on the train on your way home from work, which is such a like incredible departure from thinking about how to build software that we've ever had before. But it sounds like something even one level deeper has kind of clicked in for you about like the stuff you actually want to build now that you can. Well I I think I'm unusual in that look I'm I'm middle-aged and I've been Not as unusual as you would think. Probably not. You're right. No, but my here my backlog of like projects is really long. Like I have a lot of GitHub repos that I had really big intentions. And then I would go work at a company or, you know, I had my children. And so like I just have this huge list of things I never finished. And so I had stacked up for me all of these kind of regretful projects. The biggest one for me was I I had a relatively early blog, but I didn't have a CMS for it. It was all custom coded XML documents. That's what I was talking about. And it was a grisly transformation. And I've tried to create a CMS and sort of like, I was like, ah, I should get my blog back up. I should have a personal archive. I should put the stuff I write and do. I should put it somewhere on my own personal website. I tell people to do that. And every time I would sit down, like a month later, I would just be like, oh well, that was that. But boy, it just, you know, it cause I could say things like build me a CMS and then kinda have a CMS. And then I could say, and again, I get real nerdy, but like, look at the structured taxonom y and entity extraction tools in this in this framework and add that to the CMS and build me a world-class hierarchical taxonomy manager. And um this is why I said that my personal website would have cost $25,000 to rebuild, and which everybody is sort of trashing me for right now. But I'm like, it it really would, folks. I'm sorry. It's because it's because I overbuilt everything and I was an idiot in my twenties, but here we are. And so like I was able to resurrect something that's like 25 years old at this point. And also import the hundreds of podcasts I've recorded and all the articles that I've written for other publications. I often write for Wired, I wrote for The New Republic, I was at Harper's for a long time and I did a newsletter. And so I could bring all of those in and suddenly I could have all my stuff in one place, hierarchically organized, on the web, and then I could say , deploy it to a server, create a secure login path. I need instrumentation. Please check it every day. And all of that stuff is why we don't build websites anymore. And now you can build websites aga in. So that's that's how I saw it. Like that's that was kind of the emotional reaction to me is I can have the web again and I can have it on my own terms. It it seems like there is some sense of I don't know, maybe guilt is not the right word, but it comes off a little like guilt in that thing. Like I think what you just described is sort of an unequivocally good thing. It's not a thing that you would have done or could have done before, and now it is a thing you can do. I mean and and there's versions of this sort of up and down the computing spectrum, right? I I was talking to E Eric on our team just before we started recording that I had Claud Code go through and just just basically dump all of the files I don't need on my computer anymore. I went through my downloads folder and made me two folders to keep and to delete. And it's the sort of thing that I just never would have done because it would have taken too long. And this is like we we invented computers to be able to do the kind of thing that you just described, to take busy, boring work that no one should have to do and now they can do it. And yet you clearly feel something weird doing this. Tell me what that is. I was I had a company. We had 100 plus employees. And I don't know and we hired them for certain roles and some of the roles I I'll tell you one thing, like I I really think this is an amazing tool for data migration because it writes code that transforms data and you can make sure that the data going in and the data out going out is exactly byte accurate. Like you can guarantee 100% perfection in your migration approach, right? So that was a lot of work that people used to do. And they used to do that when they were getting into the industry. I wrote what is code because I really did believe that this was a good way into the middle class. And it had been for me. I don't talk about this a lot, but I grew up really poor. I went to a school for the poor. Uh and I associate myself and I a lot of the people I work with today are people who also grew up without a lot of means. And we saw this industry as such a gift, right? Like it really brought us in. And we I was frankly, a fat, nerdy twenty-something, but I just loved document markup and I could make a life out of that. Okay. I can't guarantee that path. And I've really spent a lot of my time over the last 20 years telling people that this was a good thing. And I feel like I have to kind of own up to that. And I guess what it is is sort of I wrote about this I wired at one point I wrote a piece about GLP1s because I was very early on Manjaro. I have type 2 diabetes. And it was such a drastic change after years of trying to diet to suddenly have any kind of control over that part of my body. I rapidly lost 70 pounds. And I was like, my reaction wasn't like, oh boy, good for me. My reaction was: after all those years of being fat, the culture is not ready for the change that is being thrust upon us. And I will say, in the intervening couple of years, I I've been proved right. Like we were not socially ready for what Azempic and Munjaro were gonna do for us. Our leadership didn't guide us, our health system is fractured even more so because of it, et cetera. And so I I feel when I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach that I I have to raise the alarm. So I am raising an alarm. Here's this wonderful opportunity because my entire life people have said, God, I hate Salesforce, or if I could just afford to do this one thing. Or every time you nerds do something, you disappear and I can't get it done. And I'm like, that I think is amazing. But at the same time, all those little structural rules. There's a bunch of big websites that like there's one old school web forum. I'm just kind of getting trashed on it right now. And part of me, it's like when I see the parts where there're saying mean things about me personally. I know you've had this experience, like your back gets up a little bit. You're like, ooh. Uh and you you want to defend yourself and you kinda can't because you write for the paper. You I mean I'm I'm telling you, but you live this every day. You live this more than I do. But at the same time, if you take a step back and I mean that's doesn't mean that I I I don't think those people they should shut up about me and just wanna say that just shut