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It's new fish season. I'm very happy about that. It's also new Dave Matthews band season. I'm so sorry about that. Didn't I say, isn't fish coming to Richmond or something like that? If I recall correctly, we have a fancy new amphitheater. I will be seeing Dave Matthews there next month, but I believe fish is coming for a night if you wanted to drive into what is presently the seventh circle of hell. You're really selling it well. Why is it new fish season and new Dave Matthews season? Is this when they spawn or?

Summer tours, baby. Summer tours. All right, then. Well, there you go. Fish season and Dave Matthews season doesn't sound as good. It's like rabbit season, duck season. You know, that's annoying, John, because as you're talking, the two of you are talking, I'm working on what will become the official show notes, and I'm trying to type fish and wabbit season, and then you made the joke on the show, so now it doesn't sound original. Great minds think alike, Casey. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Anyways, well, if you want to come to the new Allianz, I don't know how you pronounce this. I think they're like an insurance company or something like that. Isn't that like the trip insurance company? Yes, I believe that's right. Okay, let me, am I supposed to be buying trip insurance when I go on trips? Because I haven't been. Hmm.

I mean, it's, I think the, are you talking about the thing where like, if your flight gets canceled, you can get a refund or whatever? I mean, that's what it, that's what it purports. I've never actually tried to use it, but I don't, it's just, it's always like, do you want to check this box and spend even more money at the end for things that are reasonable to be covered that we really should cover without this thing, but we're not reasonable. I kind of reject that on principle, but like, should I be doing that? I mean, like if you, if you're booking a trip and you're like, well, there's a good chance I might have to change my mind on this trip, but it's not a refundable ticket. I think that,

You might want to get the trip insurance. Well, but then it becomes squishy because a lot of trip insurance, it's very specific about the ways in which you can cancel and what constitutes... Well, it's like any insurance. They're going to do everything they can not to pay it out. So you have to read the fine print. But that's... My understanding is always like, consider... What do you think the odds are that...

you could change your mind about this trip or that you could be sick or that you could not have to go or that something could go wrong in a way that otherwise you would lose your money if the odds of that seems low then just roll the dice because it's probably and also if it's you know they try to get you by saying oh it's like it's like 20 bucks you're like oh what's 20 bucks but you know that's how they get there for 20 bucks from you but it's usually it's usually like a few hundred bucks like it can be a lot anything at that price it's like oh no i'll just take the risk it's

It's like doing AppleCare. It's like, well, you're going to drop your computer once every 15 years, but if you don't pay for the AppleCare, you'll probably make it up. But if you drop your phone every single year, Casey, then maybe consider getting the AppleCare. I also like – I don't usually like involving a third-party company in these kind of warranties. It's like if it's through Apple, like if you're buying an iPhone in the Apple Store and you're getting a warranty through Apple,

That at least tells you like they're probably not going to screw me too badly if I actually try to make a claim. Whereas like if it's one of these like third party companies that you get like at the end of an airline check-in, you're like, like if I have to make a claim through them, is it going to be a crazy pain in the butt because they are not the airline? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It will be. And also, and like,

I've occasionally had to cancel a flight near last minute or whatever. I usually, I guess, will call the airline and just ask, hey, what can you do for me here? And oftentimes, even if it wasn't officially refundable, they'll at least give me a credit that I can use within a year or something like that, if you just ask. So I find, I don't know, so far I have never had a situation where I got really screwed by not having travel insurance. I don't think I've ever paid for it either, but I do consider it each time it goes by.

Someone is calling from inside John's house to point out that travel insurance can also be helpful for bigger trips, which is, I think we did it for our London trip last year, and covers more than just the plane tickets for international. It also covers medical costs, which is important because we're a backwards country and need to worry about these things. Yeah, there you go. I don't do a lot of international travel, as you know.

Yeah. Well, and that's also really important for people who fly to the U.S., who are not normally in the U.S. and therefore don't have U.S. medical insurance. Obviously, that's a different situation. But, you know, I think usually we can go other places and their civilized systems will take care of us a little bit better than we take care of them.

Additionally, John just made a joke, which is completely fair, about me constantly dropping my phones. And I will tell you that I have not had a case on my 16 Pro since I bought it. I have had a screen protector for the very first time. A screen protector? Well, I have had a screen protector on this phone pretty much the entire time I've had it. I use the Belkin Ultra Glass 2 that you apply at the Apple Store, like the Apple people will do it. And I think...

I'm going to be receiving my fourth this week because I keep breaking them. I mean, the phone itself is fine. The screen is fine as far as I can tell. But apparently the Belkin Ultra Glass 2 screen protectors are made of hopes and dreams. So just... Well, I guess the screen protector is doing its job. It is in that regard. But I feel like I glance at this thing and the screen protector is like, screw it, I'm done. Which is better than the screen saying that. But...

So this explains why your screen is always scratched up, by the way. I guess? You're like, I don't know. Well, now we put a sort of destructible layer on the screen and we see you're destroying it all the time. I mean, I really want to argue with you, but I can't. So fair enough. So every time the new iPhone is announced and they spend about 30 seconds talking about how amazingly strong the new glass is in the front. And every time we're like, I guess that means something to some people. Now we know it means it's for you. It's all for you. It's 100% for me.

We have some administrative to take care of. So here's the thing. Last month, we made an egregious error and we forgot to point out a new member special on the immediately following episode after that member special.

And we knew that as three reasonably intelligent human beings, we would 100%— three reasonably intelligent human beings, of which two of us have a functioning memory, we knew without a doubt that we would not make that mistake again. And yet here I am saying to you, whoopsie-doopsies, we forgot to mention last week that there is a new member special, HP Movie Club Sneakers, which is the 1992 movie not about footwear, but about sneaking around. And it's a really, really fun movie.

like caper movie or how did you, what's the word? It's a heist. Heist movie. Thank you. There we go. Heist movie. And the three of us watched it and had a conversation about it. And I really, really enjoyed it. I, I will tip my hat and say, I freaking love this movie. So if you're looking for something,

pretty positive, I like to think. We obviously did critique the movie from time to time, but overall, I think we all enjoyed it. So you can check that out. If you're not a member, you can go to atp.fm slash join, and I will remind you that you get not only this member special, but all of the other ones going back to the beginning, which at this point is something like 20 or 30 episodes, I think. And so there's the bootleg and all the other goodies. So you should definitely check that out. Especially if you're a younger person and have never heard of this movie, let alone seen it,

uh, it's worth watching the movie. Like obviously before you listen to the member special, uh, because it's, it's, I'm not saying it's a cult classic, but it is lesser known. Obviously nerds know about it because it's a movie that actually focuses on computers and hacking a little bit. And those are, uh,

pretty narrow interest but if you've never even heard of this movie go find it sneakers 1992 watch it and then listen to the podcast yeah and i gotta say the movie was a lot better than i expected it to be yeah like you definitely do not think a movie from the 90s about computer hacking is you think it's going to be like oh we'll just laugh at it it's such a dumb movie but this somehow manages to avoid all that you'll hear what we have to say about it yep

And then finally, we have one last piece of administrative. John, would you tell me about what's going on with the ATP store, please? So we had our ATP merch sale before WWDC. One of our items, unfortunately, was discontinued by the manufacturer. That is our ATP performance shirt, which is the shirt that doesn't stick to your body when you sweat. That's Casey.

his description yeah i think think of it as like under armor-esque it's not literally under armor but very very it's actually made by adidas um anyway they discontinued our shirt and so we had a problem filling all those orders everybody who ordered one of those performance shirts was given an option they could either get a refund or they could pick the shirt in a different color uh and so everyone who did order the shirt has now made that choice the way we accommodated that it was like oh no they're they've discontinued our shirt we just bought like

not all the rest of the shirts they have, but we bought a whole bunch of shirts up front so that when we went through the process of like, hey, you know, going back and forth with everybody who ordered that shirt to see what they wanted, we have lots of choices for them. Because if we didn't, if we had just said, oh, you know, for each person, I'll email them and say, hey, the shirt you ordered, we can't give it to you. Do you want it refunded? Do you want it in a different color? And you go back and forth. I'll take a black one instead of a red one. Then we can't then at that point go, okay, let's have a black shirt because they might be out of stock. So as soon as we found out they're discontinued,

we ordered a whole bunch of shirts in a whole bunch of colors and a whole bunch of sizes so that people had options. What that means is we have a whole bunch of leftover shirts. So if you want an ATP performance shirt in one of the colors that we still have left and one of the sizes we still have left, they are priced to move. They are, we're trying to sell through the inventory that we bought to help people do exchanges. Everyone has now done their exchanges. Everyone has been taken care of.

but we have at least one shirt in every size from small to two X, because that is the range of the, of the shirts that were ordered. Um,

And we have, I think, at least one of every color. And like I said, they are available at a discount, atp.fm/.store if you want an ATP Performance shirt. If you already got one and want to get a second one for cheaper, you can do that. And by the way, the mugs are still there, believe it or not. They're also priced to move. We no longer care if we make any money on these mugs. We just want to get rid of them. They have been price reduced. It's a fire sale, atp.fm/.store.

Again, these are like the Adidas shirts, performance shirts and the mugs. These are exactly the same ones that we sell in like the time limited sales. Everything else on the store page is like the on demand stuff, which print with printing. It's not as good that you shouldn't buy unless you desperately want one of those things. But the mugs and the performance shirts, same quality you get in our regular sales, lower price.

