We’re taking a victory lap down memory lane. From spooky-accurate predictions to "did we really say that?" moments, this one’s for the history books.
This is Coda Radio, episode 600 for December 17th, 2024. Hey friend, welcome in to Jupiter 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 crushing 600 episodes, it's our host, Mr. Dominic. Hello, Mike.
You know what, Chris? You know what? They expect the Jar Jar, but you know what they're getting?
What are they getting, Mike?
Chevron 600 is a lock, baby. Stargate all the way. Although, as is performed, we did not check if the dial home device was operable on the other side. So everybody dies at the end.
Oh, I was planning to make nice with the natives, set up a nice family, and just assume that my buddies were never coming back ever again and build an entire new life over there.
Chris, if you and I keep making nice with the natives, our child support bills are going to be astronomical. We've got to stop with the natives. Yeah, especially those intergalactic fees they put on those. Oh, my God. This is why Bitcoin needs to be a thing, just to avoid those transit fees. Right.
We have the lightning network. We need the light speed network for that. So I've been teased that you have a fancy, fast speed upgrade of some type, and I want to know what and how much. Okay. Well, you said right here in the doc, Mike's Flash-like speed upgrade. I want to know what you're talking about.
Oh, well, I thought we weren't going to talk about that because I didn't want to hurt your feelings.
Oh, my goodness. On 600?
On episode 600? Well, fine. I'll nuke your feelings. I'll nuke it from orbit. Let's do it.
Oh, no.
Okay. All right. So, you know, Chris, my internet service provider only charges me $95 a month.
Stay a while and listen.
Oh, no. But I am going to be paying more effective Thursday. I'm sorry, Friday. Friday. Okay. Tell me why. Because I'm going up to 5x5 gigabytes.
Oh, my. What are you going to use that for? What are you doing over there? Running a data center? See, the questions. Just to hurt me. Just to hurt me is what you're doing.
I called them. The lady was like, well, you don't really need this. I said, yeah, but there's this guy. Okay. Yeah. I need to really nuke him for more. But now they had a seven by seven. What was that? Was that like 200 bucks a month? Was that too much? No, I'm using it for episode 700. Obviously, seven by seven. I see. Let me tell you something. All right. Kidding aside.
So I get off the phone call. Do you know which percentage of the time on the telephone was spent me buying the actual service that I want? Oh, I bet 10% or something like that. Okay. Okay. Sweet lady. Nice lady. I'm not bashing her. What was she trying to do on the rest of the call? Just get your information. What? Nope. Sell me f***ing Norton antivirus. What year is it? No. Yes.
I guess we're doing a Stargate theme. It's like one of those Stargates where the gate messes up and you go back in time instead of space. I was like, Norton. I said, I'm on an Apple. Oh, and apparently Norton has Apple products too now.
You know, I was just helping a neighbor who got a new PC and not only did it had Norton, but it also had the built-in Windows one. And then it had some sort of other app that is a security app. And it's like, so it's maybe three different types of anti-malware applications.
And I'm sure the PC's dog's slow.
Yeah, that's what that was and runs hot.
Although, I'll give this lady credit. She said, oh, well, 5x5. She's like, yeah, we have the service. She said, so, are you running Apache systems? You know what? Just for knowing the name Apache. Was she port scanning you?
Like, what's happening there?
She's literally hacking me.
She wants to know, for this, you must... It's funny that they get suspicious. They have a product, they offer it, but then they're suspicious when the customer wants it. That's hilarious to me.
No, they were. She's like, so, actually, it's so funny you say that. She said, I see the account paying for your account is in the corporation's name. I'm like, yep. Okay. Okay.
hmm yeah so i ended up with five static ips too oh oh man dang you could set up a little data center who says i'm not there you go it's all gonna serve jar jar binks memes sure yeah nobody else will so somebody's got to do it yeah see yeah i don't know why you're like that but chris 600 episodes oh man congratulations dude that's pretty awesome congratulations to you of fully bad advice
Yeah, and also, of course, a shout out to Mr. Wes Payne, who's not only stepped into the hosting role from time to time, but always been a very helpful presence behind the scenes for the show, too. So shout out to Mr. Wes.
See, me and Wes had a long Pydantic, not a joke, it's a real Python library, conversation last night. We should monetize that. We should, like, print T-shirts of me and Wes going back and forth on Python libraries. Yeah.
You know, I also have to say, of course, the silent partner behind the show, of course, big shout out to editor Drew as well. Drew's the man. Yeah. Always, always the MVP. I always appreciate Drew very much. So, by the way, just a little public service announcement. We are taking next week off because it is Christmas week.
And I guess that's one of the advantages of not really having sponsors is we can take a week off. So we're going to take Christmas week off. But like maniacs, we'll be back New Year's week. So we're only gone for for one week.
So a quarter radio bet here. Yeah. We're going to take one week off. Something major is going to happen.
Probably. It's it's unlikely because it's Christmas, but it could still happen.
Right.
Market crash or could even happen. Maybe it's outside the tech industry. Who knows?
I think Sam Altman, and this is my bet, Sam Altman and Elon go into the octagon to settle the differences.
As long as it's Christmas themed. We got to stay on brand there.
I mean, you and I, Chris, I hope you're not offended. You and I are kind of more portly fellows. We're bigger dudes. Yeah, yeah. So I think Elon is a brother in this as well. So maybe Elon's dressed like Santa Claus, and Sam Altman, let's be honest, that man is either the Heatmiser or an elf.
