168: It's Cool to Be Cool

00:00SPEAKER- So Brad, last week when chat was on,

00:02SPEAKERhe said something that kind of stuck with me.

00:04SPEAKER- Well, that could be a lot of things, but sure.

00:06SPEAKER- He said, you guys with your NASA's blah, blah, blah,

00:11SPEAKERfreaks, I don't know.

00:12SPEAKER- Freaks, I can tell you freaks was the operative word used.

00:16SPEAKER- So right now, today, January 20th, 2023,

00:20SPEAKERif you go to the Steam page for the anacrusis,

00:24SPEAKERby the way, price dropped last week, it's 20 bucks now,

00:26SPEAKERyou can get it around Xbox, Steam, wherever, 20 bucks.

00:29SPEAKER- Is that a permanent?

00:30SPEAKER- 20 bucks, permanent price drop.

00:31SPEAKERWell, I don't know about permanent,

00:33SPEAKERlike we might go back up when we get out of early access,

00:34SPEAKERbut that's, yeah, we did a poll and the people were like,

00:38SPEAKERhey, if the game was 20 bucks,

00:39SPEAKERI'd recommend it to my friends, they buy it, whatever.

00:42SPEAKERSo we're gonna try it and see, listen to the people.

00:44SPEAKERI'm not gonna say the thing that the other guy says.

00:46SPEAKERAnyway, the point is, at the top of that,

00:49SPEAKERyou'll see a thing that says,

00:50SPEAKERhey, watch the developer stream.

00:52SPEAKERDo you know where that's running from right now?

00:53SPEAKER- Where is that running from right now?

00:54SPEAKER- It's running from a Docker container

00:57SPEAKERthat's running FFmpeg on my NAS, Chet.

01:00SPEAKER- What?

01:01SPEAKER- On my NAS.

01:02SPEAKER- I'm just gonna pull the curtain back here

01:04SPEAKERin the show notes.

01:06SPEAKERBullet point number one, cold open, suck it, Chet.

01:13SPEAKERHey, you know what?

01:14SPEAKERTurns out having a box sitting around with compute in it

01:16SPEAKERthat is on 24/7 and connected to the internet,

01:18SPEAKERyou can do some fun stuff with it.

01:20SPEAKERAnd when you have that sitting there,

01:22SPEAKERyou have ideas for more fun stuff to do.

01:24SPEAKERAnd sometimes those ideas benefit your workplace.

01:27SPEAKER- Yeah, well, look, I'm gonna go and tell you.

01:29SPEAKERIt's like all you have is a hammer, everything's a nail.

01:33SPEAKER- That's for sure.

01:34SPEAKER- When you have it always on computer,

01:36SPEAKERthere's almost always something cool

01:37SPEAKERyou can come up to do with it.

01:38SPEAKER- We talked about it.

01:39SPEAKERWe talked about it three years ago.

01:40SPEAKEROh my God, almost three years ago now.

01:42SPEAKERLike when we went to work from home out of nowhere,

01:45SPEAKERlike I immediately started finding stuff for my NAS

01:48SPEAKERto do that benefited work in all kinds of ways

01:51SPEAKERin terms of streaming and storage.

01:52SPEAKERAnd yeah, it's nice to have a tool, B-Link.

01:55SPEAKER- Yeah.

01:56SPEAKER- B-Link just doing it for you.

01:58SPEAKER- Look, I gotta talk about my B-Link

02:00SPEAKER'cause the B-Link is some hot stuff.

02:02SPEAKER- Your off-brand NUC.

02:03SPEAKER- Look, it was really, it was way, NUCs are expensive now.

02:06SPEAKER- NUCs are very expensive, you're not wrong.

02:07SPEAKERThey are hundreds of dollars.

02:09SPEAKER- Yeah, and like, well,

02:11SPEAKERbut I mean, we're gonna talk about it in the episode.

02:12SPEAKERWe're gonna talk about other stuff too.

02:13SPEAKERSo just pre-AMBL for the people who are scared

02:17SPEAKERthat we're talking about server stuff in the cold open.

02:19SPEAKER- That's at the end.

02:20SPEAKER- Yeah, we're doing a grab bag today.

02:22SPEAKERThere's, we had like five topics

02:24SPEAKERthat we thought were probably worth talking about

02:25SPEAKERand we cut it down to three or maybe four

02:27SPEAKERif you want to count Suck It, Chet as a topic.

02:30SPEAKERAnd I think we have a good show for you today.

02:35SPEAKER- Well, now we have to prove it.

02:36SPEAKER- Oh no.

02:37SPEAKER(upbeat music)

02:52SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

03:05SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."

03:08SPEAKERI'm Will.

03:08SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

03:09SPEAKER- Yeah, but the always on,

03:11SPEAKERI think we called it getting nasty back in the day.

03:14SPEAKER- Mm-hmm, I think that's right.

03:16SPEAKER- I believe that was our moniker

03:17SPEAKERfor finding something to do with an always on computer

03:20SPEAKERthat happened to be in your house.

03:21SPEAKER- I believe, I believe that was the original name

03:24SPEAKERof the kind of networking channel on the Discord.

03:27SPEAKER- Yes.

03:28SPEAKER- Before I changed it to just network things,

03:30SPEAKERwhich I thought was maybe a little more G rated.

03:33SPEAKER- I think people find it easier now

03:35SPEAKERand it's less likely to attract shit posters, so.

03:38SPEAKERAnyway, a lot of stuff,

03:40SPEAKERlike it was kind of a bonkers news week this week.

03:43SPEAKER- Yeah, and not in a great way in most cases.

03:46SPEAKERIn fact, in just about all cases,

03:48SPEAKERwas there a single good piece of news?

03:52SPEAKERI mean, there's been some nice space stuff,

03:54SPEAKERthere's been some other, like there's been a,

03:57SPEAKERlook, we're gonna talk about a couple of bad news stories.

04:01SPEAKER- Yeah.

04:02SPEAKER- Maybe with a little bit of a silver lining on one of them.

04:04SPEAKER- Okay, all right, I look forward to hearing what that is.

04:07SPEAKER- There's gonna be some schadenfreude,

04:09SPEAKERand then we're gonna talk about my Beelink.

04:11SPEAKERI bought a little Beelink server machine

04:13SPEAKERthat I'm using as a, it's like 150,

04:16SPEAKERI think I paid 200 bucks for it

04:18SPEAKER'cause I bought the slightly upgraded version.

04:20SPEAKERBut it's a little compute cube

04:23SPEAKERthat has a Celeron N5-105 in it,

04:26SPEAKERand 16 gigs of RAM, and a 500 gig SSD.

04:30SPEAKERAnd I paid 200 bucks for it,

04:31SPEAKERand I screwed it onto the wall of my garage.

04:33SPEAKER- Now you're home labbing.

04:35SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, and I think I'm gonna put a little box

04:38SPEAKERaround it with a Sharpie that says server.

04:41SPEAKER- That would be cool.

04:42SPEAKERI don't think I like the term home lab.

04:45SPEAKERI'm not sure, I can't decide,

04:46SPEAKERbut every time I say it or see it, I'm not sure.

04:50SPEAKER- I associate it with Reddit in a way

04:52SPEAKERthat I associate some things that I find unpleasant,

04:54SPEAKERlike the idea of the PC master race,

04:57SPEAKERwhich is a fucking terrible phrase.

04:59SPEAKER- Well, at least to be fair,

05:00SPEAKERlike the term home lab is not fraught

05:02SPEAKERin the same like racialized kind of way.

05:05SPEAKERIt's more just a little like grading in a non-specific way

05:08SPEAKERthat I can't quite define.

05:10SPEAKER- Yeah, and it's like, I like the idea,

05:13SPEAKERlike conceptually, I'm gonna say,

05:16SPEAKERI like the idea of an, hold on, Brad,

05:19SPEAKERwas that a Seaman Pro Club mug?

05:21SPEAKER- Whoa, do you wanna try pronouncing that again?

05:24SPEAKER- Brad, was that a Seaman Pro Shop mug?

05:28SPEAKERThat is pretty incredible.

05:29SPEAKER- Yes, that is a Seaman Pro Shops coffee mug, yes.

05:33SPEAKER- That is exquisite.

05:34SPEAKERAnyway, I think it's because of the Reddit association.

05:39SPEAKER- That's all it is, and like that's maybe not fair,

05:42SPEAKERor maybe that's-

05:42SPEAKER- No, 'cause that home lab subreddit

05:44SPEAKERis a fine community of people, like from what I can tell.

05:47SPEAKER- Honestly, there's just some vague recollection

05:51SPEAKERof like forum SIGs 20 years ago with people posting

05:54SPEAKERlike 20 line breakdowns of their gaming rig or something.

05:57SPEAKERYou know what I mean?

05:58SPEAKERIt's like that hot rod culture of like, I don't know,

06:01SPEAKERlike I like the activity.

06:03SPEAKERI don't know that some of the fervor around it is warranted.

06:07SPEAKER- It's kind of like the everyday carry thing,

06:09SPEAKERwhich went from being about like having a nice flashlight

06:11SPEAKERand maybe a multi-tool in your pocket

06:13SPEAKERto like what gun are you carrying now?

06:16SPEAKERAnd like it got kind of weirdly extreme.

06:19SPEAKER- It's one of those things where the means become the end.

06:21SPEAKERYou know, it's no longer like,

06:22SPEAKERhey, I'm building this like home network stuff

06:24SPEAKERto do things with.

06:25SPEAKERIt's like, I just need to make this thing

06:27SPEAKERas big and bad-ass as I can.

06:30SPEAKER- You know, I'm basically just running

06:31SPEAKERa small company's IT department in my garage for no reason,

06:35SPEAKERother than because it's available to me.

06:37SPEAKERAnd I have like, once you have a rack,

06:39SPEAKERyou're gonna fill it, I think is the lesson of the home lab.

06:42SPEAKER- Yeah, and then to be clear, do what makes you happy.

06:44SPEAKERYou know, like have fun with it.

06:45SPEAKER- I certainly do.

06:46SPEAKERI don't know.

06:47SPEAKERThere's something, it's not the doing it,

06:49SPEAKERit's the kind of like, I don't know,

06:51SPEAKERthe kind of cheesy subculture around it is what,

06:55SPEAKERokay, nevermind.

06:56SPEAKER- You know what we're doing?

06:57SPEAKERWe're doing the thing that Chet did to us last week.

06:58SPEAKERWe're gatekeeping, Brad.

06:59SPEAKER- I'm not here to judge.

07:00SPEAKER- We're kink shaming.

07:01SPEAKER- Well, it's gatekeeping.

07:03SPEAKERThey're fine to do it.

07:04SPEAKERJust like, hey, maybe don't be,

07:06SPEAKERto be a certain way when you talk about it, which is cool.

07:08SPEAKER- Keep it to yourself, man.

07:10SPEAKER- It's cool to be cool.

07:11SPEAKER- Yeah.

07:13SPEAKERSo, okay, first news item, this one sucks.

07:15SPEAKERThere's no silver lining here.

07:16SPEAKER- Yeah.

07:17SPEAKER- There were a ton of layoffs this week,

07:21SPEAKERincluding at, Microsoft laid off 10,000 people,

07:25SPEAKERwhich is an incredible number of people,

07:28SPEAKERat game studios, at main Microsoft campus,

07:31SPEAKERaround the world.

07:32SPEAKER- Yeah.

07:33SPEAKER- Amazon laid off a ton of people.

07:34SPEAKER- I think Amazon was more.

07:35SPEAKERI think, wasn't Amazon like 18,000?

07:37SPEAKER- I didn't, I thought it was eight,

07:39SPEAKERbut I keep it wrong.

07:40SPEAKER- No, Amazon is 18,000 positions, which is absolute.

07:44SPEAKER- Google announced layoffs this morning,

07:46SPEAKERas we were getting ready to record.

07:47SPEAKERI don't have the details on that one yet.

07:49SPEAKER- I think they're also in five figures.

07:55SPEAKER12,000, yeah, geez.

