NC #1113 Marked QL, Invisible Cadence Editing, UGREEN Transmitter/Receiver, AI-Assisted Coding with Adam Engst

0:00Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NoCel at Pobfee.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, September 6, 2026, and this is show number 1113. And numbers get long to say. Well, before we get started, if you're listening to this episode close to when it comes out, remember that Stephen and I will be joining all of the other lovely NoCel and our live chatroom at Pobfee.com slash chat during the Apple announcement this Wednesday, September 9th at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Really hope to have you there. As always, we will not be talking in voice like we are right now in the live chatroom, but we will be there texting with everybody all saying, hey, is your feed stalled and how much money have you got if you sold your kidney yet to get that a folding phone, that kind of chatter is the kind of things we talk about there. All right, remember last week when Alistair talked about his long and accomplished career as a programmer and how he walked us through his transition to accepting an AI assistant to help him code? Well, this week we sort of have opposite land.

1:01After some earlier segments, Bay Eddy Tonko and me, you're going to hear Adam Angst explained to me his long career of never becoming an accomplished programmer and how he also accepted an AI and how he also accepted an AI assistant and allows him to have the joy of creation of applications. Music plays, videos play, PDFs render, presentation, word processing files rendered nicely, and plain text files render as well, plain text, even affinity designer files render their images with quick look. Now you know I'm a fan of Markdown, which is a plain text format that is superpowers when rendered by a Markdown interpreter. It uses hashbarks for headings, asterisk or underscores for italics, and numbers for numbered lists and has kind of a clean format for how you do links.

2:06Sadly, Quick Look would apply to a Markdown file only shows that file is plain text. I put an example screenshot in the show notes of a recent security bits file in Markdown. The text is a tiny, mono space font, all the Markdown is showing in the indents look all wrong. I'd never thought to see if there was a solution to this. Just kind of accepted it as, you know, a fact of life. But then I came across a thread conversation where someone who goes by the name of Pierre O. Sierra wrote, hey Apple, can we get preview to render Markdowns? K, thanks by. So several people chimed in with solutions, but the one that caught my eye was by our friend Mike Rose, who pointed to marked QL written by another friend, Brett Turpstra. Mark QL is an instant Markdown preview in Quick Look. The installation goes as follows. Get ready, right? Get ready, right this down, ready? Install the app, use the space bar to Quick Look Markdown files. That's literally all you have to do. I put a screenshot in the show notes showing off how beautiful and more importantly more readable security bits looks in Quick Look after installing Mark QL.

3:10There's a left sidebar with clickable outline of headings and the main panel is rendered with nicely indented bullets abuse syntax highlighting for links. If we had any math, diagrams are coded in this file. Brett promises that would be rendered nicely as well. As soon as I wrote that sentence for the show notes, I knew I needed to at least test that claim with a mermaid diagram. Mermaid diagrams are created with plain text and it's a pretty arcane and difficult thing to follow if you don't know the languages conventions. In Quick Look, without Mark QL, you see things like B dash greater than symbol, pipe, daytime, pipe, space, C square bracket, living room scene, closed square bracket. Now, if you open that with Mark QL installed in Quick Look, the diagram is rendered as a beautiful flow diagram with arrows just like any of the proper diagram. In this screenshot, I included again in the show notes, you can see a purple box with the words living room scene and an arrow going to it with the word daytime over the line.

4:11This is the kind of magic the mermaid can create, but you can't see unless you if you're using Quick Look, you can't see it without Mark QL. It looks fabulous with Mark QL. If you open Mark QL, the only thing you'll see is the settings window with options to set the apex mode, which is Pretz own unified Markdown engine and some fancy things I don't understand at all, like the ability to toggle on Enable Quarro support, had custom styles and changed which preview style you like. I do understand that last one. The default is GitHub, which is what I've been using, but there's nine other styles to choose from. On the preview tab of settings, you'll find way more options. In fact, I had to use a scrolling screenshot to capture them all. I like seeing the table of contents in the syntax highlighting, but you can toggle either of those off. You can even toggle off mermaid diagrams, but I can't imagine wanting to do that. But default the size of the text and images is fixed, but there's a toggle to scale the preview with the window size. Here's another problem Mark QL solves, at least for me.

5:15Bart writes the security bits and programming by style show notes in Markdown, but he uses the application obsidian to create his Markdown and organize his files. This tool adds a bunch of so-called front matter to the file, which it uses for that organization. Obviously very useful for him, but when I get the Markdown file it has a whole bunch of lines at the top that for me are purely visual noise. With Mark QL, by default, it hides the front matter, which is glorious. Now if you do want to see the front matter, Mark QL can present it as a code block or a nicely formatted table. I also want to draw your attention to a section at the bottom where you can pre-grant permission to images stored on your desktop documents and download folders. You don't have to check these boxes, but if you have a Markdown file that calls embedded images from a local folder, you'll be prompted to grant those permissions. I thought that was a nice little touch by Brett. Now if you want to test out Mark QL, you can download a free trial from markedapp.com, and when you decide you can't live without it, you can buy it in the App Store for $10, or it's available with your setup subscription.

6:21If $10 is too steep for you and you don't have a setup to a subscription, follow the link to the threads conversation that I put in the show notes to see other open source solutions to solve the same problem. Now it makes sense that Brett would be the one to solve this, and elegantly at that, since he's the author of the app marked. So this is marked QL. Marked is a Mac app that's a standalone preview app for your Markdown documents with advanced proofreading tools, beautiful themes, and powerful export options. Thanks to Brett for solving the problem, and a micro's for telling us about it. Invisible cadence editing in logic. Fast cuts that still feel human. Hi, this is Eddie Tonkoy, the in-house nerd for everything behind the scenes, on my wife, Jern's character-driven queer love stories, including audiobook narration and production. This segment is about the kind of editing that can be technically perfect and still feel wrong.

7:23You know the feeling, the noise is gone, the cut is clean, there is no obvious click or pop. And yet the sentence feels impatient. It feels like the narrator is rushing the listener, unlike the thought did not have time to land. That is what I mean by invisible cadence editing. The goal is not silence, the goal is meaning. Because in narration, timing is not just timing, it is punctuation you cannot see. The important thing is that meaning lives in pauses, not silence. Here is the nerdy concept, but it is basically common sense once you hear it. Our brains do not interpret speech as a flat stream of sounds. We interpret it as a stream of intentions. A lot of that intention is carried by micro pauses. The breath before an important clause. The tiny hang before a reveal.