I think the other problem with Sam is he probably consumes child's blood, so he's probably got that young energy.
Well, elves can be vampires too, right? So he could be a dark elf for all our Baldur's Gate 3 players out there. Yeah. I'm sure I'm wrong on the lore. I think – and somebody please send me D&D. I think there is like vampire elves, right? It's a thing. I'm going to say yes. I mean now how he's going to make up that – what is it now? Like $17 million? Oh, yeah. There's a – oh, yeah.
I'm jumping ahead. Sorry. Go, go, go. I might – yeah, I might add something to that a bit. But I think before we get to current AI – Let's go back in time. You know, the current state and hype around AI, I think one of the first ways it materialized into our area of the industry was back in episode 439 of the Coder Radio program. And that is titled GitHub No Pilot.
where it's one of the first, I don't know if it's the first, but it's one of the first times we talked about GitHub Copilot. This is November 10th, 2021 is when this happened. You know, I don't know, man, I'll play this clip for you. I think maybe at first we missed the wider story about Copilot. In part, I think because it was just a feature in Visual Studio Code, it wasn't a standalone product.
But you also will probably recall when things like Copilot were announced, There was an immediate concern around this product.
And also the other big feature they're pushing in VS 2022, the kind of AI code assistant thing. I don't like GitHub CodePilot. I don't want that built into my editor. I have lots of concerns about potential license violations if they regurgitate GPL code.
It's just not the kind of thing I would rather just better IntelliSense via, you know, semantic, just like the normal semantic crap that all these code completion things have been using forever. Not AI scanning open GitHub repos. That's my soapbox. I know people are excited about it.
I mean, the big concern, if you recall, when Copilot first launched and the first versions, it was essentially reproducing GPL code almost line for line. And code laundering and whatnot was a concern. Code laundering, wow.
We haven't talked about that in a while. Well, I think they kind of fixed it, right? Yeah, yeah. And also, I think not using something like CodePilot at this point is actually putting you and, frankly, your clients or customers at a disadvantage. Ooh, I like this hot take. All right, so I wasn't going to do anything new today, but I guess I'll share something new.
My main use for Copilot and my $200 chat GPT sub is asking it for libraries that are the correct licenses that do things I need to do. Oh, interesting. Yeah. it is far more efficient than I could ever be searching GitHub. Huh. Yeah.
It's a very boring use, but it actually saves me a ton of time because usually it gives you the library, then it produces like a sample of like, if you want to integrate this with, you know, FastAPI, because I told it I use FastAPI.
It's fascinating going back and, you know, seeing the transition, this particular topic, has taken on the show. Because to hear you say this now, for a few weeks even, it was like a few weeks after this thing was out, we were fairly skeptical. So I thought maybe by this week, all of the hoopla around Copilot would have just simmered out, but it definitely has not.
And I didn't take this very seriously initially. Neither did I. I didn't even really bother trying it. I just thought, okay.
Yeah, I thought it was like a dumb toy. We did it. Honestly, it was one of our little, okay, we need content. Let's just throw it in.
Yeah, let's just talk about it. It's like it's weird. It's new. Like we weren't taking it very seriously, but it definitely has gotten a whole gamut. It's gotten a lot of praise. It's also gotten a lot of fire. And I mean, I really don't even know what to think of it at this point. I'm curious where you're at with it.
I sort of feel like this is either one of those things that I'm just going to completely be wrong about. I don't get it. I get the concept, but everybody that I follow and that follows me or whatever on Twitter is all pissed off about this. I don't understand why. It's a kind of bad idea that isn't working super well. And there may be some licensing issues. I don't know. I'm not an attorney.
I personally don't understand how there could be. But like, oh, it reproduced a stupid bad code. Well, yeah, it's just regurgitating code that's public available on GitHub. What idiot would copy pasta code from GitHub or Stack Overflow? Every developer ever is the right answer to that question. But we all pretend like we don't. So like, I don't know. Is it, I mean, could it be useful? Maybe.
I don't. Honestly, I did not install it. So this is one of those things like maybe I'm completely missing the boat. I mean, my judgment's been so good with Windows 8 and Metro.
Hilarious that he made that comparison. Now, that was our 2021 take. But by early 2022, episode 472, I think our tune had started to change. And I think it came down to one big factor. Microsoft released Copilot as its own standalone product, no longer only integrated individual studio code. GitHub Copilot has launched and it is $10 a month.
And I'm flying with my drunken robotic friend. You signed up. You actually signed up. I paid for a year. And this is the dumbest pair programming partner I've ever had.
You went right in. How did you go from this is horrible and going to get me in legal trouble to here's a year of subscription? How did you make that jump?
My stepdaughter is agency. She's 14. And she introduced me to the phrase YOLO. And you know what? If there's anything that. Our friend Alex, listening to all the Coder Radios, might learn. I seem to, without saying it, be very YOLO. And you know what? I wanted to see how good this Codepilot is. Let me tell you something. It's pretty f***ing bad. Really? Is it pretty? Is it like dumb?
Just like bad code? It's like the drunkest junior developer I've ever met. And let me tell you something. Having been a very drunk junior developer myself in the past, I don't understand what I paid for.