Go, go, go. Now, now, now. Go ahead and take care of it. ATP.fm slash store. And again, the member special. You can check that out. Check out membership at ATP.fm slash join. All right, let's do some follow-up. As always, since we are in June, we have a lot. John, tell me, if I really, really hated the Squircle Jail, what can I do about it? I mentioned these programs on a previous episode, many previous episodes, I think, and I think we've even linked them before, that will replace icons of applications on your MacBook.

that the keyword is persistently because it's easy to just, you know, get info on an icon and paste on an app in your Mac and the finder and paste on a new icon. But then when the app runs an auto updater or gets automatically updated from the Mac app store, your custom icon is gone. And it's annoying to have to repaste it over and over again. You make this little folder full of icons and every time it happens, you know, whatever. There are programs that will do this for you. They will watch the applications that you customize and

And when the applications are updated, they will swap back in the icon. They'll do it so fast that when an app auto-updates itself and relaunches, the custom icon will already be there. You won't even have to quit it and relaunch it one more time to get it. And I can never for the life of me remember what the heck the name of these programs are. So I'm once again putting it in the show notes. The one that I use is called Spooks.

called Pictogram by Neil Sedarcy. I have a note in my notes document with the title, change Mac icon persistently. Like I'm just putting keywords in so I can find it because I can never remember it. So much so that I found myself, the reason I made that note is when I found myself scrolling through my applications folder, looking for an icon that's going to remind me of what's the app that does that? Because I wanted to do it to another app and I could not remember. Anyway, Pictogram. We'll put a link to that one. And the second one that's a little bit newer is called

It's like the word replace and the word icon stuck together with the E removed. Replacion? Replace icon? Replacicon? I don't know how to pronounce it. But anyway. Replacicon. Yeah, Replacicon. R-E-P-L-A-C-I-O-N dot app. We'll put a link to that one in the show notes as well. Have not used it, but two applications. Two, two, two applications that you can use to jailbreak your icons and

if Squirgle Jail still exists when Tahoe ships. Excellent. And tell me about Tahoe Beta 2 icons, please. Yeah, so Tahoe Beta 2 is out. The big news is that they reversed the colors in the finder icon. It still looks the same as it did before, but now the blue is on the left and the lighter color is on the right. Still has the border. That's bad.

The dark mode one is a little baffling because in the dark mode one, they made the left eye blue and the right eye black and the smile is half blue and half black with a fade between it. Yeah, I really don't like that. Not great. As we pointed out in the last show and as more people keep doing, like Louis Menteo did one, if you just take the existing Finder icon and make it glass, like there's nothing wrong with it. Like it's not like the old icon doesn't fit with a new style. It fits perfectly. It is literally like flat planes that you can make glossy. Like it...

It perfectly fits the new style. Just take it. Anyway, so anyway, Finder Icon's getting better. They still haven't done the obvious thing. It's kind of like iPadOS. We'll have to wait for 15 years, which is just take the existing icon and make it out of glass. It's so easy to do. You can do it yourself with Icon Composer. I mean, Louis Mantena, granted, is a designer who used to make icons for Apple, so maybe they're, let's say, overpowered for this particular task. But still, anybody can do it. It looks perfectly fine. We'll link to Louis' example. Apple, just do that. But anyway, we're going in the right direction.

Something that has entered the List family lexicon, and specifically Declan's lexicon, is OP, which is something that happened after I stopped playing video games, and everything now is OP. It's OP this, OP that. Oh, that's so OP. I'm getting to that point where I'm starting to feel properly old. Like, I already felt kind of old, because I am, but now I'm starting to feel properly old, and I'm not comfortable with it. You can refer to things as broken if you want to join in the lexicon there. I mean, obviously you know about buffs and nerfs, right?

No. I can give you a refresher course because I'm still in the video game world and I'm very familiar with these terms. Okay. Well, maybe that can be our member special next month. We'll see. We got to talk about that privately. You're going to hear all it because where kids get all their info now is just YouTube. And what's all over YouTube? People talking about games. So that's just like all the vocabulary is YouTube vocabulary now. But what you can do though, because we are the dads...

It is our job to be uncool to them. If we try to use their terminology, they hate it. So the best thing we can do is go all the way ridiculous and intentionally misuse it. Like you can be like, man, that salad is so op. Ha ha.

Or you could tell them, another dad thing you can do is say, you know, back in my day, before OP meant overpowered, it used to mean original poster. When you refer back to the person who originally wrote something that you're responding to, they love hearing about that history. It's fascinating to them. Yeah, they're like, please tell me more ancient history about when you were young. Ancient history of the web, which for us is like two years ago. It seems like it's two years ago. Yep.

Well, let me tell you, John, there are some new settings that are in Tahoe Beta 2 that are definitely OP. You want to tell me about them? I don't think they are OP, actually. They're kind of mid. There is a new setting in settings in Tahoe Beta 2 in the menu bar.

I don't know what we call them. You just call them preference pains, whatever in the menu bar setting, which is a surprising to me, first of all, because settings is so system settings so weirdly organized that I fully expected to find this not I expect to find it like either an accessibility or in like appearance or in desktop and documents, but it was actually in the menu bar system settings thing. And that item is show menu bar background and it's a toggle switch. It's off by default.

If you turn it on, it gives the menu bar a background. Is that background opaque? No, it's not. It's tinted. But, you know, progress. Now there's an option to show something there. I feel like for people who want that option, they probably want like a full-fledged stronger background instead of this tinted one. But so far, again, moving in the right direction. Option for a menu bar background, even if it is still not particularly opaque.

I am very happy about that. Oh, and one more thing about beta two. When we all got it and installed it and launched Safari, there was like ugly black underlines underneath all the tabs. That's a bug. It's mentioned in the release notes. Don't don't flip out. That's not how tabs are supposed to look. Tabs are still low contrast and terrible. They haven't fixed them. But in Safari, they have fully black underlines under the inactive tabs, which is just a plain bug.

I mean, on the other hand, it does help me find the active tab more because there is no contrast. Even like on a MacBook Pro, like HDR, perfectly calibrated screen, the difference in color between the current tab and the inactive tabs is...

is it's like 1% RGB value. Like it's so tiny. It's visible if you have really good vision, but it's invisible. Like I said, it's invisible on the MacBook Air screen. It is visible on a very expensive screen, but just because it's visible if you concentrate doesn't mean it is sufficiently visible. Yeah, it's definitely like a stretch at best. And like the only way to tell what tab is active is it has text next to the icon.

But if you have a lot going on in your screen, that takes a second to scan for. Like, it's bad. Yeah, terminal's real bad, too, because the text doesn't even help. So, yeah, for now, that black underline bug will actually help you differentiate which is the active tab. It's the one without the underline. Great.

All right, tell me about Tahoe's not-so-naked robotic menu bar core, I guess. Yeah, it's a naked robotic menu bar. The idea is if they draw nothing there, then you can just make your desktop background have a white stripe at the top, and look, you've got a solid white menu bar. Isn't that great? And we went back and forth about this. You were saying it was like translucent. I'm like, it's not translucent. It's just plain not there, as in it doesn't draw anything behind it. And Vitor on Mastodon noted that

That's true some of the times, but not always. So I got curious because every time I tried it, it had drawn nothing. So I did a bunch of different backgrounds, like solid colored backgrounds to see what the menu area would do. The non-bar. So if you make the background black or white...

it draws nothing there. Like, and the way I determined this is you could just do like a, you know, digital color meter to measure the color between the words file and edit, and then one inch below the words file and edit. It's 100% white. Between, it's 100% white. Underneath, same thing with black. It draws nothing, okay? So then I did red, green, and blue.

And I did red. I'm like, oh, it's still drawing nothing. And then I did green and blue. And I'm like, hmm, with green, 100% green and 100% blue, it is drawing something. Talk about an eye test. Both of you can look in the show notes at these things. The red, I'm pretty, I forget the details of this, but the red, I believe the red I measured as it's just, you know, R255, 0G, 0B everywhere. But the blue and the green, there is a subtle gradient. Can you see the gradient in the green? Nope.

Not a bit. It's there. I assure you, if you take out a measuring device, you can measure it and it's like G255 and like R2 and B2. Like there's a fade to it. And so then I changed it to teal and gray. And now you can see with the naked eye, see what it's doing with the teal and the gray, especially the gray. You can see. And I tell you, these backgrounds are solid colors. We'll put the gray one in the show notes and like the red one or the white ones you can see.

On the gray, you can see, oh, when the background is gray, it does draw a gradient under the menu bar. The gradient goes farther than the bar, mind you. It's like twice or three times as long before it fades into the color. But this is a solid color background and it's putting a gradient on it. So Mac OS Tahoe is baffling. By the way, all these screenshots are from beta one. I don't think beta two behaves particularly differently, but it might make slightly different decisions about when it draws something and when it draws nothing.

So its ways are mysterious. Sometimes the menu bar is not there, and sometimes something is there. So I'm using Xscope by friends of the show, Icon Factory. And sure enough, the images you put in the show notes, it goes from hex 28FF11 to 25FF0E.

You're talking about the gray one? No, the green one. Sorry. Yeah, the green one. For the life of me, even hyper mega zoomed in in the X-scope like palette or whatever you want to call it, still can't tell the difference. I got nothing. Yeah, that's why I measured the black and the white one to make sure I wasn't not seeing it there. And they are. There's nothing there. So, yeah. Works in mysterious ways. Bananas.

All right. Do you want to talk more about the Safari toolbars, please? Yeah, Luis de Regio wrote in to say, to remind us that in Sequoia and earlier OSs, Safari will do exactly the same thing that we were complaining about, which is basically like pick up color from the web page and put it into the toolbar area. So the example screenshot from his email was like the Guardian website.

which has this like Navy blue color and my whole toolbar is Navy blue. It's not quite the same as, uh, what, uh, Tahoe does because I think the guardian is setting it with like, um, a setting in the page. Um, like for, for web developers, if you set the theme color and the meta tag, you can control what the top bar says. Or if you have like a web app, you know, what do you call it? PWA progressive web app. You can set it in the theme color property in the web app manifest and

Uh, and on, and when you use Chrome, if you install a website as an application, it uses a theme color for the menu bar. So there's this whole system where websites can tell the title bar of either the window it's in or the Safari browser that's in to color itself. It's not quite the same as Tahoe in that it picks up the color of any webpage you scroll underneath it. I did a bunch of different webpages and scrolled them behind it. Um,

And it wasn't as flashy, like literally like flashing as the one in Tahoe. But you will only see this. The reason I think we all forgot about it, you only see this is if you have the option in Safari to show color in compact tab bar in the advanced setting. And I think we all turn that off as soon as this feature was released and have never turned it back on. So that's why we just have a more or less solid gray screen.

toolbar in Safari, but it's a reminder that still exists. And I was further reminded when I was doing some digging for some other screenshots today that way back in Yosemite, Mac OS 10 10.10, I think is when they first rolled this out where they would color the tabs and the toolbar in Safari based on the content of the web page and

In a way, it looked... I mean, it was very frosted and very kind of opaque, but it would still add colors to it. I put this very pretty screenshot into my USMV review that we'll link in the show notes to show what it looked like. But this is another one of those options that I immediately turned off. I think this was influenced by the, like, um...

to allow desktop to tint window backgrounds or something like that. I don't remember what it was that turned this one off. It was a long time ago. But all this is to say that Apple has been obsessed with making Safari's toolbar and tabs be colored by the thing that's in them since at least 2014, which is when Yosemite rolled out.

