The emails cometh, and bringeth with them questions and tips about why nobody can order a 3080 or PS5, the eyeball-saving properties of red nightlights, rounded vs. angular phone design, consumerism in tech and ethics in coding, and, yes, how to make your own Lack rack. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
The emails cometh, and bringeth with them questions and tips about why nobody can order a 3080 or PS5, the eyeball-saving properties of red nightlights, rounded vs. angular phone design, consumerism in tech and ethics in coding, and, yes, how to make your own Lack rack.
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Will: [00:00:00] I miss going to the movies, man.
Brad: [00:00:01] Yeah
I, even when I could go to the movies, I didn't go to the movies, but then again, I didn't go much of anywhere. So
Will: [00:00:07] I went to the movies enough that I paid for one of those like pay 20 bucks a month and go as much as you want deals.
Brad: [00:00:12] that was almost enough to get me back there. Actually. Did you feel like you were getting your money's worth out of that?
Will: [00:00:16] Uh, it was kind of cyclical, like, so I paid for the AMC one, which was at the Metreon downtown. And like, you know how, when you're at GDC, sometimes we're at a conference at Moscone and you have like, you have like three hours between meetings and you're like, you don't want to go be social. You just want to go have a quiet dark room.
And I I'm pretty sure I watched captain Marvel two or three times during GDC one year.
Brad: [00:00:36] I really, I have great admiration for people who are impulsive enough to just go see a movie on the spot. I don't think I'm capable of it.
Will: [00:00:43] Yeah. Like if, if we had had that, when I, when we worked downtown, when I was still working downtown and like, it was just like, get off muni or Bart, you know, or walk from the office to the movie theater, I would have gone all the time.
Brad: [00:00:55] That's amazing Just the, just to get the idea to be standing right next to the movie theater. And then just on the spot to say, I haven't been to see a movie is like mind blowing to me. Like I
Will: [00:01:03] Oh, it's the best.
Brad: [00:01:04] Every movie I've ever seen in my life required to like 48 hours of contemplation.
Will: [00:01:08] Sometimes we're very different people, but so I just saw that Alamo is doing this thing where if you buy, you pay 150 bucks and guarantee 150 bucks in food and Bev, you can rent a whole theater for you. And you're like your, your Rona pod.
Brad: [00:01:26] is there any minimum number of people? Could that be like for four people?
Will: [00:01:29] It could be for one person. It looks like if you're willing to buy like 150 bucks worth of food at the Alamo, not that much.
Brad: [00:01:33] It's probably not that hard to do.
Will: [00:01:35] Yeah, I can do that
Brad: [00:01:36] It's like three beers.
Will: [00:01:38] It's look, it's more than that, but you get a, you get one of those be like, you have to avoid the popcorn and you get into the novelty food, you know, the, the, the, the potstickers and the whatever themed food is.
Brad: [00:01:49] Go. We gotta go for a high caloric density, high calorie to money, right to cost ratio
Will: [00:01:54] High calorie to mass. Yeah. You don't want to get a lot of, I just wonder how can you get them to show whatever you want?
Brad: [00:02:00] Oh, I didn't think about that. I thought you meant you had to be seeing a first run, like whatever was on that's. Huh? What could you just bring your own?
Will: [00:02:07] I,
Brad: [00:02:08] Here's a thumb drive. Just pull up the MKV on there.
Will: [00:02:10] look, here's my Plex log in. I got ya. Um, I just feel like, what would I like to see in this? There's like a handful of movies that I never saw in theaters that I would love to see in theaters, like alien is a, is on that. I never saw alien in theaters. Um, I just, yeah, I'm, I'm into this idea a lot, but I think three people, you know, six, a hundred bucks, a person is a lot.
I'd have to get another, we'd have to like diagonally sit in opposite corners of the theater with like another three or four people to make the finances work for it.
Brad: [00:02:42] The social distancing kind of undermine the group social aspect a little bit. It's maybe, I guess, whatever. I guess if you're it's you're, you're a theater, you can just holler and heckle all you want. Right.
Will: [00:02:51] Yeah. Yeah. Like he was like, do a double feature, watch, happy bill Gilmore and Billy Madison and, you know, blaze up, have a good time live large.
Brad: [00:03:00] we really are different people.
Will: [00:03:33] Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will
Brad: [00:03:36] I'm Brad. I brought the emails
Will: [00:03:38] you brought the, you, you have the emails.
Brad: [00:03:41] here looking at it. Let's see all of them are labeled. Uh, just about half of them are also starred. I don't know if that the notes, anything special about those emails.
Will: [00:03:49] That means that I marked them as special, uh, not knowing that you were labeling them. Cause we, we have a plan, but we have not communicated the new, the new order of emails,
Brad: [00:03:59] Yes. A new order, a new order is rising in our shared Gmail account.
Will: [00:04:04] look, if the Russians hack us, it's going to be very orderly. That's all I'm saying.
Brad: [00:04:08] Uh, yeah. So it is, um,
Will: [00:04:11] We've got fresh crop. It's the September, the September harvest is in these emails are pumpkin spice flavored. I think
Brad: [00:04:17] I'd have a little bit of an agrarian for flare to these email episodes. I love, I know I've said it before. I love email week just because we know what the topics are going to be.
Will: [00:04:25] so. So, you know, this is the thing that we talked about off, off the lines a little
Brad: [00:04:29] I've got some ideas.
Will: [00:04:30] Uh, but I think, I think the thing about this podcast that has become clear over the last year and change of doing it because we're at the one year Mark now is that, uh, the research episodes are often very time intensive. The emails episodes are very not time intensive. It would be nice to have one more regular format. Like even when we do interviews, they're pretty time intensive. Like it would be nice to have one regular format that is not like somebody doing eight hours of reading before we do a recording.
Brad: [00:05:03] Like I had that idea about, guests. The other day I was like, I would have, what if every other episode that's not the email episode was a guest episode, but you're right. Like that getting guests is like such a moving target that that's really tough to want to rely on.
Will: [00:05:14] I mean, I think, I think once we get a pipeline of guests, it could be, but it's, it's pretty time consuming to like, think about who the guests should be and then figure out when the schedules work and accutaly
Brad: [00:05:24] Booking them as booking them as is a big part of the workload. But then the big, the big one is just the life. Always. Not always, but life can always happen. You know what I mean? Like
Will: [00:05:31] Yeah. It turns out.
well, you have a real job. I have a job ish.
Brad: [00:05:35] if you're more of the point though, like your guests surely has a, has a busy life already and sometimes life can get in the way.
And then all of a sudden you're trying to figure out what to do if they can't make
Will: [00:05:45] Well,
yeah. And like we have a couple of guests, we have a couple of potential. We have, we have a pretty deep, well of potential incoming guests that we've engaged with and that are excited about coming on the show. And either like, they don't have a good place to record or they're moving or they're doing book tours or, you know, whatever, whatever it happens to be, uh, it makes it challenging.
So.
Brad: [00:06:05] I think we're making,
Will: [00:06:06] to be, yeah.
Brad: [00:06:07] yeah, we're making progress though. Cause we knew what this week's episode was going to be. And we know what next week's episode is going to be, which is.
Will: [00:06:13] Wait, what's next? What's next. Week's episode going to be,
Brad: [00:06:15] I thought it was the Hitchhiker's guide episode
Will: [00:06:18] Oh, we're doing that next week
Brad: [00:06:19] Oh yeah. where are we?
Will: [00:06:20] I mean, we can, yeah, sure. Why not? Lets do it
Brad: [00:06:22] Maybe I have been, maybe I have been, I've been reading too furiously if we're not then.
Will: [00:06:26] just, I just told you that seed her even finished the damn book.
Brad: [00:06:28] Okay. I'm getting there.
Will: [00:06:30] Um, are you enjoying?
Brad: [00:06:32] Yeah. I'm not super deep in yet. I can't say. Okay. Fine. All right. Okay.
Will: [00:06:37] I was just curious.
Brad: [00:06:38] I'm just, I'm glad I read the introduction before I started the book. So I get the Ford prefect joke. Cause otherwise I wouldn't have had a clue what the prefect was.
Will: [00:06:45] a lot of seventies criticisms in there. Um, but emails
Brad: [00:06:49] Emails. None of them are about Hitchhiker's guide.
Will: [00:06:52] that's perfect.
Brad: [00:06:53] They're all
about, yeah.
They're all about other stuff. Uh,
Will: [00:06:56] want to hear people's stories about when they first read Hitchhiker's guide next month.
Brad: [00:07:00] Yes. I've seen a couple of those on the discord already. Um, all right. Uh, what's the email address? I always
Will: [00:07:06] It Is techpod@content.town the internets number one, content, destination tech pod at content
Brad: [00:07:13] That's right. We have all the answers to any question you might ask. I promise. first email is from Charlie. This is very timely. It's extremely timely. And I would say something about the communities we hang out in, but I feel like this is half of all anybody's talking about right now.
I don't want to talk about what the other half is.
Will: [00:07:32] Yeah. The other half is really a bummer. So let's not, we'll, we'll get into that on the other show, the fall of Western civilization.
Brad: [00:07:37] Uh, alright. Here's Charlie's question. What happens on the back end? When a high number of people try to order a product at the same time, as we've seen with the new console preorders and the a GeForce 3080 situation, major retailers and providers of cloud services are still unable to keep things running smoothly during these high demand scenarios.