8:26The slightly longer pause after a name. The thinking beat before a correction. These pauses are rarely long, they might be a few tens or hundreds of milliseconds, but removing them can change what the sentence means. So the point of cadence editing is not to delete space, it is to shape space so the intention remains intact. This is also where editing speed starts to come from. The personal bit for me is that editing speed is not mainly about hotkeys. Hotkeys help, of course, but the real speed comes from rhythm. When I have a consistent rhythm for handling breaths, pauses, mistakes, pickups and transitions, I stop re-deciding everything. I develop a taste for what humans sounds like in my material, and I repeat it. That is what makes the edit invisible. Not perfection, taste.

9:30Which is annoying because taste is much harder to put in a checklist. There are two failure modes I listen for. Once I can hear these clearly, I can work much faster. The first is rushed cadence. Everything is clean, but the listener never gets to settle. The voice feels as if it is trying to get through the text, rather than live inside it. Common causes are deleting every pause after a sentence because it looks long on the waveform. Trimming breaths to aggressively. Removing the tiny hesitation that signals a thought turning. The second failure mode is consonant blur. This one is not about processing, it is about cutting too close to speech. If I cut right up to the frontal edge of words, I can shave off consonant on sets. TKP, even the start of it.

10:32The line starts to feel less articulate, even if I cannot immediately say why. This is the editing version of the repair tool problem from last time. The starts of words matter. So I want edits that keep meaning, and cuts that do not steal edges. I use minimum silence rules, so I do not negotiate with myself. They're not rigid laws, but they stop me from over editing. Within a sentence, micro-pourses are often meaningful. I do not flatten them by default. If I tighten them, I tighten gently. Between sentences, I usually want a little more space than I think, especially at audiobook pace. Removing too much makes the narration feel impatient. Around breaths, I remember that breaths are phrasing. I will control loud breaths, but I'm careful about deleting the pause they sit in,

11:37because that pause is often what makes the line feel natural. You can translate this into numbers if you like, and sometimes I do use numbers just to stop myself drifting, but the better rule is perceptual. If the edit is clean but the thought does not land, I cut too much. Then there is the question of ambience aware fades. The other half of invisible editing is ambience. If I cut in a dead way, hard edges, mismatch, room tone, sharp transitions, the listener gets that subtle edited feeling, even if there is no click. So the habit in logic is simple. Almost everything gets a fade. Tiny fades on the ends of regions avoid little clicks. Slightly longer fades help when I'm crossing between different noise or room moments. And if I've cut around a breath or a noise, I'm listening for bed changes, not just silence.

12:37In other words, I'm shaping the floor as much as the voice. So what does cadence pass look like in logic? My cadence edit pass is not an attempt to sculpt the whole chapter in one heroic sweep. It's a rhythm pass. First, I remove obvious mistakes and false starts, the moments where I genuinely did not mean to say that. Second, and this is where logic's removed silence type tools can help get to a rough shape, I tighten long dead air, anything genuinely empty that does not serve pacing. Third, I shape pauses rather than delete them. This is the real work. If a pause feels long, I shorten it slightly and listen again rather than nuking it. Fourth, I protect word on sets. When I cut near speech, I leave a tiny buffer. I'm not trying to cut at the pixel, I'm trying to avoid shaving consonants.

13:37Fifth, I check transitions. If a cut is technically clean but the sentence now feels as if it is leaning forward too hard, I put some time back. That sounds slow, but it becomes fast once the ear knows what it is looking for. It is much quicker to make the same good decision 100 times than to have a fresh little crisis at every pause. Here is the demo. Awkward pause rushed versus human. This is an excellent demo because the difference is not theoretical. So take one awkward moment, a hesitation, a breath, or a long pause before a clause. And make two edits on it. Version 1 is clean but rushed. Trim the pause until it feels tight. Make it as short as you think it can be without sounding obviously chopped. And now you listen as a listener, not as an editor.

14:37Let's listen to mine. So take one awkward moment, a hesitation, a breath, or a long pause before a clause. Often it will feel impatient, like the narrator does not trust the listener to keep up. Version 2 has human timing. Put some pause back, not all of it, just enough that the thought lands. Let's listen again. So take one awkward moment, a hesitation, a breath, or a long pause before a clause. What changes is not silence. It is intention. The second version often feels more confident, even if it is technically slower. And that is the test. Cadence editing is not about speed. It is about the sentence feeling like a person said it on purpose. So where does that leave us?

15:37The takeaways are simple. Do not delete every pause. Shape it. It fade like you mean it. Listen for rushed cadence. And listen for consonant blur. After a cadence pass, I listen to a few minutes at a time and ask one question. Does this feel like a human thought, or like an editor pushing it along? If the edit is clean but the sentence feels impatient, the edit is wrong. Next time, we keep it boring again in the best way, because once capture and cadence are right, EQ becomes much simpler, subtractive, minimal, and surprisingly effective. If you want to know more, come and ask me over in the Slack community at podfeet.com for a slash slack, where I and all the other lovely no-silla castaways enjoy friendly, positive, online conversations. Feel free to message me, Eddie Tonkoy, if you have any thoughts, questions, or techniques you're using,

16:38it will be nice to share ideas. You can also find our work at jerntonkoy.com, where you'll find jurns' character driven queer love stories, the audio books I produce for them, and bonus material for our subscribers. I'll be back soon to talk through some more of my workflow, but for now, happy recording and happy reading. I'm a broken record. I love these pieces by Eddie Tonkoy. Now I think this is the second and the last one on this subject, but I think he's got more fun physics stuff to do for us, or other things up his sleeve. He says he's going to keep doing recordings, and I couldn't be happier. I just love listening to his voice, so you know what? You should go check out those books at jerntonkoy.com. Are you the kind of person who brings an Apple TV with you when you go away on vacation? If you are, you might be a candidate for the gadget I'm about to tell you about, but first the problem to be solved. When you go away from home for business or vacation, you may miss being able to easily watch the streaming TV you're used to at home,