07:57SPEAKER- I mean, that is, there's very little reason

08:01SPEAKERto do this right now, given the amount of money

08:03SPEAKERthat these companies are still making.

08:05SPEAKERIt seems like it's literally just, hey, Facebook laid off

08:10SPEAKERa bunch of people and Twitter laid off a bunch of people,

08:11SPEAKERand a bunch of other people laid off a bunch of people,

08:13SPEAKERand shareholders are going, hey, why aren't we laying off

08:15SPEAKERa bunch of people?

08:16SPEAKERWe should lay off people too, everybody's laying off people.

08:19SPEAKERAnd it sucks, it's a bad policy.

08:23SPEAKER- Yeah, condolences, I mean, you know, smaller scale

08:25SPEAKERin terms of numbers, layoffs hit people we know

08:28SPEAKERin the games media.

08:28SPEAKER- Yeah, well, and Riot, Giant Bomb, all over the place.

08:33SPEAKER- So condolences to everyone who has lost their job

08:36SPEAKERand their healthcare, it sucks a lot.

08:38SPEAKERIt's a shit start to the year.

08:41SPEAKERYesterday on an Ex-Lander stream,

08:42SPEAKERI declared this shit January and I'm sticking to it.

08:45SPEAKER- I think that's probably, well, so if you know jobs,

08:49SPEAKERpost them, help people if you can.

08:50SPEAKER- Yes, yes, for sure.

08:52SPEAKER- That's, and that goes for folks in the Discord too.

08:54SPEAKERWe have a job hunting channel that has,

08:58SPEAKERit's gotten a lot of people jobs over the last few years.

09:00SPEAKER- Yeah, it's cool, or even just advice, you know,

09:02SPEAKERlike just increasing your odds,

09:04SPEAKEReven if you don't have a direct lead or whatever.

09:07SPEAKER- If we have people in there who are good at negotiating

09:09SPEAKERpay raises and salaries and stuff like that,

09:11SPEAKERthen they can, they've been very generous with their time.

09:13SPEAKER- Yeah, or, you know, even just stuff like, you know,

09:15SPEAKERgiving people sample interview questions, you know,

09:17SPEAKERpeople who do interviews as part of their job

09:20SPEAKERcan help people who are about to take interviews.

09:22SPEAKER- Yeah.

09:23SPEAKER- Things like that.

09:24SPEAKERI'm sure you've encountered this,

09:26SPEAKERthe narrative about all these layoffs

09:28SPEAKERgenerally has been like, oh,

09:30SPEAKERwe hired way too much during the pandemic

09:32SPEAKERand then growth didn't reflect that headcount increase.

09:36SPEAKERLike that's what, that seems to be the line

09:38SPEAKERfor most places.

09:40SPEAKER- I mean, here's the thing, everybody is seeing

09:42SPEAKERa contraction in revenue as people stay home.

09:45SPEAKERLike the companies that were making a bunch of money,

09:46SPEAKERlike Microsoft and Sony, and I mean,

09:50SPEAKERI actually don't think Sony's done layoffs yet,

09:51SPEAKERbut like the game industry saw a massive explosion

09:56SPEAKERin profit in 2020 because everybody was staying home, right?

10:01SPEAKERThe thing is we're still above the 2020 numbers

10:03SPEAKERwhen people started hiring up.

10:05SPEAKERSo, you know, this is just taking a little bit

10:08SPEAKERof a trim off the top and saving the people at the top

10:13SPEAKERthat get the big paychecks a little bit more money.

10:16SPEAKER- Yeah, we might still be above the 2020 numbers,

10:19SPEAKERbut are we enough above them to keep these employees

10:22SPEAKERasks the executive?

10:24SPEAKER- Well, I think that there's a, and this is gonna,

10:27SPEAKERit's funny, so we're gonna talk about Apple here for a sec.

10:31SPEAKERBig shout out to Tim Cook for cutting his pay.

10:34SPEAKERI mean, part of it was a response to last year.

10:36SPEAKERThey overpaid him and shareholders

10:38SPEAKERwere not thrilled with that.

10:40SPEAKER- Yeah, and you know, I mean,

10:41SPEAKERwe should point out like post-pay cut,

10:44SPEAKERI think he's still taking home like $50 million this year.

10:48SPEAKER- Tim Cook's gonna be fine, Brad.

10:49SPEAKERDon't, you don't have to worry about him.

10:50SPEAKER- Yeah, sure, so I mean, like, you know,

10:51SPEAKERcertainly it's easy to sneer at this for some people,

10:54SPEAKERbut like it is, you know, like Iwata did that at Nintendo

10:58SPEAKERyears and years ago when they underperformed and like,

11:00SPEAKERyou know, whether or not he is still like

11:03SPEAKERthe wildly compensated, it's still a lot more

11:06SPEAKERthan most other CEOs are doing.

11:08SPEAKER- Well, he's less, he is less compensated than another,

11:14SPEAKERthan CEOs at comparable sized companies are.

11:16SPEAKERLike when you're talking about the largest company

11:18SPEAKERin the world or the third largest company in the world

11:20SPEAKERby market cap, he is much, much less compensated

11:24SPEAKERthan those folks.

11:25SPEAKERNow, like, is it still right that he makes $49 million

11:30SPEAKERand somebody who's assembling phones in a factory

11:31SPEAKERis making $2 an hour?

11:33SPEAKERNo, fuck that, that's terrible.

11:35SPEAKERBut at least they're not laying off tens of thousands

11:38SPEAKERof people and he's not taking a pay cut at the same time.

11:42SPEAKER- Yeah, do they commit to no layoffs?

11:44SPEAKER- No, of course not, nobody ever commits

11:46SPEAKERto no layoffs, Brad.

11:47SPEAKER- Okay, sure.

11:49SPEAKER- The thing, the other thing that I think

11:52SPEAKERthis is all highlighting is so much of how a company

11:57SPEAKERis doing in the eyes of Wall Street and Stark Market

11:59SPEAKERand analysts and all that stuff has to do with the growth.

12:03SPEAKERAnd we're reaching a point with Apple and Google

12:07SPEAKERin terms of smartphone share where there's not

12:08SPEAKERany more growth to be had.

12:10SPEAKERLike the easy growth is done.

12:11SPEAKEREverybody who's gonna buy a smartphone before long

12:13SPEAKERwill have a smartphone.

12:14SPEAKERAnd then we get into Apple and Google going at each other

12:18SPEAKERto eat into each other's smartphone markets

12:20SPEAKERand they're increasingly entrenched

12:21SPEAKERand growth isn't going to drive those massive

12:24SPEAKERtrillion dollar scale businesses anymore.

12:26SPEAKERAnd we're going to have to, the last century

12:32SPEAKERof economics growth for the world, GDP,

12:36SPEAKERhas been based on bringing stuff that people have

12:38SPEAKERin the West to the other less developed parts of the world.

12:42SPEAKERAnd that stops.

12:45SPEAKERWhen everybody gets a cellphone, you can't sell

12:48SPEAKERmore cellphones to people that don't have cellphones.

12:51SPEAKERNobody's gonna buy two smartphones.

12:52SPEAKERMost people aren't gonna buy, some people buy

12:54SPEAKERtwo smartphones, I know.

12:55SPEAKERBut anyway, the upshot is we're gonna have,

12:58SPEAKERlike the growth focus is one of the things

13:01SPEAKERthat is destroying the planet.

13:02SPEAKERAnd we have to, as a society and as an economy,

13:07SPEAKERyou know, get rid of the people who are really

13:09SPEAKERenthusiastic about that.

13:10SPEAKERI, you know, the French had solutions for this.

13:13SPEAKERThat's all I'm saying.

13:13SPEAKER- Interesting choice of words, sure.

13:16SPEAKERSpeaking of haircuts.

13:18SPEAKER- Yeah.

13:21SPEAKER- Yeah, you know, socioeconomic system that did not

13:25SPEAKERprioritize endless unsustainable growth

13:27SPEAKERand that did not constantly empower psychopaths

13:30SPEAKERat all levels of management and government

13:32SPEAKERwould be pretty cool.

13:34SPEAKER- Hey, speaking of psychopaths, New York Times.

13:37SPEAKER- Sorry, I just, there was a, God, who ran it?

13:41SPEAKERIt was a New York Times, Washington Post.

13:43SPEAKERI forget, one of the major newspapers ran a big story

13:46SPEAKERthis week that was highlighting, mostly highlighting

13:48SPEAKERpassages from a paper from like 2018.

13:50SPEAKERIt's been a few years.

13:51SPEAKERI think the study was done in the wake of Trump

13:53SPEAKERgetting elected and stuff, but like,

13:55SPEAKERit was a pair of psychologists in somewhere in Scandinavia,

13:59SPEAKERmaybe Norway, and anyway, strong determination

14:03SPEAKERthat, yeah, I mean, news to nobody that psychopath do,

14:08SPEAKERlike people with actual demonstrable psychopathic traits

14:12SPEAKERtend to do very well in the systems of government

14:15SPEAKERand corporate management that we currently have.

14:18SPEAKERAnd also, I mean, following on from that,

14:20SPEAKERlike in the environment of extreme polarization

14:22SPEAKERthat we're in, they do even better,

14:24SPEAKERthat those types of people even more

14:25SPEAKERtend to rise to the top.

14:27SPEAKERAnyway, it was very grim.

14:29SPEAKER- That sounds fun.

14:30SPEAKERWhat a fun read.

14:32SPEAKEROkay, so I've been talking about Tesla

14:36SPEAKERand full self-driving and autopilot for,

14:39SPEAKERit seems like 10 years now, it's not been quite that long,

14:41SPEAKERbut we talked about this on,

14:43SPEAKERthis is only a test a long time.

14:45SPEAKERFirst with kind of awe and then with,

14:47SPEAKERoh, this is gonna get people killed

14:49SPEAKERand it's gonna set back the actual cause

14:51SPEAKERof self-driving cars a long way

14:53SPEAKERbecause these people are clearly assholes.

14:55SPEAKER- What was there?

14:56SPEAKERI mean, I wasn't really paying close attention

14:58SPEAKERto the stuff back then.

14:59SPEAKERWas there a period of pure awe for you guys on that show

15:02SPEAKERbefore reality started kicking in?

15:04SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, look, absolutely.

15:07SPEAKERI will, when you see, so there's a,

15:11SPEAKERwhat is now a famous video

15:14SPEAKERand I'm gonna go to the actual Vimeo page.

15:16SPEAKERIt's called Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Teslas.

15:19SPEAKERIt's from six years ago, so that would've been 2016.

15:23SPEAKERThat was after I was off, this is only a test,

15:24SPEAKERbut he was talking about this before then

15:27SPEAKERas a conceptual thing, I think, before that.

15:34SPEAKERIt showed somebody sitting there with their thumbs

15:36SPEAKERjust kind of resting on the steering wheel of the car

15:37SPEAKERand driving around a neighborhood in Palo Alto,

15:39SPEAKERit looks like, and getting on 280 and getting off 280

15:43SPEAKERand merging onto the, on and off the freeway

15:46SPEAKERand pulling into a parking lot

15:47SPEAKERand you're like, this is fucking incredible, right?

15:49SPEAKERThis is truly magic, even if the demo is cooked,

15:52SPEAKERwhich, oh, by the way, spoiler alert, it was fucking cooked.

15:55SPEAKER- So when did that come out?

15:56SPEAKERWas that just this week? - Yesterday, three days ago.

15:58SPEAKER- Literally just the last few days that it,

16:00SPEAKERI think that was testified by a Tesla engineer, right?

16:04SPEAKEROr former?

16:05SPEAKER- Somebody went on the record

16:06SPEAKERwith either the New York Times or the Verge,

16:09SPEAKERbut also it was part of the discovery

16:11SPEAKERin one of the many lawsuits against Tesla

16:15SPEAKERfrom people whose family members were killed

16:17SPEAKERby cars that were in autopilot or full software.

16:19SPEAKERSo, okay, so history.

16:21SPEAKERThere's autopilot driver assist system,

16:23SPEAKERwhich was basically like every other driver assist system

16:26SPEAKERin the world in that it would keep in a lane kind of,

16:30SPEAKERand it would keep you from smashing into a car

16:32SPEAKERin front of you on the freeway if you were driving

16:34SPEAKERand not like, it was like adaptive cruise control basically.