Why hasn't this problem been solved yet?
Will: [00:07:59] It has been solved. The sneaker people figured it out years ago. Yeah. The sneaker, the situation like you get a token, you show up at a specific time. You get a token, use the token exchanges, the token for goods or services
Brad: [00:08:09] Wait, Do you mean physically show up with your token, with a physical token?
Will: [00:08:12] both. I look, I'm not a sneaker person. I'm sure. John Drake has a lot of information about this if we asked him.
Um,
Brad: [00:08:18] obviously going, going to a place, not exactly an option right now,
Will: [00:08:21] Like, all I know is that the one time that I tried to engage with the sneaker culture business is like I logged in five minutes before I made sure all my credit card stuff was into the site. I was logged in, ready to go on the right page, hit the button to refresh it, hit the button to add to cart.
And by the time I clicked add to cart, it had shifted over to sold out. So it was maybe a five. Like I was in limbo for maybe eight seconds. I was like, Oh shit, I'm going to get these shoes finally. That's awesome. And then they were gone.
Brad: [00:08:47] I mean, it may have been a failure, but at least it was a seamless or painless failure.
Will: [00:08:50] There was no ambiguity in that I had failed to achieve these shoes on the first pass.
Brad: [00:08:55] you just get your failure up, uh, in your face nice and early and just move on with your life. Um,
Will: [00:09:00] I could move on to not having the shoes. I transitioned directly from wanting to buy shoes, to never owning the shoes. It was great.
Brad: [00:09:07] Um, I mean obviously like the, the PS5 preorder situation was largely a failure of messaging, but the Xbox and GeForce stuff was messaged quite clearly. And those were also on fire. So it is definitely partially a backend problem, but like, Is it, is it, is it a, is it a case of these specific retailers not dealing with these high demand situations often enough to like backstop their systems to, to withstand it?
Like they just don't have the practice.
Will: [00:09:31] It's it's definitely. I mean, that is definitely a component. It's the same thing. When we talked about, uh, I can't remember, what game it was, but was it called duty or something that launched and the servers just shit, the bed for five days
Brad: [00:09:41] Yes. we have talked about this exact thing for game launches before.
Will: [00:09:45] Yeah. It's so it's the same thing. There are multiple systems that have to talk to each other. Um, in this case you have the retail front end, you have the inventory backend, you have the payment processing backend and under normal situations, the bottlenecks are not apparent. And then what happens is when you get 50 million people trying to buy an Xbox at the same time, one of those systems bottlenecks, usually the credit card processing is my understanding and the whole thing falls to shit.
And, and like, everybody gets stuck in horrible limbo. The one company who's pretty good at this, it turns out is Apple. They've been doing, they've been doing the online preorders now since like the iPhone five. And the like, if you are online at the right time and you hit the right button and you know what you want, you don't dilly dally.
You usually can buy the thing that you're looking for.
Brad: [00:10:30] Sure. Have you idea of who Apple's cloud compute provider is?
Will: [00:10:34] Apple,
Brad: [00:10:35] Wait, do they run their own stuff?
Will: [00:10:36] they have data centers
Brad: [00:10:37] Well, yeah, for the, um, for their, for their, uh, like customer facing stuff, but I mean, for,
Will: [00:10:43] for their, for their like iCloud stuff?
Brad: [00:10:45] Like, are they really, are they really big enough in that game to provide everything they need for themselves? Like you don't think they're doing any,
Will: [00:10:51] Look they, they're one of the gamble or, you know, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft fat facebook,
Yeah.
Brad: [00:10:57] right. I just, I just, I just assumed, like, I mean, all I've ever heard is the database, AWS and Azure are so much of that market that I assumed there was no way that Apple could be providing all of their needs themselves.
Will: [00:11:07] Apple is still small compared to AWS and Azure and, and all that stuff, but yeah, no and Google, but yeah, Apple has
Brad: [00:11:14] you think they are they're do
Will: [00:11:15] giant data centers.
Brad: [00:11:16] doing it all.
Okay. Um,
Will: [00:11:19] There's probably a teams upon teams of people. Cause like they do their own pay. They own a credit card processing system. Now like they, with apple pay
Brad: [00:11:24] fair. Yes, that's fair
Will: [00:11:25] They're soup to nuts.
They're vertically integrated. They're Japanese in 1980.
Brad: [00:11:29] You're right. I should've known that as Apple's whole thing. Like I knew for the backend of the iCloud, the once you already have the product, those services that you engage with, I knew that they were handling all that stuff themselves, but
Will: [00:11:39] I mean, it's entirely possible. There's another payment processor in there, but at the scale that they work, it would behoove them to just not pay other people to do that work and figure it out themselves.
Brad: [00:11:46] Of course. Um, another question I had looking at this was in this future of cloud computing and like spinning up virtualized servers on demand. And scaling things almost endlessly. Like, do you think we could, could we get to a point and especially like maybe even machine learning is involved in this in some way?
I don't know. Could we get to a point where all those systems you described the payment processing authentication like X, Y the, you know, all the bottlenecks, could those all just be deployed by robots dynamically as the need arises and just like, not run into these, these, uh, these situations anymore.
Will: [00:12:20] Well, so, so this is the interesting part about this whole thing. This is the thing Honza explained to me in like 2012 or
Brad: [00:12:26] I miss man. I miss, I miss I miss getting drunk with Honza. He was one of the smartest people I have ever hung out with.
Will: [00:12:32] Yeah. I mean, don't play, don't play German board games with him. Cause he just can hold the whole state of the game in his head. But w we would, um, he, it was explaining why, why that similar situation failed.
He's like, look, okay. There's some stuff that you can't like. You can spin up infinite web servers to deliver webpages, right. And that is, there's a tool that does that for you. And the workload for that. It's really easy. You can't do is spin up multiple load balancers. Cause you need to have one giant beefy load balancer.
You can't have multiple copies of a database server because then the database has get out of sync and think bad things happen. So like if the bottleneck is. The PA the front end, going to the inventory to see if the thing is in stock before they transfer to the payment processor, you can't have like there's bad, bad things happen.
If the inventory system gets it's out of, out of, out of stock with the out of, out of sync with the, you know, if multiple nodes of the inventory system get out of sync. So the reason this stuff still happens is that it's hard to fake those workloads. Like you can fake a normal workload pretty easily with a few hundred machines and spinning up VMs to do testing and stuff like that.
But it's. Pretty expensive to spin up 30,000 instances and hit, you know, 30,000 fake, uh, you know, a massive scale all ending at one time.
Brad: [00:13:47] that makes sense,
Will: [00:13:49] Yeah,
Brad: [00:13:49] Mystery solved
Will: [00:13:49] it's probably cheaper to just deal with the aftermath than to harden your system against that or alternately each time you have that kind of sales system, you'd log it and you see what happens and, and you see what, so you see how to do it better next time.
But, but sometimes it's something stupid. Like maybe the load balancer has logging turned on and, uh, that then you get gated by how fast you can write to the, to the discs, right. That log to the discs. So.
Brad: [00:14:14] It, uh, it sucks to say this and I am by no means defending this mess, but it's not like, it's not like all the people who feel like they got screwed, trying to get a 3080 suddenly want a 3080, less because of the experience. So I can see why the NVIDIA's and Sony's of the world. They're just kind of sail right through and keep going.
Will: [00:14:32] It's not as bad as when. Uh, and, and at the end of the day, this is about consumer electronics, not like vital things. It's not like, you know, when you had 10 days to sign up for insurance under the affordable care act, and that site just didn't work for any of those 10 days, that, that it turned out was bad.
Brad: [00:14:51] yes. That's for sure. Also actually like what I just said was not totally fair to Nvidia and Sony because both of them actually came out pretty publicly and apologize for the situation. Then the last in the last week or two? Uh,
Will: [00:15:04] I mean, I feel like this is the second generation of console stuff is specifically that like the hardware vendors released the hardware and it was unclear whether they, like, you couldn't tell if they thought there was going to be a market for it. Right. Like I remember on the PS four Xbox one generation people were like, I don't know if people are gonna buy these phones are really popular.
It turns out and yeah. And then here we are at a hundred million consoles later, 200 million
Brad: [00:15:26] actually, I, I mean, I don't want to spend the whole episode on this topic or this question, but, um, did you read the FAQ that Nvidia put up? They actually, like Sony just tweeted, which for a company like Sony, that I understand is like kind of momentous in its own, right. That they even said anything, but they just posted a tweet saying like, Hey, sorry, the stuff definitely could have gone better.
We will have more stock soon. But nVidia, straight up, put up a whole web page on their site. Gefore 3080 launch. What happened? You asked, we answered. And it's, it's a full on FAQ of a launch has made it near impossible to find one. And this is really disappointing. What happened? What's the overall stock situation. Uh, why do you start with such low inventory?
Why don't wait until more cards are produced? Uh, what changes are you making on your store? Like the, you know, they, uh, they , I'm searching here for bots. Yes. There are multiple references to bots in this FAQ.
Will: [00:16:19] So the thing, the other thing that has happened, and that's a good point I forgot about that is that the sneaker bots have been weaponized against this kind of electronic good too. Cause it's a scalping situation. Like you can buy a 3080, and then turn it around on eBay for 200, 300, 400,
500 bucks more and, you know, make a pretty good amount of money doing that.