17:41or maybe you have slaying or YouTube TV, or another service to watch network TV shows when you're at home, how do you watch those when you're away? Perhaps the place you're staying has a smart TV. Technically, you could lock into your Netflix Hulu Paramount Plus P-Cock HBO Max accounts, but then you'd have to remember to log out of all of them before you leave. The Apple TV is pretty small at 3.7 inches square and 1.2 inches thick, so it's fairly easy to slip into your luggage. You also have to bring the proprietary power cable that's nice and long and a bit thick. Oh, and an HDMI cable. And don't forget the remote we've done that before. Now, somebody told me recently pointed out you could use the app on your phone to control your Apple TV, but the remote is a little bit easier for us. If you've gone long enough or addicted to TV enough, this work might be worth it. It's even I've done it quite a few times, and it works well. But for some trips, it's just not worth climbing behind the cabinet to unplug one of our Apple TVs, and then to wrap up all the cables and get the remote. Often we just suffer with lying in bed trying to watch something on my iPad Pro.

18:44It's not terrible, especially with the 13-inch model and its Magic Keyboard case, but it's kind of hard to balance in bed, get it up high enough for viewing, and not have it pointed at just one or the other of us. And the primary technology podcast, or it might have been Mac Power Users, Stephen Robles told the audience about an interesting solution. As soon as I heard his description, I immediately purchased the U-Green Magnetic Wireless USB-C transmitter and HDMI receiver from Amazon for $70. The big picture is that the device lets you wirelessly transmit from your phone, tablet, or computer to a TV, projector, or other display without Wi-Fi, without Bluetooth, or pretty much any fafing about making the connection. A U-Green is a trusted company amongst the nerds, which is great. The product comes in two pieces, a wireless transmitter and a wireless receiver. The two units are palm-sized cylinders around, say, 2 and 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1, and only 0.4 inches thick. The transmitter plugs into your device via an attached USB-C cable,

19:46and since it's magnetic, you could just slap it on the back of your phone. Did you hear that? Wait, not loud enough? not loud enough. I would probably be taken up by my filters anyway. Even if it's on an iPad or a Mac it just hangs out the side of the USB-C port. Now the transmitter draws power from your device so the transmitter also sports a pass-through USB-C charging port which is really a nice feature. The receiver puck has an HDMI port to connect it to the display. It comes with a pretty short 21 inch HDMI cable. Now the length isn't a problem because you're just going to hang this off the back of the TV anyway. The receiver does need power which is supplied through USB-C to any power supply you have lying around even as low as 5 volts and 1 amp. So you know like those really old original iPhone chargers you could just use one of those. Now I made this sound complicated but it's just these two pucks. One goes into the device sending the video, the other one goes into the device receiving it. When you plug them both in the display will show a graphic telling you

20:48to press the button on the devices to pair them. You can also tap the button on the receiver to rotate the image on screen which makes sense especially if you use a phone as the transmitting device. Now another use for the U-Green transmitter receiver would be for doing presentations without having to hook your device to a projector. The transmit operational distance is 50 meters or 164 feet so you could walk around a reasonable size auditorium with a phone to do your presentation. The video will only be 1080p at 60Hz, no 4k here, that's still pretty good for most use cases. The U-Green transmitter receiver is so small that we had room in our electronics bag to carry it to Europe with us. We were way too busy most of the trip to use it until we got to Ireland to visit with Bart. We finally had some downtime so we gave it a try. Now we use YouTube TV as our network TV service so I brought it up on my iPad and Steve plugged into the transmitter or sorry plug in the transmitter and receiver and it didn't work. Not because of the U-Green device but because

21:49YouTube TV said the local Los Angeles shows Steve had recorded were not available. We were surprised at this because we had we were on our tailscale network using our Mac Minis and exit node so as far as Google knew we were at home. Steve did some slew thing with an AI's help and cracked the code. For some reason on the iPad I had location services enabled for YouTube TV. As soon as Steve turned those off he had his long Los Angeles news items to watch. Then I made him put on headphones because I hate local news. Now the bottom line is that with this U-Green transmitter receiver for 70 bucks you can carry a device in a sandwich sized zip lock to bring your streaming TV to the big screen. The only thing I can find wrong with it is that it doesn't have a snappy name. Bruce from the Lies Chat Room is telling me that it's $85 now but it's still that's really not that much money for what you get. Now we had a chance to try the U-Green again when we went away for the weekend. The TV in the hotel was mounted to the wall in the corner of the room and that was cool because it had tons of rooms so you could walk around behind it

22:52said you're trying to shove your hand in sideways on a TV mounted flat against the wall. It was trivial to use the included HDMI cable which I didn't mention was it's actually really small like I said it's short so it's a nice little compact thing to fold up. Anyway so we use the included HDMI cable to hook up the receiver to HDMI 2 leaving the normal feed on HDMI 1 alone figured why mess with the way it was supposed to work if we didn't have to. Oddly we were never able to get the TV to recognize the U-Green on HDMI I plugged what I can only presume was a cable box feed from HDMI 1 and then the U-Green was immediately recognized so it was some other problem it wasn't the U-Green's fault. But then we ran into a very odd problem the audio was really really loud. We were transmitting from my 13 inch iPad and neither the remote control for the TV nor the volume button on my iPad's magic keyboard would lower the volume. The same promoted work find to control the audio level on the regular TV feed but there was something about this setup that it wasn't

23:55working. We came up with an ingenious solution we used the remote to mute the TV speakers which luckily did work and then we switched the audio output on the iPad to use its own internal speakers. We set the iPad on a table between us and the TV and it sounded fantastic probably better than the TV speakers. I wanted to add that little tidbit to the end of the review to make sure you know that fiddling with hotel TVs is always an adventure both the little creativity YouTube homage Star Trek Strange New Worlds and Silo went away from home with the U-Green transmitter receiver. Well this week's hero is Drew who made a very very generous donation through PayPal. Not only did he contribute financially he also wrote a lovely note that made me feel all warm and fuzzy so I'd like to read you a little bit of it. He wrote, thanks to DTNS I've enjoyed your podcast for years, sat up countless other app recommendations and the Mac Geek app. I pass your assistive tech info to my daughter who works with autistic children you reach beyond the individual.

