Our thoughts on the iPhone 16, and then Mike surfs the WSL wave.
This is Coda Radio, episode 587, recorded on September 10th, 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 sharpening his claws, it's our host, Mr. Dominic. Hello, Mike. Huzzah! Happy debate day. Oh, yeah. You have to be excited for us. Yeah.
But for people listening, it's just post debate day. So hope you had fun. Hope you had fun. Oh, yeah. You know, Google's not having too much fun. So the Biden administration has, you know, the DOJ part. So the DOJ has not publicly offered. A plan for what they're going to do with Google.
We're going to have, you know, final judgment in August of next year, but they're already leaking what some of their considerations are. And it looks like they're considering the leaks is on the table. A forced sale of Android. Forced sale off of Chrome. But nothing in the leak about the ad business, which is what all the news was talking about this morning, was the ad business.
Because it turns out there's a separate antitrust that has just kicked off around just the ad business. And they're going to try to slice that off, too. This would be way beyond what they did for Microsoft back in the early 2000s, right? Because Microsoft didn't actually have to split out into a bunch of different companies. What do you think?
So this we're going to get we're going to get strung along, strung along until August. So maybe we talk about it now and then we just watch. But I'm curious at the onset of this with the DOJ leaking this to publishers at Politico. Seemingly to try to specifically say Android Chrome. Off on their own, they have to be their own separate businesses. YouTube didn't come up.
Ad business didn't come up yet, but that may come up in the next trial.
Yeah, I mean, this will be in court for 10 years if they actually go for the breakup, right?
It seems a little too extreme, too. It was a 10-week trial, right? And then, boom, now we're talking about splitting up one of the largest tech companies in the world, who's, I don't know, like, I don't love Google. And I'm going to make it clear, I think people on this show know how I feel about Google. I've gone through a lot of efforts to de-Google my life.
Not a big fan of theirs, and I think they are kind of a disappointment as a company these days. However, if you were to break up Google's ad business and you were to break up Chrome and you were to start splitting these things up, there may be some advantages to that.
I'd be really curious to solicit the audience's thoughts on what those might be because what I can think of right now are the negatives.
And the reality, in my opinion, is that you can throw a lot of things at Google, but when you compare them to other advertising companies or other tech companies, Google has probably one of the most transparent, documented, and understood privacy policies out there. And Google is held to a very high standard. Now, I'm sure they're constantly secretly violating that trust.
But they still, I think, probably are better in this area than any other tech company, let alone any other company in America, probably the rest of the world. And I'm not saying they're great.
But as far as what they let you control, what you can delete, take your, you know, they have Google takeout and what and and they tell you what they're watching and what they monitor and they document it copiously. And. No other company is going to have those levels of protections. And the further down the food chain you go, the worse those protections are going to get.
And so in some bizarre way, a move that may be touted as great for consumer privacy, i.e. breaking away Android and Chrome from Google, may actually be worse for consumer privacy. Because it's not like these tracking behaviors go away, but now you just have companies that are held to lower standards that have lower standards of privacy policies making deals with each other.
That's where my concern comes in. And that's just my first reaction.
I may be wrong. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I mean, you know, it's interesting the businesses they're talking about splitting out. When, if I think of, you know, self-sustaining businesses at Google, I would think of YouTube, obviously. And then actually maybe the not, I think, discussed enough Google App Engine, which is like their AWS or Azure.
But Chrome, I don't know how Chrome could possibly live on its own.
That's what I was thinking, too. Yeah. Chrome is not a sustainable model if it's not part of an overall web strategy by a giant corporation. Right. Like the way Chrome starts to get monetized when it's its own company is a lot creepier. You see what I'm saying? Right.
Or even then it might not be sustainable, right?
It's like they got us. It's like they're too big to fail now. Chrome's too big to fail. And if you break it off into its own company, it's going to have – ginormous infrastructure costs. Huge, huge server-side costs to maintain and deploy Chrome. It's the kind of thing that only a wacky tech company that makes a ton of money from something else entirely could do. So, yeah, man. I don't know.
And again, I sort of feel, I'm not 100% on this feeling, but it seems like five years too late, everybody. Right? Google is facing more competition than ever. And if Google's broken up like this, like you said, I'd rather see YouTube become its own company. That would be a lot better.
I would love to see YouTube have to fairly compete in that market so it doesn't just have an absolute monopoly over video on the web and then thus a monopoly over speech on the web in video form.
Yeah, it would be interesting, right? Because then it would also compete with Google search and other people have discussed this possibility. But like I said, if there is anything like that suggested, it will be Oracle versus Google level appeals.
Oh, yeah. You're right about that. You are right about that. OK, well, a little bit of feedback. So, you know, last week for like 10 minutes, the Gophers won and we had a song. Well, BHH, a.k.a. Brian's back. He says, well, it was a short-lived victory. I just heard that massive R boost, so here is R's official song.
Now, this one's going to help us chill out after thinking about those annoying Google problems and help us relax a little bit with an R song in the style of folk music.
Down by the meadow Under the banging tree Where old folks gather, jabber, and take their tea Talking about numbers Trends to foresee in the world of digits None purer than thee With R as our vessel voyaging through time Mining data quarries, rough ores we refine For stately computations and visions divine Your cold, unwrapped stories, line by line.
Oh, sweet or silent as the dew in the world of ones and zeros, your lighthouse true. Where numbers sing and scattered floods bloom through days, labyrinth, you lead us past gloom.
How do you comfort an R programmer who's feeling down? You tell them, don't worry. Everything will be all right. Thank you, BHH. You can find him on Nostra or Fountain as BHH32, a.k.a. Brian. Very soothing. It was, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was. Good stuff.
It's interesting. You see the Gophers and the R folks, they were a little more rowdy. I mean, the Gopher and the Rust folks, sorry. And the R folks seem a little chill, man. It's like everything's going to be okay.
Well, I would say that there are Buddhist monks of the audience, right?
