Siracusa Says

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.

If you want to save some money, you don’t need 11 nines of data durability for your things, I’m assuming you don’t. You’d take 7 nines probably! It’s plenty of nines for you. Some people don’t need any nines!

Well who else uses this, and who else develops software for it, and so there is a network effect on platforms as well. And you mentioned like moving to another country, it’s like, well, if I don’t want to use Apple platforms and I don’t want to use Windows or Android, I’m going to use Linux on the desktop, but that’s like moving to Antarctica. I mean, it exists, and it’s a land mass, and you can go there and stand on it, but ewwww.

One of the accidental booby-trap, bear trap, accidental pitfalls that lies lurking in the Perl programming language - yeah, I know everyone is saying “yeah, among the many” - if you’re writing like a little test thing where you’re like “I just want to try something out” and you just make up class names or whatever. If you call your classes foo and bar you’re fine, but if you have the misfortune to decide “I’m going to name a class A, B, C, and D”, you know what I mean? Uh, there already is a B class and it’s kind of important to the way Perl works.

“Why isn’t this working right, what is it doing?”, because of course Perl will let you do whatever you want to the B namespace but guess what, the B namespace is occupied and it’s occupied by bears. B does not stand for bear.

I don’t even know enough about how Swift namespacing works to know how they get away with it, I’m assuming like all the names are scoped to the module or something like that, but I just go with the Swift convention. If they’re going to call their things in SwiftUI “view” and stuff like that, well I’m calling my thing “app”. Deal with it.