16:37SPEAKER- And then to be clear as someone

16:38SPEAKERwho doesn't drive regularly, like every car maker

16:41SPEAKERhas some version of that, right?

16:43SPEAKER- Not at the time, like it was a new technology.

16:46SPEAKER- Oh now, these days though, what I mean.

16:48SPEAKER- These days everybody, like it's an option on most cars.

16:51SPEAKER- Kind of, it's the thing that'll just beep at you

16:52SPEAKERif it senses that you're drifting into the other lane,

16:55SPEAKERthat kind of thing.

16:55SPEAKER- No, it'll actually turn the wheel.

16:57SPEAKER- Or it's actually corrective, right?

16:58SPEAKER- Yeah, like if you, like I drove a Hyundai

17:00SPEAKERwhen I had to go to LA a few months ago

17:02SPEAKERor years ago now, I guess,

17:04SPEAKERthat had the full self-driving Nissan,

17:07SPEAKERlike rental cars often have it

17:09SPEAKERand it'll keep you in the lane

17:10SPEAKERand it uses cameras generally

17:11SPEAKERto see where the lines on the road are and the markers are.

17:15SPEAKERAnd usually it starts with like a little nudge on the wheel

17:17SPEAKERand then it'll actually turn the wheel

17:19SPEAKERto get you back in the lane if you're drifting.

17:21SPEAKERAnd then the adaptive cruise control

17:22SPEAKERwill break and accelerate to keep you

17:24SPEAKERat a specified distance from the cars in front of you.

17:26SPEAKERAnd if like traffic on the freeway stops,

17:29SPEAKERthe car will stop.

17:32SPEAKERSo this New York Times article came out earlier this week

17:35SPEAKERand it's mostly reporting it seems like

17:39SPEAKERis based on discovery from these trials

17:41SPEAKERthat are happening around the country right now.

17:44SPEAKERAnd I'm gonna go and tell you, it's damning.

17:47SPEAKER- It's pretty damning. - It's worse than I expected.

17:48SPEAKER- It's kind of terrifying in a lot of ways,

17:50SPEAKERnot just in terms of the technology

17:52SPEAKERthat is now being employed on the road,

17:56SPEAKERbut also in the sense that you're seeing these people

17:59SPEAKERthat are in the grip of ideological blind faith,

18:03SPEAKERI guess is the only way I can describe it.

18:05SPEAKER- Delusional is what I would say.

18:06SPEAKER- It's kind of chilling.

18:09SPEAKERThis was in the New York Times Magazine.

18:10SPEAKERThe title of the piece is Elon Musk's

18:12SPEAKERAppetite for Destruction.

18:14SPEAKER- Yeah.

18:20SPEAKERThe story is a reporter who reports on these,

18:24SPEAKERhe talks about these fatal car crashes that killed people.

18:30SPEAKERAnd then he goes out and finds people

18:33SPEAKERwho are seemingly rational human beings

18:36SPEAKERwho also self-identify as Tesla fans

18:39SPEAKERwho wanna show them how good the software actually is.

18:42SPEAKER- It's funny, he kind of starts this piece

18:44SPEAKERby talking about the two categories of people

18:48SPEAKERwho wouldn't talk to him about this topic.

18:52SPEAKEROne of whom is people engaged in litigation

18:54SPEAKERso they can't speak on the advice of counsel.

18:57SPEAKERAnd I believe the other type was people

18:59SPEAKERwho didn't want to disparage Tesla or Elon Musk

19:03SPEAKERin public because they love both so much

19:05SPEAKERdespite having bad experiences with full self-driving.

19:09SPEAKER- Yeah, that seems right.

19:11SPEAKER- So what I'm getting at is the filtering mechanism

19:13SPEAKERfor who would speak for the story

19:15SPEAKERturned out to be the zealots, the true believers,

19:17SPEAKERthe people who, like you said, are delusional.

19:22SPEAKER- Well, and the pattern with the,

19:25SPEAKERokay, so there's multiple parts of this.

19:26SPEAKEROne is he finds people who are actually

19:31SPEAKERin non-fatal, for the most part, accidents

19:38SPEAKERwhere they, like one guy was driving down,

19:41SPEAKERI think highway one,

19:42SPEAKERor basically just a road in Laguna Beach,

19:45SPEAKERand the car swerved out of the lane

19:49SPEAKERwhile it was in self-driving

19:50SPEAKERand smashed into the back of a parked police car.

19:52SPEAKER- Yes, yes, along with what they describe

19:55SPEAKERas a very simple two-lane straight mile stretch of road.

20:01SPEAKERThey never, I guess, arrived at a reason

20:03SPEAKERfor this specific bug,

20:04SPEAKERbut they said in this period of time,

20:07SPEAKERFSD had a tendency to smash into police cars,

20:10SPEAKERparked police cars.

20:11SPEAKER- The flashing lights were listed as a,

20:14SPEAKERmaybe in one of the other articles,

20:15SPEAKERbut that guy said stationary objects are a problem

20:19SPEAKERand flashing lights are confusing.

20:21SPEAKERSo, you know, be careful driving your Teslas

20:23SPEAKERaround stationary objects.

20:25SPEAKER- I just, I don't think we need to get any further

20:26SPEAKERinto describing the details of this piece

20:29SPEAKERbefore we just go, how is this possible

20:32SPEAKERthat it's allowed for this thing to be beta tested

20:34SPEAKERin this state on public roads, putting people in danger?

20:37SPEAKERI just cannot.

20:39SPEAKER- Well, I do think it's worth talking about

20:42SPEAKERthe way this is presented,

20:43SPEAKER'cause that's the crux of a lot of these lawsuits,

20:45SPEAKERit sounds like.

20:46SPEAKERThey're talking about the way autopilot is presented

20:48SPEAKERas something more than a driver assist, right?

20:53SPEAKERAs a, hey, like the video starts,

20:58SPEAKERthe video that Tesla posted, the famous video

21:00SPEAKERwith painted black playing in the background

21:02SPEAKERstarts with Elon testing a link

21:06SPEAKERthat says Tesla drives itself

21:08SPEAKERand the video opens with white text on a black screen

21:11SPEAKERthat says the person in the driver's seat

21:13SPEAKERis only there for legal reasons.

21:14SPEAKERHe's not doing anything.

21:15SPEAKERThe car is driving itself.

21:16SPEAKERThe video is a fucking lie.

21:18SPEAKER- Yeah.

21:19SPEAKER- Like there was somebody maintaining the gas and the brake.

21:22SPEAKERThey don't know, they don't say how it happened,

21:23SPEAKERbut multiple people at Tesla testified or told reporters

21:28SPEAKERthat it was a cooked video on a pre-planned course

21:32SPEAKERthat was not representative of the software

21:34SPEAKERthat was in the place.

21:35SPEAKERNow, the thing that happened immediately after this

21:37SPEAKERis a bunch of dipshits got out in their Teslas,

21:39SPEAKERdownloaded the software as soon as it was available,

21:41SPEAKERand then did the exact same fucking thing

21:43SPEAKERin a way that endangers everybody else that's on the road.

21:46SPEAKERNow, like some fundamentals.

21:48SPEAKERPeople are shit at driving cars, right?

21:51SPEAKERI think everybody who's spent any time on an American road

21:54SPEAKERwill agree that as a country, not great drivers.

21:58SPEAKERPeople are distracted.

21:59SPEAKERPeople are turning around yelling at their kids.

22:01SPEAKERThey're swerving all over the place.

22:03SPEAKER- Road raging.

22:04SPEAKER- They're angry.

22:05SPEAKERThey're going too fast.

22:06SPEAKERThey're weaving.

22:07SPEAKERI am fucking first in line.

22:09SPEAKER- Falling too close behind.

22:10SPEAKER- Yeah, I am all about letting the machines take over

22:14SPEAKERand drive cars for us.

22:14SPEAKERI think that is a great idea long-term.

22:17SPEAKERNow, the problem, this is the thing we talked about

22:19SPEAKERand this is only a test a lot.

22:20SPEAKERThe problem, so apologies for remapping

22:23SPEAKERdecade-old arguments at this point,

22:25SPEAKERbut the problem is that when people,

22:30SPEAKERwhen new technology replaces something

22:32SPEAKERthat people have traditionally done,

22:33SPEAKERpeople are inherently skeptical of it

22:35SPEAKERand are unlikely to trust the machines out of the gate,

22:40SPEAKERwhich is why companies like Waymo, Google,

22:43SPEAKERand a bunch of others were incredibly careful

22:45SPEAKERwith the self-driving technology.

22:47SPEAKEROnly using it on their campuses at first.

22:48SPEAKERThey were doing incredibly limited things.

22:50SPEAKERThey had people sitting behind the wheel of the car

22:54SPEAKERwith constant attention, hands on the wheel,

22:56SPEAKERready to take over when the machine made a mistake,

22:57SPEAKER'cause the machines make mistakes, right?

23:00SPEAKERSo any mistake that kills people,

23:03SPEAKEReven though ultimately getting self-driving cars online

23:06SPEAKERwill probably save more lives than it takes

23:07SPEAKERduring the beta period

23:08SPEAKERthat we're all suffering through right now,

23:11SPEAKERany perception of the machines being bad at this

23:15SPEAKERand killing people unnecessarily

23:17SPEAKERis going to result in legislation and litigation

23:19SPEAKERand it will slow the whole thing down.

23:21SPEAKERSo you can't be an asshole about it.

23:24SPEAKERYou have to be smart and you have to be deliberate

23:26SPEAKERand you have to be safe.

23:29SPEAKERAnd now, as, when we're gonna put links to the article,

23:32SPEAKERyou should read the article.

23:34SPEAKERAs reported in this incredible article in New York Times,

23:39SPEAKERthey had, they believed that the ethics,

23:42SPEAKERTesla, Musk, believed that the ethics

23:45SPEAKERof getting self-driving cars online

23:49SPEAKERwas such that no matter what the cost was getting it online,

23:53SPEAKERthey would ultimately save more lives.

23:56SPEAKERTherefore, whatever they needed to do was necessary,

23:58SPEAKERincluding cooking videos

23:59SPEAKERand releasing software that wasn't ready

24:01SPEAKERand they knew had problems and they knew would kill people.

24:04SPEAKER- Yeah, when I say this is an article about blind faith,

24:06SPEAKERI mean it in two senses.

24:07SPEAKEROne, blind faith on the part of Tesla fans

24:10SPEAKERfor Tesla and Elon Musk's mission.

24:14SPEAKERAlso blind faith on his part

24:15SPEAKERtoward his kind of utilitarian view of philanthropy

24:20SPEAKERor how do you wanna term his like,

24:23SPEAKERI mean, is he termed like long-termism thrown around?

24:26SPEAKERYou know, he's got some abstract belief in, you know,

24:33SPEAKERif I can claim to be serving a vast number

24:38SPEAKERof future humans who don't exist,

24:40SPEAKERthen it's than any kind of excesses

24:42SPEAKERthat harm existing living actual humans now are justifiable.

24:47SPEAKER- Well, yeah, it's like a savior complex, right?

24:49SPEAKER- Yes, yes.

24:51SPEAKER- They didn't, so as an example,

24:56SPEAKERthey didn't wanna put driver monitoring in them,

24:58SPEAKERwhich ensures that the driver's paying attention

25:00SPEAKERand actually, you know, driving the car

25:02SPEAKERwhen the autopilot stuff was on.

25:05SPEAKERI mean, honestly, even naming it autopilot that long ago

25:09SPEAKERis offensively stupid at this point to me.

25:12SPEAKER- It's probably disingenuous.

25:13SPEAKERI mean, a big part of the problem here

25:14SPEAKERyou can see reading this piece is the messaging

25:16SPEAKERbecause they even point out that there's fine print

25:18SPEAKERaround full self-driving that for I'm sure legal reasons

25:22SPEAKERspecifies like, hey, this is,

25:23SPEAKERI don't remember what the term is,

25:25SPEAKERbut they describe it in the fine print as a driver assist

25:28SPEAKERat the same time that he is out there

25:29SPEAKERand of course everybody's gonna pay attention

25:31SPEAKERto what the, you know, once in a century industrialists,

25:35SPEAKERentrepreneur, genius brainchild is saying.