I think – clearly. Clearly. I just want to take a moment and say thank you to everybody who supported the show recently. For last week, Coda Radio was in the number one spot for top episodes on Fountain FM thanks to your boost. The boost put it on the charts in the number one position. That's just fantastic because it means a whole bunch of new people will discover us.
And of course, Fountain FM just had their 1.1 release, which includes full Nostra support. So if you've been considering just dipping a toe in Nostra to see what it's like to own your own identity online... Well, they have a setup wizard that'll create a Nostra public key for you and a private key. And then you can take that to other apps. It's cross-app compatible.
It's just a public-private key pair system. And now Fountain will create one for you if you don't already have one. So it's a cool way to check out the Fountain app and... get your Nostra identity started as well.
It's just so awesome to see you guys boost in, the fun that we've had with the language battles, and then to see it work Coder up to the number one spot in the charts and have a bunch of new people discover the show because of that.
I'm just simply so grateful for our members, the Coder QA crew, and of course the Jupiter Signal members who support the show on autopilot, and of course you boosters who boost in with a podcasting 2.0 app like Fountain. It means the world to us, and it's kept us on the air for this last year. All right, let's get to this.
We don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but we should talk about it at least. The iPhone 16 is out. We got an i6. As everybody expects, you got a pro and you got a regular one. You know, Apple really, really leaned into health and the, quote, impact on our lives. And everything was designed from the ground up for Apple intelligence, just like we knew it would be.
Tim was really out there with the enthusiasm, a.k.a. yelling. iPhone 16 starts at $799. The 16 Plus starts at $899 for a 128-gigabyte model. And they did something kind of cute for the iPhone 16 that I wanted to get your thoughts on. They blasted right past the A17, and they went to the A18 with 17% more memory bandwidth.
built for AI models running on-chip 6-core CPU, 2 performance, 4 low power, and they say 30% faster than the iPhone 15 while using less power. Notably, they did a lot of comparisons just to the 15. A lot of times I see Apple go back a model or two, but for the GPU, CPU, and neural cores, they were comparing it mostly to the iPhone 15. And they also stuck a bigger battery in this thing and Wi-Fi 7.
So looking at just the raw performance, Mike, you got the A18 chip with about 30% faster performance overall than the iPhone 15 last year's model, which is incredible at this stage. You got the bigger battery. You got Wi-Fi 7 in this thing. Just base, looking at the hardware specs, seems like, you know, pretty decent iPhone if you're like on a 14 or older right now.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'll just give my general impressions, right? All these iPhones are basically performance bumps from the 15. I'm on a 14 Pro Max, whatever. I am still, you know, I'm toying with it. I'm not sure I'm going to upgrade.
I think Apple's hoping that the intelligence features would kind of draw you to upgrading.
No, I don't see that drawing me to upgrading. I think about what I do on my phone. I use it as a phone. Shocker right now. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks and check my email. Oh, and I take pictures of my kid. Now, honestly, the most compelling thing is the camera stuff on the new Pros. Yeah, cameras are better for sure.
But is that worth me, you know, having a phone payment or dropping whatever it's going to cost?
Twelve hundred bucks or whatever.
Right.
I think it's like I think it's like twelve ninety nine if you want five twelve gig or something. Yeah, I don't see it. You know, I think I do always like the Apple event. I'm on the 14 myself, and I have a Pixel 7, and I've really kind of been stuck in this sort of phantom zone of between ecosystems.
And, like, you really these days have to make a hard commit if you're really going to get a $1,200 device. Yeah. I'm not sure any of the software features are a hard commit for me because while I do think people are going to buy this phone for emoji gen and things like that, I think what we'll discover pretty quickly is that...
It's pretty standard AI gen stuff that you can get from a lot of different services or open source self-hosted projects online. And it's going to be pretty boxed, right? Apple sandboxes everything. So these things are going to be pretty safe. They're probably going to all look like Apple stuff.
So you're going to probably after, you know, a few months after these features ship, whenever they do ship, which is ironic, people will be getting the iPhone 16. And as far as I can tell, most of these features aren't even going to be in the phone, which is hilarious. It really shows you the pace of what they're trying to do this, and yet they're still a year too late to the market.
You're going to know. When you see an emoji or you see a picture, you're going to know that it came from an iPhone 15 or whatever, 16, Apple. You're going to know that it was an Apple-generated thing because they're all going to have a look because that's how Apple works. And I'm not sure I even want to participate in that. So...
Other than things like email summary and text shortening, which I can do via other apps on the phone today, like Spark email does that already on the existing iPhone, I don't think I'm going to do it myself. I do find it interesting how Apple is at this state now where The rest of the industry is kind of catching up to them in terms of quality of device.
I don't like them, but Samsung has some pretty good phones today. They just have way too many SKUs. The Pixel 8 and 9 have been pretty solid devices. The 9 in particular looks really nice. And the iPhone, while still the best, in my opinion, hardware, the gap's starting to get a little narrower, and the price is starting to get a little... a little harder to swallow.
And now they have to start differentiating in software. And they do this very, very, very well. Like they do it with integration with the Apple Watch. They do it now with satellite messaging and calling, which they are expanding, which I think is a killer feature. I mean, that thing almost, almost sells the phone right there for my family members, right?
Because, or me, you know, imagine I'm on a road trip somewhere without cell frequency that happens often. Maybe this would save my life one day. I mean, that's a serious feature, although the Android phones are going to start having that too. They're trying to differentiate with these types of features, you know, and Apple intelligence is one of them.
But the reality is the Apple intelligence is going to be substandard to what Microsoft slash open AI or Google can do. You know, the Washington Post had a headline this morning and said the iPhone 16's Apple intelligence is useful except for when it's bonkers.
And we talked about this before, and I'd said, if they don't nail this Apple intelligence stuff after already being a year late to the market, it's going to be like the Apple Vision Pro. It's just not going to matter, and nobody's going to be talking about it in six months after all of this hype and all of this. They reoriented the entire damn company and injected AI into everything.