All right. There are some ways that one can install macOS Tahoe betas. I think you had said that this conversation started by you saying that your installation procedure was not fun. I said as a VM using VirtualBuddy worked really well for me. But Robert Sherry writes, in order to DFU restore to macOS betas, you need to install the beta version of Xcode on the device doing the restoration.

This is also required to create a VM, as that is effectively also a DFU restore and will fail with some esoteric message otherwise. I think I was experiencing this because I did not install the Xcode beta because I did not know that you needed to do this to install a beta version of an OS with DFU. You don't need Apple Configurator. Finder can do a DFU restore, and I think it does mention not having, quote, device support, quote, when you don't have the beta Xcode installed.

For restoring to a physical device, I use the wonderful Asahi Mac VDM tool to boot the other device into DFU mode because the key combination sucks. We'll put a link in the show notes. I hope my last pain, my past pain, excuse me, can help some people out.

Additionally, Brian Lashom writes, with regard to John trying to DFU restore Mac with an IPSW file, I couldn't live without DFU Blaster. Again, link in the show notes. With DFU Blaster Pro, you can put a Mac system into DFU mode with the press of a single button and restore any version of Mac OS that the Mac system supports. Plus,

Plug in a Mac via the DFU port, press a button, and the Apple Silicon Mac goes into DFU mode. The fact that there's multiple tools to do this tells me that Apple should probably just build this into their OSes since apparently you can do it with software somehow instead of making us do the incantation that is...

very weird and complicated and not particularly satisfying and easy to get wrong that i have to look up every single time so i'm keeping these items in mind and i'll probably do what i often do which is use our show notes to remind myself of something next time i need to do this like we talked about an atp uh do a site colon atp.fm query and look for this look for dfu and i'll find dfu blaster

And additionally, and finally in this regard, Andy Beyer Bowden writes, John installed Tahoe by installing Sequoia first, but this isn't necessary. I did it by downloading Apple's installassistant.package for Tahoe, opening the installer and selecting the desired external drive within the installer's GUI as the install destination.

works like a charm for a clean external install for my Apple Silicon Mac. Yeah. So this, uh, Mr. Macintosh site that will link always finds these installer things. Why Apple makes these so hard to find that a website's part of a, uh, a website's reputation is they find these things and link them for every single OS. It's like Apple, if you're going to make these things, make them available to us. It's great that you do the IPSW. Like that's probably useful to a lot of people. Uh,

They used to put them on the Mac App Store, I think, and you'd get the installer there. But yeah, this installassistant.pkg really would have helped out. I think they don't appear like the second the beta is available on developer.apple.com. I think the installassistant.pkg things, they either take a while to appear or it takes a while for the Mr. Macintosh website to find them. But either way, this is definitely the easiest option. Node.dfu restore is just a .pkg file that you run, point in an external disk, and it installs. Too late for me, but hopefully this helps other people.

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All right, let's talk iOS 26. There's apparently more frosting. Anilian writes, it seems to me like they've turned up the opacity and the frostiness in beta two on the liquid glass toolbars. Seems especially improved in cases where the toolbars hover over images like in Safari, Podcaster Music. These were completely unreadable in beta one.

So there's two screenshots here. I hope these are in the post by nearly end showing control center in iOS. Yeah, and iOS beta one and beta two. And you can see the difference, right? So in beta one, the background shows through more strongly, less blurred. It's less frosted, right? And beta two is an improvement. But I was looking at this and I was thinking, okay, we're looking at this. First of all, we're looking at beta one versus beta two. And we can see, okay, we're going in the right direction. Things are improving, like they're adjusting stuff, right?

And we're also looking at this from a perspective where we know that Liquid Glass is a redesign and we know what it's supposed to be doing and we know what Control Center looks like. But I looked at the Beta 2 screenshot a little bit longer and I said, you know what? If they ship something like Beta 2 and someone who doesn't know anything about Liquid Glass or any of this stuff saw that screen, someone in my life, let's say, someone I'm related to and saw this, do you know what they would say to me? They would say to me,

Why is that button red? Why is that one green? Does that mean it's on? Oh, yeah, yeah. Because a bunch of the buttons in control center now look like they are colored. And they'd be saying like, you know, imagine it's a control that they knew because they don't know that's a screen recording button. They don't know it's a dark mode or whatever. They'd say like, my whatever button is red for some reason. I'm like, what do you mean it's red?

Like in the pull down thing, the button is red and I can't make it not red, but some of them are green. Why? And it's like, the answer is behind that is an icon on your home screen that's red and it is fully making these buttons look like they are colored buttons. I'm not saying it's not an improvement because if you look at the beta one one, it's like half red, but at least that looks more like something is showing through. This just looks like, Hey, something behind me is red. So I'm going to fully show myself as red, but then battery is going to show itself as yellow. Yeah.

So they've still got some work to do. And honestly, I'm not sure what the solution is other than just essentially drain more of the color out of this. But this, for all the world, looks like some buttons in Control Center are colored. I think when people actually use it, I think the motion of everything will get people very quickly accustomed to the idea that this is a layer on top of stuff. And so I don't actually expect that...

color effect to be like a big confusing thing for people. I mean, the legibility of things, that's going to be a problem, you know, because like, as I keep mentioning, like, when you scroll content under the liquid glass material of various colors, it is jarring and it is hard to read in many conditions. The shifts from light to dark are still pretty jarring and don't really help things, but...

This particular concern about the control center being confusing to people, I don't think it'll be confusing. I think they'll figure it out very quickly that these are just the things behind it. I mean, so the advantage of things like scrolling behind is that they scroll and move so you see that it's changing. But if you pull down control center on the home screen, nothing is changing behind it.

I don't think it will stop them from using it, but I think a lot of people might be wondering, I just wonder why that button is always red in Control Center. It was never red before, especially if like they only have one home screen or they're mainly on a particular home screen. They pull it down a lot. They'll just think the button turned red for some reason. It's not going to be that big of a deal, but I fully I can just hear people in my life saying to me, why is that button? Like my mom makes a list of like things that she wants me to look at on her devices when she comes visit. This would be on the list fully. She'd be like this button turned red recently. Why?

You know what? When this comes out to the public, report back on this because I actually – I think it's not going to happen. I think the motion of it coming in and out demonstrates well enough to people, oh, it's just clear. Like, again, there's other issues with the design, but I don't think that's going to be one of them. And this is beta 2, so we don't know what beta 3 is going to look like, so on and so forth. So the point is they are making adjustments, and it is going in the right direction. Yeah, I mean, because like –

obviously, like, you know, they want things to look fresh and new. And I think there's a lot of room between looking old, like what we had before, and...

you know, the new design all the way, all the way to one side. And in the middle is all these like, okay, well, yes, you want, we need some compromises here because full transparency is hard to read in a lot of contexts because it's, it's still a computer interface. So we still need to like, you know, put text on top of buttons sometimes and have things be legible and have stuff go under it sometimes because scrolling exists and, you know, uncontrolled content exists and,

So there's a wide range between the extreme of it has to be perfectly transparent and it has to look just like the old material. What we had in iOS 18 and earlier is, as we mentioned before, a lot of very heavily frosted glass looks.

And what we have here is a bunch of almost not at all frosted glass looks. Somewhere in the middle, I think they can achieve a really fresh, nice, new look that has enough frosting and blurring to be legible enough in most conditions.

They are getting closer to that with these tweaks, but a lot of the things are still not tweaked. Like the tab bar, which I think is one of the most egregious examples. This is like the controls at the bottom of the music app, anything with the different sectioned buttons at the bottom. That's still pretty, as far as I can tell, it's unchanged in beta 2. I at least didn't notice any difference. I screenshotted back to back and I couldn't tell any difference. Tab bars are still, and the little mini players and music buttons.

Those are still pretty hard to read and still flash a lot when stuff scrolls, but they are making little improvements to other things. So I have some faith that maybe they will come upon that as well and tweak it a little bit.

Marco, you've been on an adventure. You've been on a treasure hunt to try to find some missing buttons. Can you talk us through what the ailment is? Then we'll talk about some potential findings. Yeah. So listener Walter Hemi wrote in because I complained last episode that in a couple of places that things that previously had toolbar buttons were now replaced with nothing. I went on a whole rant about things being replaced by nothing. Yeah.

And one of the examples I gave was in the music app. When you're in an album view in the music app, usually in the upper right corner, there'll be a plus icon if the album is not in your library. It'll be a checkmark icon if it's downloaded or it'll be like a down arrow download button if it's in your library but not downloaded.

And that was a quick way to tell, is this album downloaded? And a quick way then to download it, which I very much use all the time. And I was complaining that button was just gone in beta one. Well, it turns out, so Walter Hemme wrote in to say that they still have the arrow button and gave a screenshot. And I wrote back, I'm like, wait, but here's a screenshot of mine. It's clearly not here. What it turned out to be is in beta one, if your album title was wide,

That button would be hidden all the time. I guess there's some mechanic of when you scroll up, when the title appears in the title bar, when you're scrolling down, the title moves from where it is in the content and it sticks in the top bar. I

And apparently there wasn't room for it or something. Anyway, long story short, they fixed this bug in beta 2. So in beta 2, now across all of my screens in Apple Music, the checkmark slash download slash add button is now back in the upper right corner where it belongs. So thank you, whoever fixed that at Apple. By looking at the screenshot, by the way, there's room for way more buttons up there. I'm not saying they should fill the top of the thing with a million buttons, but yeah, it looks even more egregious knowing that

They took what was one little ellipsis menu, and now it's a little ellipsis menu connected in a capsule with the button that you were just referring to. Still plenty of room on the top there. Not a lot of stuff going on. This is not a busy interface. Using Beta 2 now for, I guess, what, a day? It's been out two days. These improvements, they tweaked the Safari buttons a little bit more, made them a little bit less terrible. Yeah.

It's getting less bad in some of these very frustrating areas. There is still a long way to go, but this is only beta 2. We have all summer to have Apple keep iterating on this and for us to keep complaining about it so that they do the right thing. I will say also beta 2 does not so far seem to be overall...

stable in most ways than beta one. It certainly doesn't seem to perform any better. My phone is still very hot all the time. I started, started bringing around, you know, my little fan cooler for the back when I'm like using like out and about using it. Cause it's just, it's so, it runs so hot.

performance is terrible i had to reboot the phone yesterday because just system wide all of a sudden i was getting like four frames a second for everything scrolling even the home screen cool like everything so like i don't know what was going on so reboot of the phone it was fine um i keep the the keyboard seems to have a problem where in the middle of typing like a paragraph into like a message or something the keyboard will just lock up the whole app

And you'll have to force quit whatever you're typing in. And then, of course, you lose what you were typing. So that's been fun. I did lose the ability to charge via MagSafe until a reboot yesterday.