the hell up for one frickin' minute, you just read the piece and realize, but regardless, okay, you hate me. One person was like, I've had bad vibes about him for years. So anyway, that's where I am right now. But let me take a step back. And if we're going to be real here, I really should have empathy for them. I'm in the paper, I have a good job, I'm doing okay, and I'm telling people, hey, this is really interesting and exciting. But a lot of people are hearing that and they're going, I am existentially at risk. People, there's somebody out there with a special needs kid who is counting on their tech job that somebody like me told them 15 years ago was the safest possible bet. And they went and got a certificate in like AWS management. And now people are telling them like, why would I ever do that? I'll just deploy by telling Claude. You know, and it's sort of like that is an enormous insult. I was not excited to be the person who would be delivering that insult in in in but what are you gonna do because that the frickin' ai companies won't do it right and the government won't do it and the sort of angry blue sky left won't acknowledge that anything's real, and the less wrong rationalists think that we should worship the god robot. And so, you know, uh maybe as a narcissistic act, as an egotistical dad with some concern for society, I threw my hat in. Yeah. So what feels different to you about this than other, you know, supposed or actual computing revolutions. We we've been through a million different ideas about what it was going to be to be a person in tech, right? And I think there's been a lot of upheaval. Um and and I think you you've lived through a bunch of these, right? I've heard a bunch of people compare this to the Yes. So what what is it just a matter of speed and scale that feels different, or is there something like qualitatively different right now to you. Trevor Burrus You know, one of okay, one of the interesting things, Linus Torvald, who created Linux, he was like, wow, this is kind of interesting. He's a big nerd. But he's like, nothing will compare to what happened when we first created compilers. Compilers sped up. Because before that, it was literally like you were flipping switches. Yeah. And punching things into a paper tape and making, you know, you had to know exactly how a computer worked. And interesting example, all of those were people's jobs. That's right. And compilers show up and suddenly you could use something like COBOL or or or you know Fortran or AUGOL and you could transform things that looked a lot like language and that had structure to them would be turned into computeries. And that increased the number of people who could program and do things with a computer like maybe like many orders of magnitude, like six or seven orders of magnitude. Like just millions of times more people are involved with programming in tech than could be without compilers. And everything got cheaper and lots of other stuff. Moore's Law, whatever. But so I think there there so that's one hypothesis. Hypothesis one is more and more people can get involved, more and more people can make the computer do what they think in their head, and that might even bring more and more people in. Hypothesis too is why would we need these many, many millions of well-paid specialists, many of whom are quite expensive? Um, if we can do that and the computer can do it. And there is an extraordinary amount of evidence. And then there's sort of hypothesis three, which is we should nuke all the AI companies from orbit. And I'm leaving that one out. That's kind of up to society. Like society might decide to do that, but that's I I'm not going to do that. But like so is it one or two? I mean, I I don't literally what do you think? Like I don't know. I mean, I i it it seems to me that the answer is uh the the cop-out answer, which is probably both, right? That's what I'm looking for. That is the brave stance. Yeah. You you poke at this in your piece. And I think so I've been thinking about this along two lines, right? And I think the one line is uh w what everybody is calling the SAS pocalypse, right? The idea that uh there was this paper that just came out with this sort of futuristic scenario that tanked the stock market. And one of the things they say is basically like, what if instead of paying a lot of money for enterprise software, somebody at your company can just spin up a competitor in a few days? I think that is somewhere between nonsense and the far future. Um I don't I don't think there's any world in which that's a real thing that you're gonna be able to do with cloud code anytime soon. On the flip side, I think the idea that people are going to suddenly be able to solve their own problems with software rather than just having to find the thing that exists that is the closest is a meaningful change to the software business, right? Like what I've been doing on Cloud Code is uh I've spent a long time switching between to do list apps and productivity suites and I have a I I realized like a hero though I have I'm I'm incredibly surprised to hear this. Oh my god I know yeah it's weird that this is a thing I'm this is brave of you. Brave of you. I don't talk about this very often. Never heard of it. But uh I realized about a year ago I actually know exactly what I want. And so I started calling around being like, why won't you give me what I want? And they were like, well, because what you want isn't what everybody wants. And then Claude Code for me was this light bulb moment of like, oh, I can just do it now. What's what a journalist moment. Like you're just kind of like, I'm gonna turn the you're all gonna do this for me. And they're like, shut up, David. And you're like, I'm No, I it was literally, I was like, what I want seems so simple and straightforward. I don't understand why every to-do list app doesn't ship a web clipper because a web clipper seems like such a like blindingly obvious feature for all of them to have. And and a bunch of them like showed me telemetry that was like, actually, nobody wants our web clipper and almost nobody used it when we had it. So we cut it. And I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. So I'm the only one who wants this. But what this gives me now is the ability, in theory, with enough time and enough sort of accumulated knowledge to just build the thing that I want. And that means I'm not stuck paying for the one that got the closest to my needs, but never actually met them. It means I am not in somebody else's ecosystem that has a lot of ramifications. It means I can build my own solutions, which is very cool and also bad for all the companies who now don't get my business. And that sorting out where that one side of things ends and the other one begins is very complicated for me. Can you bring up a web browser in this conversation? Sure. Okay. Go to a it's called polyend.com . Okay Okay. Now