And the initial results are it's still very beta. Joanna Stern said the same thing on CNBC this morning. It is very beta still. Well, that sucks, man, because they're already late to market. They're so late to market that they're not even getting much of a stock bump from any of this. And the analysts are coming on the air and saying, well, this doesn't really matter.
Doesn't really move the needle. We're not going to play into the super cycle because of this. I.E. Apple is irrelevant in the most and only not the most. Not the most. The only category in tech that has mattered for now two years, and Apple is a total non-player in it.
Additionally, while their hardware is great, you know, here I am on the iPhone 14, so we're like, I'm not sure I want to spend $1,200. So they're not differentiating enough on the software anymore, and the hardware is too expensive because of where they've placed themselves in the market. So, you know, look around. Any non-tech person, they're on like three iPhones a go.
I think my wife's on the 11th. Sure, why not? So they have a real big problem here. The market has moved into an area where they're irrelevant, and their prices are not that great. So you're looking at two, three iPhone release cycles now before you upgrade. What I saw up there was a company dancing for Wall Street after Wall Street already left the theater.
Well, that's what it felt like, right? It felt like they had to have an AI story. And we talked about this in our DubDub episode, too. And right now, whether this makes a whole lot of sense or not, Wall Street analysts want you to be talking about AI. So this is very, we're, you know, this is very, we're in the beanie babies, right? We're in the fad.
That's not to say all AI is fake or anything like that, but. It's pretty clear that Apple threw this together pretty recently, right? As we record, this is the day after the event, their stock's down. Right. I don't really have much on this topic. I feel like if you want a phone, get a phone. But there's nothing earth-shattering in these.
I do feel like if you want to fry the bacon, the Cupertino Apple Smoked Bacon... What really, in my opinion, happened here is they had a whole multi-year AR roadmap laid out.
Oh, God, you're right.
That's why the cameras and the pros are so balling, right? It was going to be that the iPhone Pro is now your content creation device for the Apple Vision Pro. Yes. And la-di-la-di-la. Well, that fell right on its face. And they had to do a hard pivot for Wall Street. They had to do a hard pivot because Sam Altman came out and, you know, kind of repositioned OpenAI as a...
Though technically not a commercial company at the moment, it's still owned by the nonprofit. There's lots of whispers that there's going to be some chicanery to change that. And that, you know, like you said, it basically put a bee in Wall Street's bonnet, and they needed a story about AI. So they made this weird partnership with ChatGPT, which is really not a whole lot, right?
It feels a lot like an API integration, honestly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they're doing Apple AI, okay. But they're not doing anything. I mean, it's a little weird, too, right? You could think they're the platform vendor, and one of the biggest complaints of iOS power users is how siloed apps are.
The obvious but perhaps like really technically challenging thing with even their own internal architecture thing for them to do would be to basically make, I think they call it workflows on iOS now. You can like have apps like, you know, basically Unix pipes, right? Pipe data to one each other. Have Siri be able to just do that.
For instance, I got the Overcast update and for about a week I was very unhappy with it because it kept crashing and I listened to a lot of podcasts.
Also, I don't know what's going on with that new first page UI. It's confounding. Totally confounding.
It feels like ADA bait, right? That's what that was. The ADA stands for Apple Design Awards for folks who didn't spend a decade doing iOS development. And it would have been very nice to say, hey, Siri, get the data, the OPL file, the OPL file from Overcast and shunt it to like, I don't know, Pocket Cast or something.
Oh, that'd be awesome.
Or Fountain, I guess, or whatever. Yeah, there you go. The problem is, one, Overcast took out the ability to export the OPNL file, which I feel like that wasn't a lot of code. And I kind of feel like, hmm, you took this out when you were launching what you probably knew was an unstable update. It's a very Mike Dominic move. I got to give it to you, Marco. That's something I would do. I mean...
I mean, make you be patient. Because it's obviously fixed now, right? I'm still using it day to day. I'm a premium customer. But the first week, week and a half, two weeks was pretty touching. Yeah. So still a good app. If you are looking for an iOS podcast app and you don't want to do whatever, it's fine.
it it it would have been great for siri to be able to handle that kind of thing for me what a dream yeah apple just really feels that those walls around each individual app silo have to be manned by snipers and with a gator filled moat straight from tallahassee so i don't i guess we can't have that but yeah i i feel like the it's like it is a big story but it's only big because of how like where's the beef right there's nothing there's no there there this one
There's a lot of air. So the whole pitch is, well, I know your current phone is fine and the cameras have gotten so good you can't even tell the difference anymore when you upgrade. And, you know, for some this is not true, but for a lot of people, probably the majority of iPhone users, they're in a one or two or three generations back.
And Apple's pitch is, well, this new stuff is so awesome that you're going to need, you know, that's why they did the whole, we went over, we jumped over the A17, and we went all the way to the A18, 3 nanometer.
That's why they made a big deal about it, because what they're trying to say is, these new phones have more RAM, they've got more CPU, they're faster at everything, bigger batteries, and you get the AI features. You need all that horsepower, right? You want these AI features. Your phone finally is no longer fast enough.
But the reality is, if you just don't care about those features, it's plenty fast. And the other thing that's sort of not compelling about these phones, and I don't know if consumers will fully understand this, you're going to get the phone and not everything's there. In December... you're going to see some more features roll out.
And in October, you're going to see some, so October 1st, some features roll out December next, some features roll out. And then slowly it rolls out for places outside the United States, like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa and the UK are the first on the list, but they don't start getting stuff until like 2025 for some of the features.
So imagine buying this phone in September and, Because of the AI features, but you're in the UK, and you don't get feature completion until 2025 because you guys just say things funny. You know? Like, that sucks, man.
Yeah, it's a level of, I think maybe calling it vapor is a little too spicy, but I'll call it vapor.
They're like shipping on the hairy, ragged edge of what they can do as a company. Like they worked for a year plus on this probably. Yeah. And that this is the absolute best, and it's probably not even fully baked.
It's also the end of the quarter. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, you know, all roads lead to what to investor relations here.