Well, they describe it as a coworker who might need a little review. That's what you paid for, according to Microsoft. So you're saying it's not actually like a coworker. I'm saying don't. Don't do it. The other problem I would have with it is not only is it not going to give you very good suggestions, but couldn't it be putting you into some kind of potential legal ambiguity?
No, because the only thing I'm using it for is a video game I'm running for my son. Well, I can't say video game. It's a Minecraft mod because my son has very sadly picked up the Pokemon problem, but he wasn't happy with just regular drugs. He had to go to fentanyl. And when I say fentanyl, I mean Minecraft. Yeah, boy, that is. That is the good stuff. And now he wants to code some mods.
Yep. That's always the direction it goes. Been there. Been there. Have fun in the .minecraft directory. You'll be in there for years. I think back to present day, we have forgotten how horrible these LLMs were at their very first iterations because the hype was so strong. Yeah. And now we're like in the agentification era and all of that.
That's bullshit too. But yeah, it's gotten better. You know what the worst part of that clip was for me? What? My son just told me that my Visual Studio code theme sucks because it's been three years, and he's exploring his own for his Python-powered Minecraft mods. You really need your own dedicated environment for that kind of thing. You know what I gave him? Carl will be happy. What's that?
He's got Miley Moore.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
That's a good kid machine. Sure, absolutely. Good kid machine. 16 gigs of RAM. It's a couple years old, but AMD processor. Makes it nice and easy. Remember, if you only care about Minecraft for some weird... Children, I don't get it. I didn't get it three years ago when that clip was recorded. I still don't get it. It's Legos. But you know what?
My kid is like... Okay, so... I'm taking a tangent here. We're solidly, right?
yeah you know you worry about your son on the internet right he's got a web browser um because i want to torture him i'm making him use firefox sure good good yeah it's also the default on uh oh also side side though uh the poor bastard is not on cosmic because this machine is that old and it's an lts so he's got another year to go
okay but i do you want to do the upgrades no no no no i look i'm like he's in firefox what's he doing he's on pi pi looking at different minecraft powered python packages that is rad wow My man, like he's going to be nine years old in a few months. I think he sleeps and when he snores, he says PIP3 install.
It's crazy. Got to watch out. Got to watch out. You know, speaking of the web, that's been a topic on the show forever. You know, when the show started, we were really kind of watching the beginning of the transformation of applications into the web. Web apps were not really a thing when the show started, and now they're just sort of the standard.
I mean, look at Slack and Office products and Discord and all these things that are electron-based. I've hated them from day one, Mike, and I still don't like them. I still, you know, a lot of my primary complaints, they're not as fast as native applications. You can have the interface just change on you randomly.
You know, an example of something that is a love-hate relationship for me is HedgeDoc. Fantastic real-time collaborative markdown editor. And sometimes I get logged out and I lose five minutes of work.
And the very fact that I have to authenticate before I can even use my application and often that authentication process also requires me to go fetch my phone like a good little boy so I can two-factor even though I don't give a crap.
None of that. All our hedge stocks are public anyway. Why? I know.
And it's like, I just want to open up my text editor and just start typing.
I hate it. Hedge stock is, I'm sure, a great product.
Yeah, it's a great application.
But it's the most annoying one I use because it constantly requires me to reauthenticate. I'm like, it's show notes. I don't care. Yeah. Yeah. Like I care, but it's not like there's going to be like, you know, private keys to it. Like there's nothing secret in the show notes.
You know, I'm literally going live and I'm trying to get signed into a web app that I need to use to do the live show. And because I'm recording, I don't bring my phone into the studio. So I leave it at my desk upstairs and I got it's almost once a day. I'm about to do something on the stream or something and I have to go fetch the phone. And then I have to say yes.
I just have to go say yes on the phone. I was never asked if I wanted to confirm a login for this service. And I just think there's so much friction. Plus, then if you're ever, you know, maybe you're not a baller like Mike. If you're like me and maybe you're spending the evening on LTE, it just multiplies all of the little bit of friction and problems that you have with these web apps.
And I was told, and you remember, I was told by the audience that these are going to get better. There's going to be things like WebAssembly. And here we are in 2024, Mike, and I'm not seeing it. I mean, these Electron apps, they're better than when they started, but they're still all the same complaints.
It's not substantially better. I mean, I totally disagree. Just, like, get better bandwidth, man. Oh, wrong answer?
Yeah, that's... All right. Coder.show slash membership. Go put your support on autopilot.
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It's a pretty big moment to get to 600, so I'll just take a second here to say, just in general, thanks for listening. Let's shift to something that was also kind of controversial on the show and something that I think maybe lost us some audience, actually. And maybe some of them come back. I don't know. And, you know, they're not doing much right now.
Oh, you may recall if you've been listening to the show for a while. A few years ago, we started talking about how the tech economy was drunk on the punch bowl of easy money. And we started talking about this early in 2022. And we would put little nuggets out there. In episode 467, we got an email from a listener. And they asked us to just kind of put it all together in one cohesive package.
And so I want to play this clip for you because I think it's fascinating looking back at this now. 2022, solidly a couple of years ago. It was kind of before things like inflation had really taken off, before we had like the tech layoff tracker website. This was actually before the Fed had even begun to hike rates.
Are we sure this halcyon time ever existed?
Like I'm tearing up over here. It sounds like an unbelievable time where money was free and people had jobs. And so for one last time, we go back now to May 25th, 2022, episode 467.