I'm a big I'm a synth nerd. It's my midlife crisis. And so I like to track the news. And this product came out. And I think this product shows me something really interesting about vibe coding. Because I think clawed code and it's like are really, really confusing. So you're at the poly end website and there's a guitar pedal on it. You plug, you take the wire out of the guitar, you put it in the pedal, you take the wire out of the pedal, you put it in the amp, and it adds an effect, delay, reverb, whatever. This is this is how U2 becomes U2. Right. And so they have a new product. It's called Endless. And it is a guitar pedal that is essentially a little computer, but it looks and acts, it has three knobs and two buttons. And if you go and you learn about it, what you find is that it has a programming environment where you describe in plain English the kind of effect that you want, and it writes, it compiles that, and then it sends it over USB to the pedal. And who is the company that's doing this? This is a company that builds digital synthesizers and digital synthesis guitar pedals. So they have all the pieces. They have the digital signal processing effects, they have the tools, they have the understanding of how you sort of move one node into another. So they have all this intellectual property and they have all this smarts. And this is one of the this is hard to program this stuff. It's really hard to make a a sound that's good. It requires experience and expertise. So what they've done is they've essentially made a big library or what you might call like a runtime where you can go in and vibe code in this very specific domain and it can be executed on this very specific platform. It costs about 300 bucks. But now you have a guitar pedal that sounds pretty good that is kind of entirely your own. And then they give you a white um sort of faceplate for it that you can put in under the knobs and you can draw your own picture. And to me, I'm like, man, that's a cool AI product. Like, I get access to all their smarts. I get to make exactly the thing I want. And then I walk away from the AI and I play guitar. And that's cool. Like I'm actually doing something cool that's not AI away from the computer that has enabled me to kind of have this very different experience and explore this different way of thinking, but I still have to go get better at guitar and figure out how what to do with this. So I'm not numbing myself by just like chatting. Right. I'm I'm doing something, I'm making something. And so I think when we're talking about this, right, I don't think the world is going to log in to Claude Code in the future. I just like that's but if you told me that like 10 years from now, lots and lots of guitarists are like hacking their own effects pedals with this stuff and then playing out and they really like it, and even though you don't hear it, they know about it. I'm like, that is more believable. Like the effects pedal runtime makes sense to me as a product in a way that like everyone can code might not. Yeah. And I think the that's it's a more a useful way to think about a lot of this stuff because then it it means the downstream effects of all of this stuff are a lot more understandable. Right. I think when when we talk about what if we create God, you get to universal basic income and it's like, okay, well how do we how do we deal with the ramifications of everything changing all at once overnight because the we've created digital Jesus? Like, so also David, like if anyone ever saying that ever seemed to really care about consciousness, like if they like they're always like, I want it so I can sell it. But it's it's like you know, it's like go read a poem. Like just do anything where you're like, God, that that external consciousness is really exciting. I like going to museums. If I could just hear those words as opposed to in the future, AI will make museums for you whenever you want a museum, I'd feel a lot better. Yeah, I completely agree. Go read a poem is a good title for this episode, by the way. Just throwing that out there. Put that up there. Let's see how they they're still gonna piss people off, but whate ver. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic can mean getting lost in the shuffle. Grammarly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Grammarly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Grammarly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Grammarly has saved In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. 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It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. You could sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash Virgcast. Go to Shopify.com slash Virgcast. That's Shopify dot com slash Virgcast . Support for this show comes from LinkedIn Ads. When you're running your own business, every decision could feel like make or break, and you can't afford to waste a penny. So if your B2B marketing is still falling short, it may be because you're preaching to the wrong choir, whether you know it or not. If you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers according to their data. That's where they stand apart from other advice. You could target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, company revenue. Also, you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. That's why LinkedIn ads boast one of the highest B2B return on ad spend of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them. So get your ads in front of the right people and make your B2B strategy work. You can spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash vergcast. That's LinkedIn.com slash virgcast. Terms and conditions app ly. So all right, one other thing I want to talk about in in this is uh next to all of this thinking about vibe coding and AI and clawed code, uh, you're writing again on the internet. Uh like a like a maniac. Um I don't know if you know this, Paul. It's been a minute since you were a blogger, but we don't do that anymore. No. We we all make TikToks. All of our stuff got ingested by AI companies that are putting us all out of business. Nobody goes to websites anymore. What what are you what are you doing? Um okay. So I used to have a website. I have a website. It's called Ftrain.com because the I You will not give yourself enough credit for this, but you were like you were like an OG blogger in a w in a way that like other OG bloggers understood. Like Jason Kotke when you started blogging was like, Oh my god, Paul Ford is blogging again. Like Yeah. No, it's a little it's a little like a ghost has returned, right? Um I if we're gonna characterize me, I was always very interested in the web as an exploratory medium. I also worked in AI around 2000. Like I was this I bit I was kind of waiting for some of these things to happen. I didn't know they would be LLMs. And in fact, actually I read an article. I I had