So it's interesting how more and more Apple is getting comfortable with. Well, we can't delay the iPhone. We got bills to pay. So we're just going to delay the software and ship it in stages. And that's just like it started with a couple of features like camera settings. Remember, that's how it started. A couple of things in the camera app, like maybe it was portrait mode would come later.
And now it's like the entire value prop of the phone comes later. That's where we're at now.
But, Chris, those colors are pretty on the non-Pro version. Yeah. Nice job with the case.
And, you know, the Apple Watch looks good, the new Apple Watch. The sleep apnea detection, legitimately, if somebody has sleep apnea, I would love to have that in my watch just so I can kind of keep an eye if things are getting worse. Yeah, that makes sense. And they made it smaller and charge faster. Like, you know, okay. The poor iPad got no love. Apple Vision Pro didn't even get a mention.
Oh, the poor iPad. But maybe that'll be another event.
Yeah, I mean, I could see me, of all the things they announced, I might pick up, or I think I'm pretty likely to pick up, is I'm running Gen 1 AirPods, and I use them all the time. Yeah, yeah. Again, for my podcasts, such as Linux Unplugged.
Yeah, the AirPods seem like they're still a really good product, and the auto-transition between silence and, like, it detects a conversation and does pass-through, like, that stuff... They're all kind of like, oh, man, I wish we always had those features. But Apple, you know, Apple adding them is really good.
In fact, I would, again, like this list from the audience, any recommendations for great AirPods that are not AirPods but have fantastic noise rejection. Maybe even has somebody else done this auto conversation transition and Apple's pretending like it's brand new? I want all that. I just don't want AirPods because I want to be able to use it with other devices.
I know I'm crazy, but I want to be able to pair it with my Switch or my phone. You can pair them as Bluetooth. Yeah, I know.
I know, but it feels... The only thing that I think is a little unnecessarily Tim Cookie about these AirPods... $50 for noise canceling on the same line? I mean, come on.
Well, no, you know what's Tim Cookie is they didn't do anything except for USB-C on the Maxes. It's still got the H1 chip. Everything's the same. It's just the same price. Even the earmuffs are the same. Everything's the same except for it has USB-C.
Um, and it's okay, but it's a $550 product, which we have a pair in my house and we also have pairs of bows and we have Sony's and I'm not going to say maybe the, maybe the AirPod Max is sound the best, but they don't necessarily have the best sound rejection. Um, they are okay, but having just flown with them to Toronto and back, um, they could be better.
And their design also transfers a lot of vibration and noise into the headphones in a way that the Sony's and the Bose do not. So there is room for improvement on these, you know, $550 headphones and USB-C wasn't just it. Yeah. I, I,
I don't know. I just... I wonder if... Like, I also have a pair of the AirPod Max, and I used to use them more... I mean, they're fine, right? I will agree, like, for over-the-head headphones, they're probably the best ones I have. Good for music. Really great. Right. But the reality is, I usually have, like, one AirPod of, like, the, you know, Gen 1 in because I'm...
cooking right or I'm like yes I you know insert thing here and I want to listen to the second I put hair I put air pods in or anything like that that's when the kids talk to me or the wife talks to me it's like it's some sort of homing honing beacon for my entire family to come ask me a question
I see. Well, my stepdaughter went through a gossip girl phase, so then you put both AirPods. Maybe I will get the active noise canceling.
I am looking for something that has great active noise canceling because not only – I use – the two environments I use them are really extreme, flights and driving my RV, which creates a bunch of just internal noises, stuff rattles. And so you put the old headphones on for a little peace of mind, but it has to be really good.
All in all, they're good products, and if you're already in the Apple ecosystem, Apple continues to deliver really great, solid updates to Apple users, and if you've already invested, if you're on a phone that's a year too old, or maybe you're on a watch that's a couple of models old, these are all really great updates, and Apple cranks us out like clockwork.
Google, some years you get a Pixel watch, it's okay. Other years you get a Pixel watch, it's garbage. The Pixel 8 seemed kind of like mid. Pixel 9 seems like it's pretty great. They don't have the consistency that Apple does. And as an Apple user, you know that, hey, if I just wait a year and I buy every other year, you're going to get a noticeable upgrade in all the things you care about.
Screen quality, battery life, performance, camera. Yeah.
I'll have to see one of these in person because, again, I have the 14 Pro Max, whatever it's called. And at least in the demo, which you would think the demo would be the cat's pajamas, right? I didn't feel like I got to go get this.
Okay. All right.
Now, maybe I could be compelled because I have Verizon and sometimes they're like, hey, it's been two years. Then, yeah, I will get it.
It does have a new 5G chip in it that's supposed to be a lot better. So there's that too.
See, I guess maybe it's where I am. I just don't have the call problems.
Yeah, I don't really have a lot either, but when I do get good 5G, it's pretty sweet. It is actually pretty sweet.
Yeah, that is pretty sweet. All right, so what if you're not loyal to the Apple ecosystem? What if you're surfing the WSL wave, Mike? Yeah, so to celebrate the end of summer and to, frankly, make better use of this ridiculously over-spec Dell I have here, I decided to give WSL a shot again.
Oh, my God. You got almost the same image I got when I told the AI to generate.
It's amazing.
Did you see that? Did you see my image? It's almost identical.
I did. Oh, wow. So the image is of Tux surfing on top of something with like a vaguely Microsoft Windows-esque logo on it. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, we've talked about it before. I think it might be a year ago. And it's certainly come a long way to the point where so far, about a weekend, it is 100% usable. The biggest hiccup I hit was actually trying to, and this isn't WSL, this is just Windows.
When I was trying to get on the air, I was trying to get on the air on the Dell, and Chrome kept saying, your Windows is blocking the microphone. So I went to do what Chrome said, and it didn't help. So that's probably – Rough edges for those kinds of things.
But maybe if you've done it 20, 30 times, it would be second nature, but it's just a different path.
