We reflect on the rise of DevOps and the frustrating dynamics that led to it. Plus, tech's latest bright idea: Roombas with attitude.
This is Coder Radio, recorded on August 19th, 2024. Hey friend, welcome in to Jupyter Broadcasting's weekly talk show, taking a pragmatic look at the art and the business of software development and the world of technology. My name is Chris, and recovering from his visit with President Roswell, it's our host, Mr. Dominic. Hello, Mike.
Got tossed right out the airlock.
You know, you kind of came in hot. I saw the video. It was all over Twitter. Oh, you know. Speaking of coming in hot, you know, everybody has been jumping in on the AI hype. But I think maybe we're starting to see the beginning of the trend reversal. I don't know if the name James Kuda rings a bell. He's not the inventor of Kuda, as far as I know. But he is the CEO of Procreate.
which is a very popular design app on the iPad. And he posted a video about how Procreate is not implementing AI features. And everybody's been asking, when AI features? When AI features? It's pretty spicy, so I wanted to play a moment of it for you. Are we rolling?
You've been asking us about AI. You know, I usually don't like getting in front of the camera. I prefer that our products speak for themselves. I really f***ing hate generative AI. I don't like what's happening in the industry and I don't like what it's doing to artists. We're not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products.
Our products are always designed and developed with the idea that a human will be creating something. You know, we don't exactly know where this story is going to go or how it ends, but we believe that we're on the right path supporting human creativity.
Oh, how about that? Is that spicy or what? Yeah, that's my, my, my. I don't get the hostility quite because you can have both, right? Like you can have something that would – it would be great to have something that is an advanced tool that generates pictures to my specifications. And then if I as a human want to use it, that seems fine. But as a human, I don't have to use it either.
But there's definitely some hostility in there including F-bombs about it.
I don't know how I feel about that.
When I zoom out, I think the fact that a company can say that and they're getting notoriety for saying that is an indication that there has been a sentiment shift.
Yeah. I mean I think the hot air got a little too hot too fast. But, you know, so honestly, when you played that clip, the first thing that popped into my mind was Master Yoda. Fear leads to anger. So with that said, Procreate competes with Adobe, who are just the worst. I'm sorry, but you guys are like dicks of the first order.
Oh, that's good context. With this framing, it's like they're taking the anti-Adobe position, because Adobe's all in.
I don't know when Adobe became super evil, but... I think Flash. Flash. Yeah, I guess so. Really, the Creative Cloud stuff really just chapped my ass a little too much. I can't... I don't know. I reflexively support any competitor of theirs. Yeah. I don't do a ton of design stuff. I contract most of that out now.
So, I mean, but we still, TMB still has a Creative Cloud license because you have to, right? Someone's going to send you a Photoshop or an Illustrator file. And that's just the way, like, it doesn't feel like a product choice. It feels like a tax almost.
Now you're spitting some wisdom here when you're saying that fear leads to anger. That's got to be what it is. But still, it's an interesting shift in the tone. I don't know. You know, I just look back and I think, what a wild year and a half it was around AI. And when it first kicked off, you could say no wrong. And we're still kind of in that era.
I think another sign of when things will really have turned is when... Everyone finally starts talking about how horribly creepy WorldCoin is and the fact that Sam Altman is tied to this horrible, creepy cryptocurrency that wants to track your eyeball scan on a blockchain. and it'll give you $25 of their fake world coin to do it or whatever.
It's the creepiest thing, and it's the quintessential definition of tech bro thinks he's invented something to solve problems for a country he's hardly ever been to and is also creating the very problem that creates the need. And that's not getting talked about. Like, so we're clearly not fully in the we can talk about everything phase yet. But Mr. Kuda coming out here feels like a sea shift.
And then you combine that with the activity that's happening on Wall Street. I don't know if anybody cares, but you're seeing the rotation from the Magnificent Seven that we witnessed for the last year or so. You're seeing them rotate into what's called smaller caps, which means smaller market cap companies.
And there's smaller tech companies that have much, much, much more regular everyday missions and valuations and not these crazy long shot AI NVIDIA plays. So the stock market is moving where it's putting its money to. And it's AI still getting money, of course. But it's not the only thing getting money now. And then you see CUDA coming out here saying, you know, F off AI.
There's a... I think the bubble is... Perhaps we're finally getting to that phase where we're going to slowly settle down on the actual things that are left and practical that get implemented and put into production. You know, I go back to just as an example. A few years ago, the edge and IOT was all the talk. It's just a few years ago. I was down at Dell during the peak of this.
And most of what Dell showed me wasn't their Linux systems. It was all of their IoT stuff and this new edge management platform that they were going to work with the Linux Foundation to open source because IoT and the edge are the next frontier of technology. And it was all they all the tech industry talked about for years. Well, like three years until it just became normal.
And standardized and internalized and the hype faded and we sort of settled on a practical implementation of these things and a practical use case where we put things on the edge versus centralized. But that was a huge conversation for a while, and now we don't talk about edge devices and IoT at all.