The great realignment is happening.
Yeah, Brandon writes in. Hi, Chris and Mike. So the economic realignment, as you guys have put it, seems to be starting. My company just laid off 20% of its workforce. I'm fine. But I'm starting to wonder more about the drivers behind the current market conditions. Would you consider doing a show that details what's happening and how it's affecting the tech industry?
I know this might be more of an unfiltered topic. I understand. I just was trying to better understand what's going on and how it's affecting me as a software engineer and our industry. Keep up the good work.
Brandon. Ooh, can I do this one? This is like my favorite. Yeah. So it's called a zero to no or low to zero interest rate drunk fed money. And if you read, I think it was Y Combinator put it out to their founders, their letter warning about the future. What happened is a lot of capital just went to, they basically had to find yield, right?
So they went to things like VC funds and all kinds of more speculative crap. Well, now the interest rates are going up. Those VCs are going to find it harder and harder to raise rounds, which means by extension, startups will find it harder, right? It's going to become more expensive to borrow all kinds of money.
But in tech specifically, you are going to see, and I'll stand by this one, a bloodbath of startups collapsing and laying folks off.
Yeah, tech's going to take this one hard. Harder than most, I think, actually. Yes. And that wasn't the case in the 2008 recession. And so what Mike is saying is that when the Fed dropped the interest rates, they made the price of money to the banks essentially free. And so the way money gets created in the U.S. economy – this is a broad statement. It's not the only way.
But one of the common ways money gets created in the U.S. economy is when banks loan it out. That money is created at that point. And so when the price for the banks is low, they're loaning out money like crazy. And the closer you are to that spigot, the more direct access you get to that cheap money. And then you need to put that somewhere.
Risky assets like crypto and tech stocks have been where this stuff has gone and VCs. That's where this money went because it was great returns. You look at the returns over 2020 and 2021. It's brilliant. But now all of that is crashing back. It's all resetting. The stock in all these companies is taking a hit. You've heard about the layoffs at Netflix.
Amazon just announced they're going to lay off 100,000 workers. They also just announced they have 10 million, I guess it's square feet, I'm not sure, of extra warehouse that they don't need anymore because the surge in buying during the pandemic has ended. And now they have a bunch of warehouse real estate they don't need.
I just backed out of an office space deal myself for that reason. I don't want the liability on the books because landlords are very prone to sue.
Yeah, and things are just in general getting more expensive for everyone. All these companies are affected by the price of fuel, diesel in particular. So that's also an issue. Even if your company doesn't deal and ship things directly, it still works with companies that do.
So there's a lot less money being spent on risky assets now, which means tech companies are going to have a lot less money flowing into them. Of course, we're not going to see Apple or Amazon or Microsoft or Google fail.
No, we're talking about like the app to put a mustache on your snake. Yes, that's a Silicon Valley reference.
And what is going on here is the Federal Reserve. I mean, I don't know S about F, but the Federal Reserve is on a mission to get inflation rates down. They're at a 40-year high right now. And the goal here, their mission, as they have stated publicly, is to get those rates down. They have a target of 2%.
And the official numbers are like around 8% right now, and the real inflation rate is probably even higher than that. They're never going to get it to 2%, but that's their goal.
Yeah, but what that does is it makes you and me and Chris and everybody else listening de facto poorer because even though we might still make – I don't know what you make, whatever you make. Let's call it $70,000. Your $70,000 doesn't go as far as it used to because things went up 10%, 15%.
They also kind of need the employment market to cool down because that cools down consumer demand. And that will also help with inflation. Right. When you reduce demand, it also helps ease inflation. Now, the thing that they're up against is there's also extremely high oil prices right now, which raises the base inflation rate. And there is also a very screwed up supply chain.
So it keeps things scarce. So even though they can reduce demand by cooling the market, They can't really compensate for the fact that the supply chain is still creating scarcity. So what we may end up into is a prolonged period of higher than they'd like inflation.
And one of the ways they're going to combat that is they're going to drive down the price of assets, which has a knock on effect in the tech industry in a big way. And they're going to do that until something breaks. Either the credit market's going to break or the oil market's going to break or something's going to break. And then once that thing breaks, they'll change course.
They'll probably either freeze the interest rates or promise to lower them in the future. And they'll probably turn the money printing back on, which also then will start flowing back into assets. And then the tech industry will begin to recover.
I think it would be remiss if we don't mention that there is one giant, literally donkey, who might try to encourage the Fed not to do what you described. Because historically, when the Fed does this, the party in power, this is all Americans, sorry, European folks, gets eviscerated at the polls. And we do have an election coming up.
And if the Fed does what Chris describes, which they probably have to, all these social issues that everybody's fighting about aren't going to matter. The Democrats are going to get eviscerated. Wow.
May 25th, 2022. Isn't that crazy?
I feel like we kind of nailed that.
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we're kind of on the other end. We didn't, I think at that point in time, see some of the AI hype. I think that kept some of the tech companies healthier, but we knew those big ones would be okay anyways. Here we are. Inflation's at 2.7 percent.
And maybe, you know, the election happened, right? Yeah. Yeah. The election happened.
The Democrats lost.
Got whacked. What did people vote on? Not on, you know, whatever social issues or identity stuff they voted on. Hey, food is kind of expensive. And that's bad.