So it's like, it's that kind of build still. This is still very early. Which to be clear, we're not faulting anyone for that. This is what beta season is about. This is, you know, Marco knew what he was getting into. Yes. This is why they tell you like, you must only install those on test devices, even though they don't know one does. But yeah, but what I'm saying is if you're, if you were, you know, out there, if you're being responsible ish and you were like, I'm not going to install beta one, maybe I'll install beta two. Yeah.

It's not to that point yet. If you have that level of cautiousness that you wouldn't install beta 1, don't install beta 2 either. We'll see how beta 3 turns out in a couple of weeks.

Sounds fun. All right. We had a brief conversation last week about the new clause showing up in simulators, I believe, Apple Vision Pro 4K. And we theorize that maybe that's hinting that there will in the future be a not 4K. And we were dead wrong because Greg Kaplan writes the Apple Vision Pro simulator did not support 4K before. Now it does.

Apple is advertising a new feature, not hinting at future products. And Greg continues, imagine Apple releasing a new iPhone that's not retina just to hit a price point with a thinking face emoji.

All right. For the record, whatever the 4K thing... Okay, fine. But this thing about, like, imagine Apple releasing a new iPhone that's not retina at a price point...

It's a little bit different when you're talking about a product family that effectively no one is buying because it is way too expensive for most people. That is not the iPhone. The iPhone, yes, it's expensive compared to inexpensive Android phones in a lot of the world. It's too expensive for a lot of people. But in Apple's target markets, in the big rich countries that Apple sells most of its products in, the iPhone sells great.

nowhere does the vision pro sell great to no market nobody anywhere no one is buying the vision pro and the price is the number one reason and it had and it isn't that it's like 10 too expensive

It's like 200% too expensive. Like you would need to cut it way, way down to, to be even in a range that most people would consider for the kind of thing it is. So yes, I can indeed envision Apple releasing a cheaper one because this product line is failing hard until they can get it a lot cheaper. So that's a very different situation than the iPhone. Also,

Again, we can see things like the Quest series of headsets that are a few hundred bucks and way lower resolution. And a lot of people love them and use them just fine. And there's a lot of advantages that they have.

And so I think we can see like it is possible to create a good headset for lots of purposes with lower resolution screens. Sure, it's not ideal. But right now with the tech we have today and with how much it costs today and the realities of the market, the reality is, yeah, if they want to, if they want this product line to continue to exist, yeah.

they're going to need to bring that price down very quickly. And they can't wait around for these particular resolution screens and specs to somehow get so cheap that they can release one of these at a third or a quarter of its current price.

I continue to hope that they don't lower the resolution. I'm not predicting what they will do. Just my hope. I think they can wait. I think they can wait it out and just continue to sell not a lot of these until the prices come down where they can get the current resolution or better in a lower price thing. That's going to be years maybe. But that is my preferred strategy. We'll see what Apple actually does.

Yeah. And then just a little bit of final follow-up with regard, well, both in general and with regard to this topic. Allegedly in the second betas that were released a couple of days ago as we record this, the two options are now Apple Vision Pro and Apple Vision Pro at resolution, which is basically...

you know, the standard up until now simulator, which reads as Apple Vision Pro, or this fancy new simulator, which will now read, instead of 4K, it will now read Apple Vision Pro at 2732 by 2048.

So there you go. Yeah, that definitely makes it much clearer that this is not a product designation, but is in fact just a readout of statistics about the way the simulator is running. It doesn't roll off the tongue as well, but it prevents people like us. Even Microsoft would not make a product called Microsoft something 2070, 2732 X 2040. You sure about that? Speaking of 2048, I heard some kid recently say that their favorite game is 2048 and I just died a little inside.

Oh, no, that was the Threes clone, wasn't it? Yes. Oh, that one. Yes, yes, yes. People, yeah, I felt like saying, you know, I thought I'm not going to say that. You know what 2048 is? You know where that comes from?

Those were the days. Have you heard of a little game called Threes? I guess not. But that's, look, that's like the reality. That was such an, you know, a sobering story to so many developers. But like the reality is like, yeah, things like ideas get copied and free usually wins over paid. Like that's, I,

Believe me, in a similar era, I had a paid app with big free competition. And I learned that lesson too. It sucked, but that's the market. And in the market of ideas...

no one cares who did it first no one cares who ripped off who and no one cares who's doing it better because threes is a better app but that doesn't matter either totally but yeah exactly like that that doesn't matter like no one cares if you invented something first except you no one cares if you do something better except you look i mean i do the same thing now like with overcast like a lot of my audio features i was like the first one to do something or i was one of the first ones or i did it in a new way or something and

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We're going to get cranky for a second, so if that's not your bag, that's fine. Well, no, I'm trying to be more positive in general. Sometimes I'm succeeding, sometimes I'm not. You're predicting all of our responses to this. You don't know what we're going to say about this first item. Sure, John. Okay, sure. Apparently, from Joaquim, I think, forgive me if I'm pronouncing that incorrectly, but they write, when uploading a cyst diagnosis or probably any other attachments to feedback,

you get the usual privacy notice that there is likely a lot of private and other sensitive info in those log files. So, you know, you're making a bug report to Apple. It'll capture what they call sysdiagnose, which is, you know, a bunch of information about the system that you were using. And, you know, you might have attachments or whatever, and you're uploading this to Apple as a part of a bug report.

It's not a great feeling, but I mostly trust the folks at Apple to treat it with respect, and I trust the logging system to redact the most serious bits. However, when filing a feedback today, this was a couple of weeks ago, I think, I noticed a new addition to the privacy notice. Quote, by submitting you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, agree that Apple may use your submission to train Apple intelligence models and other machine learning models.

I'm sorry. What? I don't think I love this. I'm really trying to be positive, but I don't think I love this. So my one complaint is that there is no way to opt out of the training part, because basically, if you don't agree to this, then you just don't get to submit a feedback.

Which seems pretty harsh because this is a new edition that before, again, SysDiagnose captures tons of stuff about your system. Every app that you're running, everything that's installed, like just tons of stuff. And what this was referring to about like the logging system has a way to redact

private information programmers have to use it correctly in their apps not to leak private information but presumably apple does a good job with that anyway you're already sending a bunch of private information but you're doing it like as a part of the bug report like you have a problem you want to send up like here's the system that i'm running here's all the apps that i'm running here's all the kernel extensions here's the versions of all my things like you're trying to help them solve whatever bug you're having so that's part of the bug report and

But now it's like, also, we might train Apple intelligence models and other machine learning models on the stuff that you submit. And there's no way to say, okay, I'll do the submission, but please don't train your models on it. Because I feel like training the models doesn't really have anything to do with a

addressing whatever bug, you know, the sysdiagnosis stuff does have to do with the bug. It's telling, you know, Apple potentially how to reproduce the bug or what's involved in, you know, crash reports, logs, stuff like that, right? But the training of the models, that's a whole separate thing. It's like, okay, maybe that's the thing they want to do and it's great that they're telling us about it, but they should be asking us, hey, do you want to submit the thing anyway, but also tell us not to train? And that's not an option and that's crappy. And that, I think, is actually my only complaint about this, that it's basically like don't submit feedback at all or allow us to train.

And I understand why people don't like it. And this is one of those things where I think a lot of people will blindly click through this and not think about it. But I'll try to give people something to think about. A lot of the ongoing court cases on which we're about to touch on.

involve people saying oh you trained on you know uh my book or new york times as you trained on our articles and the reason i know that is if i ask a question in a certain way i see paragraphs from my book spit back at me i see paragraphs from a new york times article spit back at me either almost verbatim or a hundred percent verbatim and so it's like so i can tell you trained on my stuff because look i can get it out of your thing if i ask the right question um

This is true of your source code too. If you submit stuff in a feedback and they train their model on it, let's say, first of all, we don't have no idea what they're training because they don't say, but let's say they're training Swift assist or one of those things that helps you in Xcode. It could be that someone somewhere type something and like auto completes to a paragraph of code that you wrote.

And you might not think about that. Maybe that paragraph of code that you wrote has like a snarky comment or a variable name or like things that are personal to you that you wouldn't want being out there in the world. Like when you're submitting a feedback report, you're not thinking someone somewhere someday will ask some Apple LM for something and my code will come back with my comments and my variable names.

And also, obviously, proprietary stuff, like if you have some secret algorithm in your app that does some fancy thing, now people can autocomplete that without knowing where it came from, without giving any credit to you or whatever. So maybe you want to think twice about that. The reason I'm personally not concerned about it is because I never upload my real source code to Feedback. I'm always making sample apps, and the sample apps have nothing that I care about in them. They're just...

Bare bones sample apps with code that is, as far as I'm concerned, could be public. If radar slash feedback had a way to market as public, I would do that. But that's not true of everybody. If you're like Adobe and you're like, we're having a problem in some part of Photoshop and you upload that portion of Photoshop, I don't think Adobe wants someone auto completing their like filter kernel in some Xcode project a year from now because Apple trained on it.

And the final thing that I'll notice in a lot of these like, oh, by the way, you might train your stuff. You're right. Train machine learning on your stuff. This cycle has happened multiple times already with other companies. And a lot of the time it's just, you know, lawyers getting in there and saying, just write this language so that we can do anything we want. And then the company swears up and down. Oh, we didn't mean it to be that broad. We just wanted to use it for this very narrow thing. But the lawyers made us put this broad thing in. So we'll change it to make a more narrow thing that works if a company is not

I was going to say, like, it employs humans who are responsive to feedback in real time. I would say that does not characterize Apple when it comes to this type of thing. So I'm not optimistic that Apple is going to remedy this language to clarify what they mean. In fact, this story is weeks old, and I don't think I've heard anything about it. But just FYI, this is a thing Apple wants you to agree to, which...

You may or may not care about. I personally don't because of the way I use feedback, but lots of people legitimately could because of the way they need to use feedback. And like I said, the only option is to not use feedback. So congratulations, Apple. You put up one more barrier to discourage people from sending feedbacks. All right. So with the disclaimer that I know this is going to make people mad, I think this is not that big of a deal.