25:37SPEAKER- Real life Tony Stark, I think is what we used to call him.

25:40SPEAKER- Right, like the straight up propaganda.

25:43SPEAKERI don't really, I can't think of another word for it

25:45SPEAKERcoming out of his mouth

25:46SPEAKERis what's gonna get all the attention

25:47SPEAKERand he's out there saying like, oh, it's perfect.

25:49SPEAKERWe're gonna save so many lives.

25:50SPEAKERLike computers drive cars better than humans do.

25:53SPEAKERLike, come on, like it's infuriating.

25:56SPEAKER- Yeah, like, look, here is the,

26:00SPEAKERhere is the, Musk said in 2019,

26:03SPEAKERif you have a system that's at

26:04SPEAKERor below human level reliability,

26:06SPEAKERthen driver monitoring makes sense.

26:08SPEAKERBut if your system is dramatically better,

26:10SPEAKERmore reliable than a human,

26:11SPEAKERthen monitoring doesn't help much.

26:12SPEAKERThat's a tweet, I think.

26:15SPEAKEROne of the legal complaints says it explicitly,

26:18SPEAKERwhich is Tesla's contact conduct was despicable

26:21SPEAKERand so contemptible that it would be looked down upon

26:23SPEAKERand despised by ordinary decent people.

26:25SPEAKER- Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at with the whole thing.

26:27SPEAKERI mean.

26:29SPEAKER- We don't need to go build the labor further, but yeah.

26:33SPEAKERIt's like, this is like Ralph Nader,

26:37SPEAKERunsafe at any speed territory,

26:39SPEAKERexcept for this feels much more real than the Ralph Nader,

26:42SPEAKERlike the Ralph Nader stuff.

26:46SPEAKERYeah, bad design.

26:49SPEAKERI don't know.

26:50SPEAKERI'm not an expert on that kind of, that era of car design.

26:52SPEAKERIt seems like maybe he went a little,

26:54SPEAKERit was a little overblown.

26:55SPEAKERI now treat, when I see a Tesla on the road in front of me,

26:58SPEAKERlike I've said this before in this podcast,

27:00SPEAKERthere's a place on one where I watch them swerve

27:02SPEAKERoff of the road and come back on every fucking day.

27:04SPEAKER- Wow.

27:05SPEAKER- Yeah.

27:06SPEAKER- I mean, dude, I,

27:09SPEAKERthe deployment of this feature in this state

27:11SPEAKERis just such an example of reckless, arrogant excess

27:15SPEAKERthat I don't know what to say about it.

27:16SPEAKERI mean, like, obviously there's value in this feature

27:19SPEAKERif and when it works properly,

27:20SPEAKERbut it seems like that should come from like defined

27:23SPEAKERindustry-wide standards that all automakers collaborate on

27:26SPEAKERand adhere to, right?

27:27SPEAKERLike not one, you know,

27:30SPEAKERlike there's one guy just kind of going off on his own

27:33SPEAKERand shoving this thing out into the world

27:34SPEAKERand killing people with it.

27:36SPEAKER- Yeah, like, I think that, I mean,

27:39SPEAKERthe applying that this is the long-term,

27:44SPEAKERultimately this feature will save more lives

27:46SPEAKERthan it costs metrics to this.

27:49SPEAKERIt means that these people shouldn't be trusted

27:52SPEAKERto roll out the software, right?

27:55SPEAKERAnd they absolutely shouldn't be trusted to self-report data

27:58SPEAKERabout crashes and safety and need monitoring.

28:00SPEAKERLike, I think that's, if anything comes of this,

28:03SPEAKERI hope to God that they get this done in the next two years

28:06SPEAKERbefore the next election cycle,

28:08SPEAKERbecause like at this point, when I see a Tesla on the road,

28:11SPEAKERI'm treating it like the same way I treat somebody

28:13SPEAKERwho I see that's swerving and I think might be drunk

28:16SPEAKERbefore I call the, you know, the police on the drunk driver.

28:19SPEAKER- Yeah, it's all very frustrating.

28:22SPEAKERLike the fact that this is happening this way,

28:24SPEAKERit just feels like another example to me

28:25SPEAKERof the kind of degenerated regulatory environment

28:28SPEAKERthat we're in that also allows egg makers

28:30SPEAKERto triple their prices in the space of a year

28:33SPEAKERand increase their profits a thousand percents

28:36SPEAKERand nothing happened, you know what I mean?

28:38SPEAKERLike it just did corporate excess is just,

28:40SPEAKERhey, not news to anybody.

28:42SPEAKERIt's a bit out of control.

28:44SPEAKER- Well, and to contrast it with,

28:47SPEAKERlike there's a couple of self-driving startups

28:51SPEAKERin San Francisco, Waymo and Cruz

28:53SPEAKERare both letting people order self-driving rides on maps.

28:56SPEAKERAnd I think one of them is driverless now and Waymo,

28:59SPEAKERI think Cruz doesn't have drivers anymore and Waymo does.

29:02SPEAKERPeople post videos of those cruise cars

29:05SPEAKERdoing weird shit all the time, right?

29:09SPEAKERBut they don't, they seem to air on the side

29:13SPEAKERof extreme safety and they're mostly in places

29:15SPEAKERwhere they're going at very low speeds,

29:16SPEAKERlike 25 or 40 miles an hour at the outside.

29:19SPEAKERLike they're not getting on freeways.

29:21SPEAKERThe Waymo cars still have people in the car.

29:24SPEAKERIt's a safer, more measured approach

29:25SPEAKERand it's in an extremely limited geographical area.

29:28SPEAKERSo it's a much more tractable problem.

29:30SPEAKERSo-

29:31SPEAKER- I'm sorry, I see those Waymo cars

29:34SPEAKEReverywhere around here with a little spinny device

29:39SPEAKERon the top.

29:40SPEAKER- You should take a ride in one, Brad, and report back.

29:44SPEAKERBut my point is, like I do, I firmly believe

29:48SPEAKERthat when we get to a point where this technology

29:50SPEAKERis good and reliable, it will save a lot of lives.

29:54SPEAKERLike I think that Tesla is wrong with that.

29:56SPEAKERI think that using that as an excuse to be reckless

29:58SPEAKERand dangerous is offensive and stupid

30:00SPEAKERand they should be regulated,

30:03SPEAKERthey should have the shit regulated out of them.

30:04SPEAKER- Yes, absolutely.

30:05SPEAKERLike the goal itself, obviously,

30:07SPEAKERthe value of the goal is self-evident,

30:08SPEAKERbut it should be achieved in a collaborative

30:12SPEAKERand measured way.

30:14SPEAKERLast thing I'll mention about this, just again,

30:16SPEAKERwith the kind of religious conviction

30:18SPEAKERthat a lot of people seem to have about this stuff.

30:20SPEAKERThe other major example of someone

30:22SPEAKERwho would talk to this reporter who had issues

30:24SPEAKERwith their full self-driving was less catastrophic

30:27SPEAKERthan plowing into a police cruiser.

30:29SPEAKERIt was, I think it was just running a red light

30:31SPEAKERand nobody was injured.

30:32SPEAKER- Yeah.

30:33SPEAKER- But there's an example given in here

30:34SPEAKERof he's part of a Tesla Reddit community

30:36SPEAKERand he got a ton of shit from other people

30:38SPEAKERin this community for posting a video of that happening.

30:40SPEAKERIt's like, here's tangible video evidence

30:42SPEAKERof this thing malfunctioning

30:44SPEAKERand everybody is basically attacking him

30:46SPEAKERfor undermining their faith or whatever.

30:47SPEAKERAnd he clearly is also a true believer,

30:49SPEAKERbut he's at least got enough sense to say like,

30:51SPEAKERhey, if we don't point out their examples,

30:53SPEAKERhow are they going to improve?

30:54SPEAKERI'm sorry, if we don't point out their faults,

30:56SPEAKERhow are they going to improve on them?

30:59SPEAKER- And there's an example of,

31:00SPEAKERI think it's that guy or one of the other ones that says,

31:03SPEAKERhere's a place where it always has problems.

31:04SPEAKERAnd then he'd gotten an update that night

31:06SPEAKERbefore the reporter got in the car with him.

31:08SPEAKERAnd guess what?

31:10SPEAKERIt was fixed at that time.

31:11SPEAKER- It was fixed, but then proceeded

31:13SPEAKERto have a half a dozen other issues

31:14SPEAKERon the way home from there.

31:15SPEAKER- Well, and also at the conclusion of the article

31:20SPEAKERis the reporter running a Tesla and driving the route

31:24SPEAKERthat was the cause of a fatal accident

31:27SPEAKERfor the people that weren't in the Tesla.

31:29SPEAKER- Right, the Tesla ran a red light and hit two poor schmucks

31:34SPEAKERthat were just on the road at the same time.

31:35SPEAKER- Yes, and killed them.

31:37SPEAKER- And killed them, and that seemed to not be fixed.

31:41SPEAKER- Yes, yes.

31:41SPEAKER- The implication is that that was not fixed.

31:43SPEAKER- Yes.

31:44SPEAKER- Anyway.

31:45SPEAKER- That's a pretty pointed way to end this piece.

31:46SPEAKERLast thing I'll say, look, I get quoting a novelist,

31:50SPEAKERmaybe a little trite here,

31:51SPEAKERbut I really liked the quote from Jeanette Winterson,

31:55SPEAKERthe novelist in this piece.

31:57SPEAKER"True believers would rather see governments topple

31:59SPEAKERthan history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith."

32:03SPEAKERLike that really sums up kind of everything going on

32:06SPEAKERin this article, I think.

32:07SPEAKERAnyway.

32:08SPEAKER(upbeat music)

32:15SPEAKER- Since the dawn of Twitter, basically,

32:17SPEAKERthird-party clients have been a key feature

32:20SPEAKERto the point that like when Twitter needed

32:22SPEAKERto make its own desktop client,

32:24SPEAKERits own mobile client for iOS,

32:28SPEAKERinstead of building their own internally,

32:30SPEAKERthey just went out and bought one of the popular

32:33SPEAKERthird-party clients for Mac and iOS.

32:36SPEAKERTweety.

32:37SPEAKER- Tweety, wasn't it?

32:38SPEAKERYeah, man, I was a fairly enthusiastic paid Tweety user,

32:41SPEAKERand then they just came and bought it and killed it.

32:43SPEAKER- Yep, that's when I switched to Tweetbot,

32:45SPEAKERif I recall, or shortly thereafter.

32:49SPEAKERTo the point that one of the third-party clients,

32:51SPEAKERTwitterific, basically was the origin of the Bluebird,

32:55SPEAKERlike Twitterific's Bluebird and Twitter's Bluebird

32:57SPEAKERare different, but Twitter didn't have a Bluebird logo

33:00SPEAKERbefore that, it was the little, it was a word mark.

33:03SPEAKERAnd Twitterific was the first one that used tweet, I think.

33:07SPEAKERI'm not sure, I'm not 100% on that, that is--

33:09SPEAKER- As a verb?

33:10SPEAKERAs an action? - That's a verb, to tweet.

33:11SPEAKERThe button said tweet on Twitterific.

33:14SPEAKER- And as Twitterific, well, not anymore,

33:16SPEAKERbut up until like three days ago,

33:18SPEAKERwas Twitterific still going strong?

33:19SPEAKER- 16 years, until earlier this week.

33:22SPEAKERSo last week, several of the third-party clients

33:28SPEAKERstopped working, most of the developers posted a tweet

33:31SPEAKERsaying that they had API.

33:33SPEAKERSo, back story, the third-party clients

33:37SPEAKERdon't scrape Twitter, you don't log into a webpage

33:39SPEAKERor something like that, and it scrapes the information off.