Uh, the, the, the, uh, Oh God, I completely lost my thought there. Um,
Brad: [00:16:44] Okay. I can fill time by saying. That you would stone faced all of a sudden, uh,
Will: [00:16:51] Oh Shit... it's totally gone.
Brad: [00:16:54] I get it. I've been there. Just
Will: [00:16:56] It was important too
Brad: [00:16:57] a mental sore. Short-circuit occurred. Some something broke in there. I know how it is
Will: [00:17:02] Oh, it was Bitcoin people. We didn't, we don't have this question in the queue. I don't think, but somebody had asked if this is because Bitcoin miners or, or cryptocurrency miners are scooping up all the high end GPS and the shift. A people don't mind Bitcoin with GPUs really anymore. They use specialized Asics a but B.
Uh, the Bitcoin that miners are going for, uh, like compute units per watt and the high end video cards that are optimized for cycles per watt or not, or cycles per clock are not particularly good for that. You're much better off buying a less expensive card that uses less power, but has a, uh, equally wide compute pipeline.
So they'll be looking at 3070s and maybe even 3060s, um, especially early on. Because of the mining tools, aren't optimized for the new GDDR memory and stuff like that. You may even see, like, you may be better off running on a 1060 or a 2060 than a 3090, even as the, is the thing I read. So
Brad: [00:17:59] That's a good news, good news for people wanting to give it a hold of these. They, I just I'll, I'll mention real fast in this FAQ Nvidia says they canceled a bunch of orders placed by bots after the fact that those, those,
Will: [00:18:10] Oh good thats where the extra excess new inventory has come
Brad: [00:18:12] those, those did not ship according to them. So that's something,
Will: [00:18:15] I mean, honestly, given what happened in China and the state of the pandemic and stuff like that. It's amazing to me that any of this stuff has launched
Brad: [00:18:23] Yes. I'm with you also, like, I don't know how much it matters, but that card is on a new process for them. The Samsung eight nanometer, they have not been on before, so like that. Yeah. So that may have constrained supply somewhat as well.
Will: [00:18:35] It's funny. I could be wrong on this, but I can't, I can't remember a time that Nvidia wasn't building chips on TSMC foundries. So it's, it's interesting that they moved to Samsung for this.
Brad: [00:18:45] I I really want one of those cards. Like I've, I've been on a 8 on a GTX 1080 regular Not TI. I, since I don't even know how long four years ago, and I have felt zero compunction to upgrade until right now. And all of a sudden,
Will: [00:18:59] The bad news for you and the good news for everybody else who wants to spend money to get a card. Is it that there are, as I understand it, reviewers got cards and influencers and everybody else's at the behind the people that are paying cash money for hardware.
Brad: [00:19:12] that is my understanding. That's fine. Um, also I've got these 1440 P monitors or an awful lot more pixels to drive suddenly the 1080s feeling a little more long in the tooth. Uh, alright. We should move on to the next email Pierce from Marquette, Michigan. Uh, you mentioned any previous podcasts that everyone should have a headlamp.
I would add everyone should have one that also has a red light mode as well.
Will: [00:19:37] Yes.
Brad: [00:19:37] Yeah, it's a, yeah. And I've actually got some experience with this recently, also that I wanted to ask about it's very handy for not blowing out your pupils late at night, when you need to use it to find something or in very specific use cases.
Uh, for example, using it in the car while driving a few years back, my wife was studying for a college course and needed to read her textbook. While we were traveling in the car, she was able to do this by turning on the red led light on her headlamp. I was not affected and could still see everything around me just fine while driving.
And she could read her book. Oh, they're making out, her highlighting was a tad bit difficult. So,
Will: [00:20:09] Don't use the red highlighter there.Yeah
Brad: [00:20:11] yes. So like, I, I only recently became aware of this in the last year or two
Will: [00:20:16] You didn't know? Well, you're not into astronomy
Brad: [00:20:18] not, not, no, no. Sadly, no, but yeah, I didn't, I didn't really realize that red light, I guess, is the only wavelengths that will totally destroy your night vision.
Will: [00:20:25] Yeah. I don't know why that is. I suppose. I bet my bet is it's a rods and cones thing right
Brad: [00:20:28] Okay. Yeah. Well, bummer. That's what I came in here to ask was why, um, is that true of everything? Like not even orange light. Cause like oranges typically, like, you know, once the, once the Apple night-shift and the well kind of, what was the original version of that? The third party
Will: [00:20:44] flux.
Brad: [00:20:44] Right. I see.
I feel terrible about that. Cause it's like flux started that whole trend and then
Will: [00:20:48] Well flux flux got sherlocked.
Brad: [00:20:50] Everybody, implemented their own at the OS level and now Flux has been forgotten that sucks.
Will: [00:20:55] but, uh, flex is still really good flux. If you have like Hue bulbs, we'll sync up your bulbs in your house to the flow, you could flex your house, you know?
Brad: [00:21:03] Flux lives on. Um,
Will: [00:21:06] so that's a different thing. That's a different
Brad: [00:21:07] no, no, I know, I know it is. I know it is. I know, I know why that happens, but I was wondering if there was any overlap there where like orange light was also better at night or is that still too, still too close to daylight to be useful?
Will: [00:21:21] I don't know
Brad: [00:21:22] The reason I ask all this is I have an led color changing nightlight in the bedroom. Um, you know, it's one of those, like, at least in the Apple home, you can just slide the, it's got a color wheel it's full on 16.7 million or whatever it is. I mean, I'm sure it doesn't actually reproduce all those, but you know what I'm talking about?
Will: [00:21:40] Yes
Brad: [00:21:41] Um, I had an orange for the longest time. Well, actually I had it on green for a long time. I don't know why. And then I was like, Oh, that's probably too close to blue to be looking at in the middle of the night. When I wake up to go to the bathroom. And then I moved to the orange and then I thought like, maybe even orange is too close to daylight.
This was once I found out about the red stuff being the best for night. So I changed it to red, which is great for not ruining my night vision, but it kinda is not bright enough, even at full brightness to really see.
Will: [00:22:08] Well, uh, so, um, I used the red flashlight when we went out to look at the Perseids a few weeks ago and it, it, it only is useful when your eyes are fully adjusted. Like, like it's part of the reason this worked for him in the car is that when he was looking, when other headlights were shining at him and stuff like that, his eyes were adjusting for the headlights and then snapping right back.
He probably could barely see the red light when he was looking at the road and the lights and the street lights and stuff like that would be my guess. But as long as she was looking down, it was fine.
Brad: [00:22:38] I'm sure even your own headlights are constricting your pupils at least somewhat, right?
Will: [00:22:44] I would think so. I mean, compared to like your full, full dilate, um, uh, you know, I've been out in a cave for the last three days. Look, it's, it's probably that, it's funny. I took an astronomy class in high school at the local college, and that was what I was introduced to the red light magic.
Cause the astronomers all had like, at that, at that point they had just normal incandescent flashlights. They put a piece of red cellophane over the, over the. The cone and would use those like little mag lights that had rubber banded cellophane on them. And it was, it was really useful,
Brad: [00:23:18] Do you think when you wake up in the middle of the night, randomly do already arise, fully dilated before you open your eyes. I mean, your pupils fully dilated.
Will: [00:23:25] I can always see really well.
Brad: [00:23:26] Like I wonder if you have to be an, a, any degree of conscious for that to fully happen.
Will: [00:23:30] Yeah, I would say think that's an autonomous thing.
Brad: [00:23:32] Yeah I would too.
Will: [00:23:33] If only we had medical professionals handy to ask this sort of thing.
Brad: [00:23:36] Yeah. Like not to get too much in a, into a cognitive rabbit hole here, but I wonder what even controls that action.
Will: [00:23:43] Oh, that's, that's definitely autonomic. You don't have any control over that.
Brad: [00:23:46] Oh, no, I know, I know you don't, I'm saying like, like, what is the, what are the mechanics of, of making that happen? Like, is that a, is that, is that some part of the lizard brain or.
Will: [00:23:54] Brad, we got, I got just the guest for this. We got to get him on
Brad: [00:23:57] Okay
Will: [00:23:57] and I gotta figure out we gotta work the schedule. Cause yeah,
Brad: [00:24:00] I got to start
Will: [00:24:01] I got your guy for this
Brad: [00:24:02] gotta, I gotta write the, write these questions down. Is there a term for something that happens without the involvement of the brain whatsoever? Like if the mechanics are entirely, somehow like controlled by the organ itself,
Uh,
Will: [00:24:12] Yeah
Brad: [00:24:12] Does that make sence I don't know if this is an example of that,
Will: [00:24:15] Well, like the hardest self-regulating there's nodes in the heart that stimulate the muscle fibers in the heart. But I don't know. I don't, I can't take, I can't remember if there's some autonomic. I feel like there's two systems there. One that makes the beats go based on the flow of blood through the, through the heart.
And then the lympic, the limbic system against autonomic nervous system that keeps the heart going period. But I it's been a long time since I've studied any of this stuff. And probably what I know is 20 years out date
Brad: [00:24:42] Yes. Yes, we are definitely out of our depth here.