Wired gave me the cover in 2019, and I made a very bold prediction that we were kind of done and it was just going to be a bunch of crypto and the tech industry was probably had had its day. So I'm often wrong about stuff, like just to put it out there. But I think crypto made a lot of people uh bearish on the tech industry for a while there. Well I'll tell you why. It's because when you use the computer to do to multiply things and make them cheaper, that feels very computer to me. But when you use the computer to make things expensive, which is what crypto what crypto does, it makes processor cycles into money. That feels really regressive. Like I'm like, that's not computer. I don't like that. Whereas LLMs, even though they burn the world and they're raising the sea level. Um they really can make a lot of things for a lot of people. Like you got a billion people using them. So it's it's real computer, even if people hate it. And so anyway, I gotta tell you, man, I got I'm running a business. The world's changing. The world sucks right now. Um I'm on blue sky, but those aren't my friends. They'll they'll throw me out the window. Um and I'm middle aged and I got into synths and then I was like, I wonder if I could get my site back up as a personal archive because I've done all this stuff and if I'm gonna be a thought leader and be on podcasts, it's kind of embarrassing that hasn't been updated for 15 years. We should just screw it up. And I was like, well, yeah, I always wanted a real CMS, but I had that weird data structure. And then it built one. And then I organized all my stuff and I brought I imported all my old tweets. I have 70,000 nodes of content on that site. If you click the little head on the top right, it all expands in a giant hierarchy. And I'm like, man, I always wanted this. And then because of everything I did, I was like, I gotta be able to edit, gotta be able to true it up, fix some old typos. And then I went, wait a minute, I have a text bo x. And the problem with me is you give me a text box and it's just like I don't, I don't have any sense of self-control. Um and suddenly I had a box to type into in the web and it just felt real good. It felt real good to not really have to be defensive all the time. You know this from writing. You have to acknowledge five million readers who are gonna be angry before you can get to your first paragraph, right? It's like just it's it's not easy to be in public in the way that it used to be. And when I mean and look, like I used to get death threats because of my blog in the nineties. Like it it's the the cult. Humans are humans. Nothing's going to change. But the sense of like I would really like a space of my own. Even though it's weird that I'm kind of corporate now in doing this. And even though I'm a writer out in the world and can write other places, I really missed this. I missed having a domain where I could explore an idea almost lazily where I could be sloppy, where I could have 10 paragraphs instead of two, and and really actually kind of put my own thinking first instead of the readers. And I also love when other people do that. I really do. I I like the unfiltered, messy parts of thinking. I like zines and I like ephemeral thought and odd one-offs. And I was like, wait a min ute. I can have that. And I can have it easily and cheaply. And I can run it safely on a website that I control. I can log into a Linux box and um I can enjoy this. And then I found that I really did. And I launched it and I organized all my stuff and I can search for old tweets. And um it feels really good. Just feels good. Do you feel like you're blogging onto a different internet than you were when you Oh my God, yes. First of all, like everything is bots. Like you're like, oh if I'd seen these numbers, I would have had a panic attack twenty years ago. It's like, you know, like one like hundreds of thousands of entities are looking at the site and none of them are human. Like and it swarms about like I had to get Claude to diagnose probably what Claude is doing um in the background So you know, like I had to tighten stuff up. I have all this domain knowledge and it's fun to kind of wake it up. So parts of my brain that I haven't used in 20 years are suddenly perking up. I'm not a manager anymore. I'm building. And um, but yeah, no, I mean the web is we all know what it is, kind of a toxic stew of bots. People are pretty cruel to each other and we've all retreated to group techs and weird slacks. And uh I'm gonna throw my hat back in the ring for a while until it feels really bad and then I'll stop. I love that. So all right, but I'm gonna let you go, but what's what's your current or next Claude Code project? One of the things that really resonated about your your times piece was this idea that I think you said I collect tales of software woe. Uh and it's the sort of thing that um I've heard from actually a couple of different AI-based software founders who are like, I what I want to do is sp is build tools that let people build the kind of tools that are too small and too pointless for anybody else to make. Uh so give give me a list of those things for you that you're working on. The your your software woe that you're trying fix yourself. I built a synth. It's on GitHub. It's called AnySynth, and it's a little digital audio workstation because I wanted to. Um it and it compiles to WebAssembly so that it actually kind of is running its own little C code in the in the browser. I built I'm working on a long-term project that I've neglected for a long time, extracting time-based data out of Wikipedia and aligning it with archive.org Wikipedia so that I can see big timelines of history with all the art objects and all the music that people made. That one's cool. That's gonna be called unscroll.com. You can it's there now, it's just broken. Um it's fun to work in public. Like I mean, uh you can just kind of I'm on a server just doing this and and like nobody cares. That's another difference with the old web. Like no one's ever gonna see anything until you literally scream it at them 7,000 times. Like everyone is tired. Yeah, the idea of somebody just like stumbling on your website i is such a completely impossible thing now. It's it's literally there's an enormous infrastructure to make sure it never ever happens, right? Like it's just never gonna happen. I I am very conscious of the fact that I am creating systems to feed LLMs at this point, right? Like my blog is now a tasty morsel. And that's what that's where the swarm came from. Yeah. Um, and so uh I have a um I helped a friend who wanted to convert a really ugly government database into something more tractable of higher education. It's got the worst name ever. It's called iPeds, IPEDS. And I gave that a nice interface and brought it into a proper database. Um I've got uh and so but you asked for next. I think next will be the timeline project, and then also I