33:41SPEAKERThey have a third-party API, originally it was just

33:43SPEAKERthe main Twitter API that you could connect to

33:45SPEAKERwith limited stuff, and then they eventually spun it out

33:48SPEAKERinto a third-party API so that it could handle

33:50SPEAKERdifferent levels of traffic.

33:53SPEAKERAnd API is an application programming interface,

33:55SPEAKERit's basically a software interface for software

33:57SPEAKERthat can get machine-readable data into and out of your app.

34:00SPEAKER- Yeah, it lets you query them for specific data

34:02SPEAKERinstead of all the data.

34:03SPEAKER- Yeah.

34:05SPEAKERSo, they cut off the, Twitter cut off the API access

34:10SPEAKERfor developers who were breaking, without saying anything,

34:13SPEAKERfor several days, like just Tweetbot, Twitterific,

34:17SPEAKERPhoenix for Android, and a couple of other Twitter clients

34:21SPEAKERjust stopped working without any warning whatsoever.

34:25SPEAKERAnd this was characterized by a bunch of people

34:28SPEAKERon like a Friday night at eight o'clock saying,

34:30SPEAKER"Hey, is Tweetbot broken?"

34:32SPEAKER- That's, so that was kind of where I left off

34:34SPEAKERwith this topic, I hadn't caught up to the fact

34:35SPEAKERthat they had put out a statement and everything,

34:37SPEAKERbecause that's, the reason I bring that up

34:40SPEAKERis that this is very indicative of just where Twitter

34:42SPEAKERis at these days, that things break and you don't know why.

34:45SPEAKERAnd it's like, is this due to lack of engineering resources

34:48SPEAKERnow, self-inflicted, or have they made a policy change

34:50SPEAKERand not bothered to tell anybody?

34:51SPEAKERIt's like, the way the whole, the thing is run

34:54SPEAKERis so ramshackle and unpredictable now

34:56SPEAKERthat you just kind of throw up your hands

34:58SPEAKERat things like this and go, "Well, who knows?"

35:00SPEAKER- Yeah, well, and as we'll see by how it actually,

35:04SPEAKERhow they did eventually, several days later,

35:06SPEAKERdecide to message it, it's kind of chicken shit.

35:10SPEAKERSo it's another point of note, third-party clients,

35:15SPEAKERbecause they use an external API,

35:16SPEAKERtraditionally don't get ads delivered.

35:19SPEAKERSo if you use, if you pay five bucks a year for Tweetbot,

35:22SPEAKERyou don't ever see an ad on Twitter,

35:23SPEAKERwhich is a real, I mean, like,

35:25SPEAKERthat's worth five bucks a year to me.

35:26SPEAKER- Sure.

35:29SPEAKER- So first, a few days later, after this API turn-off,

35:34SPEAKERthey posted it, oh, it's also worth mentioning,

35:36SPEAKERseveral other third-party clients,

35:39SPEAKERlike Hootsuite, for example, and TweetDeck,

35:42SPEAKERwhich is a Twitter-owned third-party client

35:45SPEAKERthat they brought in as a professional-level tool.

35:47SPEAKERHootsuite is, I mean, there's a consumer-level version

35:50SPEAKERof Hootsuite, but it's mainly something that people pay,

35:53SPEAKERlike if you do corporate communications,

35:54SPEAKERif you do customer support through Twitter,

35:57SPEAKERif you're like Comcast or somebody like that

36:00SPEAKERthat has a large Twitter support presence,

36:02SPEAKERyou probably use something that's similar to Hootsuite,

36:03SPEAKERand presumably they're using a paid API key

36:06SPEAKERrather than a free API key like Tweetbot

36:08SPEAKERand this kind of smaller indie third-party clients.

36:10SPEAKERAnyway, a few days after this, they said,

36:15SPEAKERTwitter just posted a tweet that said,

36:17SPEAKERhey, we're killing, we're enforcing rules

36:22SPEAKERthat have been long, we're enforcing longstanding rules

36:24SPEAKERand cutting off AP access for software

36:26SPEAKERthat breaks those rules.

36:28SPEAKERAnd everybody looks at the developer third-party rules,

36:30SPEAKERlike, what the fuck rules is Tweetbot

36:32SPEAKERor Twitter horrific or Tweety breaking?

36:35SPEAKERNobody knows, right?

36:36SPEAKERThere's no, like, they were traditionally very careful

36:38SPEAKERto stay within the rules, 'cause, you know,

36:40SPEAKERyour entire business depends on this.

36:42SPEAKERA few days even after that, they update

36:46SPEAKERthe developer guidelines, the developer rules,

36:51SPEAKERto say, use or access the licensed materials

36:54SPEAKERto create or attempt to create a substitute

36:56SPEAKERor similar service or product

36:57SPEAKERto the Twitter applications is forbidden.

37:00SPEAKERWeird, what a weird coincidence.

37:01SPEAKERSo-

37:02SPEAKER- Okay, so they were retroactively slapped

37:05SPEAKERwith a rule that didn't exist?

37:07SPEAKER- It's a Kafka-esque situation for developers

37:12SPEAKERof third-party apps, yeah.

37:15SPEAKERBasically what they're saying is, hey,

37:17SPEAKERthe business that you've spent 15 or 16 years

37:20SPEAKERin Twitterific's case, or a little bit less

37:22SPEAKERin Tweetbot's case and Phoenix's case,

37:24SPEAKERbuilding on our platform in good faith

37:27SPEAKERwith full knowledge and in full display

37:30SPEAKERand with a fully authorized API key

37:34SPEAKERfor, you know, the last decade plus,

37:38SPEAKERis suddenly inconvenient to our business,

37:40SPEAKEReven though, like, third-party clients in these days

37:43SPEAKERare used by a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of users, right?

37:48SPEAKERBut probably that mostly the legacy blue checks

37:51SPEAKERthat Musk doesn't like.

37:53SPEAKER- Sure, but probably more than enough to,

37:56SPEAKERI mean, clearly more than enough

37:57SPEAKERto sustain development of these apps

37:58SPEAKERand provide a living to the developers, presumably.

38:02SPEAKER- Good businesses for these small teams, yeah.

38:05SPEAKERAnd most of these teams are pretty,

38:06SPEAKERlike, I think Tweetbot is two or three people.

38:08SPEAKERIt's a small company.

38:12SPEAKERAnyway, that's it, that's the whole story.

38:15SPEAKERAt this point, I think it's pretty safe to say

38:17SPEAKERDan Gilmore said something along these lines,

38:19SPEAKERand I tend to agree with him.

38:20SPEAKERI was thinking it beforehand,

38:22SPEAKERbut you'd have to be really stupid

38:27SPEAKERto build any kind of business on top of Twitter

38:30SPEAKERin an era when they're unpredictable and capricious.

38:34SPEAKERI mean, maybe, like, actively malicious

38:37SPEAKERto people who are building stuff

38:39SPEAKERthat makes money on their platform.

38:41SPEAKER- I don't think there's any maybe

38:42SPEAKERabout their demonstrated malice, but anyway.

38:46SPEAKERI mean, this has always been the danger

38:48SPEAKERof this kind of thing.

38:49SPEAKERThis is just an extremely egregious example

38:51SPEAKERof people building a livelihood

38:54SPEAKERon top of a massive corporate platform

38:56SPEAKERand then subjecting themselves to the whims

38:58SPEAKERand edicts of that platform.

39:01SPEAKERLike, you know, it's the same thing with YouTube

39:03SPEAKERand Twitch and Patreon and you name it.

39:06SPEAKERLike, it's great right up until it isn't.

39:10SPEAKER- But you can typically expect large corporations

39:14SPEAKERto behave in a predictable way if it makes them money, right?

39:17SPEAKER- That's what makes this egregious,

39:18SPEAKERis nobody expected this globe-spanning social media platform

39:22SPEAKERto go private and suddenly be unilaterally controlled

39:26SPEAKERby someone who seems a little unhinged.

39:28SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's a little bit unhinged

39:33SPEAKERis a good way to describe it, yeah.

39:34SPEAKERSo anyway, that's that.

39:38SPEAKER- Huh, that's, man, that sucks.

39:39SPEAKERI have, I just have submitted

39:41SPEAKERto using the official stuff years ago,

39:43SPEAKERso I have not really been aware

39:45SPEAKERof the state of third-party clients at this point.

39:47SPEAKER- Well, so third-party clients,

39:48SPEAKERonce you reached a certain account volume,

39:52SPEAKERthe third-party clients kind of broke down

39:54SPEAKERbecause they didn't have access to full API.

39:58SPEAKERSo like, the server-side mute lists

40:00SPEAKERand stuff like that stopped working.

40:01SPEAKER- Oh, you mean in terms of the types of data you could get?

40:04SPEAKER- Yeah, so like, I couldn't, on the official clients,

40:07SPEAKERI could filter my replies to only show people who follow me.

40:12SPEAKER- Okay. - That stuff like that

40:13SPEAKERdidn't work on the third-party API, so.

40:17SPEAKER- Interesting, I assumed that there would be a problem

40:19SPEAKERwith one of these apps potentially being rate-limited

40:22SPEAKERin terms of the number of requests

40:23SPEAKERit can make per second, per minute.

40:25SPEAKER- So there is that, there's also a limit

40:28SPEAKERto the total number of keys that they would issue,

40:30SPEAKERand then you'd have to get an extension

40:31SPEAKERwhen you sold more copies than that,

40:33SPEAKERor if you sold more copies than that.

40:34SPEAKERThe unfortunate thing is,

40:39SPEAKERlike, it's not like they're not gonna maintain these APIs,

40:43SPEAKERlike, look, if they had come out and said,

40:45SPEAKER"Hey, we're gonna move the engineers

40:46SPEAKER"that maintain these third-party APIs onto other things

40:49SPEAKER"because it's time-consuming and expensive

40:51SPEAKER"to maintain these," like, that is a valid,

40:53SPEAKERlike, I could believe that.

40:55SPEAKERSo, you know, we're gonna turn this off in six months,

40:58SPEAKERwe're gonna turn this off in three months,

41:00SPEAKERmigrate your customers off,

41:01SPEAKERgive them a chance to transition off of this thing

41:05SPEAKERthat they've been using for a long time.

41:07SPEAKERLike, that's actually okay with me.

41:10SPEAKERI mean, it's not great, but I understand that,

41:13SPEAKERand, like, maintaining a third-party API

41:14SPEAKERin addition to the main API that they use internally

41:17SPEAKERis undoubtedly expensive.

41:19SPEAKERHowever, they have paying customers that pay for API access,

41:22SPEAKERso they're gonna continue maintaining these third-party APIs.

41:25SPEAKERAll they're saying is, "Yo, you're not,"

41:27SPEAKERand the best part about this is they didn't even say,

41:29SPEAKER"Hey, if you wanna pay for API access, you can keep going,"

41:32SPEAKERright, they just turned it off

41:34SPEAKERand didn't say shit to these people for two weeks.

41:36SPEAKER- I feel like that is indicative of the level

41:39SPEAKERof kind of reality distortion going on

41:41SPEAKERaround the behavior of Twitter these days,

41:43SPEAKERthat when you point out like,

41:45SPEAKER"Oh, they could have given a three-month notice

41:47SPEAKERthat, hey, this is a policy change we are making,

41:49SPEAKERhere is your window to make your own changes,

41:51SPEAKERto accommodate it,"

41:52SPEAKERthat's how any one of these large tech companies

41:55SPEAKERwould have handled this, right?

41:56SPEAKERLike, it took you spelling that example out.

41:59SPEAKER- Yeah, even Google, who loves killing stuff,

42:02SPEAKERdoesn't just fucking turn off.

42:05SPEAKERThey don't say, "Hey, we're gonna shut this down tonight."

42:07SPEAKER- And again, not just shut it down,

42:09SPEAKERbut the Orwellian step of retroactively trying to justify it

42:13SPEAKERwith a rule that didn't exist.

42:15SPEAKER- So anyway, Hootsuite still works.

42:17SPEAKER- Man, the musk of this episode

42:19SPEAKERis getting a little too strong.

42:20SPEAKERI can't, I'm having a hard time breathing.