Will: [00:24:44] Yeah, this has a scary conversation. I expect it. Usually we get yelled at, by the business people, but this time it's going to be the science
Brad: [00:24:49] Yes. Uh, anyway. Yeah. I don't know why, but that red night light is not really enough to see very well at night. So I'm gonna have to get back to the orange.
Will: [00:24:56] Well it's cause your eyes aren't adjusted.
Brad: [00:24:58] Well, that's why I was asking. Do you think they're fully dilated when you wake up?
Will: [00:25:02] Uh, I mean maybe you're just, I mean, one of the other things that happens as we get older is our night vision gets worse Brad.
Brad: [00:25:06] Awe, don't say that, don't say that.
Will: [00:25:08] I'm sorry. I got bad news. You've got the look, let me tell you, going out and star gazing with a seven year old. It is
Brad: [00:25:17] an eyeopening experience,
Will: [00:25:19] Yeah. She sees she's like, Hey, there's a raccoon over there. I was like, there's no raccoon over there. And then I hear the skittering and you're like, no, there's a raccoon. ah I need to eat, more carrots.
Brad: [00:25:27] Yes. I've already been told that I am an early candidate for bifocals
Will: [00:25:30] Congratulations
Brad: [00:25:31] so I don't need to hear any more about my, my, my vision deteriorating.
Will: [00:25:35] Just, you know, you can also get longer arms if you need to. That's the other way to do it. Just hold that. Hold that reading stuff further out.
Brad: [00:25:42] start hanging out on the monkey bars or, okay. Let's see. Quick question from Jonathan. Uh, if you want to small cheap network rack, Ikea Lac tables are exactly the right size, to put rack mount switches into, I wouldn't put anything heavy in, but if it's just for a cupboard and a 24 port switch, they totally work.
I had actually, I don't know if this came up on the discord or somewhere, but I'd seen this going around somewhere else recently. Also, we used to have a couple of lacks around here that we just kind of gave away on the sidewalk, which makes me really sad.
Will: [00:26:15] you threw away a potential rack.
Brad: [00:26:16] I know
the Lac rack would be pretty awesome.
Will: [00:26:19] I feel like you'd have to like
Brad: [00:26:21] You'd have a drill. You'd have to drill into it or something. Yeah. Like,
Will: [00:26:23] You'd have to drill for sure. Um, you can get, you can also get, uh, like a, a quarter or half rack for like 80 bucks on Amazon. It seems like they're they're like you think you, I don't, I don't think most normal human beings want a full eight footer.
Right? Like you want,
Brad: [00:26:40] I do
Will: [00:26:41] what is that a 48u, you want like a 12U,
Brad: [00:26:44] I want a rack that I can stand in.
Will: [00:26:48] Well, I mean,
Brad: [00:26:48] I don't have a good reason for it. I
Will: [00:26:50] it's just really heavy your floor. Isn't rated for it. Probably. If you filled that thing with the computer as you'd you'd
Brad: [00:26:55] No, I'd never do it in an apartment. That's
Will: [00:26:56] You'd sag the building.
Brad: [00:26:57] That is a stand up racks or for a cement floor basement and nothing else.
Will: [00:27:03] Yeah, exactly.
Brad: [00:27:04] that's my stance. Anyway. That's why that's a pretty hot tip.
Will: [00:27:08] I like that. I mean, you could have a little side table over here with a rack in it. I'm I'm increasingly on the let's rack, Mount everything in the office. Train my, my switches rack mountable put the streaming computer rack mount
Brad: [00:27:20] Give it a lot of sight.
Will: [00:27:21] I told you about my, my water, water, uh, heat sink idea.
Brad: [00:27:25] Yes. Yes.
Will: [00:27:26] Just put a bucket of cold of cold water in here at the start of the night and
Brad: [00:27:30] throw that in the rack
Will: [00:27:31] Dump all the heat from the computer in there.
Brad: [00:27:32] There you go. Um, all right. I have been looking at 10 gigabit network equipment again, so
Will: [00:27:41] Oh, no.
Brad: [00:27:41] I might need a rack size switch at some point that's out. That's way down the line.
Will: [00:27:46] what kind of files are you transferring over there man,
Brad: [00:27:48] Well, actually right now, I mean, since we're doing everything at home, like I am recording 30 to 40 gigabyte videos on a near daily basis.
Will: [00:27:56] Oh, shit.
Brad: [00:27:57] Since I'm working, I'm archiving, every
Will: [00:27:59] 10 gigabit makes sense.
Brad: [00:28:00] Like I'm archiving everything at 30 megabit right now.
Will: [00:28:02] Wow
Brad: [00:28:03] So yeah. It's like the Mario 2 stream we did yesterday was over 30 gig. When we finished like files of that size. Take a little bit of time to move around.
Will: [00:28:11] Hold on. Just to be clear, you're playing a 240 vertical line resolution
Brad: [00:28:18] man. Don't don't nitpick don't they don't nitpick my workflow, please. Don't forget, don't forget. These files are going straight through another round of compression after we record them. So they need to, they need to be high quality the first time, because they are immeditally going to get crunched down to like eight megabit again?
And then if they like, that's the thing we were pulling like Twitch archives, which are already eight megabit and throwing in through that encoder again, that doesn't look very good.
Will: [00:28:43] No, no Twitch archives are like Twitch and YouTube archives are not an acceptable archiving medium.
Brad: [00:28:49] That's what I'm saying. So I like, we need, we need a high quality version to throw into our video robot to crunch it down again. Anyway, like I probably wouldn't get a switch. I would just get two 10 gig cards, one in my PC, one in my NAS and just do a direct connection.
Will: [00:29:05] that makes
Brad: [00:29:06] Yeah, it would be fun. Um, let's see here.
Uh,
Will: [00:29:11] Is there a question in there.
Brad: [00:29:12] No, it was just a little tip
Will: [00:29:14] Okay.
Brad: [00:29:14] the Lac is just happens to be the exact right
Will: [00:29:17] Oh, Oh, got it.
Brad: [00:29:18] Yeah. Um, question from Justin, how do I get my windows audio to automatically switch for my computer speakers to my TV HDMI when I turn it on.
Will: [00:29:29] That's impossible. You can't do it.
Brad: [00:29:30] windows audio device juggling is terrible and always has been.
Will: [00:29:34] Well, hold on. You can do that. If you leave it plugged in all the time and you set the HDMI on the TV as the primary by turn to it when it's on. And then when you plug in the TV or turn on the TV ever, even if it's not you doing it, it will switch. It should. That's what it's supposed to do
Brad: [00:29:51] Yeah. Which is great right up until the first time it happens and you don't want it to when somebody else turns the TV on.
Will: [00:29:57] something untoward and say a partner turns on the TV in the other room and all of a sudden there's strange noises coming from it.
Brad: [00:30:02] Not, that's not exactly where my mind went with that, but sure. That is also one desirable.
Will: [00:30:06] Look, I'm talking about, I'm talking about buying gifts through your partner in incognito mode gifts.
Brad: [00:30:13] Yes. If you're watching a YouTube review of that cutlery set and you don't want to give away the surprise,
Will: [00:30:17] Yeah. You're like into some you're watching Anime and people are really excited.
Brad: [00:30:22] yeah. Or just gotten way down a Vtuber for whole, and you don't want anybody to know what you're up to.
Will: [00:30:27] Yeah. I got no beef with the V tubers.
Brad: [00:30:31] Um, we'll see if I can manage to include a V tuber thumbnail on both podcasts that I edit this week.
Will: [00:30:37] Uh, that was, there was some con con conversation about this, that this week on the discord
Brad: [00:30:42] it's it's attention getting, um,
Will: [00:30:43] People oved their V tubers. We have some friends who are, who do do some light Vtuber stuff. I
Brad: [00:30:49] dude. I was about. Fuck that, man. I was V tubing five years ago.
Will: [00:30:53] How were you vtubing five years ago?
have I had I've full on used a face rig on a UPF in 2015
Wow. You were a thought leader
Brad: [00:31:00] sub myself in
Will: [00:31:02] T H O T T you could have been, you could have been a, you could have been huge in, in Japan, Korea and China
Brad: [00:31:09] I missed my, I missed my calling
Will: [00:31:10] missed opportunity.
Brad: [00:31:12] Um, there might be some third party solutions out there to make the audio device switching a little better in windows, but it's not amazing. It's better than it used to be. Actually,
Will: [00:31:22] I feel like there's a command line script like theres a niersoft tool.
Brad: [00:31:25] Oh yeah. Nirsoft often always to the rescue Nirsoft definitly.
In fact, I use Nirsoft , a Nirsoft utility to do exactly that, but like, that's, that's not quite, he's asking for automatic switching back and forth intelligently and it doesn't even in my use case with that Nirsoft , I still have to like click a shortcut every time I want to change the device and stuff like that.
Will: [00:31:43] well, so you can do tasks, scheduler, and habit watched for a particular event ID that said device connecting and then fire the Nirsoft task on that. But my guess is it's not going to work very well and it's going to be really fucking annoying
Brad: [00:31:56] Knowing windows, that's probably not very reliable and probably more work than you want to do. Um, yeah, it's just kind of a mess. Uh, let's see. I see here, actually, I didn't realize we have two PC audio questions this week, so I'll just do the other ones. Jack, if you have speakers hooked up to your computer and they have a volume knob on them, but your keyboard also has volume keys, which do you use the software volume control or the hardware?