Yeah. I mean, we've been talking about this for years now, right, that ever since the mobile app boom, I feel like the industry has been looking for the next big hotness that would generate outsized returns. You know what I've realized, Mike?
It's because… The tech industry has sort of been what's holding up the S&P 500 and everybody's 401ks and everybody's investment in the stock market has really been – I mean there's other companies like Defense and there's been healthcare. But when you zoom out since the dot-com boom, tech has been an exponential performer. Today, as we record, Google IPO'd 20 years ago.
7,200%.
Tech has been a significant market grower, one of the few sources of growth in the United States for the last 20 years. And so I think the reason why they've got addicted to chasing bubble after bubble is because the entire financial system in the country is hooked on tech. And they refer to tech as a risk on kind of investment. So they consider tech stocks to be volatile and somewhat risky.
But that's the kind of stuff that the market likes to play to get returns is the volatile stuff. And so they look at tech as this volatile play to get good big gains and their big bets on Wall Street. And they got hooked on it. And so now tech is expected to continually deliver on that. So they're jumping faster and harder into every next thing that comes along because everything's riding on it.
Yeah, no, I absolutely believe that. I mean, I don't know what to say. It seems pretty obvious to me. I mean, have you been grocery shopping recently? Oh, my gosh, yeah. Like, I wish I owned a chicken coop, honestly.
If I could just for a moment mention inflation is still up. It is going up at a slower pace right now.
But it's up on the basics. It's stuff you really – you're a forced buyer in a lot of ways.
So right now we're kind of – everybody is celebrating because like I think the CPI went to 3 or 2.9. It's in that range. It's a matter of kind of probably margin of error now. But that means it's still gaining. So think of it like this. Three years ago, you put on 36 pounds in one year. That was really bad. And then the next year, you put on 12 pounds. And now this year, you've put on six pounds.
You're still way overweight. You're just putting on weight slower. That's what we're celebrating right now. Inflation is still above the Fed's 2% target by about a full percent. And I would argue 2% inflation is still ridiculous theft. So it's not solved.
It's still extremely expensive to operate a family or a business unless you're in our audience's demographic for a lot of them who are in very well-to-do tech jobs. That's the class that has been impacted, I think, the least by all of this in the last couple of years. Ironically, most of them are in our listener base, I would bet, is people that have good-paying tech jobs that have –
Frankly, probably overpaid relative to other industries for a long time. And so they've been ahead for a while. They've been making enough that they have buffer here that if eggs go from three dollars to eight dollars, they can still buy those eggs.
Maybe. I mean, I just I would push back a little bit because we've also heard tons of people. Even in our small jobs chat room, which I would encourage people to use because it doesn't cost you anything, right? Whether you're the employer or the prospective employee. And we don't get anything. Do we, Chris? I don't think we get a damn thing from that. No, it's just a matrix chat.
It's a community thing, yeah. So a lot of people have gotten laid off, right? There's been... I mean, I would say yes, if you if you were making, you know, $80,000 a year or something, it's a lot easier to take the hit than than somebody, you know, like, let's say a bartender or, you know, waitress during COVID. But it's it's still like pain is all relative and it still hurts.
So I agree with you. There's also, we've talked about this before, like classes of tech people. Like, yeah, fancy pants guy who went to MIT and then got a job at Google and is really upset because now he has to show up at the office and he can't get his massage every day. Well, I agree. I do believe work from home is actually a good idea for a lot of stuff.
It's hard for me to sympathize with someone who started off making that much money with that kind of perks. Yeah, I don't know. Drunk money is bad. I don't even know what to say. The zero interest rate drunk money was really, really bad. It created this whole situation. And it's coming back, baby.
Just give it another month. It's coming back. That's what I feel. I feel like we're... We're just about on the other side of this. You and I... We've been talking about this for a while because you and I started giving people a heads up it was coming six months or so before it started happening. And told we were nuts. Right.
And now here we are on the other end of it and we're telling you it's about to ease up. But it got rough. It got really rough. Like bad. Well, OK.
It's about to ease up. And that won't fix it. That won't fix it right away. That's exactly where I'm going with this. I'm just going to use my drunk money analogy again. It's going to ease up. So are we going – are we – and I don't mean we. I mean let's be honest, the fancy VCs. Are we going to learn to moderate our trendy chase the new hotness habit?
No.
Or are we going to go back on another bender? No.
Of course. You know what, Mike? They have no other route because this has been happening since 2008. So you have people now.
I'd argue this has been happening since 1990.
Yeah. I mean, it's been happening for a long time. Actually, if you look at if you look at Federal Reserve policy, they got really accommodative of Wall Street in the mid 80s. They really took on this third mandate, which is – so first mandate is maintain inflation. Second mandate is maintain employment. And then they really – they have this third mandate that they don't admit to.