42:22SPEAKERWhy don't we move on?

42:23SPEAKER(upbeat music)

42:30SPEAKER- I think I'm going to be very happy

42:31SPEAKERwith this new machine I bought, Brad.

42:33SPEAKER- Yeah?

42:34SPEAKER- Are you going to be, or are?

42:35SPEAKER- I am, like, it's been fun.

42:37SPEAKERIt's been a fun, so I replaced my big, heavy,

42:40SPEAKERexpensive-to-run desktop Haswell-E,

42:45SPEAKERFreeBSD 100% power consumption all the time server.

42:49SPEAKER- Oh, well, I wouldn't say that.

42:50SPEAKERThe FreeBSD's power management is pretty good these days.

42:53SPEAKERIt's not quite Linux, but I ran a PowerD-V fairly often,

42:59SPEAKERand it does clock down like you would expect.

43:02SPEAKERIt supports most of the Intel C-States.

43:04SPEAKER- I put the monitor on it and was like,

43:07SPEAKERthis is costing me, yeah, so it was bumping me up

43:11SPEAKERinto a higher tier of electrical usage,

43:13SPEAKERwhich was costing me probably 30 bucks a month.

43:15SPEAKER- Oh, my God.

43:16SPEAKER- Like, not all the time, but sometimes.

43:18SPEAKER- Man, as somebody who rebuilt their equivalent

43:23SPEAKERheavy NAS server machine into another heavy NAS

43:27SPEAKERwhen the first one died a few months ago,

43:28SPEAKERyou're really making me question my life choices right now.

43:31SPEAKER- $30?

43:32SPEAKER- Well, but you also, well, okay, A,

43:34SPEAKERI have more people using stuff in my house.

43:37SPEAKERI'm in a neighborhood where there are fewer people.

43:39SPEAKERI also changed rate plans since that time,

43:42SPEAKERso I'm on a time-of-use plan now,

43:44SPEAKERwhich means I get better rates, and I'm not.

43:48SPEAKERPG&E does this thing that I think is kind of bullshit

43:49SPEAKERwhere they compare your usage to your neighbor's usage,

43:51SPEAKERand if you're higher usage to them,

43:53SPEAKERthen you get charged more

43:55SPEAKERonce you get into the higher tiers.

43:56SPEAKER- What?

43:57SPEAKER- Yeah, it seems like it should be illegal,

43:59SPEAKERbecause, like, how is location relevant there?

44:03SPEAKER- You know, that is, well, presumably,

44:05SPEAKERthe houses are the same era in construction,

44:07SPEAKERso they're, like, the same level of inefficiency

44:09SPEAKERand same number of rooms and stuff like that.

44:10SPEAKER- Right, but I mean, your draw from the grid

44:12SPEAKERis the same no matter where you are, right?

44:16SPEAKER- Look, man, I'm not an expert.

44:17SPEAKERThe point is, when I got the electric car,

44:21SPEAKERthen we switched to time-of-use,

44:23SPEAKERwhich means we pay a different rate

44:24SPEAKERfrom, like, midnight to 3 p.m.

44:26SPEAKERthan we do from 3 p.m. to midnight, basically.

44:30SPEAKERAnd the 3 p.m. to midnight is more expensive,

44:32SPEAKER'cause that's a higher consumption time

44:33SPEAKERfor the overall generation and transmission of the grid.

44:37SPEAKERAnyway, the upshot is I wanted to build a server,

44:40SPEAKERI wanted to replace that big, heavy server

44:42SPEAKERwith two machines that were both combined,

44:46SPEAKERtheoretically, be less power consumptive

44:48SPEAKERthan the big machine.

44:49SPEAKERNow, I realize as we're talking about this

44:51SPEAKERthat I haven't actually plugged in the monitor yet,

44:54SPEAKERso I may have played myself,

44:56SPEAKERbut we'll see.

44:58SPEAKER- Well, you know, Synology and that little...

45:00SPEAKERIt's a B-Link, we should say.

45:02SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a B-Link.

45:05SPEAKERI got the 11th Gen N5105, 16 gig, 500 gig SSD,

45:10SPEAKER16 gig RAM, 500 gig SSD version.

45:12SPEAKER- Actually, you know what?

45:14SPEAKERLet me know when you do monitor that stuff.

45:16SPEAKERI wonder.

45:17SPEAKERI bet I could see those things collectively amounting

45:20SPEAKERto anywhere from 60 to 90 watts, maybe.

45:25SPEAKER- Well, so the CPU on both of them,

45:26SPEAKERthere's three hard drives in the NAS.

45:29SPEAKERThe CPU is typically around 5% on both machines.

45:34SPEAKERIt spikes up a little bit

45:35SPEAKERwhen I'm doing a Plex transcode to 20,

45:38SPEAKERor when somebody's on the Minecraft server.

45:40SPEAKERAnyway, so the upshot is I put Ubuntu Server on this thing,

45:44SPEAKERand I spent five days trying to get

45:47SPEAKERthe hardware-accelerated transcode working for Plex.

45:49SPEAKER- I enjoyed witnessing your rare appearance

45:52SPEAKERin the Linux channel and the Discord,

45:54SPEAKERwhere I spend a lot of my time.

45:55SPEAKERIt was fun to see you becoming acquainted with systemd

45:59SPEAKERand got weird Docker networking idiosyncrasies

46:03SPEAKERand passing a render device through to your Plex container.

46:08SPEAKER- Well, it's funny as somebody who's dipped in and out

46:10SPEAKERof Linux stuff over the last decade or two at this point.

46:16SPEAKERIt's funny what stuff comes back immediately,

46:18SPEAKERlike my fstab, no problems.

46:20SPEAKERI got those mounts down.

46:21SPEAKERI can mount stuff left and right like crazy.

46:23SPEAKERIt's no issue.

46:25SPEAKERI'd never had to pass through.

46:26SPEAKERI'd never had to do hardware-accelerated drivers

46:28SPEAKERfor anything before, right?

46:29SPEAKERI'd never had to deal with that.

46:31SPEAKERAnd it took a long time to get that stuff working,

46:34SPEAKERmainly because, let's see, I think this is a Jasper Lake.

46:38SPEAKEROur friends who work at Intel and are listening to this

46:40SPEAKERare probably yelling at their computers right now.

46:43SPEAKERIt's a little Celeron,

46:45SPEAKERbut it does have good hardware-accelerated

46:47SPEAKERencode and decode of video.

46:49SPEAKERSo that specifically Plex can do tone mapping

46:53SPEAKERon 4K HDR Blu-ray rips to make them work on 1080p TVs

47:00SPEAKERso that I don't have to think about that shit

47:02SPEAKERon the clients when I want to watch something

47:04SPEAKERon the TV in the bedroom or whatever.

47:08SPEAKERAnd it'll do that for multiple streams at a time.

47:11SPEAKERSo in order for this, versus on the big PC,

47:15SPEAKERit would spike the CPUs to do that same thing.

47:18SPEAKER- Oh, 'cause that Haswell did not have,

47:20SPEAKERdid it have any form of Quick Sync at all?

47:22SPEAKER- No, Haswell does not have Quick Sync

47:24SPEAKER'cause there's no GPU on those.

47:25SPEAKER- That's a server chip, right?

47:26SPEAKER- Server chip, yeah.

47:29SPEAKERSo I put in a GPU and was doing it on an Nvidia card,

47:32SPEAKERwhich is not, obviously-

47:34SPEAKER- That's a lot of power for a machine

47:35SPEAKERthat doesn't even have a monitor.

47:37SPEAKER- Beefy, yeah, beefy.

47:39SPEAKERSo this 5105, it's like 2.4 gigahertz,

47:43SPEAKER2.9 gigahertz processor up to,

47:45SPEAKERon the boost clocks and all that.

47:46SPEAKERBut mostly it just runs, it ticks along at a real low speed

47:49SPEAKERand just is serving files, it's not even serving files,

47:53SPEAKERit's just streaming stuff on Plex.

47:55SPEAKER- We have two things about your Plex.

47:56SPEAKERSo someone who uses your Plex on a somewhat regular basis.

48:00SPEAKERNumber one, I am a conscientious Plex user

48:02SPEAKERand I'm quite sure that I'm only using it in the hours

48:04SPEAKERthat your time of use rate is lowest.

48:09SPEAKERI tend to only be on there late on a Saturday night

48:11SPEAKERor something.

48:12SPEAKER- Yeah.

48:14SPEAKER- But the other thing, oh, the other thing

48:17SPEAKERis in the last week or so.

48:19SPEAKER- It's gotten good, right?

48:20SPEAKER- The speed of the buffering is like,

48:23SPEAKERthere's no comparison at all.

48:24SPEAKERLike there barely is any buffering.

48:26SPEAKERLike it would buffer like a, and I'm not even,

48:29SPEAKERI think I set my options on your Plex

48:31SPEAKERto play original files 'cause we're eight miles

48:34SPEAKERor whatever apart and we both have gigabit upstream.

48:37SPEAKER- Yeah.

48:37SPEAKER- It's like, why not just play the full file

48:39SPEAKERand not make you transcode or whatever?

48:41SPEAKERBut I guess sometimes maybe it does transcode anyway.

48:42SPEAKERSo if you have to, like a lot of things

48:45SPEAKERtrigger transcodes that you might not expect.

48:46SPEAKERLike if you have subtitles on a client

48:49SPEAKERthat doesn't support soft subtitles and stuff like that.

48:51SPEAKER- Yeah, so anyway, on the previous setup,

48:54SPEAKERbuffering was like five plus seconds just to play something.

48:58SPEAKERAnd it's like almost instantaneous now.

49:00SPEAKERIt's a very big change.

49:01SPEAKER- Yeah, well, and you can skip forward and back

49:03SPEAKERand stuff like that while you're playing without,

49:05SPEAKERlike if you miss something, you've rewind a little bit

49:07SPEAKERand then jack up the whole playback.

49:08SPEAKER- Yeah.

49:11SPEAKER- It's funny, my daughter has habitually turned on subtitles

49:14SPEAKERsince she started reading

49:16SPEAKER'cause she likes to read the subtitles.

49:18SPEAKERIt's like fun practice.

49:20SPEAKERAnd as a result, Plex has become a little less popular

49:24SPEAKERin the house because I didn't have subtitles on

49:26SPEAKERover the last few months since we switched to NAS

49:29SPEAKERinstead of the big machine.

49:31SPEAKERAnyway, the upshot is I learned how to use Docker this week.

49:38SPEAKERI learned that in order to get hardware accelerated

49:41SPEAKERPlex transcode on the 5105,

49:43SPEAKERI had to be running a newer kernel

49:45SPEAKERthan shipped by default with Ubuntu 2210.

49:51SPEAKER- Yes, it seems like a lot of your issues did arise

49:54SPEAKERfrom just having a pretty new CPU

49:56SPEAKERand not having good driver support.

49:59SPEAKER- It's an 11th gen, it's not that new.

50:01SPEAKER- Well.

50:02SPEAKER- It's newish, it's the Diet Coke of new.

50:05SPEAKER- Like as someone who keeps quite an eye

50:06SPEAKERon kernel development these days,

50:08SPEAKERI'm gonna say that support for new hardware is,

50:14SPEAKERI'll say this, it's a hell of a lot faster

50:15SPEAKERthan FreeBSD, it's not Windows.

50:17SPEAKER- Yeah, fair.

50:18SPEAKER- In terms of support coming on for online for new hardware,

50:22SPEAKERLinux does lag still these days a bit.

50:24SPEAKER- So anyway, I spent a week installing on the metal,

50:27SPEAKERlearning how to use Docker,

50:29SPEAKERstill not getting Docker to work,

50:31SPEAKERtrying a bazillion driver changes and software config files

50:34SPEAKERand trying a million things

50:36SPEAKERand sending a bunch of stuff to text files

50:38SPEAKERand piping things all over the place.

50:40SPEAKER- I love type.