I've I've always opted for the hardware knob, but my sneakers, uh, I think he meant speakers here. Uh, but my speakers on my desk will be behind monitors now. So I'm going to have to try and retreat train my whole situation. Do you have strong
Will: [00:32:37] I sat the hardware knob at 50%.
Brad: [00:32:40] and then never touch it?
Will: [00:32:41] Never touch it
Brad: [00:32:41] oh my God, that is, I'm a little more flexible these days, but that is the exact opposite of where I used to be like way back in the day, like 20 years ago or whatever.
Like I was full on hardware knob and nothing else. I didn't want to touch any of the volume sliders on the PC for any reason, if I can help it. I don't know why, but like application specific volume controls, or even like the slider and windows or whatever, just like, no, thank you. I don't like, I couldn't, I couldn't tell you.
I wanted a consistent volume out of the source and just be able to change it at the hardware level.
Will: [00:33:10] so that's what I used to do, I guess. And since I started streaming more, getting the audio levels right. Is more impactful to other human beings and not just me.
Brad: [00:33:19] Yes I think that's what broke me of that habit is at some point, if you're trying to stream, you're trying to send one type audio out to people on your discord and like another one to the stream you're doing. And like, you're trying to maybe our record yet another volume, like at some point you have to give in and just fiddle volume anywhere you can.
Will: [00:33:34] Yeah, exactly. Um, I, I miss. So I also have studio monitors on my desk and haven't had an easy volume knob on them in like five years. So when I got rid of the Klipshs, the, the volume knob went away. So that, that kind of solved the problem for me.
Brad: [00:33:49] you will take my Cambridge South works cubes from my cold dead hands. So I will always have a volume knob.
Will: [00:33:55] Look you have a life time supply right now.
Brad: [00:33:57] That's right. I will always have a volume knob, uh, but to use the use the software ones too. That's what they're there for. All right.
Will: [00:34:06] think we might've gotten a little bit of my daughter in that last question. So I apologize.
Brad: [00:34:10] I didn't hear anything. Using the RTX mess with that broadcast app.
I should probably save that for another week, but
Will: [00:34:18] So the broadcast app, uh, this question is from Brad. Hey, have you messed with that broadcast app at all? Uh, it doesn't really work for me cause I do two PC
Brad: [00:34:26] Oh,
Will: [00:34:26] streaming
Brad: [00:34:27] right. Okay.
Yeah. And it it's, it's spitting out virtual devices, so you need it to be on the same machine as the streaming is happening on.
Will: [00:34:34] Did they like theoretically? So I don't have an RTX card in the streaming machine cause I don't need one there. Um, I could theoretically run it there and it would be nice maybe to filter discord. Cause a lot of times you play games with people who have clocky keyboards. So it would be dope to take out the clunkiness from their feed.
Um, but it, it doesn't that the, because of the way I use the hardware mixer, it makes everything way more complicated. And I don't think there's an easy way to do that. Cause it runs the discord feed runs into voice meter and then across an ASIO bus. To the mixer where it gets mixed in and then it goes straight to OBS.
So there's no place for me to filter it out. Really? Yeah.
Brad: [00:35:15] That is fair. If, and when I get my hands on an RTX card, I am excited to try that stuff out, especially because I got this, I got this super nice, this new mirrorless camera, which already does that the field optically. So I'm, I'm hoping that, I mean, it seems like that RTX fake green or the programmatic green screen feature works very well anyway, but I'm assuming if you've got a camera that focuses very well on the foreground and blurs the background.
It's, it'll be even better.
Will: [00:35:39] You shouldn't. But I mean, since you have the camera that folk, that blurs the background, you shouldn't need dark. Like, cause remember this performance hit on that stuff. You don't want to, you don't want to take a 10% performance hit on blurring the background when you have a lens that does that on your camera already.
Brad: [00:35:52] Oh, no, I'm not talking about blurring background. I'm talking about removing it
Will: [00:35:55] Well, same thing.
Oh you want a green screen it with the.
Brad: [00:35:58] Yes. Yes. I want, I want just to cut out of me in the foreground with no background.
Will: [00:36:02] Yeah, that works
Brad: [00:36:03] I'm excited to try that stuff out.
Will: [00:36:05] It's funny. Cause all the Twitch kids are all about having cool, cool backgrounds.
Brad: [00:36:09] Well, a lot of people do that cut out now. Like I just feel like a lot of the bigger Twitch feeds I look at.
Will: [00:36:15] in the three years that I've been streaming it's it has gone, it started out as everybody green screening and then everybody went to the big, to the big, you know, the big room and now people are that started. The wave is starting to turn back. It seems.
Brad: [00:36:28] Don't get me wrong. If I can sub stupid animated backgrounds in, instead of cutting myself out, keying myself out or whatever, I will absolutely lead in that direction.
Will: [00:36:36] don't do static H.265 Does not like static turns out.
Brad: [00:36:39] I will, uh, I will hang out in front of the weather channel all day long.
Will: [00:36:43] yeah. That good place background. Everything's fine.
Brad: [00:36:48] At least it's find somewhere. Um,
Will: [00:36:50] In hell.
Brad: [00:36:50] let's see.
Uh, how about how. This one, Tom, from Cape Cod.
Will: [00:37:00] Okay.
Brad: [00:37:00] I wanted to get your thoughts on the arc of industrial design of phones and other consumer tech products, specifically Apple's iPhone and air pod line. Uh, I've never understood the move towards a design, prioritizing rounded edges on all glass. That seems incapable of being held reliably by the human hand and prone to sliding effortlessly from your pocket.
Likewise, the smooth rounded edges of my, our AirPods case seemed to be tailor made to slip out of the pockets of my scrubs. While driving or off the edge of shelves and desks. So I wanted to hear your thoughts on this drive towards form over function that ultimately ends up being somewhat or mostly concealed by some form of protective case.
Anyway, I loved the early days with my droid and iPhone four, where I could safely carry my phone naked as the day was born unencumbered by a protective case.
Will: [00:37:47] I miss the plastic back phones.
Brad: [00:37:48] Really?
Huh. Interesting.
Will: [00:37:51] well, I've I've I've I,
Brad: [00:37:53] Just for the ruggedness.
Will: [00:37:55] so my daughter was born in 2013, starting about 2015. I always had to have a case on the phone cause I smashed two iPhones within about two weeks of each other. It was expensive.
Brad: [00:38:05] that hurts.
Will: [00:38:06] I mean, I didn't smash them. I had help, but the point is they were equally destroyed.
Um, I feel like the post iPhone four design was designed to move cases. Or Apple care
Brad: [00:38:20] Well, I
Will: [00:38:21] have to be a maniac to not buy Apple care on a phone with a glass back.
Brad: [00:38:24] Yeah, totally. Uh, well, so the four had a glass back. Did it not? I'm pretty sure it did. The four did the five did not
Will: [00:38:29] I'm saying anything from the four on yeah.
Brad: [00:38:32] the five, the five was all metal. And then actually, so it was the six, it was like
Will: [00:38:37] The 5 had a partial glass back
everything else after that has after that has been glass.
Brad: [00:38:40] Oh, it was all, it was, it was that little strip at the top that was glass.
Right. And I think that was for antenna purposes. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's why they're on glass now, right. Is mostly antenna stuff and wireless charging
Will: [00:38:49] Plastic is just as transparent as plastic
Brad: [00:38:51] I'm I'm with you. I wish they would just come up with some high end Italian plastic that Apple could be happy with.
Will: [00:38:57] look it's. This is, yeah, this is very much like the design goal. With first off scrubs have terrible pockets. I've never worn a pair. I've only worn scrubs. A handful of times the pockets suck. They're always too shallow and shit falls out of them. So there's that a B. I don't. I think that they, part of this is Johnny Ives, bullshit about making things thinner and shiny and making them feel expensive, even if they're not,
Brad: [00:39:24] and more rounded
Will: [00:39:26] well, I mean, the round, it is an old school Apple thing that's been around.
Like they always did rounded icons and stuff like that.
Brad: [00:39:30] The four, I mean, I'll just say it right now. I never owned an iPhone four, but the four and the five, which I did own, I think are my favorite iPhone still,
Will: [00:39:37] The five is probably my favorite iPhone at this point
Brad: [00:39:39] The five might be my favorite iPhone. I mean, the chamfered edges were a little weird, you know, the triangular kind of. slanted shape, but
Will: [00:39:45] there's a straight through line from the four and the five to the 10 though.
Brad: [00:39:48] I've got, I've got my five right here.
The screen is flat.
Will: [00:39:54] What a Butte?
Brad: [00:39:56] Just nice, nice, hard edge. It's easy to swipe all the way to the, to the edge of the screen. It stands up like, can you can't see it in the camera? But like
Will: [00:40:03] Yeah, the standing up is really
Brad: [00:40:04] It literally stands up on its edge. I've got it sitting here, standing up on its side right
Will: [00:40:08] I would put it on the plane on the tray, in front of me and just balance it on the, on the barely pulled out plain tray.
Brad: [00:40:14] I, so do you know how, uh, starting with the six they're glass and I've got an eight right here, which you can maybe kind of see, like there, the glass went to rounded, starting with the six.