Well, and I have a suspicion that it's the way, because I plugged in the Zoom 22 into the front of the Dell via USB-C that I use for the Mac. I bet had I ran it behind the desk into like a regular USB-A port, I just have this feeling it would have not been done. But we're talking about WSL, not Windows in general. We should just take a quick detour, right? So Windows is fine, right?
PowerShell is, I would say... Pretty good now, even though I don't use it much at all. They have fixed, and you can read DHS's post about this too, text rendering is no longer terrible on Windows until you get into some of those older applications that look like a dead turkey. And WSL, so there's still two modes. There's WSL 1, which is like the translation layer.
Think of it like wine, but Windows to Linux almost. Kind of slow. The only real big advantage is that working with the Windows file system is faster. What you really want, and what most people are talking about when they talk about WSL today, is WSL 2, which is running a full big daddy tux Linux kernel inside of Windows.
Yeah. I've only had like a brief bit of experience with it, but it did seem like more of the real deal. Like Microsoft had to rethink of how to do this. And also in WSL2, like they've plumbed in the ability to like pipe graphical applications through. So it's like it does more stuff as well.
It does more stuff. And a lot of, I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, but a lot of the IDE vendors, such as, you know, I love my JetBrains tools, right, have strong WSL support now.
Good.
Where it's like two-click setup for, I'm using PyCharm and RubyMine, of course. Really easy setup. CLion has good integrations.
I recall there was pretty good integration with Visual Code Studio. Did you get a chance to play with that?
Yeah, VS Code does some weird stuff. It automatically configures itself if you install their plugin, and it will sometimes launch a Linux version of VS Code or VS Code in a Linux email for you if you type code into WSL.
Oh, neat. Okay.
Yeah, so if you want the I-want-to-do-no configuration of an IDE whatsoever, Visual Studio Code is your buddy. It's there for you.
I suppose it should be a first-class experience.
Yeah, well, I kind of think it might be why VS Code exists, to be honest with you. It's really... You know, I did take a quick walk on the VS Code site again, and they are... they really want to make it easy for you to go from like VS code to get hub to deployed.
Yes. Yeah.
And there's all kinds of little Microsoft published helpers for that. So take that for what it's worth, right? You know, you just, how tightly you want to be in that ecosystem.
Did you get a sense of how much overhead on your Windows box there was by keeping a WSL system in the background running? I'm assuming, I know you, you probably went with Penguin, right?
I know you're a Penguin guy. So I did two. I did Penguin, but I ended up writing the post. I'm going to do a more in-depth one later with Ubuntu for the simple fact that Ubuntu is free.
Ah, sure, yeah, okay.
And most of the tutorials that I think beginners will find are going to be for Ubuntu. Okay.
So what kind of resources are we talking here? Is it gigs and gigs and gigs of RAM? Is it kind of unnoticeable?
So you don't have to run it at startup either. Right, okay, right. I mean, I don't notice it. I also have 128 gigs of RAM on my machine. By default, it only allows it to take up to 50% of the RAM on your system.
Oh, is that all?
That's all. In your system, that's still a ridiculous amount of RAM. Well, right. There's a config file where you can override that if you're insane. But I have noticed no performance lag. Again, 128 gigs of RAM. Yeah, yeah.
Now, did you try any kind of Docker setup? Because like our podcast in the chat room is saying he's had some major issues trying to get Docker on WSL on his Windows 10 laptop.
So I haven't done, I don't do my dev environments in Docker. I deploy to Docker for staging and production. So I have not, but that is definitely something I should look into.
Yeah, I don't remember having a strong problem, but I probably only played with Docker for like 15 seconds. To me, it just never makes sense because I'm not doing application development. I'm running the end result in most cases. I'm deploying the Docker container on a system, and then for me, it's just always made sense to just... do that on a native Linux box.
What do you feel like the advantage is for you here, having Windows? I mean, obviously you get like applications that are only available for Windows, but is there something beyond, say, application compatibility?
So there's two things. Let me just jump to the Docker thing real quick too. Yeah, so there's other ways to use Docker, right? You could do like Doku or Docker Compose where like Voltron's up the Docker container on the server, which is basically what I do. Okay. So the advantage is, well, you know, that $1,500 Mac Studio display I bought? About two years ago? Yeah. Hmm. decided to die.
Oh, so this is more of a rage trial. I see. I see. Um, no, but there are, there are legitimate advantages, right? Like, so I do have, um, windows applications that I still support. I have, uh, you know, some game stuff that I'm doing gaming and game dev stuff that is just easier on windows right now. And I gotta be honest with you. Like I'm going to be redoing my little home office.
Cause I just, I grabbed a monitor I had in the garage and, The prices on non-Apple stuff, I know this is going to come as I told you so from a lot of our commenters. There's just a whole world of affordable things out there in every shape and size.
Yeah, fair point. Yeah, it's a lot easier on the wallet.
I can also upgrade this Dell thing. I think it can go up to 256 gigs, which is ridiculous.
And nothing prevents them from being Linux boxes, too. So that's the other nice thing is, like, you can buy it with Windows. You know you can use Windows. But also down the road, you want to make it a Linux machine when you get the next computer or something like that. You know, it's a little bit harder with a Mac. it can become an overpowered Plex server. Sure. Yeah, or a NAS.
Yeah, you just don't, I mean, you can do that stuff with the Mac if you want to use macOS for sure, but if you want to use Linux, well, then you're looking at Asahi and you're looking at some stuff like maybe your speakers or the Wi-Fi not quite working.
Yeah, so, I mean, a couple, you know, I do like the PC game. Proton has come a long way. Lutris is great. We've talked about them both in the show. It still is a lot easier just to, like, you know, have it native on Windows, especially if you play, like, online RTSs, which I do quite a bit recently. Those stupid, what do they call them? Not DRM. Anti-cheats. Oh, God. Anti-cheats.
For some reason, they must be something I'm doing. They just hate Lutris.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm always getting like, you've been kicked, you know.