25:01Isn't that wonderful? I love being part of the DTNS family and I'm thrilled if anything I do hear benefits those on the spectrum. It's also great to know just to know that Drew is out there listening. If you'd like to be a hero like Drew head on over to podfee.com, size PayPal and show your support financially maybe drop me a little note too. Well that's that time of the week again it's time for Chitchat across the pond. This is episode number 840 for August 26 2026 and I'm your host Allison Sheridan. This week our guest is Adam Manks of tidbits fame and fortune. How are you doing today Adam? And here to talk about I was 26 no sorry. Are you having trouble with 26ers? Seeing the actual date now like because of 26 and 27 I pause on the year. Which one I will admit I've had trouble with ever since we got to 2020 because of the like we're just typing it. It's the 202 like I

26:08my hand wants to get I do a lot of 2 2 zeros. So been troubling me for years. 19 was there for a lot of our lives right? And sooner or later it's going to go away this problem. But not in the first 26 years sometime after that. So it was worth 20 30 L it'll be I'm sure it'll be better. I'm doing fine. Nice to see you Allison. Nice to see you too. So while I was galvanting around the planet of vacation you published a very interesting thought piece on tidbits that you titled decades after hypercard AI is democratizing development again. And I found it a really great read in the article part way through you started walking us through your programming journey. And I was wondering if we could start there and then bring us up to today's technologies. What made you muse back so far in time and think about this? My programming journey which for the most part wasn't programming like failing miserably. That's right. A section is entitled a personal history of failing to become a developer.

27:11That's where I want to start. That's that's a great title. Well, so I mean I'm sure everyone's I mean like well so so so I have to start briefly here because we all we've all heard these stories about you know the the kid who finally manages to get a computer and picks it up and becomes this great programmer and everything without ever having been taught anything. I'm not that person. You know I you know like I had a I had a Atari video game um you know a Atari VCS system you know adventure and space invaders and all those kind of games. And I kind of loved them. I mean this was early this was early video games when they were just unimaginably cool and I could never man never just could never really bring myself to deal with arcades in their quarters. Oh oh just playing it home. I hate I yeah I'm just I'm way too I do not like things that want me to pay like regularly. It just freaks me absolutely crazy.

28:14I didn't have a lot of money and you know I was like I could not deal with like what if I what if I fail you know what if I make a mistake early on and my game is over really quickly I wasted that 25 cents. So so I really liked the Atari VCS because it let me you know let me play video games without without stress and and so yes what was a kid and I thought you know wouldn't it be cool if I can make a video game. I mean now in case you can go to college for this for goodness sake. But but back then you know I mostly daydreamed about it while I was driving driving around fields on our tractor or while you know doing farm work because that's what I actually did with my my time during the summers. That's a nice humble beginning story. Yeah and and you know I don't have that tracked you know I don't I don't have that tractor but but I have one that's only slightly newer you know probably 1959 or something like that so we're not talking we're not talking fancy equipment here we're talking you know ancient hardware. Okay so you're driving around and you're

29:16dreaming about someday you'll make a video game. Yeah because like I mean maybe people don't record don't know this but like when you're doing farm work you drive very slowly like tractors don't go quickly. It's like driving a Zamboni or something. Yeah it's like I mean take about a lawnmower right you're you know you're a dry riding lawnmower it's about like that and so and but you're going around a seven eight fifteen acre field who like it can take you 20 minutes to make a revolution and you're and all you have to do is drive in a straight line. I mean or you know like make you know turn when appropriate at the corner like this is not something that takes a lot of mental effort. Okay you got a few spare brain brain cells going on. A few spare brain cells to work. So yeah so I was like I mean I I wish I could remember what I actually was you know kind of designing in my head back then but I can't they don't don't don't remember in the slightest but but you know it was definitely you know kind of along the lines of you know the kind of things

30:20that one could play on a Atari VCS and I had literally no idea how one one made them and making the mind you had cartridges you you you plug in these kind of eight track things into into the Atari to be able to play them and so it wasn't you know there was no concept that you could write anything or do anything yourself and eventually you know we got it we got a computer I got in a minute Franklin Ace 1000 which was I heard of that yeah it was a clone that an Apple 2 2 plus clone that Apple sued out of existence eventually and but it was actually I mean part of the reason why they sued it out of existence is that in a number of ways it was better than the Apple 2 the Apple 2 plus because it was one of those things where they just like copied it and made certain things better and and I have no idea you know I didn't really know much about the history they were sold oh God where was it was it was it a video get like a video store like the store you know

31:25you could go rent videos there okay and the people who who ran the store decided to take on this sideline of selling this particular computer I don't think I ever knew anybody who owned a clone I heard of I heard tell of those stories but the parent apparently I am I am the like the the weird computer or you know person early on because you know it the Franklin was great you know I was able to play Apple 2 games and you know like everyone else at the time mostly pirated them you find someone who would who had want had a had a copy you get a copy but it also had basic and so you know I immediately thought oh I could build something in basic and you know what not so much that that you probably basic for me wasn't we've talked about this before that I can't really visualize things in my head so I need something to be able to see to react to and so with basic

32:27I had I had a hard time getting it to do much of anything interactively and it was much more you know like I could get it to print stuff or calculate stuff or what out the world oh yeah maybe it do loop to do it more than once yep precisely you know for loops you know if the if the analysis you know go to go so oh yeah go to 10 I remember go to 10 yeah yeah precisely and so so you know like I could do that and I did but I couldn't ever come up with anything that was interesting frankly and and so so I so I so I you know I'm again like I do now I used apps you know and I was very good at using the apps and you know we had ace kelk and ace writer which were you know word processor and a busy kelk clone and use those in high school and you know then my high school got IBM PCs

33:28like the original IBM PCs not PCATs or XTs or anything like that but like the first ones which were pretty weak frankly but but we had a we had a we had a programming class and I thought oh well maybe maybe I just need a class that's of course I went to I went to a small school there were no really choices in the classes you took when you were like me you you just took the hard classes that were available okay because there was only one and it was like the next one that was available and so and I was you know in this class with all these people that I knew pretty well and a number of them were better at it than I was the programming and this gave a shot you could you were reasonably bright fellow I was validatorian okay I had the best grades in the in the school okay although the there there there was there was one one girl who was who was always quite upset at me because she had taken band or something like that and and it hurt her GPA slightly no and she was not pleased about the fact that she was saludatorian because of this