See, Casey, you're 0 for 2. I know. I'm shooketh over here. I cannot believe my ears. My goodness. I think John is right about, like, you know, for the most part, what you should submit if you want your feedback report to actually get fixed. First of all, you're rolling the dice anyway. Good luck. Odds are you're wasting your time. But...

If any human being ever actually looks at it, which is, again, very unlikely, what you need to attach to it is a very, very simple, simple project that doesn't really contain any of your code. It's just like, here is me using this API in this way, and when I do these four lines of code, it doesn't work. That's the kind of thing they will actually respond to. It should fit on one screen. Yeah, if you're uploading your actual source code to your actual functioning app of thousands of lines, at least, of code, that's...

that's probably not going to even get your bug fixed because it's too complex and if you can't figure out a very small amount of code that shows the problem they won't even bother looking at it either ideally you're not really submitting anything of significant value or exclusive knowledge to you that being said I think broadly speaking and please forgive me everyone

I think no one's going to care about this kind of stuff in like two years. Wait to find this stuff. Training on training AIs on quote my content. Like what? But you know, I think people are largely not going to care about this in the long term. I think the AI tools provide a huge amount of value and we're all starting to use them in all sorts of ways.

And so as that value goes up, first of all, I do think it weakens the argument that a lot of people make that like, well, you ripped off my content and you're creating value just for yourself. Because the reality is most of us over the next few years, if we aren't already using AI tools to help us out,

it's going to be in everything in everywhere we're all going to use ai tools in some way even if you just do google searches now you're using ai whether you whether you whether you like to or not like it's everywhere and it's getting everywhere even even more so because these tools are so useful and they have very high utility to so many different contexts like you're using ai everywhere whether you whether you intend to or not it's just getting everywhere and

There are always going to be people who resist it and who are against it for various reasons, but I think the numbers of those people are going to dwindle over time, and it's going to become marginalized. The same way that people freaked out about a lot about the internet when the internet was new, and over time...

For the most part, most people have gotten past that or those people just got more and more marginalized who wouldn't let go of those objections because there was so much value being created in so many other ways that it's helped so many other people in so many ways. Everyone kind of moved on. I think that's happening with AI. I think that will continue to happen over time. And so people who were super against AI on principle...

Are just going to keep getting more and more marginalized. And if you are one of those people. This probably sucks to hear. And you're probably really mad at me. And I'm sorry. Because it's not. It isn't super clear cut. I can't say this is a universal good with no downsides. It's not. But it is creating a ton of value for a ton of people. And it's just going everywhere now. So there is no fight against it.

When technology develops a way to do something that is very valuable, it goes everywhere. You can't stop it. And this is one of those techniques. So I think in the long term...

people will stop caring about what ai trained on and why because it's just being trained on everything everywhere all the time the same way web search engines crawl everything everywhere as much as they can like they you know they index that data for you to make use of it later like that's where we are now that's where we are headed it's just more more of ai ubiquity and all the different products that we use and most people just not caring

Young people already don't care. Young people who are coming into the workforce now or in college now, they've been using ChatGPT for a few years now, and that's just what they have. It's just available to them. That's their technology world. You can be a part of it, and you can embrace it now, or you can wait for it to be forced upon you by all of your platform vendors over the next few years. But I think embracing it now is probably the way to go. So I think this is...

largely a temporary objection of it even mattering at any meaningful scale and in the long term it won't and again if you are on the other side of this you're probably really mad at me and i i don't disagree with you about why you should be mad at me but i think this is the reality of where this is going you know there's only so much we can fight it and i think once you are using ai tools

even if you didn't mean to, but hey, you know, oh, there's now there's there's new button in Google Apps or whatever. Or like, even if you are, if you are using AI tools, I do think it then becomes a little bit problematic to say, well, I'm going to happily take the value of this tool, but I'm not going to allow it to train on anything that I make. That's a little bit of a tricky place to be. So I just think about that. Like,

Again, I don't think I'm going to change anybody's mind with any of this, but I think just this is what's happening. This wave is crashing over all of this stuff in all of our tech world. It's only going to keep increasing because, again, there is a lot of value being created and a lot of utility being created. And whether you use it or not, everyone else is using it. So I don't think it's a big deal.

I don't think it's a tricky position to be in to say, I'll use this thing, but I don't want it to train on my data. There's plenty of other analogous situations in the world where you will accept a service made by somebody else, but you don't want to contribute to that service for whatever reason. I feel like that should still be your option, which is, I don't want to contribute to this thing, so don't contribute to the thing. But you could still use it because it's filled with other people who presumably consented to their contributions, let's say, in the most ideal scenario. So I don't think that's a big deal at all. But that will...

As for your other points, I think we will touch on them as we go down the line of other items in this very long topic.

I'm stunned. And I think I mostly agree with you guys. But I think the thing that chaps my bottom the most is that basically, hey, you've done all this free work for us, but we would like to use the things you send us to do more free labor. Okay, thanks. I mean, look, there's lots of reasons to be mad at Apple for the terrible feedback system that just at every possible, in every possible way, they dump the entire cost on us in every way.

And they expect us to do all sorts of free work so that one of their bug filter people three months later can mass close thousands of bugs by saying, does it still work in the current beta? And they never even bothered running your sample project. Like that's the reality of the system. The reality of the system is it's wasting our time for lots of other reasons.

This is a small slap in the face in that context. But when taken in absolute terms, do I object to this particular behavior? It's not great, but there are worse things.

Yep, I think I agree with that. And I also wholeheartedly agree with what John said at the beginning of the segment. There should be a way to say, yeah, I understand you're getting sensitive data and that's fine, but I do not want to use it to feed your never-ending, never-satiated LLM. But here we are.

Speaking of LLMs and AIs and things like that, Meta has some thoughts on the value of AI training data. This is reading from an article in Vanity Fair. This is how Meta AI staffers deemed more than 7 million books to have no, quote, economic value. Reading from the Post says,

lawyers for Meta are invoking a fair use defense in a copyright suit that's been winding, I think it says winding here. Is that a word? Winding is a word. Okay, so today I learned. Wending its way, not winding, folks. I didn't know either. See, thank you. Okay. Wending its way through the Northern District of California legal system for nearly two years.

The reams of confidential meta communications newly in the public record as exhibits for the plaintiffs offers an unprecedented look at the internal maneuverings behind the company's decision to train its model on a database containing more than 7 million pirated books. Meta's attorneys argue that under precedent, it does not matter whether Meta downloaded data sets containing pirated books from a third party who lacked authorization to distribute them or borrowed used books from the library and scanned them by hand to achieve the same result.

But their defense also hinges on the argument that the individual books themselves are essentially worthless. One expert witness for Meta describes the influence of a single book in LLM pertaining, quote, adjusted its performance by less than 0.06% on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise.

That, first of all, that actually sounds kind of high. It's like, okay, so you only need a few hundred books to train your entire model to be amazing? Well, maybe it's kind of the type of thing of like, you know, you change one bit in something and like the MD5 changes radically, right? So maybe even just omitting one book can change it by 0.06%.

Continuing from Vanity Fair, furthermore, Meta says that while the company has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in LLM development, they see no market in paying authors to license their books because, quote,

For there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of the plaintiff's works has economic value individually as training data, end quote. An argument essential to fair use, but that also sounds like a scaled-up version of a scenario in which the New York Philharmonic Board argues against paying individual members of the orchestra because the organization spent a lot of money on the upkeep of the David Geffen Hall, and also a solo bassoon cannot play every part in The Rite of Spring. Sorry.

I love this quote that I bolded in here in the notes. It's saying, you know, in order for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of the plaintiff's works has economic value individually as training did. They're basically saying all the books in the world are worth billions of dollars to our company, but your one book is worth zero. So if we add up billions of zeros...

We get billions of dollars of value. It's an interesting math trick to say, well, our product is worthless without your data, but your data is also worthless. But if we add up all the worthless data in the world, it equals billions and billions of dollars worth of value.

So good luck to their lawyers about this. Like, I get what they're saying. They're like, well, what is one book? Like what they're basically making the argument is like, look, if we had to pay for all these books, it would cost us so much money. There's lots of other articles you'll find here of similar things. So basically saying if we had to pay for the data that we train AIs on, it would bankrupt us and you couldn't have AI. So obviously we can't do that.

If I had to pay for all the Ferraris in the world, I couldn't have all these Ferraris. So obviously we can't do that. You should just give them to me for free. But anyway, they're literally making the argument in court. Your one book is worth $0. I'm just rounding now. It's worth $0. And it's like, okay, great. Well, so if these things are worthless, we'll just take all the way. It's like, well, if you take them all the way, we don't have a product. So we can't have that. But we're just saying your one book is worth $0.

I mean, it's any kind of collective bargaining. Any individual worker is worthless, but if you unionize, suddenly the workers en masse have value and now you have to negotiate with them. So, I mean, people will make all sorts of arguments in court cases. This one I don't think has wrapped up yet, although this is an older article. But,

But, yeah, this is one way to go, which is to say we need your stuff, but we don't want to pay for it because we had to pay for it to be expensive and your stuff is worthless anyway. What a crazy argument. Like, despite what I just said about defending the value of AI, like, I mean, Meta's a terrible company. They just do ridiculously unethical, terrible things all the time. And this is a terrible argument. This is like saying we don't think that – I mean, this is – it's basically the Napster argument.

It's like, we think you are overpriced. Therefore, we will take it for free. And that is reasonable. It's great that you brought that up because that is the first thing that sprung to mind when you were saying before how it's like, well, there's no fighting this because it's just going to happen. I feel like it's very much like the Napster days where it's like suddenly we have the technology to copy music everywhere for free.