You know, and I think somebody listening, they could have made some money. Yeah.
Let's move the show.
Why are we not rich, dude?
Why are we not getting 5% at least? Just a hedge fund to see. Come on.
It's interesting to see it kind of turn around, although it's not 100%. Things are still a little shaky, but it definitely seems like asset prices are back up. Bitcoin went through like an 18-month bear market or something. It went through whatever it was. It was like one of its longest bear market periods in history. Yep. Yep. The advertising market still hasn't rebounded.
So some areas haven't recovered, but some areas have, and helped by some of the AI hype as well.
Thank you.
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They build super fast and super efficiently. That's what they do. Mission Control is always around to chat about anything from apps to distros and open source. They're Coda Radio listeners. That's why they're sponsoring the show, and they'd love to hear from you. So go drop them a line. Go to mcntrl.com. Kick around a new idea. Maybe work with them for a new project, big or small.
Mission Control is where you want to go. mcntrl.com. And a big thank you to Mission Control for sponsoring this. Episode 600 of the Coder Radio Program. That's mcntrl.com. Mission Control. So now bringing us back to the present, seems like the AI features that are shipping in smartphones are not hitting the mark. And we have some data for Samsung and iPhone users.
Overall, this is a survey that was conducted by CellCell, so CellCells. In other words, you know, sell your cell phone. It shows that nearly half of iPhone users consider the AI features very or somewhat important when purchasing a smartphone, but they believe that the current AI features offer little value. They care more, iPhone users care more about onboard AI features than Samsung users.
47.6% of iPhone users surveyed. Versus 23.7% of Samsung users said it impacted their decision when choosing a new phone. 73% of the Apple users who have tried Apple intelligence say it adds, quote, little to no value to their experience. Although Samsung's, you know, Samsung's users say 87% of the Samsung users surveyed, 87%. See little to no value in Samsung's AI features.
I have so many questions. So, one, who are these users that you've sampled? Not you, personally.
Yeah, sell, sell.
Yeah. Okay, so.
They claim to be, you know, this is what they do as business intelligence for the cell phone industry. So this is sort of their market.
I kind of think it's mostly bull. I don't know. No? All right. So, like, I just upgraded my iPhone. Oh, you got the 16? Yeah.
uh no i have yeah because i destroyed my other one uh just in time for the warranty have you tried any of the apple intelligence stuff i sure have okay uh i love so i made the mistake of putting my personal cell phone number on my company's website which i think is still there because nobody listens to me that's what i tell them to do uh it better be down but i'm gonna check right after the show uh and what uh has been happening is apparently there's a bunch of uh
I mean, there's no nice way to say this. Just really sleazy salespeople that just farm phone numbers. So I've had to put my phone on do not disturb basically all day long and then call people back.
Mm-hmm.
apple intelligence has a mode where it kind of like it figures out like i've got a client you know named mike i've got another one named dan and it figures out if it's them let it through right because i always respond i always text back or i call or whatever um if it's dave i always you know it always lets it through because i did it figure this out on its own yeah just by my usage patterns
That's just a standard machine learning, though, really, isn't it? Well, that is not my most loved feature. The summarizing messages has been amazing.
See, this is the thing that seems to be the most polarizing. People either love it or they think it's laughable.
I love it. Because sometimes you get a text message... Now, I haven't... We don't have that many outages, but if... whatever, like an Alice instance goes out or something, I want to know that immediately, right? So I want to get it back up. But if it's just like, hey, give me a call when you get a chance, well, I'll call you when I can. So, yeah, I'm loving it. I don't know.
So when they were surveyed, it seemed like most people liked the writing tools. Then the second most liked thing was notification summaries and priority messages.
I hate the writing tools. See, this is my thing. The writing tools... These are like the most HR-driven fake emails or fake text messages back you could ever get. I would be embarrassed to send somebody something like that because it doesn't seem like it's from a person. Well, because it's not, right?
What they can be good at is shortening.
True.
Or you could highlight it and say, hey, make this sound a little more professional or nicer because I was grumpy when I wrote this. They can sometimes do that.
What if you're writing to Rust developers and you make this 100 times meaner?
Yeah, there you go.
What I thought was – Throw in some of your mama jokes while you're at it.
Some of the things that I think are neat is like the stuff you can do in photos where you can take a photo bomber out of the back of a picture or clean something up and – or you can take a – you can add – swap – like the AI photo editing stuff has been some of the more compelling features ever. For me, and yet it's like almost bottom of the list for the users that were surveyed.
Okay. But the fact that you keep adding me into photos where I assassinate Kennedy from the grassy knoll. Has been awesome. Problematic for me. Okay.
All right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe if I hadn't sent them to everybody.
Yeah. Why is the crooked media team camping out in my front lawn right now being like truth for JFK?
Oh, I DM'd RFK Jr. and sent him the photos, and I think he made a few calls.
All right, you know what? I'm not throwing shade at RFK Jr. I listened to eight hours of RFK Jr. about Red 40 and Yellow No. 5, and I'm throwing a bunch of shit at that.
There you go. All right, well, boost it and tell me where you find yourself using these AI tools, be it ChatGipity or Gemini or... Claude's keys or llama or whatever it is.
Wait, wait, Chad Jippity? You're going to just get away with that? Chad Jippity. Chad Jippity. You know what, Sam? You should trademark that right now.