34:34so she claimed this was back when you know you got your report card you know three weeks after the school and school year ended as opposed to now when kids can check it in real time to three digits three digits of precision so it was a little bit more random what you actually got now that was going to affect you right right okay but but so yeah so like as I said I you know it was it was a little sobering humbling perhaps even if such a thing could be possible for a 16 and 17 year old that that you know these friends of mine were just better at it than I was oh I could do it I got a's in the class you know it wasn't like I was no you know I was completely incapable but it was clear there was just something about it that didn't fit with my brain okay so as a spark or a puzzle or well I don't yeah I don't I don't like solving puzzles

35:36you know I'm capable of it but you know how you know there's always like I've some some magazines will have like the back page puzzle or something and it's you know I don't various different kind of kinds of puzzles I never do those because I don't enjoy them okay then you know crossword puzzles Sudoku puzzles yeah I can do them I mean I'm capable I'm just not I'm just not interested and and I think it's some of the same kind of thing that it just feels I don't know like spinning your wheels you're not gonna get anywhere at the end the puzzle will be done but it's not like anything to change so many people today just live and breathe for their word will score and I just don't get it I don't dislike doing it but it just feels like a waste of time to me I liked wordled during the pandemic yeah for a little while it was so this was like right precisely that was like oh and and you know and there were you know fam you know friends and family you know who we were all talking about it like it was the only thing yeah but as soon as we

36:41started to be able to like you know the pandemic started to ease up I was like yeah fine whatever I got other things to do with even the few minutes of my life that it might take you know and then of course you got a hard one or whatever and then it was like more than a few minutes like I can't believe I wasted 25 minutes on this stupid game other people see that as time invested and you know really enjoy it I'm not one of them yeah yeah so so you so yes kind of puzzles of figuring out programming was it did the light you up it it felt like it was the same kind of thing that that you know the algorithm was really a puzzle and you know how what was the and particularly when you got into like what was the best way to do something you know that that you know I guess modern day coding interviews are like that you know where they walk basically it's a programming puzzle that you're supposed to solve during the interview yeah and make people absolutely crazy if you're not good at doing things on demand as opposed to sitting down and working

37:42through it on your own so so the next computer I got was an Atari 1040 ST as I said it did not apparently go mainstream for quite a while and with that one I was I got that to to go to Cornell wait what was that yeah something called Gemma and it was its own thing okay but it was kind of like a Mac it was a 68,000 based computer with a windowing operating system you know mouse and everything but it had full color and and a larger screen and so and it did MIDI really well the Atari 1040 was actually super popular with musicians because of its MIDI support oh so but you know again it was it was sort of like it was a direction where things could have gone you know instead of the Mac but Atari was not the company to make that happen

38:46so you know they they they tried and it wasn't a bad computer it had its issues but you know no really no more so than an early Mac I don't want to defend was your your Cornell sensibilities here but I worked with a guy at Hughes aircraft was one year out of school out of grad school from Cornell and he got offered a job to run the robotics division at Atari and I looked at him I say okay you're a year out of school sweetie you're real real bright kid though you're real smart but who you gonna learn from you don't know anything by the all I'm gonna go do it and they folded you know six months after they they should have been a red flag that they would hire you for this job you're right right precisely just be cut I mean to be fair back in that day the fact you'd gone through grad school was more than like most people had him and gotten college to be computer stuff yeah right and this was robotics so engineering you had been engineering maybe yes but robotics

39:48so we're much in way robotics programs at that point yeah yeah that's true I mean he wasn't gonna be the one didn't vent to me there apparently no no I worked I worked with a guy at Cornell who did his internship at Apple who I wasn't very impressed with as a as a as a student shall we say and his internship was on the Apple fax modem yeah which I'm like these things match up pretty well so but any event so I had this 1040 ST and I decided I wanted to my major my would sit on sophomore year was going to be a hypertextual fiction in the college scholar program what does that mean well so college scholar program was something Cornell did for like if you wanted to do something that wasn't satisfied by any of Cornell's many many many majors and hypertextual fiction is

40:49basically you can think of it as fiction on the web nowadays so where there's a different pay a different web page for each chunk of tax using hypertext move around right use hypertext to move around and in kind of the academic aspect of it the story that you end up with is different depending on the text on the links that you have clicked the path you've taken through it make your own adventure game that was a very a primitive approach to the same kind of thing yes okay and so so as part of this because I didn't have one once you once you're in the college scholar program you have no requirements for classes right because that's the whole point you know the major majors have their requirements because I know what you need to take but you've designed your own major so and and so I didn't have any any any specific requirements so I thought this is going to be a computer related thing I mean this has to be on the computer hypertext has to be on a computer

41:50I should probably learn how to you know learn how to program because I'll be I'll work out much better this time because you know I'm at Cornell not at not at North Valley high school I think it lasted a week so the problem was is at the time computer science 100 CS 100 was taught in light speed Pascal on a Mac because Cornell was an early was one of the one of the very first Mac sites that Apple had seeded and light speed Pascal was an early compiler and so the way the course catalog and it was a catalog back then like a phone book like thing describe the class it sounded like I could use my I know a Pascal compiler on my my Atari I think was called personal Pascal and and so you know I got personal Pascal and I I went to the class and the first the first

42:50assignment was I just gave you some some some code to type in to light speed Pascal to see that you could compile and run it okay that makes sense and I typed it in to that personal Pascal and it didn't work at all and so I started looking at and I figured out why it wouldn't work at all and took me quite a while to get it to compile had to rewrite most of the code and this seemed like it was going to be a problem so so I went because like if I you know if I had to if I had to like do that much work just to get this type in and you know compile project working so I went to talk to the professor who was completely unsympathetic I may have to say oh really and basically said no the class is light speed Pascal on a Mac and that's what the the the TAs will be grading oh okay so so not for you just can't can't use something else just because it's Pascal it's apparent Pascal is apparently not Pascal in everything in the same way everywhere I don't know maybe maybe it was true