And it's like, look, there's no fighting that. You can't stop this technology. Everyone's going to be able to do it. And I think all these court cases, as terrible as they may be as a way to get to this, all these court cases and thoughts around it, it gets back to what I said very early on on this topic months ago. We need to come up with some kind of economic system that

incorporates the new technology, like acknowledges its existence and that it's going to be there, but nevertheless gives us some kind of path forward. And the adamant of Napster and MP3s or whatever essentially decimated the recording industry as it existed. Today, people still pay money for music. Spotify is terrible. Record labels are terrible. Artists get paid less. They have to go on tour and sell T-shirts, blah, blah, blah. But what didn't happen is now all music is free forever for everybody. That's not a thing that happened. It is more free than it used to be

But still, we have come up with models, business models and markets, however imperfect and however impoverished compared to the old ones that have lots of downsides versus the old ones, but also some upsides that we're trying to find a way forward. And that happened through lawsuits and through new laws being passed and through new business models being created. And, you know, people who like the old record system will tell you that the new one is bad, but there are good aspects to it as well. Like, I feel like we need that.

for AI training. And we are at the very early stages. We're at the Metallica suing people in their basement stage of AI training. It's like, you can't fight the technology. There's no going back from like, oh, it's trivial to distribute music online. It's still trivial to distribute music online. It's always going to be. But the innovation was like, iTunes, we will compete with piracy by being more convenient. We will let you pay a monthly fee for essentially all the music in the world. And we're going to let you pay a monthly fee

And it's like, well, how does that work? How can artists make money? Like, well, it's better than everyone getting all the music for free. So let's try to work something out. And I feel like, you know, I'm not saying we've reached a successful endpoint and that the music industry should be the model for the rest of the world, especially since the sort of gatekeepers in the record label still managed to somehow cling to power and be a thorn in our side to this day. And Spotify is trying to become the new version, modern version of that.

So I'm not saying it's all roses, but what I am saying is that this whole thing looks familiar. And I feel like what you said, Marco, about like, there is no way to fight this is true. But also what we should trying to do is figure out a way forward without sort of like holding back the tide or boiling the ocean or whatever analogy you want to say. It's like, you can't, you're not going to stop this by refusing to use AI. You're not going to outlaw AI. You're not going to do any of the things that they tried to do to stop Napster. But we should also not say, okay,

It's a free for all. All data is free for anybody at all times. We have to figure out something in the middle. And as this Medicaid emphasizes, it can't be like, OK, we'll pay everybody a dollar for their book.

Because that also seems like it wouldn't work because it would be a lot of dollars. And even so, that's not an ongoing thing. So I don't know. I don't know what the answer is, but that's what these cases are hopefully moving us toward is some kind of market for creative work that allows AI to exist and be useful, but also allows people to still somehow make money for creating things. It's tough because there's no clear answer. And I don't know where to go from here.

Uh, related, but a new topic. Uh, the New York times first generative AI deal is with Amazon, uh, reading from the verge. The New York times has struck a multi-year AI licensing deal with Amazon that will bring its editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences. The outlet announced on some recent Thursday under the agreement, Amazon will include summaries and short excerpts of the times content and products like Alexa, and we'll also use times articles to help train its AI models. The deal comes with,

over a year after the Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement, accusing the companies of copying and using millions of its articles to train their AI models, while depriving the publication of subscription licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue. Several other outlets have sued OpenAI on similar grounds, including The Intercept, Raw Story, CBC, Radio Canada, the owner of IGN and CNET,

The other publishers like the Atlantic News Corp and the Verge parent company Vox Media have struck AI licensing deals. In addition to using content from the Times, Amazon will also draw from the outlet's sports-focused outlet, The Athletic, and its recipe hub, New York Times Cooking. Amazon launched its AI-upgraded Alexa Plus in early access earlier this year and claims hundreds of thousands of customers have tried the assistant. The

the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. So this has been going on for a while. This is like rallying off a list of people who have cut deals. This is New York Times. It is cutting a deal. This is...

it makes sense that this is happening and in some ways it certainly makes sense for the AI companies that are like we really want that New York Times data we have a lot of money can we just give you a deal that like we give you this amount of money or whatever the financial terms are and then you let us train on your data because we're doing it anyway and you're trying to sue us and let's work something out right

But this is not, I think, a system that we it's not a good system because what it means is big, rich companies, they're going to afford to sue open AI like Disney and the New York Times and like, you know, the Atlantic and News Corp and Vox Media. They will strike deals where they get paid to allow, you know, they'll be paid by everyone who wants to train in their data. They'll strike a deal, whatever those deals are, they'll figure out the terms like this makes sense to us. You can train our data in exchange. We get some part of the riches that you're getting from our content.

But the only people who can do that are these big companies with lots of money and lawyers who can strike these deals. And it's basically what that basically means is if you're a peon, all these AI companies get your content for free and you have no recourse. If you're a big company, you get paid. And that doesn't seem to be to be a great system, at least in the Napster days. Everyone's music could be pirated.

You know, like it wasn't just some people who got paid for it. And it does have some precedence of like the record company staying around and still taking all the money and a few streaming companies, you know, dominating in the current era. But I don't like the shape of this. But on the other hand, I do like the idea of,

essentially setting a precedent that if you want to train our content then pass something and presumably the deal is not like you pay us a dollar per word like it's obviously a deal that they can do it's i'm sure it's like spotify it's like well if you have to pay you know 250 000 for every infringement or whatever the hell it is for like each song uh what what would it look like for a service where you could get access to all the songs in the world that must be like prohibitively expensive it's like no it's a couple bucks a month and you can get access to all the songs in the world

It's like, how does that make any sense? That's like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a cent for each song. How does that make any sense? And it's like, well, it's not great, but it's still better than zero and people still can get some money from it. So like we're still working that out. But I don't like the idea of like if you are a big company, you get paid and everyone else doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. Again, there's no clear good answers, but it'll work itself out. Yeah.

Reading from Engadget this time, it turns out you can train AI models without copyrighted material. It's just a pain in the tuchus.

So reading from the article, AI companies claim their tools couldn't exist without training on copyrighted material. It turns out they could. It's just really hard. To prove it, AI researchers trained a new model that's less powerful but much more ethical. That's because the LLM's data set uses only public domain and openly licensed material. The paper, via the Washington Post, was a collaboration between 14 different institutions. The authors represent various universities and nonprofits.

The group built an eight terabyte ethically sourced data set. Among the data was a set of 130,000 books in the library of Congress. After inputting the material, they trained a 7 billion parameter, large language model or LLM on that data. The results, it performed about as well as Meta's similarly sized Lama two seven B from 2023. The team didn't publish benchmarks comparing its results to today's top models.

Performance comparable to a two-year-old model wasn't the only downside. The process of putting it all together was also a grind. Much of the data couldn't be read by machines, so humans had to sift through it. Quote, we use automated tools, but all our stuff was manually annotated and at the end of the day, at the end of the day and checked by people, quote, co-author Stella Biderman told the Washington Post. And that's just really hard.

Figuring out the legal details also made the process hard. The team had to determine which license applied to each website they scanned. It's a lot of work. Yeah, so, I mean, this is about, you know, text training on books and things that are publicly available. I think Adobe has already shown that you can make a useful, viable product without training on essentially stolen data because, according to Adobe, all of their Photoshop AI image generation features are trained on content that Adobe already owns or licenses.

That is a very conservative, safe way to do this. Pay for or already own the content you want to train on and then train on it. And...

If it's content you already own, fine. You've already paid for it. If it's content you want to pay for and someone will license it to you, knowing that you're going to train your model on it, fine. Like that, you can make useful things out of that. The place where it gets like untenable is like, okay, but that's great for a thing that makes images in Photoshop or some tiny model that with 7 billion parameters that it runs on your phone or something. But what about the big models? They need all the knowledge in the world. What are you going to do? Pay everybody in the world for their stuff. You can't even figure out who to pay or how much to pay. It's like, it doesn't make any sense. You either,

You either can have a model like the biggest chat GPT for or whatever, or you can pay people, but you can't do both. But it is worth pointing out that

This doesn't mean that, okay, well, anybody who's ever training a model, there's no way you can do it without stealing everything. You can. You totally can. Yes, it is more hard, but also it is essentially insurance against, like, depending on which way court cases go, like, Adobe's butt is covered. Like, we're training on stuff that we own or license for this purpose. Everyone is getting, you know, these are all legal agreements. They're all sound. There's nothing weird about it. Licensing data is a thing that happens all the time. As long as you put the terms in the license, that's what we're going to train. Like,

They're fine no matter what. It's a great hedge for them to say, we're putting out AI products. We're telling you Photoshop can do image generation. Photoshop can do this AI stuff. And we don't have to worry whatever happens in all the laws unless they try to like outlaw AI, which I don't think anybody's going to successfully do at this point.

But just putting it out there and more people trying to do it, it is possible to do this if you are very careful. And yes, it is a pain, but there are dividends for you doing this. There are dividends for you and there are dividends for your customers because it's just they don't have to worry about suddenly your product becoming like useless because all of a sudden it becomes it turns out it's violating tons of laws that just got passed or something. Finally, for tonight.

And this was breaking as of just yesterday, I believe. Anthropic wins a major fair use victory for AI, but it's still in trouble for stealing books. Reading from The Verge, a federal judge has sided with Anthropic in an AI copyright case ruling that training and only training its AI models on legally purchased books without author's permission is fair use.

It's a first of its kind ruling in favor of the AI industry, but it's importantly limited specifically to physical books, anthropic purchased and digitized. Judge William Alsop of the Northern District of California also says in his decision that the company must face a separate trial for pirating millions of books from the internet.

The decision also does not address whether the outputs of an AI model infringe copyrights, which is at issue in other related cases. So minor victory for Anthropic here, but I feel like not ruling on the outputs. Like, I'm not a lawyer, but my brief understanding from the story that just broke yesterday is what they're saying is like, okay, it's fair use to essentially...

You know, if you pay for a book and you scan it, it's like taking it and like making an archive backup copy and compressing it into a model and yada, yada, yada. But it says nothing about the quote unquote outputs, which I think what they're saying is, OK, you can do that and it's fine.

But we're not saying anything about you charging someone $20 a month to talk to your model. That's an output. So now all of a sudden you have a product that you're selling whose value is derived from the books that you scan. So yeah, you can train it and you can talk to it yourself just like you can like the whole sort of quote unquote backup thing that people use like pirate ROMs or whatever. If you bought a game, you have a legal right to dump the ROM for your own personal quote unquote backup purposes because you own the ROM. You bought it, you paid for it. You can make a digital copy of it, stick it in your attic, whatever. Like it's, you can do that.

What you can't do is probably, according to this type of analogy, is start a store where you rent out time on people paying you money so they can play your game or whatever. It's like buying a vehicle.