50:41SPEAKER- I mean, okay, it is nice to get just like,

50:44SPEAKERwhen you have your NAS mounted

50:45SPEAKERand I wanna read something on my desktop

50:47SPEAKERand not having to read in the shell

50:48SPEAKERand I just pipe it to a text file in a folder

50:50SPEAKERthat I can access from my Windows machine

50:52SPEAKERand just open it up in Notepad Plus

50:53SPEAKERand watch the text come in, it's pretty cool.

50:56SPEAKERBut the TLDR is, once I updated the kernel,

51:00SPEAKEReverything worked.

51:01SPEAKERSo probably like if I'd run instead of the LTS version

51:05SPEAKERof Ubuntu, which is 22,

51:07SPEAKERI started doing 204- - 2204 is LTS.

51:11SPEAKER- Didn't do what I needed.

51:12SPEAKERIf I had run the 23, the testing version

51:17SPEAKERof the next release instead of the stable version

51:19SPEAKERof the last release, I probably would have been fine.

51:22SPEAKERBut upgrading the kernel fixed the problem

51:24SPEAKERand now I have hardware accelerated Plex

51:26SPEAKERand tone mapping and the whole thing,

51:28SPEAKERwhich feels pretty good.

51:32SPEAKER- Yeah, it was fun watching you play through

51:34SPEAKERor play out some of that stuff.

51:36SPEAKERI've done, I also run Plex in container,

51:38SPEAKERdifferent kind of container, but it was a good object lesson

51:44SPEAKERin the everything is a file philosophy of Unix and Linux.

51:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

51:49SPEAKER- Because that render device, the quick sync,

51:51SPEAKERthe video encode engine on that CPU,

51:54SPEAKERjust like every other piece of hardware in your machine

51:56SPEAKERjust shows up as a file in /dev.

51:59SPEAKERAnd so like passing that through to a container

52:02SPEAKERoften is just a process of mounting that file

52:06SPEAKERin the container or depending on how you're doing privileges

52:09SPEAKERand stuff, in my case, like creating a user

52:12SPEAKERin that container and giving it group read access,

52:15SPEAKERread write access to that, you know what I mean?

52:17SPEAKERLike it's so interesting coming from the Windows world

52:20SPEAKERof like device manager and installing drivers

52:22SPEAKERfrom websites and stuff like that.

52:24SPEAKERJust the every piece of hardware is a file thing

52:28SPEAKERis such a different paradigm and it's kind of awesome

52:30SPEAKERwhen, you know, again, you can map concepts

52:33SPEAKERyou already know to that, you know, like I said,

52:35SPEAKERyou can just assign group ownership to users

52:37SPEAKERand now they can access that device,

52:39SPEAKERbut you can even do things like you can cat from that device

52:42SPEAKERto a file and get a raw image jump of whatever is in

52:45SPEAKERthe frame buffer or whatever.

52:46SPEAKERI might be kind of messing up the details a little bit there,

52:48SPEAKERbut it's like, you know, all these little utilities

52:51SPEAKERthat you know how to use work on these hardware devices,

52:53SPEAKERjust like they would a text file.

52:54SPEAKERIt's kind of awesome.

52:55SPEAKER- Well, so part of the challenge I had was that

52:57SPEAKERthat dev slash DRI, which is the driver for the Intel GPU

53:01SPEAKERwas showing up when I had the wrong kernel installed,

53:05SPEAKERbut that kernel didn't know how to talk to,

53:07SPEAKER'cause the drivers are essentially like the interface

53:10SPEAKERfor the drivers and the hardware is embedded in the kernel.

53:14SPEAKERI wasn't able to use the quick sync stuff

53:16SPEAKER'cause the kernel didn't know what to do with it.

53:17SPEAKERSo it was just ignoring that part of the chip.

53:20SPEAKERAnyway, that part doesn't matter.

53:21SPEAKERThe nice thing is after I got this going,

53:23SPEAKERI was able to set up a Docker, a Minecraft server in Docker

53:26SPEAKERfor a Java Minecraft instance,

53:28SPEAKERlike really super fast, no problem.

53:32SPEAKERAnd then I did the thing that we talked about

53:34SPEAKERin the cold open with the FFmpeg.

53:36SPEAKERI think that's running in a systemd script

53:37SPEAKERon the metal right now, not in a Docker container,

53:40SPEAKERbut I'll move it over at some point.

53:41SPEAKERAnd Docker is neat compared to BSD jails,

53:46SPEAKERbut I miss the ability to just say,

53:48SPEAKERhey, each of these gets its own IP address

53:50SPEAKERand shows up on its own machine

53:51SPEAKERand not have to deal with a bunch of port forwarding

53:53SPEAKERand the Docker infrastructure.

53:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I think there are ways to do that

53:57SPEAKERwith Docker containers, but how--

53:59SPEAKER- You have to have the Mac VLANs and a bunch of nonsense.

54:01SPEAKERAnd it seemed like a lot of trouble.

54:05SPEAKERI also have been documenting everything I've done on this

54:08SPEAKERin a note, in notes so that when I have to recreate it

54:11SPEAKERat some point in the future,

54:11SPEAKERI'll be able to do that, which is nice.

54:14SPEAKER- See, I did not do that.

54:15SPEAKERAnd when I, so I moved this NAS to straight Linux,

54:18SPEAKERno web UI, no, you know, application layer

54:22SPEAKERor handholding in late August, beginning of September.

54:26SPEAKER- Yeah, just in that time of life.

54:29SPEAKER- I made it maybe three months, two and a half months

54:32SPEAKERbefore I hosed the system badly enough

54:34SPEAKERthat I couldn't figure out how to recover it

54:35SPEAKERand just wipe and reinstall.

54:38SPEAKER- Oh no.

54:39SPEAKER- I F'd up, it's a long story.

54:42SPEAKERI messed up the bootloader.

54:44SPEAKERSomething bad happened to the grub partition

54:46SPEAKERand I couldn't figure out how to rebuild it properly.

54:48SPEAKERSo I just said, it'd be easier to wipe this.

54:50SPEAKERAnyway, point is--

54:52SPEAKER- Declaring Linux bankruptcy is what I used to call that.

54:54SPEAKER- Yes, having not documented any,

54:56SPEAKERall of the things I had done to that machine,

54:58SPEAKERit was like a slow month long process

55:00SPEAKERof like every couple of days, remembering like,

55:02SPEAKERoh, I forgot to go set that other thing up.

55:04SPEAKERLike, oh, I need to go set the ZFS arc size again.

55:07SPEAKERI forgot to do that, you know what I mean?

55:08SPEAKERIt's probably the note taking is good.

55:11SPEAKER- The note taking, I mean, it was nice

55:13SPEAKER'cause it meant that I could find,

55:14SPEAKERlike when I accidentally closed the window in Firefox

55:16SPEAKERand I closed 35 tabs

55:17SPEAKERthat had all the different how-tos I was using,

55:19SPEAKERit was nice 'cause the one that was the good one

55:21SPEAKERwas still in the notes and I could just click on it

55:23SPEAKERand go back to where I left off.

55:27SPEAKERThe next thing I think is to set up a Linux GSM instance

55:31SPEAKERin a Docker container on that

55:33SPEAKERso I can set up some quake servers and stuff like that.

55:35SPEAKER- I am running Linux GSM as we speak

55:38SPEAKERto run a Valheim server for some friends.

55:41SPEAKERIt's nice, it's a little clunky in some ways,

55:43SPEAKERbut I think it's probably still better

55:45SPEAKERthan doing it all yourself.

55:47SPEAKER- So the experiment here was that I was unsure

55:51SPEAKERif the little, 'cause my NAS has a small Celeron in it too.

55:55SPEAKERIt may even be the same processor.

55:56SPEAKERThe difference is that the NAS,

55:58SPEAKERbecause it's Synology's Linux,

56:00SPEAKERI can't do stuff like update kernel and things like that.

56:02SPEAKERAnd they're usually pretty good about that,

56:04SPEAKERbut also I'm fine having this stuff

56:07SPEAKERrunning on a separate machine.

56:08SPEAKERIt turns out with NFS and all that, it was pretty easy.

56:11SPEAKER- That's the beauty of the flat Linux install,

56:13SPEAKERnot the appliance type true NAS or whatever sort of thing,

56:17SPEAKERis you can just do whatever you want.

56:19SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a certain freedom there.

56:21SPEAKERI think my next thing is gonna be looking

56:23SPEAKERat the Linux containers that are more like,

56:25SPEAKERyou had told me about a couple of them yesterday.

56:27SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what I do.

56:28SPEAKERThat's also what the Debian project leader does.

56:31SPEAKERIt feels so vindicated.

56:32SPEAKERI use LXC, or I think it's actually pronounced Lexi,

56:36SPEAKERbut who knows how to pronounce anything in Linux,

56:39SPEAKERwhich is, the distinction is that Docker

56:41SPEAKERis application level containers.

56:42SPEAKERAll that's in that container is the application

56:44SPEAKERand its dependencies.

56:45SPEAKERThere's nothing else in there.

56:46SPEAKERAnd LXC is more like FreeBSD jails, where it's a full system.

56:50SPEAKERIt's a whole ass Linux in each container.

56:52SPEAKER- So that means I can have a different kernel running on?

56:55SPEAKER- No, no, no, just like application containers,

56:58SPEAKERit does run on the same.

57:00SPEAKER- Okay.

57:00SPEAKER- Yeah, you'd need a VM to do that sort of thing.

57:03SPEAKER- But like they each have a file system

57:04SPEAKERthat I can then put something in the mount Fstab for?

57:11SPEAKER- Yes, exactly.

57:12SPEAKERIt feels much more like a full Linux system.

57:15SPEAKERI mean, there are some things that are proxied

57:16SPEAKERfrom the host system, like proc and sys

57:18SPEAKERand some of those kind of suitable systems

57:21SPEAKERthat refer to hardware are just passed through.

57:23SPEAKERAnd so you do get some weird issues where,

57:26SPEAKERlike if you look at memory usage in the container,

57:28SPEAKERyou're only gonna see what it's using

57:29SPEAKERand not what the whole system,

57:30SPEAKERlike it's aware of some things, not others.

57:32SPEAKERBut anyway, it is much more of a full Linux system.

57:35SPEAKERAnd then part of the cool thing there is that,

57:37SPEAKERlike I'm running all of my main service containers

57:40SPEAKERon Ubuntu 22.04, 'cause it's LTS.

57:42SPEAKERAnd it's like, oh, this is good and sturdy.

57:45SPEAKERI've got a, what I think of as kind of

57:46SPEAKERa Swiss army knife container that's Arch.

57:49SPEAKERAnd that, then I can just install

57:51SPEAKERall the bleeding edge bullshit that Arch offers

57:54SPEAKERin a sandbox and I can use it

57:56SPEAKERand not worry about hosing the main system.

57:58SPEAKERBut I also ran into a situation where like,

58:00SPEAKERI wanted to set up the unify controller,

58:01SPEAKERwhich runs the, the Ubiquity access points.

58:05SPEAKERFor-

58:06SPEAKER- There's a good doctor image for that, for what it's worth.

58:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I know, I know, I know.

58:10SPEAKERBut for various reasons, their dependencies

58:12SPEAKERare so out of date that I couldn't install those

58:14SPEAKERon Ubuntu 22.04, but I was able to just go grab

58:17SPEAKERan Ubuntu 20.04 image that did have the older dependencies

58:20SPEAKERthat needed and just spin that container up

58:23SPEAKERon that Ubuntu instead.

58:25SPEAKERSo like, you got a lot of flexibility there.

58:26SPEAKERLike, like I could try Fedora.

58:28SPEAKERLike I would, I would like to,

58:30SPEAKERI would like to get my head around the Red Hat tool chain

58:32SPEAKERwith DNF and Yum and like all their package management stuff.

58:35SPEAKERAnd you can very easily just spin up a Fedora container

58:38SPEAKERwith this and jump in there and mess around with that stuff.

58:40SPEAKERIt's-

58:41SPEAKER- That's cool.

58:42SPEAKER- It's pretty neat.

58:43SPEAKER- Pretty neat.

58:44SPEAKER- Yeah, that's how I feel about the server.

58:46SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm even doing stuff, sorry, I'll stop.