built a tool . There's one, I've registered a domain, which I haven't done in a while, but I'm taking piano lessons because, you know, midlife crisis. And I realized that a good name for a piano practice management app would be to-do list L-I-S-Z-T. Nice. So I got yeah, I know. But you know, my spouse just looks at me. She's just like, are we doing this again? Like we put the this it's been a long time. Are we really back here? We're so back, Paul. We're so so back. So so I don't know. I mean I mean part of me, um, especially if I didn't have to talk about it in public, it's just a honeymoon, right? Like it's everything I love about computers. I also gonna throw this at you because I think you'll you'll I'm curious what you think. This was the promise. This was Xerox Park. You're gonna like you're gonna be able to open up a little bo book and you'll be able to manipulate everything in the book and you'll talk to it and interact with it and it will do what you say and it will make you a system and you will get smarter and better. We've never been closer to that. And at the same time, I've never there's a profound cultural rejection of that moment for a lot of really good reasons, but it's also just this vast bummer because the thing that I just loved about the culture of technology, like nobody even wants to have that conversation because so much stuff around it is so toxic. I agree. And I think uh I think a lot about like how would we have felt if Microsoft had invented the internet and stood to be the only company profiting from it, uh, how the development of the internet would have been different. And the obvious answer is it would have been different and it would have been worse. And I and I think we are we are staring down the barrel of this is not uh this this is bringing us a lot of features that we have wanted for a very long time. I th I think you're right that like obviously the the chat is not the UI for everything, but there are things inside of these products that are what we have wanted computers to be for decades and will make everyone's computing lives easier. But it is it is the way that they were created, who stands to benefit the most, and the the cavalier way with which they all seem to be approaching what this stuff might mean just makes people feel icky. So we're we're and this is part of why I wanted to talk to you, right? Is it so hard for me to divorce this feeling of what I get when I'm sitting here building software, I don't know how to build, but I am building it right next to I hate everything about everyone who is gonna get rich and what this is doing in some data center in your I don't I don't know how to separate those two. No, and you and I get this really big cop out 'cause we're able to be like but I'm learning about it to share it for work. I get to share it with everybody and and I'm doing I'm doing my service while I play with shiny. That's what I tell myself. I'm gonna write a story at the end of this so, it's allowed. That's what I tell myself. We are enormous hypocrites, but I don't know how else to be right now if I'm going to really understand what's happening to the world. And like I actually kind of I don't really welcome people telling me I'm a horrible monster because I wrote about AI, but I do welcome people who want to resolve that like hypocrisy. I mean, I I think there is there is the element of like, boy, it would be nice to just step back from this. There's also an element like maybe we should just be advocating for more and more stricter regulation all the time, right? Like I don't know. The the the tricky thing too is like, but then you talk to climate scientists and they're like, boy, I was finally able to cut through that hideous data set. You know, and then you're just like, ah, yeah. This stuff this stuff matters and feels bad and I don't know which of those wins or if we can ever pull those two things apart from each other. But it's uh I guess what I would say, like you and I are a couple of nerds and we're we're culture nerds, but we're nerds and it'd be really good if people could come into this conversation from worlds that are pretty resistant and realize that we think there's real value here. Like I would love a couple poets to scream at me for a while or just like a few. I'd love to get like just I'd like this culture, this conversation needs to get broader because it will not go back in the box. And if the only thing you believe is put it back in the box, you're going to be really frustrated. So we should talk about that. But if it's gonna be out of the box, what the hell are we gonna do? Because it's also really cool. And so this is an ugly wrestling match. Yep. And it's yeah, and it it's but it is out of the box. I think that that is a thing you and I agree on. It is I mean, let me there is no going back from here. For better or for worse. There's no going back. I know we're closing this up, but I would leave everyone with the question, like, how would you put it back in the box when the most of the core technology is freely available and can run on your phone? And so like no servers need it. Like we could be, you could destroy OpenAI, Anthropic, and Deep Seek, but it would still be out there. So it will not go away any more than like BitTorrent can go away. Yeah. I would argue we solve a lot of things by getting to the it just runs on my phone end state as quick as humanly possible. Yeah. But that is for another podcast. Paul, thank you so much. It was great to have you. Let's let's do this again sometime. I will answer your emails in you know nine months or so. Alright we're gonna take a break. We'll be back . Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500, and that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash bu ild. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan and the ones you don't. For the time you forgot your charger at the gate. Passengers, we are now on our initial ascent. Or when you're bouncing between projects like a ping-pong b all. We build PCs with long-lasting battery life so you're not scrambling for an outlet. And built-in intelligence, so you can stay focused on whatever you're doing. Dell Technologies, built for you. Dell.com slash Dell PC s. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan and the ones you don't. For the time you forgot your charger at the gate, passengers, we are now on our initial ascent. Or when you're bouncing between projects like a ping pong ball. We build PCs with long-lasting battery life, so you're not scrambling for an outlet. And built-in intelligence so you can stay focused on whatever you're doing. Dell Technologies built for you. Dell.com slash Dell PC s. All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the verge cast hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge11. The email is vergcast at the verge.com. The Verge is Dom Preston is here to help me with today's question. Dom, hello. How are you doing? You're just on a run of like weird phones on the VergeCast. I love this. It is weird phone time of year, apparently. Uh there's been a bunch of them. It is, in fact. Um, we have we have a question that actually dovetails perfectly with something you and I have talked about pretty recently. So uh I'm just gonna play the question. Let's get into it. Hi. Um this is Chris in LA. I was listening to the Friday show after Mobile World Congress. And I hadn't heard of of most these phones because I live in America. Like I've never heard of Honor before. I think I'd heard of techno like that week for the first time. And now I'm out here wondering like, am I missing out on a better phone by living in the US. I don't even necessarily know if there are mainstream features in other countries that don't like exist in the US. Is there mainly more global competition like at the low end or like for foldables or for niche stu ff. But the top sellers around the world are generally similar to features on the top sellers in the US. Like my iPhone is great. Even if iMessage was brought to Android, I would still probably pick an iPhone, at least today. And I'm not a huge foldable person. So am I just missing out on gimmicks like 240 watt charging and 200x digital zoom? Or are there mainstream features that we're missing out on state side? I don't even know. Thin ks Okay. I I think this is the perfect framing for this question. Um because we we've talked about all the stuff that is available in other countries that's not available in the US, right? Like do, you want a phone that has features not available to you in the United States? Are there lots of those abroad? Of course yes. The answer is tons of yes. But I think the question is, like if you are a person in the United States in particular, are you missing something? Is there is there something important and valuable and meaningfully better in some way that you are missing out on by virtue of being in the United States? Um and I wanna I wanna sort of roll up to that question. But you've you've seen a lot of weird phones, you've seen a lot of these things with new features and brands that uh only exist in f it so in some cases, like only in China, and in some cases everywhere but the United States. What have you seen in this weird phone season that strikes you as sort of a particularly interesting new idea about smartphones? A lot of it's been in the concept stuff, right? The really interesting stuff is stuff that isn't even actually in products. We've got uh the caller mentioned techno who were at MWC and they had this module phone, but they had just a slightly different take on modular phones to what we'd seen before that felt very clever, but it's still not a real product. This is still just them saying we found a better way of imagining what a modular phone might be, but we still can't build it at any meaningful scale and and sell it, right? Um I think the stuff I've seen from certain from the last few weeks and in general, from the last six months, year or so, in in terms of the the non US phone market. The biggest things are actually in in a way boring, but it's big, boring practical things that are nice to have, like better cameras and bigger batteries. Is honestly where, a lot of it lies right now. Sure. What talk me through better cameras? Because when I think about some of the phones we see, there are a lot of bizarre cameras, right? Like you've covered ones where the camera comes with a whole professional camera rig or camera comes with you Is that the kind of stuff you're talking about or is there other camera work happening? There is definitely other camera work happening. So that stuff is fun. I really enjoy playing with these phones that are building on big gimmicky accessories that push the limits of what you can shoot with a phone and build more of that idea that what if the phone was kind of a camera body and you could slap more stuff on top and make it a semi professional shooting device. Um but that's not what most people want. The caller mentioned am I just missing out on gimmic Yeah, that kind of stuff is maybe gimmicky and you probably aren't gonna spend an extra few hundred bucks on this kind of add on telephoto lens that looks really kind of goofy when it's attached to your phone and you know, even if you buy it, you're not gonna use it every day. I think the bigger thing is particularly looking at the high and looking at the flagship space and looking at the ultra models. So you've got this funny thing in the US where there's only one real ultra phone and it's Samsung's phone. Um and they do an ultra every year and they kind of introduce this this banding, this like above a flagship price category. Um, in terms of bigger phones with better cameras, better zoom, things like that. The funny thing now is that when you look at the rest of the market, Samsung's ultras don't feel very ultra. Samsung's ultras feel like everyone else's regular flagships. And you've get got then this space where you've got Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, Ona, Huawei, who are throwing out what they're calling ultra phones, which are a step more expensive than Samsung's generally. Um they're in the kind of some of them are starting around the same place as as Samsung's Ultra, but some of them are pushing two thousand dollars for kind of, you know, as you upstorage and get add-ons and special things like that. But really they're just going all in on cameras. And Samsung hasn't really touched his cameras in a meaningful way, uh even in the Ultra. The Ultra this time got some like slight aperture tweaks, but it's fundamentally the same system. Um we're seeing really big main camera sensors. Um sometimes in megapixel count, um two hundred megapixels becoming very standard in these phones. But radius more about actual sensor size. Uh one inch type sensors are very common or sensors getting close to that size. There is no one in the US selling a phone with an image sensor that big. And these basically are just meaning you're getting one of the side effects of the bigger sensor is a lot more depth to images. You get this real camera feel where that kind of portrait mode thing of trying to get blowy backgrounds that has to be done digitally and and you know various algorithms make that happening just kind of happens naturally. It's a funny thing that that leap even I remember this moment in like low-end digital cameras when we went from the like one over two point eight, the sort of standard digital camera CMOS sensor to the one inch sensor, is like the the leap in it feeling like a camera, like you said, is so enormous that there's all kinds of new stuff that becomes available just in that one physical sensor size leap. And like I don't pretend to be a camera expert, but I have been trained over the years that the single best way to make a camera bigger is to make the sensor bigger. Like forget