I'm trying to think of an analogy that's relevant to modern people. If you bought a VHS tape, you could watch it at your house. But Blockbuster did not pay the same price as you for that same VHS tape because they are going to run a business on it by renting it out again and again. And they had a very different price than you for that copy of Die Hard on VHS. Anyway, not addressing the outputs is like, well...

how useful is training a model if you're not going to charge people money to use it i guess and even giving it away for free it's like what if i did this i i bought your book i scanned it and now i'm letting the entire world talk to the lm that i trained and oops there goes passages from your book in the output um for whatever reason the lawyers in this case like didn't contest that angle didn't talk about it at all like they were not trying to you know they basically conceded that like

the training of it is all they're concerned about. And so, yeah, they won that part. You are allowed to buy a book and scan it and train a model on it. But then it's like, okay, but they're not just training a model out and putting it in a drawer somewhere. Something happens after that that involves lots of money and people using it. And that was not part of this case. So stay tuned. But I feel like this is

at least one legal decision on the side of the AI people, which is like that one little piece, because you paid for the book, like you literally bought the book, they bought copies of these individual books, and then they cut the pages out of them and ran them through a digital scanner. Because you did that, yeah, it's your book. You can train your AI model on it. It's just like, you know, again, buying a computer thing and taking it apart and dumping the ROMs. It's your thing. You can do whatever you want with it. Tune in later to see whatever all the court cases that talk about

Okay, but can I charge people $20 a month to talk to the thing that I just made without paying the authors anything? Unclear. All right, do you want to do a little Ask ATP? Yeah, I haven't done it in ages. Yes.

All right. Samuel Polay writes, I noticed that Marco's car is one of the handful of models that works with Apple Car Key. Do he or his wife use the feature or still carry around fobs for convenience sake? Are there any frustrations with BMW's implementation of Car Key that have caused him to stop using it? My partner and I are considering a new vehicle and the Kia Niro we're considering also supports Car Key. So I'm curious if there's any noteworthy limitations we should be aware of.

I do use Carkey. It is one of the reasons why I picked the iX, actually, because BMW is seemingly a pretty close partner whenever Apple deploys new stuff, with the notable exception of CarPlay Ultra, which I don't know if they're going to ever do that. Allegedly not. That broke earlier today, actually. I don't know if you saw that. Oh, I didn't see that, no. But for the most part, whenever Apple deploys some other kind of technology around cars, BMW is usually one of the first and often one of the best to implement it.

So that's one of the reasons I went back to that direction. So Carkey works great. I use it most of the time. I do have... So most modern cars that support this kind of thing, usually you also have some kind of key card. It's like an RFID card. I keep that card in my wallet just in case I ever need it. I think I had to use it once, and I've had my car for almost a year. The only time I really...

I will occasionally have a glitch where the Bluetooth on the phone won't actually unlock the door for a couple of seconds as I'm sitting there holding the handle, waiting for it to open. This only got me kind of wet in the rain more than it had to be once. Again, in a year, that's really not bad. And the convenience of just having my phone be the key

And not having some giant key fob in my pocket all the time, which sucks. Like, that's very, very nice. If I'm going, like, on a trip, like, so whenever I have, like, my backpack with me, like, my main backpack that I bring everywhere, I do keep one of the key fobs in the backpack. So just in case I'm, like, out in the middle of nowhere somewhere and for some reason it's not working, I can use the key fob. It'll be fine. But I have not needed to yet in a year. And it seems like whenever the...

downside or like slowness of it sometimes is it sure seems like it's apple's bug not bmw's everything with iphones and cars and bluetooth works really well like 97 percent of the time but then there's that three percent that it doesn't and it because i've seen this across multiple cars from multiple brands it seems like that's an apple thing not a bmw thing um

So there is that occasional unreliability. Also, when I get into the car and start driving, it has wireless carplay.

But sometimes the CarPlay doesn't connect for like the first 20 or 30 seconds of the drive. Again, not frequently, but sometimes. And again, that feels like an Apple bug, not a BMW bug. But for the most part, the rest of the integration really is quite solid. And I use it again. That is the main way I use my car is I walk near it with my phone in my pocket and it opens up and I get in and I sit down and I just start driving. It's great. And at this point...

I don't think I would consider a car that didn't have that functionality. Now imagine this, but having a always updated central infotainment system, which you do have now, as you said, this is why people are such nut jobs, including me, hello, about CarPlay. Like I don't think I really need my phone to unlock my car. Although maybe I'm saying that, maybe I'm saying that only because I'm ignorant and I don't realize how amazing it is. But I tell you, I am not going to buy a car without CarPlay. I'm just not, it's not going to happen.

This is an interesting confluence of technology development related to getting into your car with the sort of the rise of the smartphone coinciding with car manufacturers moving to, you know, having a primitive keyless entry and moving up the ladder. So,

very old sort of keyless entry, you know, key fob thing that you can, that uses radio to unlock your car. If you press a button and then eventually uses radio to unlock your car, when you get close to it in the beginning, those use tech that would like go off the, like the, what is it? The, uh, I forgot the number thing, but the, the battery that's in, uh, an air tag, what is that one? Uh, 2032. Yeah. Anyway, uh, like, like a little cell battery and it would last for like years and years. Like eventually your thing would die if you own your car for a long time. All right. Um, and,

And those, you know, they were cheap to make. They weren't particularly technically sophisticated. They did the job. A lot of them were not particularly secure, but, you know, whatever. And then smartphones started rising. But then the car manufacturers were like, well, this technology exists now. Like these new standards, Bluetooth, RFID. My car is like a little computer. All that stuff we were doing with those little coin batteries and those primitive like RF transmitter receivers, right?

Our key fob should become a little miniature computer now instead. And so what happened is key fobs started to become gigantic because I don't know, like there's a little computer in there that has Bluetooth and other like...

I don't understand why they got so big. I assume it's because they stopped being like little RadioShack radio frequency things and started being tiny little computers. And they just got so big that it would lead you to say, well, the second I don't have to carry this rock in my pocket, I can just use my phone, which I'm carrying anyway. I'm just going to throw this thing away and not use it. And

Like key fob inflation, like it goes right alongside like the size of cars in America. Some of the key fobs I see in these car reviews, I'm like, that can't be real. Like that cannot be the size of the key fob. Like they're the size of a submarine sandwich. Like who can even fit that in their pocket? What is in there? And then of course there are ugly ones. The Ioniq series has a horrendous key fob that's also kind of big. But anyway...

This is leading people, I think, to eventually, like, once this sort of trickles down from the fancy BMWs to other cars, as soon as regular people can just use their phone as their car key, assuming this works in any way reliably, it will be such a relief not to bring those giant key fobs along with you.

In the same way that we had that brief period where it was a relief not to have to stick a metal key into a thing. They used to have the ones where the keys closed down like a switchblade, so if you needed it, it was there or whatever. And they're like, ah, just abandon it. There's no actual physical key. It's just the fob. But then the fobs got giant. So now car makers are essentially driving people towards car key and other solutions now.

If those things become reliable, I'm glad the BMW one is reliable, but I'm not confident that every car brand will be as reliable. But all I know is I don't want my key fobs to get any bigger. And that's been happening because I don't yet have any fancy cars. But even just in the series of Hondas I buy, the key fobs keep getting bigger. I'm like, easy, guys, back off. My pockets are only so big.

I mean, and for the record, first of all, I think my favorite key fob of any car I ever had was actually the Tesla Model S key fob. It was basically a little tiny black Tesla. Like, it was shaped like the Model S, and you'd, like, click the front for the frunk to open the frunk, click the back to open the back, and click the middle, like, the roof of it, like a little matchbox car to lock and unlock. And it was, like, small and sleek. Yeah.

And because it was curved like the car, it actually didn't make a huge bulge in your pocket. It was nice. But also for the record, the car key situation, Rivian...

I don't know if they support the actual car. I think their version 2 supports car key better. My R1S was like the first version, and it used Bluetooth in some different way to basically be a car key. And that also worked very reliably the vast majority of the time. The actual Apple car key does work better. It's more reliable more of the time than the Rivian one was. But the Rivian one was reliable enough that that's what I used, again, the vast majority of the time. I never used the key fob in that car.

And I think, if I recall correctly, I think even my Land Rover Defender before that also had some kind of app Bluetooth key thing, and I think that also worked just fine. But again, the car key in the BMW has been the best so far of all of them. I also wanted to briefly address, listener Steve Stutz wrote in earlier yesterday to ask just generally how I'm liking the BMW so far, and

When I was looking for a replacement for the Rivian, I'd mentioned that I didn't want to go with like a Lucid or a Fisker or some other EV startup. I wanted to go with like a big established company because I was tired of it. And Steve wanted to know why, basically, and how that's working out for me. So, so far, I love the iX. It's great. It is such a terrible looking car. With respect, can confirm. Yeah, it is not attractive at all.

But it is really nice to like once you are once you're no longer outside of it and you once you get inside of it, it's a very nice vehicle. And so and what I what I was tired of with the EV startups was.

was with Tesla I was tired of I mean first of all the politics of the company pretty significantly changed over the time but but that was actually mostly after I was already off of it but with Tesla I was mostly irritated by the software constantly redesigning and moving controls in weird places and that was kind of annoying but overall it was a great ownership experience that really was not that big of a problem and

I mainly moved off of Tesla's because I needed something off road when I was living on the beach. And of course, now I wouldn't go back because the politics. But if not for the politics, I might go back because their cars really were very nice to own. It is a different beast now that they've like scaled a lot of stuff up. And I think quality has suffered a little bit from what I've heard. But that's not I haven't I don't follow that closely. Rivian, that was very much a version one car for a version one car company. And the service situation was atrocious.

that's really what got me. It needed a bunch of service on minor things because it was a version 1 car, and the service situation was just terrible. Having to drive it very far away on a very unpleasant drive to even get service and not being able to get service for literally 11 weeks when I needed it, that was quite a poor experience. But when the car worked, it was great, but I was so tired of dealing with bugs.

BMW, it's really mature. It's a very low drama ownership experience for a very nice car. And the car itself, the iX is the nicest EV I've ever driven in so many ways.

Most notably, what you notice in that car is that is a luxury car. When you are inside of it, it feels like a luxury car. It sounds like a luxury car. It is the smoothest, nicest ride I have ever felt in any car.

Like it is so smooth. You feel like you're just driving a cloud down the street and it's so quiet inside because they like, they use like sound dampening, you know, well compared to, you know, Rivian and Tesla were both horrendous at that. Like they, it's a quiet, smooth, nice ride. It has infinite speed. I didn't even get the super fast model, but very, very fast. The range is great. It's way better than they advertise in practice. It's,

It's been amazing. So I'm very happy with it. And if I ever do need service, which so far in a year I have not, which is more than I can say about Rivian, but if I ever do need service...

The service like Tiff has a BMW. She got service recently. She she caught up like, you know, the day before and got her car right in. Like, it's so easy because they're a big brand with an established dealer network and established supply chain and their service people know what they're doing and have been doing it for years. And so it's just a much nicer, easier experience. Buying the car was easier.