But it is keep the stock market afloat because everybody's retirement is tied up in it.
Well, they have – right. Exactly. You got it exactly right because we went from pensions to 401ks and Roth and regular IRAs. And this is – Mike and Chris teach why you really wanted a guaranteed benefit pension and not a 401k. But hey – Unless you own the company, then you definitely want the 401k or the Roth IRA.
I don't remember which one is the most tax-advantaged one because you can defer your income tax and not pay high – especially if Democrats win – That's an opportune time to tax-free invest in your retirement, which lowers your taxable income that year, and you can stay below that ever-critical $105,000 mark. I don't know what it is.
I know Trump changed the brackets, but there used to be a mark where $1 over your bracket changes, and you're in a lot of trouble.
So you're going to have them start to get accommodative because of this very situation. Yeah. They really cannot push it any further. Inflation has not been fully solved.
The problem is you can't go below zero, right? That was the wall. That was the corner they put themselves in. They went to zero. Zero is zero. Yeah.
And the issue is beyond the fact that you have just absolute shenanigans like people spending $200,000 on monkey JPEGs when you have 0% interest rates. But that gives the Fed no tools to adjust if the market has an emergency. So if the Fed lowers interest rates a few basis points, the market's going to respond positively. But they still have room to lower.
So that way, if the economic conditions are not improving, they can lower more. But once you're at zero, you cannot lower anymore. So there's no way for them to juice the market and improve things. So what they've done is they've bought themselves over the last couple of years
A teensy teensy tiny bit of breathing room where they can manipulate the rate a little bit and juice the market and pump things when they start to suffer like it's happening right now. And so they're probably never going to. Well, never. They're probably not going to go right to zero.
They're probably if they go down, they're going to go down kind of slowly and they'll probably hover a little bit above where they were at in the past. And I would think that over time will start to improve things because money gets cheaper for corporations because when the interest rate goes down, their loans are cheaper.
And so they can take out loans often where the rates are actually lower than the rate of true inflation. So for a business, that's a great deal. So they'll take the rates. When they get down, they'll take the loans. They'll start hiring. They'll start investing. They'll start building again. that trickles out into the rest of the economy. But you can imagine that takes a long time.
When the rates get tight, they can react very quickly by laying off, by suspending projects, by canceling sponsorships and advertising, pulling back on marketing, pulling back on trips, pulling back on software deals. R&D. R&D is the first to go.
Right.
And they can do that almost immediately, right? But the spin back up To start investing again in R&D or to start investing again in sales and marketing, to start investing again in hiring, you do that at a much more slower, much more cautious pace. So even though the rate will come down, it's going to come down slowly. It's not going to go right to zero. It's going to come down slowly.
So the impact will be slow and businesses will naturally be slow and hesitant to begin investing in those areas again. So that will be slow.
Which, honestly, is not crazy for us, for small businesses. That's a reasonable thing to do. I mean, I wouldn't go balls out. So, can I fry some alligator bacon? Please do.
In my local paper here, there was an article, a study, based on a study from a local university about, unfortunately, when we had Hurricane Betty, a lot of the sewers flooded up in Sarasota and other places, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Now, as part of the cleanup effort, the state of Florida and the counties, whatever agencies are in charge of this, they test the content of the sewer water for various diseases. Oh, God. Oh, we're proud to have our brand new variant of new dominant COVID that is spreading like wildfire here.
Yeah, yeah, I've been hearing about that.
And a lot of people are infected and don't know.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And they test the sewage, and it turns out there's a lot in there.
Well, you and I have been predicting that that COVID thing wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Yeah. So I'm getting very... Now, Florida, just fun fact about living in a very hot place, our seasons are... people go outside in the winter and stay inside in the summer.
That's hilarious.
Right. So like COVID transmission is worse in the summer. So the hope, and this is like the positive spin the paper put on it is that, well, we're coming to the cooler season and that's great because you know, when the North gets it and everybody else gets it, it'll, we'll be good. We already went through it. You probably had COVID and sure enough, they've been testing people.
A lot of people had COVID and didn't know, right. This new version. We have no fat in the economic buffer here to take another hit like that, even if it's not two years, even if it's three months, six months. I mean, I can only speak for myself on this, but... All those COVID business reliefs were so crooked. The companies got a lot.
A lot of little guys, myself included, are being forced to pay back money they would not have taken had they not been solicited to take it. I would have simply laid people off. And I'm being compelled to pay it back with interest, which is bullshit because the people I kept employed all got very good jobs anyway. Right.
They left naturally when the when the you know, whatever, because they were young and they got better jobs. And I'm left. Basically, I kept them on and now I'm left paying for them again. So this is where the limits of government intervention are minimal, let's say, right? And try negotiating with the IRS. It's fun.
What do you say we go back in time and tell the people the good story of how we recall the growth and history of DevOps? This was suggested by Editor Drew, and I love the idea because You know, part of this journey was captured, I think, on our show. Oh, yeah. When we were doing the pod, or in the early days, we were watching this go down.