everything else. Make the sensor bigger and you make the camera bigger. And a one-inch sensor is actually, at least in my experience, a real sort of inflection point in the kinds of photos you can take. So that that's a really interesting kind of big deal. And and so what we're seeing now is I think you're right that that's a big inflection point. And part of the reason it feels that way is that the manufacturers have all said, cool, this is as big as we need to go. And I don't think Samsung and Sony are really making larger image sensors image sensors than that yet for phones. And the manufacturers I don't think are pushing them to because everyone's like, this is great. Our main camera sensors are big enough. These are wonderful. Now the race is can we make the ultra wide sensor bigger as well? Can we make the telephoto sensors bigger as well? You know, how many of these big sensors can we fit on a phone? No one's putting in more than one one inch type sensor yet. I was gonna say three one inch sensors is like there's literally only so much physical room. Someone's gonna try it. They're working on it. You know, they are pushing the limits to what they can do with it. I mean, so we saw this, you know, with stuff like I haven't actually tried this phone, but uh Huawei had a phone uh last year called the the Pure Pure 80 Ultra. Um And the fun thing that that did was it wanted to have two telephotos. But to save space on having two telephotos, it just has moving lenses that share one sensor. So it has two different telephoto lenses that move in and out from above the one larger sensor, which allows them to fit in a bigger telephoto sensor than they could have if they were just doing two different telephotos genuinely. This is kind of the same reason Xiaomi took to this continuous zoom for it's uh Xiaomi 17 Ultra where it's kind of getting the same thing of having two telephotors that's just one lens with real zoom. But again part of the point of that is instead of fitting in two telephoto sensors, we just have to do one. That means we can get a better one. And it's teeing them up to keep making them bigger and better down the line as they go. And this is really the race we're seeing right now. And I think telephotos in particular, I read a piece for our newsletter, The Step Back, about this just before MWC, so maybe a month or so ago, about how the telephoto camera really outside of the US just feels like the place where everything is happening on smartphones. And just go back to this, you know, the the the question we had was asking if they were just missing out on gimmicky two hundred times zoom. I said the answer is no. Like we we are still seeing people pushing things like like nothing the other week announced 140 time Zoom for its 4A Pro. And I tried it at the launch event, it was terrible. It's blurry. It's there's AI filling the gaps. It doesn't look good. You're not getting anything usable out of that. But what matters here is that three to five times range, maybe up to ten times, suddenly you're getting really, really, really good photos. And you're getting photos that are as good as, maybe better than a lot of the main cameras you're gonna get in in a US flagship. So when I'm reviewing one of these ultra phones, when I'm reviewing a Xiaomi Ultra or Vivo Ultra, I honestly spend most of my time shooting on the telephoto because I find it's a more natural distance to shoot product shots, which I do for work, food shots, which I do when I'm out about, taking photos of friends, that kind of portrait distance. Um, anything like that, it creates a much more natural feel. Whereas I'm sure everyone's had that feeling of trying to take a photo of like something close up to them and you feel like, wow, my just the main camera is so zoomed out actually. They're always kind of quite wide angled these days. And they see kind of moving the camera really in and it distorts things a little and make the angles start to look weird. So the telephotos are getting this effect where actually you're getting incredi ble quality shots with natural bokeh and depth that do amazingly well in low light. You know, you're not getting a low light drop-off from these telephoto cameras anymore. They are as good as the main cameras if you want to go shoot complicated nighttime scenes, things like that. So you're really getting this feeling more and more of a complete camera system in these ultra-level flagships where you can go between the main and the telephoto and feel there's just no quality drop-off whatsoever in almost any lighting, video or stills. And in some cases, I think vivo and oppo, the two brands pushing this side, they're trying to do that for the ultra-wide as well, and trying to really make it feel like you can go between any of these three lenses and they're just gonna do they're going to feel like the main camera in an iPhone, basic ally. Yeah. That is a very compelling argument. I thought like I I look at some of these things, you know, the the huge batteries, and um you you've been playing with the new Oppo phone with the creaseless foldable. All that stuff strikes me as a good ideas, but sort of B obviously coming, right? Like the minute Samsung can do this, it will. And it might it might be a generation behind some of these Chinese companies in particular, just because of the way the m manufacturing world works. And and that's all fine and good. But like I think if you're a US customer, you don't need to feel deep loathing jealousy for a creaseless Oppo phone. Like, I think it's fine. You you will get that when it is time. A it is just true that the camera is the most important thing on your phone right now. And the idea of it being not just slightly better because of AI processing, but like meaningfully physically better is I think a huge deal. And it makes me wonder, this is obviously a giant question we don't really have time to get into today, but uh why do you think that stuff hasn't come to the US? Uh i it's not like it's a less competitive camera landscape in the US. Like why why is this not totally standard on every phone everywhere now? Every company, Apple on down, seems like it has every incentive to put the best camera it possibly can into its phone as fast as possible. I think there's a a couple of reasons. I me an one is the US brands prioritize the US market above every other market. They are playing in other markets. Samsung and Google, uh particularly Samsung and Apple are obviously big players globally. Um but they still see the US as probably the biggest, most important market. And because the US market is small, they can get away with pushing the boat out a bit less because they know they don't have this competition. They're not up against ultra flam, ultra kind of cameras in in the US market. They don't exist there. So Apple just has to look and be like, well we've do we have a better cam camera or on a par with what Google and Samsung are