I have always had a hard time swiping to the far edge of the UI because of that stupid rounded edge. And I hate it.
Will: [00:40:28] The six also had the new borosilicate glass and the curves, the six was the one I broke two of. And I'm pretty sure it was because those curves are incredible stress points. So any kind of impact on the curve, the corner curves seem to smash them. Um, I feel like the chamfered edges on the aluminum were really good.
Um, but, but I, I would say all modern phones. With a handful of exceptions are designed to have cases. And that's just a cost of doing business.
Brad: [00:40:59] Yeah I suppose so.
Will: [00:41:00] I mean, w w also the thing to remember is in that time, I mean, the iPhone was expensive when it launched, but we've gone from phones that they expected you to upgrade every year or two I'm into my third year, I think on my iPhone 10.
And it's just now starting to kind of chug a little bit. So I feel like, you know, buy a case. I've had, I've had I'm on my second case for this phone. Actually, the first I've wore the first one out, one of them, the leather one that I got at first. So,
Brad: [00:41:28] Case I'm using on this aid is billed as the world's thinnest case. In fact, I feel you, I feel like calling it a case is very generous.
Will: [00:41:35] Those don't do anything to protect the phone from drops. It's just scratches
Brad: [00:41:38] No it's just scratches. I only got it. I got it. Cause it has a glass back and I wanted to not scratch that up to make sure the resale value hung around a bit.
Will: [00:41:45] Well, the nice thing about the thin cases on the glass back is if you smashed the back, it doesn't matter. Cause you'll never know until you take the case off when you're ready to sell it.
Brad: [00:41:52] it And it does give a nice textured grip that makes it easier to, and does not increase the bulk of the phone anyway. Um, I mean, it's totally understandable that they sure are late with the, uh, iPhone announcement for the year. Um, but all those rumors about it, all those rumors about the iPhone 12, going back to the four or five era design language are very, very exciting to me.
I'm.
Will: [00:42:13] I, this is the first time in a while that like, we don't kind of know what the phone's going to look like yet. Usually there's rumors by this point.
Brad: [00:42:19] there are some renders out there. You can find some stuff. It's not
Will: [00:42:21] There's always renders, but are they like actual, like, like typically the case manufacturers will have leaked blanks and stuff like that by now.
Brad: [00:42:30] I wonder if just the pandemic is just making it harder for leakers to get their hands on that information.
Will: [00:42:34] I would bet that there are way fewer people actually touching the things in it, across all, all, all types of these markets.
Brad: [00:42:42] I think all of the latest rumors I saw said announcement like early October. So that's probably just a couple of weeks, three weeks off, maybe
Will: [00:42:48] I mean, so, so the only thing that makes me excited about those dual screen phones, uh, is that then you have something that you put it, you close up, the clam shell closes up, you put it in your pocket and it's and all the delicate bits are protected.
Brad: [00:43:01] God we're just back to flip phones again aren't we.
Will: [00:43:03] I mean, you can buy a razor right now.
Brad: [00:43:05] Everything. Everything just wraps back around eventually.
kinds.
Will: [00:43:08] Yeah. Pretty soon
Brad: [00:43:09] Yes.
Will: [00:43:10] that, that joke in zoo Lander about how small the phone is, will make sense to the next generation of children.
Brad: [00:43:15] indeed.
Will: [00:43:15] Also don't watch Zoo Lander, maybe.
Brad: [00:43:18] uh, alright. Couple more emails real quick before we get out of here. Uh, this one is from Tom in Toronto. Couple of more like socially-minded topics here around tech, um, around April, I decided to learn how to program. I've done random coding and scripting over the years, but most of the time I didn't really understand what I was doing and just copied and pasted random stuff from stack overflow, a literal script kitty, uh, also I'm approaching 40 and maybe this is my midlife crisis, but the good news is that it's been great at keeping my mind occupied and has been incredibly rewarding.
It's obviously intimidating and daunting to start out at my age and considering I could barely remember high school math. I thought there was a good chance. I wouldn't actually be able to do it. Uh, but since April I've learned enough C to be somewhat dangerous and enough Python to already consider other languages inferior.
I've learned a ton and maybe I just happened to fall into decent communities, including your own, but people have been incredibly helpful and supportive with that long self-congratulatory preamble over. One thing that keeps popping into my head is the thought that a lot of the work programmers do may not be very ethical.
I don't just mean programmers and engineers that write something illicit so that a car passes an emissions test. I mean, the run of the mill work done within a lot of companies. How many people do programmers put out of work each year? Open AI has only been around for five years and GPT has only been around since 2018.
Where will they be in 2030? I also don't hear a lot of politicians and lawmakers addressing this sort of thing. Generally. When anything related to technology comes up in front of government leaders, it's embarrassing. I don't think most countries have any sort of programmers, labor organization like engineers may have, or the same level of just cultures where this sort of thing might be addressed.
I'm guessing this must be discussed in academics, but from the outside, a lot of the general organization seems insanely fragmented and heavily corporate. Do you know of any leaders out there talking about this sort of thing intelligently, does any of this worry you as much as it does me. Will shook his head and then nodded his head.
I think I'm with you on all of that.
Will: [00:45:22] Yeah. Everything you said is right.
Brad: [00:45:25] Yes like, I mean, whatever. I mean, that's a such a broad topic. You know, the, the idea of automation displacing people's livelihoods becomes more and more urgent every day. Like the.
Will: [00:45:37] yeah,
Brad: [00:45:38] Like the one, I don't know how much stock you put in this, but the one I always see floated as the nightmare scenario is the idea of the end of human operated long haul trucking.
Will: [00:45:48] That seems like it would take a boatload of jobs. Huh?
Brad: [00:45:50] yes. And how many people that will put out of work or more to the point how close that might be. I mean, that's the part where maybe it breaks down is maybe like people always think things like self-driving are a lot closer than they actually are. Maybe that's 30 or 40 years away instead of 10, but like.
That's the one I keep saying, or I keep seeing people saying is like, Oh, that's the one that may actually happen. And cause this massive, massive disruption,
Will: [00:46:14] So I talked to an economist friend about the idea of automation killing jobs years ago.
Brad: [00:46:19] you know, in this case we can also roll like AI killing jobs. You know
Will: [00:46:23] the same thing.
Brad: [00:46:23] What a lot of
Will: [00:46:24] AI is replacing brain jobs. Automation is replacing mechanic physical jobs. Um, And he said that every time this has happened in the past, starting with like the inventing invention of the cotton mill or cotton gin and the industrial revolution and all of that stuff, every time there's been a technological advance that reduced the amount of labor that goes into previous jobs, the, the they're the result of their, of that labor going away was always more jobs. Um, like, like, because. You know, if all the blogging in the example we were talking about was AI machine learning algorithms, writing blog posts. Cause that's been like we, if you recall, there was a thing in like 2013 that they had a bad ML algorithm that kind of generate a blog post off of a press release pretty easily.
And the thing, the thing that he said in that, in that example was, Hey, Probably the people that are doing those jobs now will find other jobs, either picking the press releases that go into this, into the generator. So they're there I'll put, goes way up. So instead of writing five, $10 blog posts a day, they'll write 50 $10 blog posts a day.
So that'd be way more content, which is a whole other problem. Or they'll they'll, there will be other jobs, you know, training the algorithms to work better or something like that. I don't. It's always scary. I think when we think about automation replacing people's jobs, but. It's the fossil fuel thing is kind of an interesting place.
Like, yeah, we've lost a bunch of coal jobs. We've lost a bunch of natural gas jobs. I mean, actually we haven't lost many natural gas jobs because fracking is way up. But, but the point is we've lost fossil fuel jobs. And at the same time, the number of environmentally friendly power generation jobs have multiplied dramatically.
Are there as many of those as there were oil drilling jobs, 50 years ago, probably not. But there aren't as many oil drilling jobs as there were 50 years ago, either because that whole industry has gotten pretty automated and yeah. Anyway.
Brad: [00:48:27] Yeah. I believe what your friend is saying on a long enough timescale of course, society is going to adapt to like, the problem is in the short term, how much pain and uncertainty does that create for the specific individuals being displaced? Like obviously people who are kids now, once they come up and those jobs are no longer there, they will find something else to do, because they've never had to find something to do in the first place before,
Will: [00:48:47] like clean water distillery will be a job when our kids are, kids are looking for jobs. They'll have to go out and moisture farm so that we have fresh water to drink.
Brad: [00:48:55] But, but you know, for the people that have built an entire life and career out of around something that suddenly is not there anymore, like that is significantly more problematic than it is for future generations. Like, I don't know, like I don't, I don't cotton to the idea that progress should be held back because it will put people out of work.
Because
Will: [00:49:13] You can't do that. It doesn't work. we've tried that before.
Brad: [00:49:15] Yeah yeah, not only that, but also like, you know, you could follow that logic to say, like, we shouldn't pursue green energy because it will put fossil fuel workers out of a job. Like that's obviously not tenable either, but like that, just that just places, even more of an onus on political leaders to take care of those people and ease the transition and make sure that they are not left destitute or helpless.
Right. But unfortunate, unfortunately it just feels like the will is never there at the political level to actually. Like have those sorts of special ed, especially here.