In my opinion, it's the damnedest thing that's happened because Linux had this incredible compatibility momentum with Proton and the launch of the Steam Deck. And it seemed like we were entering a new era. And it has greatly improved, greatly improved. But...
the momentum has definitely been stolen because a few great games, um, have these horrible anti-cheat systems and that just do not let Linux play at all. And, uh, you know, even like companies like Roblox, they have these on and off relationships, ships with Linux where, you know, it's okay for using it under wine for a little bit.
And then all of a sudden they'll start banning accounts that are using wine. And then now it's seemingly back on again and you can, and it's, It's really frustrating, and it's to their own detriment as they just are locking people into a platform that doesn't care about them.
Yeah. I mean, I will say, I mean, this isn't the Windows Action Show. Windows 11 isn't that. It just isn't. And it sounds like the dev story you think is pretty solid. The dev story is solid. Now, maybe, like, so far I haven't hit anything. Maybe I will hit some crazy situation. My one big hurdle, but this was user error,
was you really, if you're going to be working your dev environment in WSL, just keep your code in the Linux file system. Don't try to cross the streams. Performance sucks crossing the streams. There's weird pathing issues as it tries to convert Windows paths to Linux paths or Unix paths, rather. Yeah, that's just not good. I kind of don't care for the GUI features.
Like, this is Penguin super big into this. And I know most of the mainstream distros have added this, too, where you could just launch GUI apps from WSL Linux versions like full X11 server. I guess that's cool if you need one of them. I'm mostly using it basically as the Unix. Right. You know, the POSIX stuff, the Linux command line. Right. With Windows native Linux.
Jetbrain IDEs because that's what I've used for work using the WSL SDKs as the remote interpreters remote in quotes because it's you know not in fact remote right it's a couple file system jumps away yeah and the idea sort of slash hope there is kind of like best of both worlds I suppose Yeah, the only other hiccup I've had is RuboCop, which is, I'm trying to think what, like a flake?
It's a linter. It's even slower in WSL. Oh, sure, yeah. I bet some things would be, wouldn't they? I figured it out, and I actually ended up asking JetBrains about it. It is not RuboCop. It is the round trip it has to take for the way they have, at most IDs, integrated into the editor. And they were able to show me you can prove it if you just go into Terminal on WSL.
and run the command manually that it's running, it's just as fast as you'd expect. That feels like a tooling thing where I would not be shocked if RubyMine couldn't fix that. I did spin up a VS Code instance in Windows that had Ruby support. But targeting WSL again, right? It did not have this performance issue for RuboCop.
But it notably doesn't have the automatic, like you could just click and be like, accept this recommendation. So I think there's something about the way they've implemented that that causes an issue. But that is a tiny, tiny gripe. And also sometimes RubyCop suggests crazy crap.
Or things that are technically, quote, the Ruby way, but make your code indecipherable to anyone who hasn't been learning under Mr. Kane for a while. Is it Dr. Kane? Father Kane? He's just an old dude, right? I don't know.
He doesn't have a title, does he? I don't know. Does he have a title?
He wears robes. He's very priestly.
Stay a while and listen.
Yeah, I don't know. I bet he does.
I feel like I should know that. I bet he's like a monk or something, yeah.
Yeah, might be. Well, I guess if anyone out there listening has some WSL experience, boost it in and tell us what it's been like and tips and tricks you've used to make it viable for you. You know, I have this low-key pressure campaign for my son to put him on Windows because...
The buddy he hangs out with, his dad works at Microsoft and they're constantly dunking on the fact that he can't play a couple of video games that look like crap anyways. Fortnite. So I think, you know, I would love some advice there because if he ever does end up on Windows, he's going to also have to have WSL. He's going to be living and breathing that and so...
Mandatory WSL. Yeah. I believe Arch Linux is available, too, so you could really. There you go. There you go. I like the way you're thinking.
Four score and seven boosts to go. All right. We got some boosts and a baller boost this week, and it's a biggie from our podcast.
Hey, Rich Lobster. 300,000 sats.
He writes, hello, Mike and Chris. The only time I've ever done a fist pump while mowing the lawn was listening to Coder Radios and the call out for the epic R boost as the official Coder Radio language. Just so devoted. It is my duty to keep the momentum going.
In what other language could I go from creating an over-the-top hotshot racing metrics dashboard to sharing an interactive shiny web app compiled in WebAssembly to the FDA? Might be some great show content, hashtag just saying. So he links us to the old hotshots dashboard here. This is hilarious and awesome at the same time.
And Eric's also in the chat room, so he may even end up titling the episode if he gives us a good one. This is so great. This dashboard is part of a very fun stack of open-source software created for the official Wimpy's World of Linux gaming, most official unofficial hotshot racing league. Have you ever played Hotshot Racers? Good little game.
Isn't that the one that used to be on, like, Ubuntu?
It is an older game, and it's sort of like a cel-shaded look, but it's just pure fun. I'm a big fan of the game. I don't play it very often, but I did back in the day a little bit, so that's a great example right there. Eric, thank you for that amazing boost. The, uh... They are crew. Do they have a nickname? Because they are kings of the coder official language crew right now.
I don't even know what to say. It's very impressive. Very impressive. They really are. Rotted Mood comes in with 50,000 sats. I hoard that which your kind covet. Just as value for value. Thank you, Rotted Mood. We really appreciate that. Tampa Tech Trekkie is back with 5,000 sats. You supposed.
Fun will now commence.
I think Mike hit the nail on the head with the whole if Steve Jobs were still alive bit. In that after Next... where Steve had been, he says it humbled him and he learned to get along to some degree with others. The iMac supported great web standards, but also Steve Jobs made Java an optional dev language in the first few editions of OS X and was taking cues from Linux back then.
Heck, they even experimented with making the Linux kernel on OS X, but it seems the GPL prevented that. I remember Jobs bragging about how, quote, Linux-like OS X was. That's what made the Apple of the 21st century. What's killing it are things like app signing, et cetera.