So, I don't know, do you have any particular spot you want to start with this?
Yeah, I mean, let's start, I think really this came about with the rise of GitHub in a lot of ways. And Git, right? It doesn't have to be GitHub, but I think GitHub is probably the most known and primary platform. You know, as development teams started using more decentralized source control, right, instead of, does anybody remember Bazaar? Huh?
Oh, yeah.
No? SVN?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Okay, cool. And GitHub started building more tools in. At the same time, we had the rise of Rails, which I think... I know I'm going to get some crap. Some people are going to yell at me for this. I actually think the Rails evangelism for things like TTD and deployments with automated tests running is a really big part of it. I mean, Rails really...
We could do a whole show, a very controversial show, on how I truly believe that Rails actually influenced a lot of what we would consider modern web development, particularly during the period of the rise of DevOps in the aughts. I mean, MVC, right? You only have ASP MVC because Rails exists. Then Spring Boot. Suspiciously, Rails is similar. Sorry, Java guys, but that's where we are.
Django, right? Do I have to keep going? It felt like there was a sea change where the role of, let's say, senior developer and IT admin were starting to overlap quite a lot, right? Yeah. So what was happening is... Now, I think you'll have a different perspective, Chris.
But I feel like a lot of companies were trying to trim kind of more experienced IT admins and make their admin department more like the help desk people. So they would pretty heartily embrace this idea that the developers themselves would deploy the applications. And that coupled with the Rails-inspired love of... Remember, it's a big deal, right?
One of the tenets of this kind of deployment philosophy is you're deploying all the time, where before this, the standard was, oh, man, we're going to be deploying this week. All right, everybody, nobody can take vacation, right? It was really all hands on deck. Yeah, yeah. Where this is, you're deploying... I mean, I know a lot of places want to deploy every couple hours. It's kind of crazy.
In 2009, just for a little bit of history, the first DevOps Day conference was held in Belgium. And I feel like around this time, there was a power dynamic. developing between developers that needed to push code to like a web production or some production system and the system administrators that built those systems.
And on the sysadmin side, you'd have frustration with developers that didn't understand how the security dynamics worked or didn't understand all of the requirements that we had to run the system and wouldn't go through the hoops that we didn't want to set up, but we had to set up so that way we would be compliant, et cetera. And on the developer side, you had like,
It seemed like IT was slow to respond. We just want to push this thing out and we have to wait two days before they get a guy on it so we can move our files for us. Why can't we just move our own files? And this was a frustration brewing between two sides of the folks that needed to use the same system.
And it broke towards the developer eventually because companies needed the software to be built more than they needed the sysadmins to be happy and the systems would be architected correctly. Not the developer's can't architect the system correctly. But at the time, you had people like their entire focus for their entire career was deploying and managing systems.
And you had people, their entire focus was development. And the two didn't really share the two jobs. That's not really the case anymore. And we've also had significant tooling built out, which is really what I think made DevOps very possible, is you could start to manage systems pragmatically. It started to make sense to a developer how you could manage a system.
And I think that truly enabled DevOps.
Yeah. So, you know, it eventually became that your Docker, Doku stuff could be deployed with just a config and a YAML file.
Yeah, you're right. And that made it way more approachable for people to deploy software. And then there was a lot of grousing. Well, they don't actually know how the system works. But I think we're kind of past all that now. And people. We are not. No, you don't think so. You still think there's.
Well, OK, we're not fully past it, but there are people that can be both excellent developers and excellent system administrators. I felt very strongly against that back in the day.
So a thing that often happens in more complicated applications, though, is you do end up relying on some binary software that just needs to be on the production system. Oh, yeah. I'm not going to say it's not possible, but it's not necessarily what these YAML file-using tools, i.e. Doku, for example, which is still my favorite, are trying to do.
So, I mean, I got to give one to the crap people today. And the Go people, actually. I don't know why I'm promoting SeaweedFS so much. I just love it. I don't get a kickback or anything. I'm just really excited about it. It's a flat file storage solution. Mimics the S3 API. I've been talking about it for three weeks now. You should go check it out. It's written in Go.
Our current language of the week.
Mike, do you mean the official programming language of the Coder Radio program?
Is that what you mean? Let's-a go! Yes, yes, that's what I mean. So, yeah, I mean, you might have to install Go dependencies, right? Or whatever, depending on how you do things.
You know what else I remember about DevOps? One more thing before we completely move off of it. This truly was the birth of intense business jargon and project jargon coming into system administration.
Before you jump there, one more positive thing, and then I'm going to join you in dunking like Michael Jordan here. All right. Docker was huge for DevOps, and Docker and the whole ecosystem of container orchestration tools that spawned, such as Kubernetes, huge. And we called it, and I'm never going to stop reminding people of that. All right. Go on. Take your dump.