43:50maybe it wasn't was didn't troops seem to be true to me my first Pascal was well my own actually know that we're two of them was Mac Pascal hmm wonder if that's later maybe a little later in time I know what what year would this have been 85 oh no 86 fall of 86 okay all right so so did you buy a Mac so clearly I couldn't take this class because I was not willing to go to a public computer room to do all my work oh okay I had a computer in my dorm room which was not that common at the time yeah did you have kind of activity in the dorm room a modem um yeah modem phone phone line so um to talk to the IBM mainframe for instance so yeah so in any event it's just you know it became clear that you know programming was really not going to be my thing and since I didn't have to take it being a college scholar and having setting my own requirements I dropped it like a hot potato and moved on with my life um but but so this is you know so I can you do to get

44:55obviously more and more into computers and using them and helping people with them and and all of that and you know I worked in the computer rooms and managed people who worked in the computer room so I became you know extremely expert in you know early Mac stuff and networking and desktop publishing and all that kind of stuff I could make laser writers do things um you know even even figure out how to write a program like a very small program in um post script uh post script is a programming language of course right and when you printed something on a laser writer it was really writing a little post-program and what most people don't know is that laser writers had passwords and so you actually had to when you with the printer driver had the password built into it and so the password was always zero um and so it would know it would just give the password it was part of the print job and someone but it's always zero yeah and so someone figured this out and changed the password on one

46:00of our laser writers um the public ones uh this was a bad thing because it meant that you couldn't print to it unless you knew the password which no one knew and it was a number between one of those you know number between you know zero and I forgot how many bits it was but it was you know 24 24 thousand something one of those kind of numbers and um and so the problem was that you had to the only way to test this you had to write this it's very simple loop to write the program to or see if a password would work and change it and and but it was ee prom um that you were writing to that password was stored in this erasable programmable read-only memory and so there were a limited number of rights which was less than the number of password possibilities okay so what does that mean so basically if you tried to say oh maybe the password's one let's write one and see if that works nope let's write two and let's see if that works you couldn't query it you just had to test it

47:03and you couldn't test it more as many as there were options precisely and it took nine seconds per try and so figuring out like how many times that was gonna how long that was gonna take it was gonna be I don't know weeks if not months um of of testing so the solution turned out to be fun we we end up um we made it clear that someone had basically broken our laser writer and we were going to have to get a new motherboard for it um and uh uh some someones friend said oh the password is such and such I think they realized they had actually they'd kind of messed up and we were going to be very angry so probably just having fun but because they could yeah probably but I mean the we just like razor writers down you know we're gonna take it away if we can't use it so any event that was that was my the closest I had to like any kind of programming when you know a very very simple loop in post-crypt which someone helped me with so so at this point you're enjoying helping other

48:04people use the computers more than than making it sing to do something for yourself yeah um and because a lot of it I mean there is obviously great joy in being able to make a computer do things um even if you're within the constraints of what the apple house you know so I remember helping helping this grad student keep in mind I was you know I was a junior or something you know helping this grad student who was impossibly older than me um impossibly older did she say yes I mean she was a grown-up right okay and uh and she was converting her thesis from multi-mate to word perfect on a p-sake you had to have your your dissertation in word perfect format for the thesis secretary and um and and this turned out to be a non-trivial conversion and I was in charge of a computer room for the summer with almost nothing happening so she would come in

49:07and I would sit down and help her tell you know like explain to her how to do this stuff because converting files was was a non-trivial process back then and getting all the code the like the hidden codes right in word perfect that was actually the real problem is the codes were really messed up in word perfect and thesis secretaries were dragons like if you didn't get your your thesis completely uh formatted perfectly they would reject it okay so yeah so so getting the like the hidden codes cleaned up in word perfect and you know that after like six years of school and you get rejected because it's not formatted properly and other margins are wrong right yes nicely so so so at any event um you know so doing that kind of thing you know that basically kind of going into the underbelly of word perfect and trying to figure out you know what these codes were doing because you could end up with you know numerous it was like HTML right numerous tested codes and you never quite knew which one was going to take over from which other one and you know cause some formatting change to happen so you're helping your using conversion yeah okay clean up from the

50:13conversion really okay um so but the point being that like there were plenty of challenges in using computers um they just for me were not programming so I could work within someone else's at world but I couldn't create my own until hypercard and then hypercard so for the children and for those of us who didn't pay much attention beyond playing mist uh that was in hypercard right yes he was missed uh he explained what hypercard was so hypercard was this amazing system from Bill Atkinson who was one of the you know early you know the the the founding Mac Apple programmers who created the Mac he wrote quickdraw for instance that allowed us to put stuff on the screen for the Mac a lot of the Mac to put stuff on the screen he also wrote Mac paint and Mac Mac paint you Mac draw I can't remember um but uh but certainly it was like some of the early apps um you know it just amazing stuff out of him so he comes up with this idea and this was actually

51:17bouncing around a lot of the time right that it was pretty clear that being a programmer was going to be a big deal and so you heard a lot about it in schools and and things like that and and and there was a lot talked about about making it easier i mean that was the entire point of basic to be you know be frank right was that it was easier than assembler or some of the other languages we had at the time you know Fortran APL PL1 you know these kind of insane languages that did specific things basic was meant to be easier for non programmers right was i mean well because you sort of wrote in English Englishy i mean all right go to ten you could understand what go to ten did and uh and if then else you know it was it was semi-Englishy but not so much you know like for anything more involved um then you know then then then then simple stuff so what hypercar

52:22did is it it it with Bill Atkinson what he does he rethought the concept of development and it gave him a he's working in the Mac paradigm so everything else was just still kind of really command liney for the most part at this point that you were typing at a i mean you were typing at the command line and you know what you what the response would come back on a string or I mean there were still computers that you were teletypes they would actually print on paper what their response was i remember that little freaky right and so he wanted something where someone could make a real Mac thing i don't want to call it a nap at the moment um and without having to get into the the nitpickiness of the code and so i mean it did need a language and it had a language called hypertalk which was even more Englishy than than basic by a long shot but what it did is it