In my opinion, the real heavyweight fight right now is between custom GPTs and Claude. Oh, my God. You're such a Claude stan. Oh, it's good. It's good. But custom GPTs are great. So I'm on the custom GPT bandwagon right now over at OpenAI. My question to you, though, audience, Boost and Intellis, celebrate 600 with a boost and tell us, what are you using these tools for?
The average users, cell phone users, it was writing tools, helping them write better emails. And then, of course, it was notification summary. I'm a weirdo. Like, I'll tell you what I used it for. So I made a custom GPT. for the Coder Radio RSS feed. Did you really? I did. It's really easy to do. Wow, okay.
So I downloaded the RSS feed, you know, it's just an XML file, and I go in to create a custom GPT, and I explain what I'm trying to do, and then I'm going to upload an XML file which represents an RSS feed for a podcast, and then I'm going to ask you questions. And so that's how I found our quotes, is I asked it some of the episodes where we talked about this,
And then I got that information from the RSS feed, and Podverse has a fantastic web player. So I go over to Podverse and I can search up the Coder Radio program and it shows all the chapters. And I just go right to the chapter. Boom.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Then how do people know that we're really us and not AI replicants?
Isn't that what you would make Notebook LM say? Wouldn't you just put this in the script? I think you would.
Well, I definitely wouldn't put that we went to System76 and Carl Rachel murdered us personally. Accusing him of murder right now. and used our blood to cool his new Thaleo Astra. This is not an ad. I just, you know, I do weep for our former carbon-based brothers. This is Mike AI, and that's Chris AI. And again, Carl Richel murdered us for his wonderful ARM64-powered Astra Thaleo desktop.
That little slip in my speech was because he's trying to hack me right now. It could be worth it. It could be worth it. It's a pretty fast machine, just saying. Again, Carl, if you want to pay us for ads, you know, stop killing us.
That's how you know the market's turned around, really.
Somebody gave us money.
I mean, God bless Mission Control, but they're just listeners of the show.
I think they should conquer not just Mission Control. Mission Control should conquer Operation Control, System Control. You got any other controls we could knock them out? Sure. Let's do it.
Speaking of control, let's do some boosts. Where people control their own destinies. And we got some nice episode 600 boosts, so this will be fun. And you know what? Look who's there at the top of the list there. It's our old buddy, our podcast with 360,000 sad fights. Jesus. All right. Thank you, our podcast. He writes a massive congratulations on episode 600.
Without Coder Radio, there's simply no way I could fill my appetite for development rants. Hello, Swift. No one else cuts through the tech press. and the AI fluff like you guys. Here's to 600 more.
So, Eric, I like your boost. Thank you. I just have, like, one problem with it. Why you got to mention Swift? We don't talk about that. He earned it. He earned it. He paid to make me sad.
Thank you, our podcast. It is good to hear from you. Our next booster is User45380136. You can't decide your They sent in 45,000 sets. I hoard that which your kind covet. Thank you. And they write a very Merry Christmas and a happy episode 600 to my two favorite cranky senior devs. Cranky? Yeah. A toast to the top to the two of you. Thanks for keeping me company on my commute this year.
I'm a new long form and the new long form members feed is awesome. Thank you, Chris, for setting that up. Oh, cheers. You're welcome. Glad you're liking it. Thanks for the feedback. You know what's more awesome? Robes. Oh my gosh.
Yes. You think I was going to let you get away with episode 600 and not mention robes?
You know, I had to like carefully avoid robe mentions when I was going through the back catalog because it just triggers me.
You knew I was going to do it. You should have just... Fair enough. I got to tell you something. I still have my OG, the first run Coder Radio robe, and that is so comfortable. We need more robes. Yeah. Boost in if you want more robes and to help me harass Chris. Also, the Coder Radio tumbler, it doesn't matter how much Hendrix you have in it.
You knock that over on your MacBook Pro, you don't destroy the computer. Yeah.
I mean, I'm assuming you're speaking with a bit of authority here.
I believe I'm the acknowledged expert.
Product tester. Yeah, product tester.
Tim Cook called me. He's like, I sent you a case of gin and three new MacBooks. You got to test them out for durability. I'm like, I got my Coder Radio Tumblr. They're not going to get a drop.
Old Uncle Cook's working hard to get in good with everybody in Florida, isn't he? Well, we were at Mar-a-Lago.
Oh, no, no, no. So Nostromo writes in. Yeah, 20,000 sats. You're doing a good job.
He says, I love the new members stream. I'm getting further insight to the show's topic. It really completes the podcast experience. Thank you, Nostoramo. Yeah, so the idea in the members pre-stream is I just try to play current event clips that might add a little bit more color or context to some of the things that Mike and I mentioned in the show.
This is the first time I'm hearing about it, so... Yay!
I've mentioned it for like the last... Five episodes?
Yeah, but I'm usually playing Civ 6 with Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney.
And then I think last episode you said it's the first time you're hearing about it.
Yeah, I'm a little cray-cray. Or I am. I don't know. It's one of us. And I really don't know which one. Koss Peeling comes in with 2,100 sats. The traders love the vol. No message, just sending us some value. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Koss. Nice to hear from you. DG at PTC comes in with a Jar Jar boost. That's 5,000 sats. Use a boost.
If Chad GPT were really Skynet, then don't you think it would have helped Altman figure out which party was going to win in November?