I just think that it's kind of a shame. And a lot of times when I hear a group of people talking the abstract, I think it often indicates they don't understand the fundamentals. And you had that kind of happen is these intense, vague names and descriptions of things started to get used more. And it's not that jargon wasn't technical beforehand.
It was technical, but it was specific and it was purposeful. And we saw kind of like this mal-change. I don't know. I think it was a bad change because we went from experts that are proficient in their field speaking to other experts, to everybody kind of talking in these abstracts, which was necessary, I think, but unfortunate and almost so bad you could parody it.
And so that was one of the things that I just really got turned off when I was in the industry back then and just really turned me off was that kind of shift. And I know it's a weird complaint now, but it was a thing.
So isn't this just exactly what happened with like Agile, right?
Yes. Well, I think that's, it's this in there is this waterfall to Agile kind of transition as well.
Yeah. But, you know, Agile, the original Agile manifesto has some very, very strong points. And then the consultants got involved.
Yes.
I would even, and I know we've gotten over the years some negative feedback on this, but that's okay. Everybody's opinion is welcome. Even Egon's. Although Egon doesn't actually care about this. The testing stuff. Testing became the same thing where it went from, hey, we can automate some testing that will catch regressions. Great.
You have to test 100% of your code, and it becomes like a religion. And there's like TDD and BDD and Gandalf the Grey DD consultants that you can hire. It's like,
Oh, yeah, they'd love it. So much money to be made to help you manage this.
Anybody who's a consultant, I mean, unless they're a dev calling themselves or an admin calling themselves a consultant, if their whole job is PowerPoints, just, you know, maybe just take your team out to dinner.
Mike, to be fair, there's a good portion of Outlook in there, too. So they do Outlook and PowerPoints. Fuck Outlook. Right, right. gives me headaches not even kidding I do a lot of custom integrations for SharePoint with Alice now and I just do not like it I must have said this on the show before but I literally had a co-worker that I sat next to and you know these were like short wall cubicles
And he spent all day in Outlook. He did not – I don't even know if he had any other applications installed on his computer. And as a tech guy, I'm always paying attention to this. So he never – he would just sit there in Outlook all day long going between his calendar and his inbox. And then he would get up and go to meetings and he'd bring a paper pad.
And then he'd come back, and he'd spend the rest of the day in Outlook. I don't even know what he was doing. But he just never ran any other applications on his computer.
Are you sure he wasn't, like, tabbing out to Miniclip or something like that? Maybe when I'm not looking. Maybe he was aware. Yeah. Yeah. So DevOps, it's where are we now? I think we should wrap it up there. Where are we now? How do you feel? You're the system admin. I don't feel like anybody talks about it anymore. Oh, contrary.
You know, because even well, even if you're well, but here's what I mean. It's like even if you're a system administrator, you're kind of doing things the DevOps way now.
They once. So I feel like the people who talk about it now, even the evil consultants got kind of shellacked. Yeah. By the the we used to call them platform as a service. Remember that pass, which always reminds me of pause the Easter die, right? The Easter egg die thing. But it's like D.O., our beloved former sponsor who I use all the time. wants to get you to use their application framework.
They have a name for it, but it's basically selling you DevOps that is specific to them. Amazon is more than eager to do the same thing.
Well, this is where I was going to go. Now it's cloud. It's cloud now.
It's cloud. Well, I would even argue Lambda and Microsoft, whatever, Azure Functions, all that stateless, serverless, whatever crap, that's just DevOps taken to its logical conclusion. Don't even worry about a server. Just give us your function. We'll throw it up there and we'll charge you three times as much to run it every time.
Well, what we have now is we have people that are AWS shops, Azure shops, Google Cloud shops. And that's a vertical. It's not like before it was the entire industry. But now you specialize in that vertical. It's a different thing. And you want to talk about jargon heavy.
I have a confession to make, though. Okay. So my choice is always like D.O., right? Yeah. Like if it's just like a client who comes to me and says, we don't care. Get it done. You know, tell us what to do. I actually, if I'm not given the choice, I prefer Azure to AWS. Which feels like blasphemy, but I just do.
I find it more, I mean, it's very Microsoft, but I think the correlation, maybe it's a correlation issue of a lot of these companies I'm working with are very deeply into the SharePoint Active Directory world. So just being on Azure tends to, one, it's easier to sell to their IT people, right? It's not a scary new vendor.
And two, there are certain advantages you could get with permissions and stuff like that.
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So we have a report from Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg, and he says that Apple is developing a tabletop robot. Here, I'll play a little bit of his interview so we can hear it in his own words.
They've landed on this home device. They're all in on robotics right now. Robotics is the next big thing at Apple. They're talking about humanoids. They're talking about mobile robots that go around your home. Now they're talking about this home device. It's a robotic neck connected to an iPad.