53:23said the concept is here is that you have a stack that was what he called it where it's a it's a bunch of cards just like stack of playing cards and each card can have information on it or controls on it so it could have graphics or it could have a field containing text or it could have a button or it could have a checkbox or a radio button things like that and then you could on each one of the objects on a card you could attach a script written in this hypertalk language and so the script would then do something when you clicked the field or tabbed in it or if you tabbed into a field or you clicked a button or you selected a checkbox something would happen so that sounds like hypertext but it's more than hypertext because it's actually executing a script yes right it means something and and keep in mind it's I mean it could just jump to another card and certainly plenty

54:26of stacks did that you know you click a button it would you know go to next right basically show you the next page so that was a very simple way to do things but hypertalk was a fully capable language like you could do a lot of different things in hypertalk and so what this enabled was that people who had significant expertise or desire to communicate something programmatically could do so so it became really popular in schools so it's accessible to more people yes so you could be a ninth grade science teacher and you know and and whip up a hypercard stack that would I don't know you show how electrons or orbit an orbit orbit the nucleus or something like that okay and basically there were just you know tons and tons of these kind of not once they

55:30necessarily personal because they were often had small audiences but they weren't widely distributed stacks that allowed someone to encapsulate their expertise in some form or fashion like where your expertise is understanding how electrons orbit around the nucleus but right but it isn't on programming right right precisely you know idea very little idea how to program but you can make a hypercard stack that explains you know basic basic atomic structure or science some you know some earth science thing or you know you and also because of the like if you think about the cards in the stack essentially a database so it was really easy to make little database as a hypercard so you could make a database that that you know had all your record albums in it and with an image of each record album okay you know that if you if you could get a picture of it somewhere you know that kind of thing so so there was the the sky was literally the limit in terms of what you could

56:37imagine and do in hypercard so now you became the programmer yeah pretty much really that in that in fact I did do quite a lot and that's where tidbits started because tidbits was a hypercard stack for the first 99 issues really oh wow so the so because so basically tidbits was you know say we had five articles it was a stack that every week would come out with five cards and the idea was that you know you could read you know there and I think there was a I have to go back and look it's been so many years you know I think there was a there was a sidebar that listed them so you could click on one go to you know go to it and then it would load that card and it was a scrolling text field so you could scroll and read the whole article so how did you but distribute this then so I'm I'm just somebody you on the internet on the internet yeah but so I had to have a Mac and I had to be running hypercard in order to open it right but yes hypercard because of Bill Ackinson being who

57:42was was bundled with every Mac right okay and so everyone did have hypercard at this point in time guaranteed and that's why it was a sort of a safe development environment and so yes so so distributing distributing is a whole nother ball of wax but basically they were binary files so they and and they had to become so I wanted to compress them because it was very important for very slow speed connections to have it be as small as possible but then the problem was is that all of the gateways between systems at the time only spoke text seven bit asky text and so binary files would be corrupted if they went through and so they were all stuffed compressed with stuff it and then bin hex and bin hex was another kind of conversion program that took a binary file and turned it into asky and so there's a really faint bell bin hex and then so when you

58:45received it it was dot hqx was bin hex you received your dot hqx file and you would you would have to debin hex it and then unstuff it and then you had the stack that you could open a hypercard and so yeah it was super easy and you know so there were there were sites like info maps that maintained archives of things and so I sort of learned I knew some of this stuff but I learned you know I learned about you know the net heavies the people who were sort of more important on the internet because they controlled major machines and you know and so you had to get their permission to do certain things this is humans or companies humans oh yeah humans huh they were mostly academics because it wasn't actually wasn't companies at all it was all academics because the internet at the time was almost entirely there was almost no commercial use at all it was all government and military and primarily academic hmm so again we're talking 1990 here you know

59:53this is the national science foundation running stuff okay I mean I was using it in a work environment and an employee environment in the early 80s I'm a little confused well 1984 was when I got my first Mac right but there wasn't there wasn't much in the way of internet at that point so like Cornell was on bit net and you know might have started a little bit but our internet would have been would have been limited to universities and military sites okay so so I mean yeah okay specifically from the networking standpoint I see what you're saying yeah yeah so so in any of that so I mean yes there were internal networks certainly although very limited once in instale I actually I know the guy who put the first apple site on the internet FTP.Apple.com was a two CI running on running under Mark Johnson's desk in developer technical support

1:00:56so that was later in the 90s I wasn't you know they Apple didn't have anything until then but there were also a lot of commercial services so CompuServe Delphi Bix Genie Apple Apple had oh gosh Apple Link Apple Link and then eWorld and so when we were distributing tidbits we actually had to distribute to all these different sites it took me quite a while you know every week to actually go to the login to each one of my modem and then Ben hex the thing and and upload the upload the Ben hex file wow so now it's something else but but any event so so yeah hypercard hypercard is really cool and so the the real reason why it had to be in hypercard was the archiving feature because can mine my mother was a was an archivist and it was really annoying to not be able to search for anything there were no search engines and magazines came on paper right you

1:01:56couldn't search anything sure and so with tidbits every week you got it and you clicked a button and it archived itself into into your your stack containing all the previous issues oh that's kind of cool and then it was searchable okay and not only that but one of the things I also did was manually I may add typed in the reviews in Mac user and Macworld and Mac week with page numbers so like oh Ramdubler in Mac user July you know July 1991 page 22 so and so wait so you were referencing it these reviews in Mac user and then talking about them we're just saying go literally indexing them so that if you wanted to look up a you could search on Ramdubler and it would tell you that it was reviewed in that issue of Mac user so you could go find it in your collection because you had no other way of knowing which issue of Mac user it would be and even if you were a subscriber and had all of them okay I thought we were talking

1:03:00about tidbits when did we switch to talk about Mac user so this was an article in every issue of tidbits was about tidbits indexed all the paper magazines oh geez for reviews okay so yeah so yeah so that's that but that's kind of why the archive was so important because it was in fact the only way to search the paper magazines of the time hmm that's crazy we you still had to go and like look up the article of course but but it would tell you where to find it. It's where to go look okay yeah yeah did you enjoy figuring that out that was he oh figure out writing I mean writing the tidbits script the tidbits a stack was a whole lot of fun but I made a mistake oh this is this was kind of one of the big the big problems actually and then partly why we moved away from tidbits was that and I can't quite remember the like the technical details but it had something to do with all the different layers and hypercard