doing? And that's what they're all looking at in terms of the US market. Obviously they're thinking about other markets and where they can get away with. Part of the benefit these guys have is they all have brand power, especially Apple, have this added cachet of just the brand. People are going to buy, a lot of people are going to buy the new iPhone Pro, regardless of whether it's the best camera on the market, because it's the best iPhone on the market. And that will be a big thing. Samsung and Google have that cachet less internationally, but still to some extent, obviously in Korea, Samsung does. Then the second part of it, I think, for me is, and this is especially an Apple thing. I wonder how much of it from them is an aesthetic thing. Because you know, you look at these big ultra flagships, and the one thing that unifies them is a design language, which is they all have a big round black circle packed with lenses, which takes up about a third of the back of the phone and just half an inch out of it. And they're just big monster giants. These are already like six point nine inch display phones. They're quite thick. They're bulky devices. You know, they're not like comically enormous. These aren't like those energizer phones with with crazy batteries in or anything, but they're they're you know they, are bulkier than a Samsung Ultra. They're generally around the same size as an iPhone Pro Max. That's what you're kind of getting. Um and these brands are not generally trying to fit these kind of cameras into smaller phones. We're beginning to see that a little bit, but still very tentatively and, there are compromises to the cameras as they do that. We're kind of not getting that true true ultra camera in the smaller sizes. Um and yeah, they just look kind of ugly. Like I I say this is someone who loves these ultra phones who if I just had to go right now and buy a phone for me that was my phone every single day and I didn't switch review devices all the time, I would probably think, Yeah, all right, God, if it's the one I've got to use every single day for the next you know five years, I'm buying one of these ultras because I've missed I love the cameras too much. I I'd struggle to give it up now. But I do it being like, I hate how ugly this thing is. And c can you imagine Apple putting out an iPhone that just has this enormous camera sticking out of the back? I think already they get so much stick for how big the cameras on on the iPhone Pros are, and they're tiny compared to what we're seeing from these Chinese ultraphones. They're not on the same leak. So I think Apple in particular is just not going to do it until they can find some way to do it without completely compromising the aesthetics of the phone. Makes sense. This also seems to me that if Google had any guts at all and was at all actually interested in winning at hardware, this is this is what they would do. Like Google should just come out and just absolutely boat race everybody else's camera. Exactly. Yeah. And be like, look, our phone's enormous. It has the best camera you can bu y, let's fight. Like that's that's what Google should be doing. What does it have to lose? Like I get why Apple wouldn't do this, right? If you're Apple, you have 20 years of this that you don't really want to undo by making a giant ugly phone. What does Google have to lose? Go make giant ugly phones, Google. People want good cameras. They already went and did the big camera ball first, which kind of feels like it's maybe making the space to do this. And I have seen someone make the point that is Apple's move to the camera plateau, you know, is it' kinds of about making the space in inside that future generations they can start to do bigger cameras and stretch that out because now they've kind of set a new design language that that does make more space for a bigger camera if they want to use it like that. Um the the And is not using its own best image sensor output. The phone building bit of Samsung is looking at the image sensor bit of Samsung and saying, We don't really want your best products. Like we're not interested in that. Right. But you can always find a company in China that someone else does something with you. Absolutely. Yeah. Hundred percent. Yeah, that that that Samsung piece of it feels like a a perfect explanation of of the whole thing that's going on here. And I hope more people make more weird phones. I think like to to the caller's question, right, this feels like a good way of looking at the whole story because on on the one hand, I think there is a case to be made that the most sort of sensibly thought out, correctly put together mainstream devices either originate in the US or sort of are made for the US market. Like that is it is the most mainstream of mainstream phones. So the question of like am I missing something mainstream is it probably not, because the US is as main is the mainstream market in so many ways. But if you want to see what's next, and I think more importantly, if you just want to have more options, like options are exactly and if you if you want a giant ass phone with a giant ass camera, you should be able to have that. And that's the thing that I think sucks about the US market is they're literally it is not available to you. Right? Like if you want to buy a weird phone, I believe it is your right as a human to buy a weird phone. And and it's just a shame that that's not available to everybody. Um last thing before I let you go here. Out of all these weird phones you've seen, is there anything that just grabs you personally, emotionally? You're like, this is a dumb feature. No phone needs it, but I love it with my whole heart and I want it really bad. What what has captured your heart in the last few weeks and. Okay Okay, this. This is uh something we're seeing a few of the the Chinese OEMs work on at the moment. I think particularly Oppo and Ono are the two brands really pushing this. And they are taking picking up where Google kind of like has done it's like, oh, we can figure out like a kind of awkward back end way to make Airdrop work. And they're like, all right, hold my beer. Because like the Honor Magic V6 has come out and been like, okay, it supports all the features of AirPods. So you'll get that like quick pairing. You can see the AirPods in the US, all of this stuff. It supports FindMy for AirPods. Not any other findMy, but it will support just the findMai for your AirPods, nothing else. Uh you can do notification syncing with Apple devices. You can do file sharing with Apple devices. So they've got all this access behind Apple's Walled Garden somehow through just kind of uh accessing the back end stuff that Apple like has not quite been able to lock down in in in the way that we all thought it was and they've all figured out and every announcement there's some new bit that they've chipped away and they're like, oh now we've added this and now you can do this.