Yeah, I got to tell you, it's going to be tough four years for Sammy boy there, I think. Yeah, he did just kick in a million bucks to Trump's inauguration fund. Whoa, whoa, hang on. Of course. Listen, the Big Macs and chicken nuggets on Trump's plane are frankly the best. Well, and they don't come free. Somebody's got to pay for it. Even RFK Jr. is eating them now.
You got to get along with the boss, you know.
This is a tasty burger.
You got it. Thank you very much for the boost, DG. It's nice to hear from you. And you're right. Mr. Dominic was able to figure it out in 2022.
Well, when you're as psychotic as me, I can see sound.
Lego feet comes in with 10,000 sats. Oh my God, this drawer is filled with Froot Loops. Cleaning out the sats from my old phone. Now that I'm living the graphing, I'm sorry, giraffe-ing OS lifestyle. I really like it. The only difficulty is MS Intune for work.
It doesn't seem to work. Well, do I have a solution for you? Go ahead and write sales at themadbotter.com or, you know, just go to alice.dev. Also, Chris suppressed. He censored you. You sent in two notes. Oh, I did? Oh, you're right. Oh, God. Oh, I missed that.
Yeah, you missed it, mate.
You're supposed to. Go ahead. Go on, let's go. Suck on some Jar Jar Sats. Notice which one he misses. I did.
I legitimately missed that.
Today's Coder Radio is brought to you by the little bulls**t. All right, I sucked on those sats.
Also, you know, let us know how it goes with MS Intune. There's got to be a way. There's got to be. Yeah, the way is get something else, but yeah. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. User 37 came in with 6,000 sats. Long-time listener since 2016. First-time booster. Hey-o! Nice. Well done. So user 37, go in Fountain and set up a profile and let us know who you are.
It's great to hear from a long-timer, though, and thanks for taking the arduous trek to get those boosts back.
Real-world question, Chris, on the boosts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do they have to use Fountain to set the profile? If they're using Fountain to boost. Okay, but what if, can they do it on the web and have a profile name instead of like user three, seven, whatever?
Yes, they still have to create an account at Fountain and set up a profile name, but you can boost from Fountain's website. Or, you know, you can use other apps. Fountain just makes it the easiest. That's why it's so popular. But there's other apps. It's an open standard and there's, you know, podcastapps.com. There's like a dozen over there. There you go.
So whoever emailed me that, there's your answer. There you go. I recommend Mountain Fountain just because they do make it so straightforward. But if you are a self-hosted kind of maniac type person, there are lots of options where you could do it fully self-hosted too. Podcastapps.com for that. And great. Thank you very much. And great boost. Thank you for setting up the boosting.
Hope to hear from you soon. Marshall Miller comes in with 9,000. One sats. It's over 9,000. You guys had a question about how long the episode should be. I'd shoot for an hour. I'm a CS professor at community college, and I recommend the show to all my students. Well, that's great.
Keeps them up to date on what is happening in a variety of languages and gets them in the habit of paying attention to the industry as a whole. Thanks for all you do. Well, shout out to the students out there.
I love that. Marshall, god damn.
That's great. That's great. Kid show now.
I think you should change your username, though, to TheCoderProf. That would be good. Or, ready? GunganProf. CodeProf? Something Jar Jar related. GunganCodeProf? That's very long, though.
You know the SEO is going to be horrible. Yeah. And they boosted from the Podcast Index. So there you go. They didn't use Fountain. They sent it from the PodcastIndex.org. Thank you for the boost. Mr. Borkander comes in with 10,000 sets. Borkander, huh? All right. This is the way. This is the way. He says, Bork. Sorry. I actually meant boost. Boost. That's a quality boost. Thank you, Borkander.
I appreciate that. Oh, and they actually sent in another 5,000 sets. Look at you being super generous. That's not possible. Nothing can do that. You can send two boosts. Thank you, guys. Thank you. And our last one this week comes in from User34, who sends in 10,000 sets.
Life phones. You tiny little life phones. You precious little life phones.
Where are you? I never play that one. I just love that one. User 34 says, great show. What's that? Thank you. That's Data from Star Trek Generations. No. Really? Yeah, he's feeling real good. He's got the emotion chip. Oh, wow. His buddy's safe. He's feeling good. No spoilers. No spoilers.
Yeah. Oh, wait. Never mind. No spoilers. Okay. Yeah.
Coming back to you now?
Yeah.
Thank you, User34, if you want to set your profile name. By the way, I have mentioned to the Fountain folks that we are getting a lot of people that boost in and they haven't set their profile name. So I think that workflow has just gotten a little bit of a refresh. Oh, nice.
And the boost UI has just gotten a little bit of a refresh to make it quicker and a little bit easier to understand what you're sending and how much and all of that. So it's just been streamlined over there. They just have that new release come out. So it's quite the pleasant experience. We're getting better every month, really. Thank you, everybody who supported episode 600.
And of course, thank you to our members. We had 25 of you stream sats as you listened. So we stacked 20,604 sats with your help. Thank you, streamers over there. When you combine that with all of you that boosted in, well, we had a very healthy, especially thanks to our podcast, Mr. Eric. We had a very healthy 502,705 sats. Big thank you to our ballers. Cheers, guys.
We really made that a special one. We appreciate you very much. You now go down in history as our supporters for episode 600 of the Coder Radio Podcast. If you'd like to get started, I have links in the show notes.