It can swivel 360 degrees, bend, move up and down, move around on top of a table or a desk, video conferencing. Okay. But it's essentially your first Apple intelligence device. It's an AI-ified iPad, a fully voice-controlled system that can move around on your table. It's going to be pretty niche, but it's also going to be pretty cool, like the Vision Pro. It sounds...
So, you know, maybe $1,000 for a table robot.
Do you remember the Butterbot in Rick and Morty? Yes. What is my purpose? You serve butter.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, so well done, Uncle Tim, on the existential crisis product.
Really, I mean, full-on humanoid robots at some point, too. Yeah, and the other thing that's sort of interesting in here is this is a subsidiary of Foxconn that's taking on the manufacturing of this, and this subsidiary has built robots, one robot, a manufacturing robot for Foxconn. The code name, they say, for this Apple robot project is J595, if anybody wants to look it up.
2026?
Jeez. Well, maybe people will have money again by then to spend on stuff like this.
Yes, to serve butter.
Apple has lost it. They've lost their way. And I go back to – I've said this comment before. I think the problem is, is that the folks that run Apple, it's kind of like an oligarchy over there. And there's a few key people, some of whom have been around since the jobs days, that make all the decisions. And you can see them on their website. You see them in the WWDC events.
They make the big decisions. And the problem is, is they have been privileged and rich for 30 years and they don't work for a living like we work for a living. They work, but not with the common people do. And they don't know what problems people are trying to solve in the real world. And so all they can try to do is come up with the next big Apple product in like their echo chamber.
And so what you get is a thousand dollar tabletop iPad that follows you around like a creep.
you know it's going to run its ass right off the table.
I mean, come on.
And it's $1,000 broken.
The arm's gone, you know?
I don't. This is a, you know, your buddy Marco Arman on the ATP show was actually pretty negative on Apple, up to the point of saying they might need new leadership. Really? Yeah, it's, they've gotten, they've gotten so big that making that number go up and to the right, I think is just a big challenge for them.
I look at what a flop so far the Vision Pro has been. Vision Pro is going nowhere. I guess they're selling for like half price on eBay right now. You know, when they come down to like 30% of the price, I might get one.
Yeah. I was like, oh, maybe. Yeah. We're getting there.
Yeah.
I mean, the MetaQuest is fun, but it's a toy. Yeah. And a really expensive toy. 500 bucks.
But you can share more easily with people.
Yeah.
Yeah. So there's that. Also, so get this. Tesla is hiring humans. to train the Optimus robot via motion capture like you do for a movie. And so Tesla's hiring very specific people. They need somebody between 5'7 and 5'11 because Optimus is likely to have a height of 5'8. And they've hired over 50 people in the last year that fit this description that are using mocap suits to do different tasks.
And they do these different tasks in these simulated real-world environments. Like doing the dishes? I don't know. Probably not that. But they do the task in these mocap suits, and then they use it to train the robot how to do the same task. That's what Tesla's doing right now. Full-on humanoid robots. We went from LLMs to robots real quick, Mike. Well, we need our next, you know, thing.
Isn't that something? I mean, that is. I thought, you know, maybe it'd be quantum computing. But no, it's LLMs because these robots have to be able to understand us, right? So just the LLM is going to empower it. So it's like the two play into each other.
If I were going to buy a robot for the house, I'd probably be more willing to buy an Apple robot, though, than a Tesla robot or a Microsoft robot or a GM robot.
There's this new upstart company over here in Orlando called Skynet. They've got this.
What's Palmer Luckey's company's name? I wonder if they're going to make a domestic robot. How about Palantir's robot? Yeah. So just wild. So that's their next moonshot. So they've killed the car. And they're going for robots. I just got to ask you out there, audience. Would you do it? No. A robot powered by Siri? Are you crazy? Well, come on now. So it's 2026.
So let's say we're on generation two of Apple intelligence. Let's say it's actually good at figuring a few things out. You know, there's stuff around the house that sucks. You know, there's stuff around the office here that needs done. I don't know what this robot would be capable of, but if it could solve actual problems. I'd be interested.
I doubt it, though, because we never even got there with the virtual LadyTube assistants. We never got to the point where my LadyTube could contact Mike's LadyTube and automatically arrange a meeting on our two calendars. They couldn't even handle basic stuff like reservations, restaurants, or just two people with LadyTubes making a meeting like an actual assistant would do. We never got there.
So I'm just very skeptical. But if it was functional, somebody could mow the lawn or I don't know what it would do. Dishes? Cook? I don't know what you have a robot do in your house. But repairs? What if it could do repairs?
I think the dream would be Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons, right?
Yeah, buddy.
I mean, I had that dream, but it's... Hey!
Yeah, good show. All right. All right, well, why don't we... We got a few emails. You want to get into some of these emails?
Yeah, let's burn through. Inappropriate?
R. Allen lives in a moose-based place, he says, I guess. Oh, no, that was supposed to be the most based place. All right, that makes a lot more sense. So I was kvetching about the traffic cameras in my area that automatically capture my license plate. And R. Allen writes, traffic cameras are not used in Missouri.
