Accidental Tech Podcast576: Quiet Little Leech
https://atp.fm/576
The cancelation of Apple's car project, excitement for potential AI applications, the wonders of email clients, and starting a car in fifth gear.
Merlin Mann
Ricky Corp III@atpfm is the Bootleg not playing for anyone?
John Siracusa@rickycorp It’s working for me. Maybe try deleting it and re-downloading?
Jason R. Heimbaugh@jasonheimbaugh I used /usr/ucb/mail instead of either of those!
sayrer@atpfm @siracusa @caseyliss @marcoarment
1) the fastmail people are doing this: https://jmap.io/spec.html
2) on the keyboards, I use the small Apple Magic keyboards because they are so close to laptop ones, so I never have to look
Colton Belfils@atpfm @siracusa have you tried Mimestream? It feels like it's doing what you might want in a mail Mac app. It's Gmail native and Mac native, made by people who used to work on mail.app. Its source of truth is the Gmail server. I wanna say it's using the Gmail api and not one of the mail protocols, so it's the exact same rules, folders, filtering, … as the server. And with it being a Gmail client in the same way the Gmail web app is, it's much more a drop in replacement than other mail apps.
@coalbell Yes. It’s great! But I still use the Gmail web client.
Anthony Allison@anthony Read The Power Broker to find out!
@siracusa you realize you just handed me a 1,344 page book and said, "go find your answer somewhere in here"? I think @hotdogsladies would be disappointed in you.
@hotdogsladies @siracusa I mean, I'll add it to the list. But I have a few other things to do first 😂
Micah@anthony @hotdogsladies @siracusa https://www.nycurbanism.com/blog/2020/7/28/robert-moses-low-parkway-bridges
Robert Moses' Low Parkway Bridges — NYC URBANISM
During the summer New Yorkers flock to the beaches on Long Island using the network of parkways and highways designed by Master Planner Robert Moses. Occasionally there are reports of accidents when trucks or buses hit one of the low overpasses. Two years ago a bus full of high school stude
@anthony I mean, you could also just Google it…
Magnus Ahltorp@atpfm ”If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a self driving car.”
traal@atpfm Every time @marcoarment goes on about his Microsoft keyboards, I wonder why he doesn't pay 10 times as much for a keyboard that's more than twice as good? 😊 Kinesis have been among the best in the business since the 1990's.
https://kinesis-ergo.com
https://kinesis-ergo.com
Darth Aloha 🌺@atpfm Sprinkle! Sprinkle!
Behold the power of photoshop's generative AI nonsense.
Jon Sagara@DarthAloha Filing this under "things I didn't know 10 year-old me needed until AI came along" 😱
Jim Lipsey
Paul Zadunajsky@localhost @DarthAloha @atpfm @siracusa Feels like I’m having a whoosh moment but anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant knows that stuff like this is real don’t they?
The Animal and the Machine@DarthAloha @atpfm
I think a lot of people will laugh at this, see how unoriginal it is and discount it. And another one that looks great. Yet they will not realise that they are the intelligence making the decision making. They are both the same to the machine.
I think a lot of people will laugh at this, see how unoriginal it is and discount it. And another one that looks great. Yet they will not realise that they are the intelligence making the decision making. They are both the same to the machine.
ChancerubbageI’d totally believe that is real, just like the giant ketchup containers they refill table bottles from in restaurants.
Penguin@atpfm I'm curious why @marcoarment thinks that a Overcast is a good indicator for AVP usage. I usually listen to podcasts when I'm doing housework, at the gym, or when driving – none of which are conducive to AVP use. If anything, I think that @caseyliss's Callsheet has a stronger use-case for the AVP when watching movies.
@belazeebub He doesn’t, and he said so on the show, I believe.
Simon B@atpfm @siracusa @marcoarment @caseyliss Regarding using AI for podcast related business, my co-host and I recently finished generating images for the entire back catalogue of episodes, the janky dreamlike quality fits in with the science-fiction tone of our show: https://www.testsfromthefuture.com
Stephen Tierney@atpfm using Google and stackoverflow is superior to ChatGPT for programming solutions because you get to see context, discussion and analysis from the community. You also usually get alternatives and history of how the state of the art has changed over time.
Andrew Gibbons@atpfm may I ask why you guys (esp @caseyliss?) pronounce the feature: Apple Vision Pro ‘Pre-sonas’? It reminds me of Steve Jobs referring to ‘MacOS Jag-wire’. Love Gibbo from Australia.
Casey Liss@gibbo1 uh…. I do?
@gibbo1 maybe it’s just fast-talking or audio compression? Got a clip?
@siracusa @caseyliss probably fast talking. No doubt an accent/culture thing - I've noticed it in Apple events with 'Preformance' too.
A crash edit of samples from this ep:
https://youtu.be/Som6yzaGDmE
Sorry if coming across as a nitpick - just trying to have fun. ATP is my #1 podcast by far. Love you guys.