Will: [00:49:43] Um, the, the other side of this is the ethics of programming. And I think, I think that people are starting to think about that much more. Now, if you look at the impact of things like Facebook and election interference and, um, you know, places where like, if you write, if you write that, if you contribute to the algorithm that determines what news people see on Facebook, are you culpable in the damage that Facebook has done to Western democracies?
I'm not in a position to say yes or no, but I wouldn't want to do that job probably. Um, and I think people have to decide whether, you know, a lot of good perks and a nice salary is worth contributing to that on an individual basis. It'd be nice if like the, the American society of engineers, the different, different engineering societies, like there's chemical engineering societies is there's, um, uh, uh, civil engineer, society, stuff like that.
Do kind of fill this hole for engineering, you know, people who, who are, who are engineer engineers, not software engineers. And I feel like we don't have that kind of infrastructure around software engineers, partly, partly because of the kind of shaming of unions for white collar workers for a long time.
Um, not that, not that those societies are necessarily like typical labor unions, but they do have some of the same. Purposes and, and, uh, we would all be better off if, if more people were thinking about what the long term Remicade ramifications of their, their work and actions were.
Brad: [00:51:15] Yes. Yes, you're totally right. There is no stopping the March of progress. Even if you want to right, the answer, it's just, you need more, more representation, more, a more robust social safety net, more regulatory action. To try to funnel it in a positive direction and not a negative one.
Will: [00:51:32] Well, and, and the other thing to do. Yeah. That's the thing to do, just to look at what freeing up all of this labor, like it's like automated, it's like, it's like industrial farming, you know, when we industrialized farming in the sixties, in the U S all of a sudden we had a ton of. Brains that could essentially be used for other things.
So like little Jimmy didn't have to go work on Papa's farm doing the chickens every day. And he could go to college and get a degree and be an accountant or a, you know, an, an, uh, an engineer or a software programmer or whatever. And, and like each time that's happened, the workforce has shifted, uh, generationally, but we do you're right.
We do have to like help the people who, who are pushed out of old jobs, whether it's bloggers or farmers or coal miners.
Brad: [00:52:15] somebody is always going to be left behind. Um,
Will: [00:52:17] Yeah it's Kirk Cameron, fuck that guy.
Brad: [00:52:20] alright. Plus
Will: [00:52:21] Hot takes here Sorry
Brad: [00:52:22] Yes. The last email, this one came in anomalously.
Will: [00:52:27] Oh.
Brad: [00:52:28] Uh, there's a lot of talk in tech communities about new things. It's the nature of the beast, but there is no escaping that new things cost money and mean old things, get phased out or thrown away companies don't get to make cool new things unless people buy them.
But often the changes are small and old things still work well. Uh, there's an undercurrent of want and consumerism to tech that prevents a lot of people from engaging with it and can be a little crass when people dismiss what was amazing a few years ago as crap. Uh, or unplayable or unwatchable or unlistenable, um, everyone is different and can do what they want with their money.
So I definitely don't want to start drawing lines or making examples. Uh, but I wanted to ask you too. How long do you consider value in tech? I'm sorry, I misread that. How do you consider value in tech when you're shopping? Do you have to have a definite purpose or want something to last a minimum amount of time?
I know it might be a bit different with work related things. But how do you feel about the consumerist angle that drives a lot of tech hobbyists and whether there is a way to lower the barrier of entry for some of this stuff. Do you get a kick out of doing something on the cheap, nearly as well as, and saving some money?
I've only answered that last question first. Yes, absolutely. Like I, 1000%, get way more gratification out of doing something like, you know, on a wishing, a wing and a prayer or whatever, you know, Like some bootstrapped cheap solution rather than like spending the big money and getting the nice thing. I will always rather put my own solution together for something like that.
Will: [00:53:57] Oh, well, and, but it's, it's true. That can be tricky too. Right? Like I was looking, I'm having router problems as predicated by our conversation a few months ago. Um,
Brad: [00:54:06] the fancy router is calling.
Will: [00:54:08] Fuck. I don't want a fancy round. Anyway, the point is I was looking at building a PFsence router with hardware that I have laying around. And when I figured out what the power would cost to run the PF sense hardware with the computer, the hardware I have laying around, I was like, it literally makes more sense for me to spend 180 bucks on an edge router.
That's going to draw infinitely less power than, than to try to like jury rig something together with parts that I have just floated in.
Brad: [00:54:34] They're always going to be considerations. I don't mean, it's not always a one size fits all. Just use your old stuff constantly kind of situation. But.
Will: [00:54:41] Yeah, no, but, but yeah, like this is a thing I've struggled with. I've done this, I've done. I've been in and out of this business for 20 years. And it's one of the things that when we started tested, when norm and I started testing, we talked about a lot because, you know, at maximum PC, the brand that I walked into and became part of and didn't have anything to do with forming was performance at all costs, which.
In the nineties made sense, right? Like, like the jump from, from a Pentium three, to, a Pentium four was enormous. And if you were using that computer for work or for play, you know, like you could spend, you could spend money on a new piece. Also the hardware was a lot cheaper. You'd spend 500 bucks on a new CPU would have a market improvement in either your enjoyment of your hobby or your day to day work life.
You could get more work done. Yeah. If you're a photographer or a video, a video editor getting more work done on that machine meant you were making more money, which is, which is presumably good. Um, the, the thing that changed is that the performance increases. Generationally you started to decrease, like you go from a 30 or 40 or 50% performance boost in some cases to a five or 10% performance in it, more incremental upgrade.
And, and at that point, no, you don't, you shouldn't upgrade for a 10% boost, unless, unless there is a measurable impact, right. Um, So when we started Tested, we wanted to balance that out. And we started thinking about, you know, when you're buying phones, you're buying a phone for at least a year or two normal people should be buying a phone for at least two years, because that's when they were, that's what the contract terms were at the time
Brad: [00:56:16] Even two years, to me sounds pretty woefully short. Like I'm, I'm kind of on the same page as this email or to some degree, like in a perfect world. And granted, we're not really there, like in a world where Android and iOS updates are coming out that make old phones run like garbage and. Actually, they are actually getting worse over time instead of just staying static.
Like it's not, it's not feasible, but like, ideally I would like to be able to get like five years or more out of a phone, because
Will: [00:56:42] Well are the phones that weird case, right? Cause the batteries are good for usually about 1500 cycles and they're relatively easy to replace now.
Brad: [00:56:48] That that's yeah. That's assuming like, Oh, you might have to go get a least one, if not two battery replacements in that time, but
Will: [00:56:54] but, but, um, but also like I, I do kind of subscribe to the Brian Brian Lamb, uh, who started Wirecutter and is a longtime friend. And one of editors of Gizmodo for a long time, uh, has, has posted a thing years ago that I think about every time, it's time to look at new iPhones, which is that that's his primary computer and.
Like you and I sit in front of desktop computers most of the day and it's, and it's not our primary computer, but if your work or your life is such that like that phone is your, is your day to day, the main way that you connect with the digital world, I can kind of see upgrading it every year, every two years.
Um, I don't, I don't find that particularly offensive, same thing. Like Gina, we have Gina on the upgrade plan for the phones, because like, it's literally the main camera for the house at this point. And she takes pictures of our, of our kid and our family doing stuff
Brad: [00:57:43] That's Fair
Will: [00:57:44] Um, and those and those, but also at the same time, the performance jump between my iPhone 10 and her iPhone 11 is such that like there's a measure, there's a market difference in the quality of the photos she takes and I take
Brad: [00:57:57] Yeah. Like phones, mobile devices are now where the PCs were 20, 25 years ago. Right.
Will: [00:58:02] Yeah. Well, I think the phones are actually now at the point where the PCs were 10 years
Brad: [00:58:07] So they're starting to, they're starting to hit that plateau. Right?
Will: [00:58:09] I think we're at that point of diminishing returns. If you buy a thousand dollar phone this year, you're probably good for three years, at least. And probably five, if you, if you, especially, if you are careful about upgrading, when you get toward the upgrading software, when you get toward the end of that cycle
Brad: [00:58:22] Like this is, this is actually the reason I it's been a couple of months, I think, or more than I was talking about replacing this iPhone eight with an se, like that's, it's the same form factor, the same screen. Like my hands on experience with this phone will not change one iota if I get us an se,
Will: [00:58:36] You get a better camera and it'll be way faster. That's two differance
Brad: [00:58:38] uh, but that's the thing, the guts of that thing are so much faster than what I've got in this phone now.
And the price is so cheap that it's like, that is actually a longterm. Like kind of, that's like a longterm play, basically. That's like, this is the least amount of money I can invest in my phone to get the maximum amount of longevity out of it. Right. Like that's why I wanted to replace it was if I bought any buy an se right now that phone is probably good for three or four years.
Will: [00:59:02] Well it's, this is one of those things. Like, this is why when we started Tested, we were focusing on what the, like, what the upgrade gives you, right? Like if the camera's a lot better than use the camera a lot, it makes sense to upgrade. If the processor is faster, the internet connections faster and you're away from wifi, or you're doing heavy lifting on that thing.
Yeah. It makes sense. I feel like, um, And, and it's dangerous cause you come into the when something new hits, that actually is a significant improvement. Like the, like the jump from 3080 1080 to 3080, or even 2080, to, 3080 in a lot of cases, uh, is such that if you do like Ray tracing workloads, That's a huge upgrade.