That's actually a great point, right? They used to literally make videos coming out and saying, you know, this is just like your Apache web server, man. Come on. Hey, here's XServe. You can run Apache. So when you're doing your Java – remember Java was the hotness, your Java development. It's just like the – it's the same environment that you're going to be running in production. So – and –
Yeah, they even tried to supplant my beloved Objective-C with Joth at one point, but we smoked Duke down.
And, you know, I remember I had a screenshot. I've long, long lost, but I remember a screenshot of literally them comparing to like Fedora. They had a Fedora terminal and an OS X, which that's what it was called back then. It was Red Hat, right? Because you got to get that Red Hat.
Right.
And they were comparing the two literally like, wow. There's like a Fedora terminal in the keynote. It was a different time. You're right. They were really trying to lean into getting software developers and power users on the platform. But they're not at that stage anymore, right? And the reality is that normies like gates and security guards and people walking around with flashlights.
And that's what the iPhone is now. It's more like the Nintendo Switch than it is a general computing device, I think. What's remarkable about this episode is it was, you know, it ended up being really solidly supported just because we had a few folks really step up because Scuba Steve takes us out with 14,300 sets. Thank you very much. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. There you go.
Nice. He says, hey, guys, here's my response to what if Steve Jobs was still alive. You both rightly pointed out the differences between Cook and Jobs, Cook being an accounting-focused CEO and Jobs being a product guy. But the biggest distinction in my mind is that Jobs is a founder. Founder-led companies get leeway with investors for moonshots and long runway projects that other companies don't.
Look at Zuck's crazy spending on the metaverse. This is why a Jobs Apple in 2024 had the potential to be much more of a consumer and product-focused company and less focused on quarterly earnings. But who can really say? I agree with that. There is something different about founder-led companies. We've had that conversation on the show once before. Zuck gets so much leeway.
He says, bonus question regarding Nostra. Yeah. Yeah. So in the Nostra world, you have a private key and a public key. And yeah, if you want to use an extension like Albi to manage it, Albi is transitioning to a fully self-hosted on your own computer, not run by them service. And they've introduced the Albi hub that you can just start up as a Docker container.
So in that case, it no longer is hosted by their services. So Albie actually just recently made that transition. There's another one that I cannot remember the name of, but it's also a browser extension that is locally encrypted and all runs locally, kind of like a Bitwarden password vault.
Those are solutions where the reason why you would use these is you go to one of these Nostra connected websites or applications. They're going to ask for your key. And instead of you having to paste in your key every time, much like Bitwarden, you put in a master password and then it does the key connection.
And then it gives you a level of privileges and a nice GUI to select how much access you want to give these things. Because these Nostra connected applications, you have to grant them permission to how much of you they get. And so Albie also gives you a nice UI around that. He says he's been listening since 2015 and he's a Jupiter Party member since the beginning. Yeah.
We got to get Mike to a meetup. Well, I got to get down to Florida, I think, is the reality of the situation.
Yeah, I got to start leaving the swamps.
No, I want to have an excuse to go to Florida when it's crappy here, like January or March. Oh, that's actually a nice time to come down here. You don't want to come here in the summer.
I know. It's freaking horrible.
It's just the problem is it's so busy. But, you know, if I flew in, you know, I planned ahead of time, get a little Airbnb, do some shows down there in the Airbnb. I think it could work out. We just got to raise the boost to make it happen. Thank you, everybody who participated. We had 19 listeners stream. We had more people that were streaming while they listened than boosted in this week.
And we stacked with the streamers 17,588 sets. We had four folks boost in. So all combined, we had 23 unique people participate. And we stacked a grand total of 386,888 sets. Not too bad at all. Thank you, everybody. This is a totally listener-supported show, which has been kind of a breath of fresh air for us in a way. I think eventually a sponsor will come knocking.
If it's the right one, I'll say yes, but I also can say no, thanks to the support we've gotten from the audience. And it's been really nice. It's been, I think, over a year now, completely audience-funded. So if you would like to fund on your own terms with the amount you like, with a message, when you like, how you like, then just go get a new podcast app, podcastapps.com.
We were talking about Noster, Fountain. We'll let you create a Nostra identity, and then you can take that identity and move it between all the different applications. It's not stuck just to Fountain. And it's a really easy way to, like, low-key, not even realize you've started a Nostra identity, and then take it further if you want. Fountain.fm for that.
Lots of great apps, though, at newpodcastapps.com. And, of course, thank you to our members. I think we'll have to cook up before the holidays a Coder QA or something for him, something like that. We just had one released a few weeks ago, and that's in the member feed. You also get an ad-free version of the show. We appreciate all of you.
I just want to mention this one story because it was sent in to me a few times before we leave, and you probably saw it going around. It's, quote, a shocking leak that suggests your phone is really listening in on all of your conversations.
A presentation was being given by Cox Media Group that claims their active listening SDK uses AI to collect and analyze real-time intent data by listening... This is what we talked about last week. No, you and I talked about it in Slack. Oh, that's right. We didn't talk about it in the show, and I've been getting messages about it all week.
They say they can listen to what you're saying, use AI to generate the intent, and then target ads. And... They had Amazon's logo on there, Google's logo on the slide deck, and Facebook's logo on the slide deck. Ridiculous. And the media took this presentation and ran with it as saying, here you go. These companies are actually spying on you 24-7 and using it to target ads.
And then I started getting people sending me stories about, you know, I was out in the yard talking to the wife about a boat. And then I came back inside and got on my device and it had ads for boats. I think this is really happening. Now, Amazon, Google, Facebook, they've said we don't have anything to do with this company. They've told this company to take our logos off.
We've never used your SDK. And it's not clear in their presentation if it's actually listening 24-7. The way it's actually phrased, if you look at the original reporting, is it looks like it's embedded into individual applications. So the mic would be listening while a particular app is running.
The thing that is persistent in these messages that I'm receiving, and I'm not dunking on anybody, is the stringent belief that these devices are actually listening to us 24-7 and streaming the data back to Google or Facebook. And somehow the devices are accomplishing this without getting warm. Without generating a large data bill and without draining the battery.