Defender of Presonas
@gibbo1 I just hear “per” 🤷♂️
Karan J
Carlos Pereira@atpfm, on the email client topic: I mainly use Gmail, for all the reasons @siracusa mentioned.
One of the main blockers of Apple Mail for me is that I am not able to archive a message without it being marked as read. I need to archive messages and still keep them as unread. I haven’t been able to find a way to do that on Apple Mail.
popbones@atpfm RE Apple Notes export, I've been looking into this recently myself. There are several projects and scripts on this. Most of them are focusing on the texts, non of then support full interpretation/rendering of the notes content as far as I know. There's even a service that can publish your shared notes to a web page.
Luckily, we are not far from it. In the SQLite database, notes content are stored as gzipped binary. The binary itself is actually protobuf serialisation of the note.
@atpfm The main schema is something Apple defined and is called Topotext. There are seperate schema for tables, a custom CRDT stuff.
It's easy enough to extract textual part from it. But without a schema, it's hard to parse more complex data.
Luckily, not sure if this by accident or good faith, one can find the proto files in the JavaScript.
I haven't have time to work on this yet, but it is not that hard to parse most of the note data convert into a format you desire for archive purposes.
@atpfm I guess the CRDT for tables, and on top of that, sketches might be a bit complicated if you want to convert it to a format that reversible so you can somehow put them back and edit them. But I for archival, it shouldn't be a problem.
@atpfm Also, if anyone is interested, the general structure of the note content is a sequence of "AttributedString", I imagine similar to that in AppKit/UIKit.
An instance of AttributeString has a pure string value and a list of Attribute spans specify what Attributes a part of the string has via range indexes.
Even when Apple introduced links to notes in the last version, this general structure wasn't changed, it's just a link attribute point to a deep link of the note specified by ID.
@atpfm Even though, it's not a feature in the Note app, but you can point to a folder you notes as well.
The URL schemas are:
- applenotes:note/{noteid}
- applenotes:folder/{folderid}
(If I didn't remember wrong)
@atpfm By the way, I think if you do the takeout, Apple probably would just give you rtfd version of your notes.
The main problem with that is checklists would be converted to simple bulletin lists.
I think I did it a couple of years back. Don't remember the exact details and can't find the file 😂. But there's probably nothing good otherwise I'd do that regularly.
@atpfm re Project Titan cancellation:
- it's likely it was a zero-interest-rate phenomenon. Apple's had more money than it knows what to do with - see volume of share repurchases - and so when interest rates are zero or close to, the theoretical benefit from a low margin business taking 10 years to profitability is still worth trying out. When interest rates are 5%, suddenly that $1bn a year you're throwing at it looks very expensive for investors expecting 15% return.
- it's likely it was a zero-interest-rate phenomenon. Apple's had more money than it knows what to do with - see volume of share repurchases - and so when interest rates are zero or close to, the theoretical benefit from a low margin business taking 10 years to profitability is still worth trying out. When interest rates are 5%, suddenly that $1bn a year you're throwing at it looks very expensive for investors expecting 15% return.
@atpfm basically zero interest rates make every potentially profitable project look like an infinite timescale.
jengerIn my experience, both car touchscreens & car infotainment systems all suck - and these are both areas where Apple is strong and could add value:
Apple make great touchscreens and the fashion for big slab displays in cars is crying out for an iPad quality screen! Embedded screens would be good, add upgradable compute and it’s even better.
These could be powered by “carOS” to deliver standalone infotainment & other car controls, plus ensure great CarPlay integration
Apple have experience in making secure, extensible operating systems and their ability to keep a secret is well-known, so they could provide value to the auto-makers through customisation.
In return, Apple could get some really interesting telemetry to improve Apple Maps, which would benefit all iPhone users, as well as being a new platform for devices and apps.
Lots of words, what do you think?
@karanj @jenger @atpfm @siracusa Very true, that’s fair 🙂
It would be interesting if they essentially provided large screen “iPads for cars” as the infotainment system though, I’d pay for that!
ie they add an OEM division to provide the infotainment hardware as well, not just the OS stack… although maybe that would mean they’d insist on providing the speakers as well… “CarPods” anyone? 😄
(Although their speakers sound pretty good to be fair)
@atpfm worst timeline: Siri Pro launches with iOS 18, which has the generative AI features and level of comprehension, but is gated behind a monthly subscription. You just *know* they're going to look for a way to add another revenue stream.
Techzha@atpfm one “feature spill” from Project Titan would have to be Crash Detection and automatically calling emergency services.
Steve Wilkinson (cgWerks)@atpfm Agree with your take on self-driving cars. I tell people it is a qualitative, not quantitative problem. Faster computers aren't going to solve the fundamental issue.... which is that when it encounters something it hasn't been 'taught' it will screw up in some manner. And, this problem set is infinite.
Wish I could have gotten a small consulting fee years ago, and saved Apple $$$ Billions!
Wish I could have gotten a small consulting fee years ago, and saved Apple $$$ Billions!