Siracusa Says

Casey: Oh, the struggle! The struggle with your mere 5Ks, but now you’re back with all six of them.

John: But still not tiny enough. I know they did an update to Audio Hijack, probably partially in response to me complaining that you couldn’t make the window small enough, and so they made it so you can make the window smaller. And I can make it narrow enough now, but I can’t make it short enough. I gotta fit it into the little corner of my screen where it goes.

Casey: So, you know, I was gonna unload on YouTube about how ridiculous you are that you two, with your 6K monitors are somehow pressed for real estate, apparently?

John: I have a few windows open, I’m not sure if you heard.

JOHN: So if these car makers kick software platforms out of the car, which is what they’re doing if they don’t allow CarPlay, you don’t android those are ways for those existing software platforms to allow applications developed for those platforms to get into the car.

If car makers kick them out, if they think hey, we’ll just write all the applications ourselves, no, you won’t you suck at this and even if you didn’t nobody can write all their own applications. Even Nintendo can’t get by only with first-party games and Nintendo is Nintendo. You are not Nintendo, right?

If you have none of those applications, you will just have a lesser platform. You say, okay, well, everybody does that, then just everyone will have crap applications. Ah, but if everyone has crap applications, someone, the Cingular of the car company, Cingular with a c, the Cingular of the car world will say, you know what, everybody else kicked all the other software platforms out, but you know what, Apple, Android, we’re gonna invite you back in.

And suddenly, it’s their unique selling proposition for whatever brand of car this is that decides to do this, like the last place competitor, Cingular, right? Says, iPhone, you can come on our platform and suddenly people are looking at Cingular again. No one was looking at Cingular before, but hey, you know what, if you want the iPhone, the literal only place to get it is on Cingular, which will eventually be called AT&T, and i was never a fan of Cingular/at&t before, but they have the iPhone, so I’m going over there.

That’s what’ll happen, and it’ll just reverse and ripple back through, because there is absolutely no way that any of these car makers are going to make a successful software platform, and they’re delusional If they think that you can either make one of their own, which will never, never, never work, or we don’t need a software platform, we’ll just write all the applications in-house.

Go ahead, do that, you’ll get Cingular. That’s what’ll happen. And it may take two decades of pain and suffering, to Marco’s point, it’ll suck for us the whole time if this reverses and goes through the whole industry and we gotta wait for a whole other decade long cycle for these idiots to get their heads out of their butts.

But inevitably it will happen because there is no fighting against software platforms. That’s where the innovation happens. Wherever the platforms are popular, where developers are making software, that’s where it happens.

And look at Waze, it’s like, well, that’s software innovation for like cell phones. We want software innovation for cars. That also happened on the phone. Phones aren’t cars, but that’s where all the good applications for cars came from. On the, because people can bring their phones into their cars.

So there’s just, there’s literally, it’s like the worst decision ever to decide, I don’t want any of the world’s most popular software application platforms to be able to use their software integrated into my car.

JOHN: I locked myself out of a locked note. You know, the Apple Notes back before you could use your Apple ID to lock a note, you could put individual passwords on notes. And I had a note that I had put an individual password on that I had forgotten and hadn’t put it in keychain or anything like that.

JOHN: And so I used my dual GPUs to crack it, like brute force. To brute force crack my own password. And guess what? The fans really spun up on my Mac Pro. But I did crack it because it was a short throwaway password or whatever.

MARCO: How long did it take?

JOHN: I don’t know, like five minutes. I did not use a 15 character password. This is an argument for you to do the thing where, I don’t remember when they did that, it was ages ago, where they let you do the thing like, “Do you want to update your thing so your Apple ID and your face can unlock all your notes?” I eventually did that.

JOHN: And that’s just a silly example, but I could have also cracked it on an iPhone. I’m not pretending that I need a big GPU to do this but the same reason people don’t need a sports car because they’re not race car drivers they just like to have one even though you you know you can’t really use it without breaking the law.