What happened is people started putting fake paper tags on their cars and paper masks of city officials on. So like a paper mask on your face of the city official. Then they would start running the red lights at 2 a.m., which automatically sent the tickets to the people in charge. That's so badass. We would never do anything like that here. He goes on to say they want to weaponize traffic cameras.
Then we'll just point it right back at them. Selling the telemetry from your car and using it to deny you a way to work. You just don't buy from them or buy an older model. He says, I'm old and cranky and I'm not afraid to mess up some jerks on my way out the door. Thank you, R. Allen. We need more people like you out there messing up the jerks.
I've clearly lived in the Pacific Northwest for too long. It never even occurred to me, I guess probably because it's probably violating the law, but paper tags and masks to look like the officials' cars and drivers and then to intentionally run the lights. That's so rebel. I can't believe I never heard that before.
I love it. That's better than a Guy Fawkes mask.
That is. That is. Thank you, R. Allen. Mike the Forgotten writes in about CrowdStrike. He says, I was just listening to the conversation about CrowdStrike, and I share your frustration, but from the angle of software engineering.
So many tech companies call their developers, quote, engineers, but it's events like this that demonstrate why, quote, real professional engineers, those who took the standardized test, look down on people that call themselves engineers. This problem was preventable, but instead of engineering a solution, they built the equivalent of someone doing a DIY for the first time. We...
The software industry have to do better. We don't have any official regulation or certifications that we need to pass like other industries do, but when one of your devs has a bad day and it costs the whole world $5.4 billion in losses, you can sure bet that we have the same or even higher impact.
You could argue that no lives were lost, so we don't need the same scrutiny as someone building a bridge, but I would counter that No lives were lost this time. It's just a matter of time, though. What if one of those delays was a cancer patient and days, months, or years were cut off of their life because they missed a treatment window?
The only way we can prevent regulation is by actually engineering solutions and self-governing ourselves.
I mean, yeah, I'm all for preventing regulations.
This is why I had some big energy towards Microsoft. I mean, I realized they didn't distribute the faulty code. Yeah, it wasn't them, right? But it was their fragile operating system and its crappy boot process that hasn't been better engineered. Right.
Like Microsoft should be building their operating system to withstand flawed software because we have 35, 40 years now of data to show us that people are going to ship software on your operating system that does bad things. And so we should build that way. And the way we do that is by making the boot process more robust. So it knows how many times it's failed.
And if it's multiple times, it boots into a backup image. They have backup images. They're called shadow copies. So make them frickin bootable. And that's all you got to do to have solved for this is you just have it come up in a recovery mode where it disables the boot drivers because it failed twice. And they would have solved for this.
So I put the blame on Microsoft because they didn't engineer the foundation that CrowdStrike built upon. Now, CrowdStrike screwed up. They shouldn't have done that, and it's super embarrassing, and I think they've been let off way too easy to the point where it's bizarre.
Oh, I don't think they've been let off. Oh, you don't think so? I think this is one of those things where we're used to moving fast in our little corner of the world, but the rest of the world moves super slow. Litigious stuff moves slower. I agree with you there. Mike, who wrote in, is right.
The $5 point whatever billion, that's going to send several lawyers' grandkids to college when the lawsuits all come in.
I agree with you on that.
If I was CrowdStrike, I'd be looking at insurance against lawsuits and bankruptcy protection or contingency plans because there's –
No, they sent out – Mike, they sent out Uber cards. You're good. They're good.
That didn't work. $10 Uber cards, which is insulting enough, but also ended up not working. So I mean if I'm the president of Delta Airlines and I need to not have my huevos rancheros cut off at the next board meeting, I'm going to my chief legal counsel and be like, so I want to bend these guys over a barrel.
How do I do that? I just realized Microsoft has zero incentive to improve this. They already have the dominance. They can't. And they would love a nice moat.
They'd love one more moat. Give them another moat. Why not? So Microsoft's defense, I'm going to make their case. I'm not saying if I agree. I could see a lot of people are saying it's disingenuous. The problem is they were forced to allow this. If Microsoft had their way, no one would have this kind of access.
Yeah.
And would the EU force them? Which I got to be honest, if I'm Satya, that's exactly what I would say because I want to get the EU out of my knickers, right? I want them out of my lingerie drawer.
It's a great moment to take a little snipe and then, well, it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been forced to build our system by regulation.
Right, what you're suggesting is making it easier and less dangerous for the thing they don't want to be done to be done. Why would you ever do that? It would be like me saying, never mind, I'm not even going to suggest it because I don't want to give anybody ideas. I don't like lawyers. I think lawyers are some pretty slippery folks.
Unless they're listening to our show. You should let us know. Or my lawyer. Maybe we should hire you. So if you're a lawyer and you're listening to the show, email in. Somebody is going to sue us for libel money. Yeah, we should build out some contacts.