I drove to a dealership, test drove one, and started a lease. They have their paperwork game together. You don't have to do weird games with like, oh, they forgot to pay the sales tax or they forgot to cancel the lease, Tesla. There's so many problems when you're dealing with young car companies that have nothing to do with how well the car drives.

and you deal with none of those when you're at one of the big companies so overall i'm very very happy with it um and whenever this car i have a three-year lease i have two years left on it in two years i'll look around again but it wouldn't surprise me if i buy the exact same car again or at least the exact same car again i'm glad it's i'm glad it's going well getting back to key fobs by the way uh the winner of the key fob game in the current generation of cars is ferrari their key fob is big and

And ridiculous, but it is beautiful and there's a special place in the car where you put it and it looks like a little piece of art. Of course. I'm surprised you didn't say Honda, to be fair. No, their key fobs are terrible. Yeah.

Uh, David Campbell writes, sometimes I import photos from my big camera to my Mac and sometimes to my iPad. Can John explain when Mac OS wants me to, why and when Mac OS wants me to eject the card before removing it while iOS doesn't care? It always feels wrong to just rip the SD card out of the iPad. Yeah, this is the eternal struggle from, uh, Mac users versus PC users. Mac users need to unmount or reject their things and PC users just yank the thing out when the light's not on and hope for the best. It's all the same thing.

technical situation under the covers, which is that operating systems do not write the data to your removable storage immediately. Instead, they build it up in buffers and dump those buffers on a schedule that they feel like as a complicated part of their IO system and a cache hierarchy. And it's,

All I'm saying is like the computer is more complicated than you think. So we don't have drive lights anymore. You can't tell when the data has all been written. Even if we did have drive lights, oh, there could be one more blink. You thought it was done right. It's not floppy. But you yanked it up or you opened the drive door or whatever. So, yeah, Mac OS is trying to stop you from removing the disk before all the data that you think is written to it has been written to it.

Most of the time you can do it and you'll be fine because you're probably not doing a lot of IO and that buffer probably did get flushed, but that's why iOS wants you to do it. And what could go wrong? If you have a fancy like journaling file system where it's, or any kind of file system that's always in an inconsistent state,

You may be missing some data, but you won't corrupt the data structures in the file system, making the entire thing unreadable. But if it's a crappy old file system that doesn't have those safeguards, like is often used on cheap removable media, and you yank it out, not only may the data that you thought was supposed to be on the card not be there, but maybe it was in the middle of updating some important data structure or directory entry, which will cause tons of other data on the drive to become unreadable.

gone or quote unquote unreadable and you have to use one of those undelete programs to find scavenge the data and repair the damaged directory entry to pull your stuff back off which is why there's a million tools for recovering or quote unquote undeleting data from SD cards and stuff so my advice is to unmount the stuff before you yank it out of your computer

If possible. And why does iOS not do that? Maybe they have a different buffering system. Maybe there's just no way to tell iOS to unmount it. Maybe someday iPadOS will get one and will become a big boy computer. But for now, I mean, if there's no way to unmount, then you just yank it out when you feel it's safe. But on the Mac, you do have an option, so don't do that. Well, also on iOS...

There are very few ways that you can write data to an SD card in iOS. It's almost always just reading it. So if it knows that like so, you know, if you are like importing a picture, which is the example David gives here, importing a picture on iOS, that is a read only operation that is never going to write anything back to the card.

When you mount that card on a Mac, it mounts as a removable volume. And you can, like, there could be some app in the background that starts doing whatever it wants on that volume. I can tell you exactly what app is going to be in the background doing whatever to it. We all know it too. MDS. MDS store. Spotlight. Ah.

It's going to be indexing it and it's going to tell you, oh, sorry, I couldn't eject that because some other process is using it or because the device is busy. And if you know how to use PS or even Activity Monitor or LSLF, you'll find out, oh, look, it's MDS or MDS Store that is now doing stuff. And it's like, stop, stop, Spotlight. I just want to eject my thing. And so you kill MDS and you unmount your thing.

Right, but iOS is not doing that. iOS knows what SD cards are and aren't, and it has very limited uses for them. It doesn't let any app just access them freely. I think the only way to write to it from any app, I think, would be probably the Files app if you're manually dragging a file onto it. But for the most part, no apps can touch it. Yeah, and that's what I would imagine people would be doing. You're copying things in the Files app onto your SD card, and you're like, well, I'm done, and you yank it out, but it wasn't really done.

Yeah, but if it's just in there and some app is going to read the photos off of it, probably Apple, then they can control, they know exactly what is going to write to it and almost nothing is. So that way they can say, all right, yeah, you can just pull it out. Obviously, if you're in the middle of a read operation and you pull it out, that operation will fail, but it's not going to corrupt the data on the card because no writes are taking place. If you're lucky, that operation will fail in a sensible way instead of giving you a half-corrupted image that might crash the app every time you try to view it. Hopefully, it will just not...

write the image at all, but error handling is tricky and that's exactly where you find like edge cases and applications where like what does happen if I'm importing photos from this SD card and I yank it out in the middle? Does it just like okay all the ones successfully written are there and all the ones not successfully written aren't there? Or is there a half-written thing that every time I scroll past it crashes the Photos app? Fingers crossed.

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All right. So there's been some TV related news. To recap, Marco was thinking about buying some new TVs. I was giving him advice, but I said, you know, during the course of the year, it takes a while for all of the TVs to be released. And so I was thinking about buying some new TVs.

And so it's hard to give a recommendation. Maybe you should wait until everyone, everyone has put their cards on the table for 2025. And so we could say, finally, all the 2020-25 TVs are out. They've been reviewed and now I can give better assessments. So I gave some tentative recommendations last time without having all the information. In particular, Sony's Bravia 8 II, the stupidly named Bravia 8 II, was not out then. It had just been announced but not reviewed. And I'm like, well, let's hedge our bets because maybe that'll be great. Maybe it'll stink, but we don't know. So let's wait until that's out.

um the all the reviews on and off this tv in particular my favorite reviewer has not yet reviewed this tv but enough people have reviewed this tv that i trust that i'm ready to make a call on what i think marco should do so first of all we'll put some links in the show notes to uh reviews of the braviate 2 uh in particular there's a good one from artings they usually do a pretty good job and they continue to improve their methodology with each passing year so i continue to recommend that site um

They're maybe not as in the weeds as my favorite reviewer, but they do, like I said, they do a good job. And the upshot is the Bravia 8 II fulfills this role as not being the top TV in Sony's marketing lineup because its number is lower. Like it's not, it's probably 8 II instead of 9 or X or whatever, right?

It is not as good as when their QD OLED was the top model, which in the previous naming scheme was the A95L. And it shows it is not as carefully calibrated as the A95L was. It is not as good in some respects as the A95L. The A95L, I believe, is a three-year-old television now. Sony didn't bother revising it because even in its second and third year, it was still one of the best TVs you can buy. Guess what?

The A95L, which you can still buy if you can find it somewhere, and it's real cheap because, you know, get them while they last, is still probably a better TV than the Bravia 8 II if what you care about is ultimate picture fidelity and you're probably going to watch in a dark room. The Bravia 8 II is brighter in some ways, but in other ways, it's not brighter than the A95L, which is shocking because it uses a three-year newer panel that supposedly is brighter. Watch the Artings video for more details. So, Marco, if you're waiting to hear what the deal with the Bravia 8 II is...

yeah the answer is they it's not great like it's there's a second video from our tank saying bravi 82 versus a95l which should you get and they basically say get the a95l of those two tvs the a95l is still better it's amazing this tv is like undefeatable i don't think they're making them anymore except for maybe in 77 inch so you can get them cheap like not cheap cheap but you know like what like for half the price they originally sold for you can get a95l so cheap that i was thinking should i get an a95l

because I have the predecessor of the 895L, the 895K, and I'm like, no, don't buy, because don't buy a three-year-old TV, because I just wonder if they'll ever make a TV as good as the 895L again.

It's depressing. But anyway, for your purposes, the LG G5 is brighter than the Bravia 8 II. It's brighter than the A95L. It is a true 2025 TV. The LG G5 did have a problem where they had some contouring issues with HDR10 output, but they fixed that in a firmware update. While we were waiting for the Bravia 8 II reviews, LG updated its firmware and they fixed that bug. So I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes to reviews of the LG G5.

That is my recommendation for you for all situations where you want an OLED in the year 2025. The LG G5, it's very bright, even in terms of its peak brightness, may not be as bright as you think, but like in whole, like we went over this last time, looking at the whole scene, many LED TVs were going to have to turn down their backlight to stop blooming. The LG G5 doesn't have to. So there are situations where the G5 is even brighter than a mini LED TV, which is usually unheard of.

It's a great TV. The LG is good with their software. You're used to LG. That's your answer. 2025, it's the LG G5 if you want an OLED television. Final answer. Yeah. I mean, the Broadway 2 is not a bad TV. The fact that it gets beat at all in anything by a three-year-old 895L is just embarrassing for Sony. Sony, get your act together. And why shouldn't I just get the 895L?

It's not as bright as the G5. Like you have your bright room situation. Like I feel like the NA5L is still like the most accurate best TV if you're going to watch in a dark room. So if you have that situation, fine. But for a sunny room, the G5 gets so much brighter than the NA5L in so many different conditions.

And it's not that much worse. Like, the LG's processing is better this year. Their color volume, it's not as good as the 895L, but you'll never notice it. Like, the LG G5 is the better all-around TV. And it supports HGIG, which helps with the stupid Switch 2 HDR brightness issue. Like, I just think the G5 is going to fit into your life a lot better. For the super-duper video file, I would still recommend the 895L. But that's not you, so...

If you really want to get a smaller 895L at bargain prices to put in like a bedroom or someplace that doesn't have bright sunlight, but you want the absolute best in color fidelity and you're never going to game on it, yeah, it's still a great TV. And for me, if I had to choose, I would pick the 895L over the G5. For the scenarios that you described, I think the G5 is a better fit.

Okay. John, I'm deeply impressed. That was incredibly brisk. Well done. Yeah, I mean, when the verdicts are in, there you go. Like I said, my favorite person hasn't come out with his review yet. It's his HDTV test. I'm still waiting for Vincent to come out with his review. When he does, if he totally contradicts our things, I'll let you know. But it seems like, yeah, the Braviate 2 is living up to its number, which is 8, which is lower than 9.