The top two links are really all you need to get started to boost in, or you can put your support on autopilot and get the new extended version of the show at coder.show slash membership. Before we run, I wanted to mention something that I've just been looking for an excuse to tell the audience about because it's kind of adorable.
Microsoft has a Python tool that converts all kinds of Microsoft Office documents into clean, readable markdown. It's the Mark It Down library. There's also a nice website built around this already. And it presently supports PDF files, PowerPoints, docx files, xlx files, images, including like their XF data.
So you can drop an image and it'll mark down up their XF metadata and it can try to OCR the text. It can also try to do the same for audio files. So if there's metadata in the audio file and it will try to transcribe it and then make markdown of it.
It'll do the same for HTML with special handling around Wikipedia and other various text-based formats you can drop in there, CSV, JSON, XML, and it generates markdown. And if you have a bunch of files, you can put them in a zip file. You can upload the zip file and it will iterate over the contents and convert each file in the zip file to markdown. Clean, nice, readable markdown.
Isn't this neat? Python tool built by Microsoft. Yeah. I know. I sent it to you. Oh, you did?
It was me, you jackass. I don't remember. Oh, yeah. Chris is like, I've been using this forever. I love it. I love it. You see, the boss takes over. See what happens? Yeah.
This is my idea, and I get the credit.
The real power of this, although he's right that there is a website you could just do that with...
is it's just a pip package right or poetry if you prefer yes yeah yeah you can run this locally so if you don't want to share your documents with some weird third party or cloud vendor or hell microsoft themselves you run this baby on your local computer your own server your hell i i shouldn't say this i'm running on a bunch of raspberry pis
Sure. Right. Why not? What a great little thing just to have them sit there and... Yeah.
I will dunk on it a little. So the OCR on images is pretty... Not so good? Yeah. It's not great. I think we have a lot of dark matter devs, right? A lot of things end up as Excel files. Yeah. It's just... God damn it.
And I get sent by the external world. I get sent a lot of Excel files, Word files, PDFs. And for long-term storage, I think I'd prefer to store them in Markdown than the actual Word document.
Well, Markdown's smaller, and it's – so this library doesn't do it, and I might be giving away a little bit of secret sauce I'm doing for somebody. But Markdown is effectively a universal data format. So you can go back from Markdown to, let's say, Excel or let's say a structured database or, you know, if you really want to get fancy presentation, write a PowerPoint presentation.
I kind of feel like a Markdown hipster all of a sudden because we've been using Markdown for a decade. Or whatever. Right. It's been around since basically recently. I mean, I can't even even since we've been using Google Docs, we were writing Google Docs in Markdown. Yeah. I think that's the beginning of the show. I don't know if it's been around. It's been around almost that long. Crazy.
I know.
Remember, I used to use the Google bullet notes and you'd be like.
I mean, it's just wild. Wild as the Markdown really just become this universal standard all over.
Well, it's an open. I mean, kidding aside, it's an open data format that anybody can use and there's no licensing encumbrance. So.
Yeah, and it sounded like – I don't know if I was seeing this on Weapon X or what, but one of the folks at Microsoft was saying we want to make it crazy easy for people to extract information from Office documents and feed it into an LLM. So there's always an AI angle on this stuff too, of course.
And Scott Guthrie is ready to help you. I don't even know if Scott Guthrie actually does the stuff at Microsoft right now.
So where should we send the good folks? And remind them that we're taking next week off, so don't panic when you don't see an episode. So between now and next time we get together, where should they go?
You could go to alice.dev or, because it's the holidays, why don't you enjoy some Babylon 5? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Is there any particular Babylon 5 episode?
Well, I mean, obviously, you got to go with the one with Mr. Freeze. I think it's season two, episode three, if I'm not mistaken. It's called the Shadow War. Mr. Freeze, who is a, what do they call them? Oh my God, Shadow Mage, something like that, explains to the humans that like, yeah, we're all going to die soon. Because aliens. Yeah. Also, never trust a Centauri.
I'm going to say, you know, we made a Star Trek Generations mention earlier. That's kind of a Christmas Star Trek episode.
It is.
It is.
Yeah.
Yeah. Picard's a whole Nexus experience. So no spoilers. But, you know, if you want to watch a little Christmas Star Trek movie, Star Trek Generations could be one for the holidays.
I mean, I'm pretty sure Captain Picard doesn't feel it was a great holiday experience. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
You're probably right. All right, well, thank you, Mr. Dominic, for all of the hard work.
Thank you.
Congratulations on 600 episodes, and thank you to everybody listening who's slugged it out with us for a while or just joined recently.
And most importantly, thank Drew for making me sound less crazy.
Yeah, that's true for all of us. All right, well, you can find me, Chris Elias, on Weapon X. The show is at Coder Radio Show. Links to some of the stuff we talked about today are, well, available at coder.show slash 600, like a lot of stuff is. What? Coder.show. Yeah, it's got a website over there with links and stuff like, you know, chat rooms, live streams, all that kind of stuff. RSS feeds.
You can also check jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar if you want to join us live or just get subscribed to the RSS feed and get episodes as they're published. We're always grateful for everyone out there listening. It's been a ton of fun to do 600 episodes. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Coder Radio. And we'll see you back here in two weeks. Happy holidays.
Ho, ho, ho.