There's maybe two games that have raytracing workloads right now that are worth playing. And presumably that'll change in the spring when it's like cyberpunk comes out and rolls out Ray tracing and stuff like that. But, but it's, it's a really. Like, if, if you're playing the TLDR on this as if you're playing on a 7,700 Intel processor and you have 1080P monitors, probably you're not going to see much of a difference between a 10 80TI and a 30,80, um, you know, your frames will go up, but you're not going to notice unless you're running a really high end monitor or our competitive e-sports player or something like that.
So, um, and, and I always. Like you should spend the money that's right for you. And, and, and that's it like, you don't have to have, you don't have to have a 3090 and a I 10,010, 900 or whatever it is to like play PC games. I know a ton of people who play, I know like competitive pubG streamers who are very good and are playing in like 10 seventies and stuff like that.
Brad: [01:00:43] Yeah, totally. I have always my whole life I have been, I've always bought the mid range to budget graphics card, not the never, never the high end.
Will: [01:00:51] Well, and the other thing to remember, especially I say this as somebody who streams on Twitch, like five nights a week, when you do that, you get access to hardware that you would not, you do not have to pay for. And that changes like do not do not look at what your favorite streamer does would there with the PC.
They have listed in the box below the stream as well. Well, shit, this is what I have to do. If I want to play call of duty, or this is what I need, like for fall guys are among us or whatever people are watching it at any given moment. Like, like be aware that a, if there's something on their screen that has a logo on it that they're getting paid, but, but like, yeah, they're the worst case.
They're probably not paying for hardware. If they have a few hundred people watching few thousand people watching definitely.
Brad: [01:01:35] Um, yeah, just to the Emailers point, uh, my girlfriend hates this, but I hang on to everything I can, like if I get a new, I get a new router, I keep the old router goes in the drawer. It doesn't get tossed out because
Will: [01:01:48] I keep one generation back just in case something breaks, so I don't have to go to best buy to replace it.
Brad: [01:01:51] Or there's been cases where like, Oh, the previous wifi rider I was using, I turned into a bridge that I could use to hookup hookup, a Netflix box in a room that didn't have good wifi there's no otherwise or something like that, you know, like there's always like finding a use for something old that I've had lying around, like the longer I've had it without using it, the more satisfied I feel. when I actually find something to do with it. Like that is, that is way more satisfying to me than buying something new. You always.
Will: [01:02:15] Brad. I have a kin phone in the garage. That's calling your name. I think you should just fire that thing up. It's on Verizon. You can hook it up. You'll be good to go. You're going to love it.
Brad: [01:02:23] I'll figure something out.
Will: [01:02:24] It spins open. I think. I can't remember. It has a weird, weird, yeah.
Brad: [01:02:28] I'll find a use for it. It's my specialty. Alright. That's it. That's all the emails.
Will: [01:02:33] Don't don't celebrate consumerism. Yeah, it's bad.
Brad: [01:02:36] Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, the other, the only other thing I was going to say is like, as long as you're disposing of your electronics responsibly, like, it's not the worst thing, you know,
Will: [01:02:44] Wait, you just flush them down the toilet or something.
Brad: [01:02:46] No, you know, like they'll, as long as you're donating them or like finding another home for them, like just Chuck stuff in the trash or whatever, you know, or like take it to an E waste recycling place, if you absolutely need to just toss it out, you know,
Will: [01:02:59] Yeah, or give it to like, like I, for a long time I don't do it anymore. Um, cause my parents have, are hooked on that iPhone life and our regular upgraders now, but uh, yeah. Give them to friends, family, kids,
Brad: [01:03:13] yes, yes. Find a home for them. Maybe a library or something
Will: [01:03:17] Yeah.
Uh, I don't think libraries take that stuff anymore. I think it's become too much of a problem. It's probably,
Brad: [01:03:21] Yeah I could see that. So,
Will: [01:03:24] uh, but this is so, uh, this is the part of the show a first off, if you have questions. You can send them to tech pod at content dot town. We answered them the last episode of very month. Usually a next week is we hit a thousand patrons last month.
And we're reading as a result, the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, which is one of my favorite books that I hadn't read in a long time. I'm realizing.
Brad: [01:03:46] I was going to ask. Are you in fact a rereading it, even though you've read it numerous times
Will: [01:03:50] Oh, yeah, of course. It's, it's funny though. Cause it's like, you know, do you have any movies that you've watched so many times you kind of don't have to watch them anymore and you can just see them.
It's like that. Like I remember the jokes that the funny thing is that some things land differently now because I definitely haven't read it since I had a kid. Um, and really probably haven't read it since I was like a working adult. I probably the last time I read it was always at maximum PC. So, uh, yeah, it's, it's been, it's been interesting.
Uh, but we're going to be doing that next week or the week after, uh, and. I think, I mean, I think that's it, but this is the, we hit a thousand patrons. We're already at 1100 patrons now. Cause a lot of people like Hitchhikers Guide, so we have to come up with a 2000 patrons stretch goal. Now, I guess
Brad: [01:04:32] You did name another book? I don't know if we're ready to go down that road yet.
Will: [01:04:35] I think we should talk. I think, I think. We need to have a conversation first, cause it's a lot. Um, but this is the part where we thank our, our patrons, uh, you know, if you want to get access to the tech pod discord where a a thousand beautiful, brilliant people share the stuff that they're interested in and, and talk to each other on the day to day, uh, it is a fabulous, fabulous community.
I'm I'm like we both had the benefit of being part of a lot of communities that are amazing, but this is this one's special.
Brad: [01:05:06] I feel enriched every day. I look at that server the other day in the coding channel, they had a long conversation about pseudorandom number generators in games, and they were literally like linking off to specific like files from the doom source code and like make it like mocking the ridiculously poor, random number generator Carmak came over
Will: [01:05:25] What did they use? Random number generators for in I
Brad: [01:05:28] think it was, it may have been multiple things. I think, I think the only example I saw was it might affect how the BFG behaves as it, as the projectile travels or something like that
Will: [01:05:37] Oh, wow.
Brad: [01:05:37] Um,
but if I read correctly, he just defined a, like a variable with like 256 values from one to 256 and it just cycled through them or something like that.
It was like a very poor anyway.
Will: [01:05:51] Did they talk about Perlin noise? Did that come out
Brad: [01:05:53] the, the term didn't come up, but they did mention like sampling entropy off of like buffers and other hardware elements that you might be able to pull some like decent Grande from those off of . Completely fascinating stuff.
Will: [01:06:03] One of my favorite ones is that you can use the shitty nature of the quartz clock on most computers to generate some random ms. Cause they, they bounce around constantly.
Brad: [01:06:12] not bad.
Will: [01:06:13] Um, anyway, uh, but yeah, if you want to join that, you can go to patreon.com/tech pod and, uh, sign up for two bucks a month to get access to the discord.
Uh, we do a monthly patron exclusive episode. Last month we talked about projects that we were working on. It was stuff like a home assistant and, and yeah. All of the weird, weird, weird, you know, all the stuff that we do, uh, in our, in our, in our free time. Uh, and this is episode where we thank all of our executive and associate producer, well patrons.
So, uh, shout outs to our executive producer, patrons, Andrew Cotton, David Allen and Jacob chapel. Thank you all so much. And as well, our associate producer level patrons, uh, Arthur geese, uh, Dan Brockman. Dave Iulian Graham banks, Jad, Rita, Sam buck, Terry Cox, and the bunny fiend
Brad: [01:07:04] Oh the buddy fiend
Will: [01:07:05] and Thomas Shea,
Brad: [01:07:06] can not forget.
Will: [01:07:07] bunny fiend
Brad: [01:07:07] Cannot, cannot forget the bunny fiend.
Will: [01:07:09] No, never. You'd look, you'd never put the bunny fiend in the corner of Brad. That's important.
Brad: [01:07:12] I mean, there are fiend. Well, you don't want to, you don't don't want to anger or someone who is a fiend
Will: [01:07:17] I mean, for bunnies though, what are you like? They made a real bunnies or are they feeding the, I actually, I don't want to know. I'm good.
Brad: [01:07:23] just, yeah. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much to everyone.
Will: [01:07:27] and, and thanks to everybody who supports the Patrion and the tech pod.
We really appreciate it. And, uh, yeah. Uh, I guess that's it for us this week. So read, read, read a Hitchhiker's. We're going to talk about that. And then I don't know if you have ideas for things you would like to see us talk about or do, uh, after we hit 2000 patrons, I guess, posted in the discord, send us a Twitter message.
Brad: [01:07:50] even without a Patriot goal attached to it, just like on Twitter or email, or if you're on the discord there anywhere is fine. But yeah, like topics, suggestions are always welcomed because there's tons of stuff out there that we probably haven't thought of. And that would be super helpful to know what people
Will: [01:08:04] Topic ideas. Oh, the last thing is, uh, people had asked about annual. Like signing up for a year rather than having to do the month a month. And we got the ability to flip that on. Since the last time we did an email's episode, so you can sign up for a year at whatever level you would like and just pay it all at once at a little bit of a discount, I think it's 5% off.
Um, so yeah. Thank you all so much.
Brad: [01:08:29] Thanks. everybody
Have a good week, Brad. And I'll talk to you next week, man.