58:48SPEAKERBut I'm hosting, you know, all those,

58:51SPEAKERall those containers live on ZFS and so I'm using,

58:53SPEAKERI made one Ubuntu container and installed like

58:55SPEAKERall the common stuff I would want in it,

58:57SPEAKERbuild dependencies and shell set up stuff and whatever.

59:00SPEAKERAnd then I'm actually just using,

59:01SPEAKERand that's on its own data set.

59:02SPEAKERAnd I'm just using ZFS clones to clone that off,

59:07SPEAKERserialize that as many times as I need more services.

59:09SPEAKERAnd they use, they use zero extra space

59:12SPEAKERuntil you change anything in there.

59:14SPEAKER- Oh, that's awesome.

59:14SPEAKER- So it's like, that's like a two gig container

59:17SPEAKERor something at the base,

59:18SPEAKERbut new services use no space until you add

59:21SPEAKERor change things in there.

59:22SPEAKERIt's kind of a nice efficient way to handle stuff.

59:24SPEAKER- That's really cool.

59:26SPEAKERThe other thing of note is this Beelink thing

59:28SPEAKERhas two ethernet ports.

59:30SPEAKERSo if you're looking and thinking about

59:31SPEAKERa lightweight PF sense router, it's 150.

59:36SPEAKERYou can get the 50, I think it's the 5005 version is,

59:42SPEAKERis a, sorry, the 5095 version is a $150.

59:50SPEAKERLike it, then they go seem to go on sale fairly often.

59:53SPEAKER- Yeah, I bet that would make a pretty nice router

59:55SPEAKERfor PF sensor, open sensor, Bios, whatever you want to.

59:59SPEAKER- Whatever your home rolled out.

1:00:01SPEAKERI don't think I'm that crazy yet, but.

1:00:02SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:00:03SPEAKER- It's an option there, but yes.

1:00:05SPEAKERAnyway, cool.

1:00:06SPEAKERThere's a little project update for you.

1:00:08SPEAKERI'm sure we'll have more on the patron episode this month.

1:00:10SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm, the next step for me on that is to,

1:00:14SPEAKERis to move that FFmpeg thing into a,

1:00:17SPEAKERsomething that doesn't involve me opening a terminal

1:00:19SPEAKERand typing some stuff.

1:00:20SPEAKEROh, I also bought an SSH client for my iPad, Brad.

1:00:24SPEAKER- Oh.

1:00:25SPEAKER- I bought the fancy panic one.

1:00:27SPEAKER- Oh, did they make one?

1:00:28SPEAKEROh yeah, I've seen that, right?

1:00:29SPEAKERI bought, I bought Shelly a few years ago,

1:00:31SPEAKERso I haven't gotten any others, but.

1:00:34SPEAKER- It's, it is called Prompt, which is a good name

1:00:39SPEAKERfor a SSH client.

1:00:40SPEAKER- Yes, I've seen that.

1:00:41SPEAKERTheir stuff looks so nice.

1:00:42SPEAKER- It's very pretty.

1:00:43SPEAKERI like panic a lot.

1:00:45SPEAKER- Also, there's something cool about like SSHing

1:00:47SPEAKERon your phone into your NAS and running HTOP

1:00:50SPEAKERor something like that.

1:00:51SPEAKERAnd just seeing this big, like seeing this big text mode,

1:00:54SPEAKERlike text user interface, colorful thing on your phone.

1:00:59SPEAKERIt's, it's like a weird retro futuristic thing.

1:01:01SPEAKER- It makes me think about a future where our phones,

1:01:07SPEAKERlike, I mean, I know on Android,

1:01:08SPEAKERyou can access command line and stuff like that.

1:01:09SPEAKERSo it's a choice that I've made.

1:01:11SPEAKERI realized that, but yeah, I wish that there was,

1:01:14SPEAKERI wish that there was more command line stuff on the phone.

1:01:16SPEAKER- Can you, can you, just on a stock,

1:01:18SPEAKERnot a rooted Android phone?

1:01:19SPEAKER- You have to get a boot manager.

1:01:21SPEAKERI don't know if it still can be used to be able to.

1:01:23SPEAKER- Man, there have been numerous times

1:01:26SPEAKERI wished you could get to a command line on an iPhone.

1:01:28SPEAKERAnyway, we should wrap this up.

1:01:29SPEAKER- I'm going to tell you, if you're, if you're,

1:01:32SPEAKERif your partner and family are living in an iOS ecosystem,

1:01:35SPEAKERyou're trapped at this point.

1:01:37SPEAKER- Yeah, no, it's like the watch is too good.

1:01:39SPEAKERI'm, I'm here.

1:01:40SPEAKER- Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

1:01:41SPEAKERAnd on that note, this has been a real,

1:01:45SPEAKERa real voyage of discovery.

1:01:47SPEAKER- Yeah. Again, again, condolences to everybody

1:01:50SPEAKERwho was losing their jobs out there.

1:01:51SPEAKERThat's awful.

1:01:55SPEAKERLet us know if we can help.

1:01:56SPEAKER- Yeah, good.

1:01:57SPEAKERAnd, and, and, and don't hesitate to ask for help.

1:01:59SPEAKERLike it's like the thing, the thing,

1:02:02SPEAKERthe thing that my first boss at a magazine told me

1:02:05SPEAKERas a budding journalist, after I'd signed the papers

1:02:08SPEAKERthat said I was going to come work there was,

1:02:10SPEAKERwhen you work in the, in this business,

1:02:12SPEAKERyou can be sacked at any moment.

1:02:14SPEAKERIt won't be because of anything you did wrong.

1:02:15SPEAKERIt won't be because your work wasn't good enough.

1:02:17SPEAKERIt won't be because you, like, you,

1:02:19SPEAKERyou didn't kick ass, right?

1:02:21SPEAKERIt's because somebody in a suit, higher up the chain,

1:02:25SPEAKERlooked at some numbers and wanted one of the numbers

1:02:27SPEAKERto be bigger than the other.

1:02:28SPEAKERAnd the easiest way to do that was to cut people's jobs.

1:02:32SPEAKERAnd, and it sucks.

1:02:33SPEAKERAnd I was like, you know,

1:02:34SPEAKERyou told me this before I quit my good job

1:02:35SPEAKERand moved to California,

1:02:37SPEAKERprobably would have not taken this job.

1:02:39SPEAKERIt's like, that's why I told you after you signed the papers.

1:02:42SPEAKER- Oh boy, oh boy.

1:02:44SPEAKER- Anyway, the upshot is it's not your fault.

1:02:46SPEAKERYou didn't do anything wrong.

1:02:47SPEAKERDon't, don't, especially if it's the first time

1:02:51SPEAKERyou've been through this, it hits hard and it sucks.

1:02:54SPEAKER- Yes, for sure.

1:02:55SPEAKER- But you're going to get through it and you'll be okay.

1:02:58SPEAKERAnd on that note, I mean,

1:03:00SPEAKERhopefully our patrons don't want to cut jobs here

1:03:02SPEAKER'cause there's not that, there's not that much fat on the,

1:03:04SPEAKERon the old, on the old podcast side of beef.

1:03:08SPEAKER- Tech Pot Inc runs pretty, pretty lean.

1:03:12SPEAKER- But we would, this is a listener supported show

1:03:14SPEAKERand we want to thank our patrons as always.

1:03:17SPEAKER- Yes, we do. Thank you, patrons.

1:03:18SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons.

1:03:20SPEAKERWe especially want to thank our executive producer

1:03:22SPEAKERtier patrons, including Nick Johnston,

1:03:25SPEAKERPaddle Creek Games Makers, Fractured Veil, Andrew Slosky.

1:03:29SPEAKEROctothorpe Bunny Crime is brought to you

1:03:30SPEAKERby Nightmares Goats doing HVAC, period.

1:03:34SPEAKERThis is a, this is a direct Twitch reference.

1:03:37SPEAKERJust Wedge, Joel Krauska, Twinkle Twinkie, and James Kamik.

1:03:41SPEAKERThank you all so much.

1:03:42SPEAKERWe really appreciate your support.

1:03:44SPEAKER- We do.

1:03:45SPEAKER- And everyone's support, frankly.

1:03:47SPEAKERSo yeah, that's, that's it for us this week.

1:03:52SPEAKERThe, like, I apologize for doing a news episode

1:03:56SPEAKER'cause we don't generally do these,

1:03:57SPEAKERbut that Tesla, like A, I feel vindicated as shit,

1:04:01SPEAKERB, that Tesla, everybody should read that Tesla article

1:04:05SPEAKERif you get in a car on the reg, so.

1:04:07SPEAKER- It's a bit chilling.

1:04:08SPEAKER- It is a bit chilling.

1:04:09SPEAKERIt is, it is right to your congressional representative

1:04:13SPEAKERand/or senator level of chilling as far as I'm concerned.

1:04:15SPEAKERAnyway.

1:04:16SPEAKER- Anyway, we'll be back with the ever lighthearted topic

1:04:19SPEAKERnext week of questions.

1:04:22SPEAKER- Is it questions already?

1:04:23SPEAKER- Yeah, we were, we were very late on questions.

1:04:26SPEAKER- Oh, right, 'cause we did the, yeah.

1:04:28SPEAKER- The December questions spilled over,

1:04:29SPEAKERso we are right back again.

1:04:31SPEAKERQuestions seeking answers on the Discord or, or?

1:04:36SPEAKER- Or the techpod@content.town is the email address.

1:04:40SPEAKER- That's right, techpod@content.town

1:04:43SPEAKERis where to send some questions that we will answer.

1:04:45SPEAKER- And, and we got good feedback last week

1:04:48SPEAKERabout the third, the not Patreon Patreon.

1:04:52SPEAKERI don't know if we have a timeline on setting that up,

1:04:55SPEAKERbut I think we are going to turn off the $2 tier very soon.

1:04:59SPEAKERI know I've said this before.

1:05:00SPEAKER- Eventually, maybe.

1:05:01SPEAKER- Look, it's-

1:05:02SPEAKER- Probably.

1:05:03SPEAKER- Change is scary, Brad.

1:05:06SPEAKERBut, but if, if you are, if you are interested in that,

1:05:09SPEAKERat some point, like I think the plan,

1:05:11SPEAKERmy thought now is that if we turn off the $2 tier on Patreon

1:05:14SPEAKERwe should turn on an equivalent thing on the other platform.

1:05:19SPEAKER'Cause the, 'cause the, just so people,

1:05:21SPEAKERfor full transparency, the problem with the $2 tier

1:05:22SPEAKERon Patreon is that with their cut at,

1:05:25SPEAKERat smaller patronage levels, lower patronage levels,

1:05:29SPEAKERtheir cut goes up.

1:05:30SPEAKERSo we basically, like we don't get very much money

1:05:33SPEAKERfrom Patreon on $2 subs, which is fine.

1:05:35SPEAKERLike we're, we're, we're okay.

1:05:37SPEAKERBut we would like to offer services

1:05:41SPEAKERlike a Mastodon account for people.

1:05:43SPEAKERAnd the other thing might work better for that.

1:05:46SPEAKERAnyway, that's where we're at.

1:05:47SPEAKER- To be explored in the future.

1:05:49SPEAKER- Yeah, but I'm, I'm going to say this is the hard cutoff

1:05:53SPEAKERand we're going to turn it off on the 29th.

1:05:55SPEAKER- Whoa, damn it.

1:05:56SPEAKER- Before the 29th, so, so.

1:05:58SPEAKER- Decisions just being made right here on the show.

1:06:00SPEAKER- I'm sorry.

1:06:01SPEAKERWe, we can discuss further if you want.

1:06:03SPEAKERWe talked about it before.

1:06:04SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:06:05SPEAKER- We can record this if you want, I'm sorry.

1:06:06SPEAKER- You should just rip the bandaid off.

1:06:07SPEAKERNo, it's okay.

1:06:08SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:06:11SPEAKERNeither of us like making decisions.

1:06:13SPEAKERAnyway, we'll see you all next week.

1:06:14SPEAKERHave a good one.

1:06:15SPEAKERBye.

1:06:16SPEAKER(upbeat music)