JOHN: At least I’m not you know breaking the law with my Mac Pro here or whatever remember those ads when you could couldn’t you couldn’t export the g4 to to communist countries because it was like a restricted export

MARCO: Yeah

JOHN: I think Apple had an ad campaign about that

MARCO: Classified as a munition because it’s too good of a computer

Anytime there’s any kind of technology that previously does something that could only be done by humans there is this battle saying that the new way to do it is soulless and bad and evil and is going to corrupt the youth and so on and so forth and then the other people who are excited about the tech and just want it to go forward.

And many times throughout history there has been a technology that has caused entire professions and entire industries to basically disappear or shrink to the point or transform in a way that’s you know, not even recognizable.

Witness the entire industry surrounding having horses pull things with people in them and the advent of the automobile. It’s not like we don’t have horses. Not like people don’t have jobs making saddles for horses and shoeing horses and taking care of horses all those jobs still exist. But boy, that industry looks a lot different than it did before the advent of the automobile. A lot different.

JOHN: There are some lessons to be learned from what Apple does that maybe that will help you succeed in your business. But the things that help you more are the intangibles. You can’t copy those.

“Oh, I’ll just do what Apple does. Make really good products. Make the right decisions about what features to include and what features not to include. And figure out what people want before they even know that they’re going to want it themselves.”

That stuff, you can say it, but you can’t copy it. It’s in the same way that you can say, “Write your own infrastructure software just like Google does and make it awesome.”

“Yeah, how do I do that again?”

It’s tough to copy greatness. So whenever I see these things of like, “Do what Apple does and you will succeed,” half of that is true and then half of it is like the great instruction on how to avoid sexual harassment in the workplace.

Step one, be handsome.

Succeed like Apple.

John: Before he goes, I’ve got the number of files. Without cheating, you want to do Price is Right rules. What are your two guesses?

Marco: I’ll say a million.

Casey: Oh, come on now. $1.00. $1.00. $1.00.

John: You’re gonna go one, you’re gonna go one.

Casey: All kidding aside, if I were to, I know to do Price is Right rules, I would guess one file, but I think it’s something to the order of 5,000 to 7,000 files, so we’re in that neck of the woods.

John: So your guess is 5 to 7,000, Marco’s is one million. Do you wanna converse with each other to figure out why you’re this far apart and maybe think about which one of you is closer to right?

Marco: Whenever I see a dialogue that says like, maybe later, when I just wanna say, no, I never wanna do this.

John: They changed it, they changed the button in an Xcode update to say like, yes, and like, I don’t know if it says yes, but whatever it says, it’s like the positive one, then the other one says dismiss, which at least is better than later, because later is a lie.

Later is like, but here’s the thing, you hit dismiss, right? You’re not saying later, you hit dismiss, but you’ll be seeing that dialogue again.

John: I’m just so angry that I can’t scribble. I’m unreasonably angry.

Casey: I can tell.

John: Like I don’t understand it. Who doesn’t want to scribble on the shared placemat, right? That’s the whole fun of it. And you guys are all having fun and doing your little messages with your handwriting, with your fingers or your Apple Pencil. And here I am, I can draw like, look, it’s a box, it’s a square. It’s just so terrible. It’s just, I don’t understand. I don’t understand why I’m being left out of the scribble party.

Casey: Because you insist on using a Mac and putting your iPad up near your bed.

It would be kind of cool if Apple eventually figured out where what the homepods are gonna be when it grows up. Right now what it is is the second generation of the exact product that they made before, it’s just they took a long vacation in between to like, I don’t know, think about stuff for a while.

Because if this had come out like a year after the home pod we’d be like, oh the next homepod is out and it’s better than the first one. And Marco probably wouldn’t even had time to have all of his fail but he just would have replaced them with the new one anyway.

But there was this weird time in the wilderness where they didn’t know what they were gonna do, and they came out of the wilderness and they said, “Let’s just do what we did before.”

I think it is a well executed version of what it is, but it is a nostalgia trip for people of a certain age. It is nostalgic for a time that is before my time, but it is my parents’ time. So I can relate to it in kind of the same way I can relate to Good Fellas. I wasn’t a mobster in the 70’s but some of my relatives probably were.