Yeah. I can't imagine Microsoft couldn't come up with some... plausible case that CrowdStrike has caused them damages? Because I think the answer is you sue them into oblivion, right? Like basically you go Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan. This isn't a suit to recover money. This is a suit to end this entity.
That would be fascinating because CrowdStrike is a very politically connected entity.
And if I was Microsoft and I need the love of my life salary in a minute, I'd go right back to the EU and say, look what you've wrought. Ah, look what you've done.
F*** the EU.
Yeah. I mean, seriously, f*** them. What have they got? Nothing. They have their regulations, but they're on a track down the toilet.
Actually, they're very proud. They're going to be the global regulator of tech, don't you know? What if you just don't let them?
I'm sorry, but China, America, even Russia, to a point, you have to listen to. But I don't know. I... Basically, they want to be the local auditor. It's just such a scummy thing. Not in the EU anymore, but Chaucer, you guys are like the partners. You're just going around trying to tax the shit out of everybody and say, oh, you can't do that, you can't do that, but build something of your own.
Where's your Microsoft? Yeah, where's your big tech company at? Right, and I agree we do need some regulation, but it should be done by us. And that regulation should be in the form of breakups.
YouTube should be its own company. The browsers should all be their own company.
Xbox, instead of Microsoft just destroying it like they are, they should just spin it out. If Azure was its own company, Office its own company. Office and Outlook together.
You could make SQL its own business too, actually.
Right. Or all Microsoft's consulting services that they do would be one of the biggest consulting companies.
And then obviously Windows.
Yeah, I mean, I actually think Windows would probably be one of the weaker ones.
Yeah, you'd just stick it with something else at this point.
I think you'd stick Windows with the… Office, probably. Office, yeah.
You'd stick it with the Office guys.
Apple's the harder one to break up. I mean, Vision Pro should be its own company just so they can write that shit off and be done with it. No kidding. Take the loss. Take the tax break. But no, I mean, no offense to our EU listeners, but this is kind of… I'm hyper-sympathetic to the Microsoft case here of, you made us open up our kernel. What did you think was going to happen?
Which, if you knew what you were talking about, you would know is a crazy thing to do.
Yeah, I wonder if this will be a talking point Microsoft uses in the future, the next time regulators come out.
Oh, Satya's too nice, because he doesn't want to draw a negative, because they're doing a bunch of other crap that they probably should be regulating for.
Well, and guess who's one of their biggest customers? The government.
But if you really look at it, it's... I don't agree with everything that was written in the op-ed, but was it – who was it? It was a Paul Graham or Peter Thiel. One of them wrote an op-ed. I think it was in the Wall Street Journal. Someone will fact-check me on this and where it was.
But they made a pretty strong case, and they were all over Twitter with it, about why the EU doesn't have a Microsoft or an Apple.
Yes, I remember this. I do remember this. I remember this piece. I don't remember what it was.
Yes, a couple weeks ago. Now, the case was awfully self-serving because they kept mentioning crypto. But, you know, it does make me wonder because, like, how come Canonical never pulled it off? Right? Canonical's a big company, but they never made it. My beloved SUSE just seems troubled these days. You know, what happened? Business?
Business? We'll see. I'd be curious to know what their response is. Now, as it happens, just as a matter of production schedule, we are recording ahead this week, which means that someone may have boosted in a new official language, but we don't know. And by default, that makes Go the official language one more week. And as promised, since Devator is listening live, we have our Go track.
This was created by Mr. Wes Payne, and it is inspired in the classic style of Avril Lavigne, and it is the official language of the Coda Radio program for Go.
Okay. All right.
All right. That's not bad. It kind of sounds like Sirius XM radio, but it's not that bad. It's not bad. We'll take it. Thank you, everybody, who does support the show, our Coder QAQ. Thank you very much. Coder.show slash membership if you'd like to put your support on autopilot. And thank you, everybody, who does boost in with one of those new podcast apps at podcastapps.com.
We'll be getting to your messages. We're back to our regularly scheduled program. I think I'll have just gotten back from Toronto when we talk.
Yeah. Anywhere you want to send the people in the meantime. Go to alice.dev and be nice to your local European politician.
Yeah. Maybe they mean well. I don't know them. It's possible they mean well, Mike. Maybe they're just stupid. No, I don't think they're stupid. They mean well, but they're dumb. So you think they're evil then? Because if they're smart, then that's not good because that means they're evil. I'll let more qualified people speak on this one. I'd love to know. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Coder.show slash contact or if it's really mean, boost it in. Links to what we talked about today.
That's really mean. You have to pay us. The more trolly it is, the more you have to pay.
You're going to yell at me after all. Really, you actually this week. Coder.show slash 585 for links to what we talked about today. At least some of it. And, of course, over there you'll find information about our Matrix chat room going 24-7, our RSS feed. And we should be live next Tuesday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. But you can always get the deets at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Coder Radio Program. See you right back here next week.