And they're somehow doing it even after the applications have been closed and the operating systems close applications running in the background and things like that. And they're doing it so effectively that you could be outside in the yard talking about a boat. And when you come inside and you fire up your computer, there's ads for boats.
And it's just this idea persists, even though it's technically not feasible, right? If you have a phone that can do that, I would love that battery life. If you have a phone that can do that, I'd love that data plan.
Also, somehow all of the sysadmins in all of the world that have metrics on their nodes and how much data they use, they've never seen any one of these devices chirping gigs worth of audio data. And then the second argument I get is, well, what if it's just listening on device and using a model? to process the audio and look for keywords, which I think will happen eventually.
But again, the battery and the CPU and the data required to do all of this is exponential. So I just, I don't know. I just, once again, I just want to encourage people to think about this critically. Really? That's all this, this is a PSA? Like this is, your devices, if you truly believe things like the Amazon app and the Facebook app are spying on you 24-7, uninstall them.
But I promise you, the bigger threat vector is the fact that they're reading every single email you receive, that they have a web of cookies that they're tracking you with. The bigger problem is they know you better than you realize, and you're just not that special, and they can figure out that you want a boat. Because they know you. They can figure out you like this band.
This is another example going around. A band that you haven't liked for a long time, all of a sudden you want to get tickets, boom, all of a sudden you get an advertising for it because you talked about it with the wife. Maybe they just know you well enough. They know that band's going to be in town. They know because you were a music subscriber how many times you've played that track.
These are the things that are actually tracking you actively.
Well, also it's the salience of the false positive. You probably see more ads in a day than you think and you just remember or take note of the ones that seem eerie to you.
That's a great point too. Yeah, like you're not thinking about all the ads you saw for razors. But that one boat sticks out.
Also, your browser agent also gives you away. If you are, I don't know, a Mac user using Safari on a pretty nice machine, they have a profile of guys who are within a certain age group, a certain demographic, who are Apple users, right? Yeah. Honestly, that's how podcasting ads work, too. You figure out who your audience is. I mean, Chris, tell me if I'm way off base. You're right.
And you sell them things that stereotypically they would probably buy.
And we happen to have an audience that the advertisers have decided they no longer care to target. Right. Which I think is silly. I think it's a great audience. And with a good product, we can do a good sales job. But the reality is that they pick and choose the markets. And, like, my wife gets these... She doesn't use any social media except for Pinterest.
And you wouldn't believe the kind of ads she gets in Pinterest. I mean, they definitely know that she is a married woman in her 40s. I'll just put it that way.
Yeah.
It's fascinating. And I understand how it feels creepy. I do get that. But... The PSA here really is that if you read a story that is based on the original story, it's two or three levels removed and it's getting reported as Amazon and Facebook and Google are listening to you 24-7 and it's getting reported as fact. But if you go back to the original reporting, it was the CMG group.
They were giving a presentation and they just put Google, Amazon and Facebook's logo on their slides when they're talking about their SDK. They're an Atlanta-based media conglomerate that makes like billions of dollars a year in advertising. So they probably are doing very creepy stuff, the CMG group.
But they were using these other companies' names to sort of like, you know, I guess affinity scan. Yeah.
Right. It's a lead generation tactic. I mean, you know, definitely be concerned about how much you're tracked. But just like take a minute and read an article about lithium-ion batteries. Hell, read the Wikipedia. Yeah. then you will understand why this is not happening anytime soon.
Right. Yeah, but server-side, you bet. Email, chat messages.
Oh, yeah.
Gmail, every single social app. I've had Gmail since it was invite-only beta, so they know everything from dating to marriage to divorce to next. I got all kinds of stuff. It's crazy. And Gmail was literally designed to never delete stuff for a reason.
I mean, we should go, but the real bacon one I'll just let folks hear about. Your credit card company, depending on who it is, many of them are doing this now, are actually tracking your transactions and selling data to advertisers.
Oh, 100%.
So that means you don't have to even be online. You could simply go to Publix or, I don't know, Kroger's, I don't know where you are. And they'll be like, huh, this person seems to be trying out vegetarianism this month. Right.
That's not even a rumor or a conspiracy.
No, they admitted it. Yeah. I have a cap one card and they're like, hey, we're going to be selling all your. Mm hmm. Yeah. So it's. Yeah.
But I'm the crazy one for wanting to do boosts. What's in your wallet? A little bitty spy. Yeah. Well, I bought seven spies in the chain, actually. Seven different spies. Yeah. True. Because the ISP is there, too. I know I just stepped into it because every time I get on this topic, everybody that believes their phone is spying on them gets upset with me.
But I'm saying you've got to make the technical argument for how it could work. Do that. Send me a technical argument for how it's possible.
Right. If you are like a Moldavian scientist who solved the cold fusion, great. You've done it. Yeah, you could probably pull this off.
Good job. Mr. Dominic, where would you like to send people?
In a bunker in Moldova. No, alice.dev. Buy some automation.
There you go. I'm going to say chrislast.com because that goes to my fancy pants, Nostra page over on Primal. And then I think we're going to be live next week on Tuesday at our regular time if you want to join us at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. I might need to move the next week. Okay, we'll figure it out. Or I might need to do it. Yeah, we'll figure it out off air.
We'll figure it out. I got like one last hurrah. Oh, we would be remiss if we didn't say rest in peace to Lord Vader. Oh, right.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I knew that was coming, but I just was still surprised by it. Yeah, terrible. Yes. You can find links to what we talked about today at coder.show slash 587. Over there, we got all kinds of stuff. Like, I don't know, the RSS feed. Have you heard of that? Yeah, you can search for previous episodes. That's great. You know, do a little backlog, spelunking.
Of course, you can also send us a contact over there or get involved in the old boosties. You know, it's a lot of fun. That's at thecoder.show. .show, it's the TLD. Can you believe they do that? I couldn't. Now everybody's doing it. Anyways, thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of the Coder Radio Program. See you right back here next week.