1:04:02where when I when I did the archive I I brought more layers from each stack that needed to be into the into the archive and as a result the archive got too big oh no and so after you know 99 issues it was something like 10 megabytes in size that's massive back then precisely that's really really big I mean this was back when like 40 megabyte drives were a thing and and it was starting to slow down and you know all this I mean just so many problems and but because of the way I had architected it not quite anticipate not anticipating this at all not even quite just totally not anticipating it it you know became too too big for itself you know it it was not a good design and and so what we our last issue and hypercard was issue 99 and after that we switched to a structure enhanced text which is sort of a precursor to markdown I'm going to correct a

1:05:04little audio typo you did a second ago you said that's why we moved away from tidbits I think you met that's why we moved away from hypercard oh yes yes sorry we do it with my record just case it was worried they were not following this plot correct oh yeah we just stop tidbits after issue 99 I don't know what's been going on since then so yeah yeah we my hypercard it became clear this was not a this was not a long-term solution because of this problem of of the way it was growing and everything and keep in mind there was all that stuffing and vinhexing right wouldn't it be nicer if it was just a text file sure and so that was the structure enhanced text format allowed us to do that and then there were apps something called easy reader in particular easy view in particular that allowed you to get the same kind of interface of a sidebar and clicking on things and searching and all of that with the c-text file the structure enhanced text file even a lot of history but the point is is that like building that stuff in hypercard was really kind of neat and I did others I did a bunch of other things as well and

1:06:06you know because like oh here was one you couldn't like let's say you had 10 button 10 checkboxes on a on a on a card there was no way to align them and you couldn't support your soul oh you cannot imagine and so and so you know there were so like and I think you couldn't select multiple things at once so what I so I actually remember writing some utilities for myself essentially to allow myself to do these like selecting everything and aligning them and that kind of stuff so you know again it was it was it was it was beyond a simple stack but it was far from becoming like real code there were got what were they called x commands these were called x commands there were ways of writing things that would extend hyper talk so you could actually like get more commands and I had no idea how to do that that was real programming but anything in hyper talk I could do I was

1:07:09pretty good at hyper talk and so that was that was about but that was the end of it as soon as you know because like I moved away from hypercard with tidbits in 1992 and then in by 93 94 hypercard was basically gone because apple stop bundling it so this is a 30 years ago this this fun was taken away from you and in those 30 years did any and twisted I am telling you better and twisted still better and twisted but something has has brought you back after these 30 years yeah as as you well know the addictive nature of AI assisted development right because I mean think about it was what was what hypercard did and what made it special and and nothing has nothing has come even close since is that it provided the combination of the environment and the easy language

1:08:10and frankly the ubiquitous distribution and because everyone had a hot hyperhurt in their mac so that you could you could sort of guarantee that everyone could look at something and everything after that oh frankly they usually tried to make it too hard you know that that the the real programmers got involved and are like oh well it would be much more powerful if it did acts well yes it would but now people can't do it anymore right and even they didn't care because they could do it they didn't care they can do it right I mean they weren't thinking this but it was job security right but like I mean remember file maker used to be people loved file maker back in the day and then it got bigger and it went relational and there was file maker server and now it's completely a developer tool I mean to the extent that it still exists at all which is always a question but but but even you know even when it was even was big it just kept getting more and bigger and bigger and more and more complicated and you know and you were a file maker developer

1:09:14right that that was a whole job database right is a whole job it became you could be a consultant for that you know so like everything moves in that direction and so so with hypercard you never I mean it even hypercard kind of moved in that direction honestly because Apple sold it for a while and that never succeeded and etc etc but what was neat was it didn't it gave you a new way of specifying what you want of like creating what you want it it wasn't about the code it was as much about the interfaces everything else as anything else okay because you started from what you could see when you put a vision down on a card and then you attached a script to the button yeah and and then the button did something like it went plank you know because you said you said that you said that the button should play this sound when it's clicked and it did and you're like

1:10:14oh now I know how to make a sound yeah and then you'd move on to the next thing and so you could just kind of work your way up so fast forward passed all this stuff all this other stuff sort of done made it easy and then always went and got harder HTML right HTML used to be super easy everyone could make a web page now you have to be a full stack developer I mean come on I mean it's just like if it's not if it's not you know dynamic CSS and who knows what JavaScript here it allowed to make a website that I'm actually use so so what AI has done is it's taken away all of the programming and just made it about the creation how do you convey what you want to the programmer behind the scenes so just as with hypercard when you were putting a button that made play to sound on the card you were in essence telling the little programmer on the inside hypercard to do this thing

1:11:15sure and it it wrote all of the it dealt with all of Apple's APIs for playing sounds and all of that kind of stuff you didn't have to know any of that it just played a sound when you click the button now AI you just tell it what you want and it goes and writes some code for you to do that and you see if it works the way you want so do you feel when you're doing it do you feel like you're programming you feel like you're creating though I'm creating but I'm not programming right I I'm really pretty uninterested in the actual code don't really care one bit don't care what language it's in don't don't care if there's I mean actually I care if there's bugs from the standpoint of like I wanted to work but it's not like I'm looking at it going wow you're missing a semi-colon there you could have structured this more efficiently or anything like that couldn't care less couldn't care less you know that languages don't interest me I mean some people love them I mean some

1:12:16some programmers are like oh let's check let's let's try Haskell or Erlang or you know whatever the rust is the you know the latest hotness in high performance language is so much faster than Python couldn't care less don't don't don't know don't care I'm finding it interesting there's two identical reactions but one is in denial and that is people who don't code being very very excited about being able to create a tool that's all that scratches in itch of their own and that's you and and I'm sort of on the fence between these two camps and the other is real programmers who do this for a living trying to say that they're not vibe coding as they're describing how they vibe coded like I listened to the accidental tech podcast and and listing a Marco Arman just begrudgingly keep admitting that you know how well and then and now he's after listening to him for a while now he's like oh man I have this thing partially written I couldn't get it finished I I had sitting

1:13:20there languishing and I just said fabled just go finish it for me right at the way I would have written it just just go do that for me and write a bunch of tests that I never would have written before and so now he's head over heels in love with it because he's getting to create again where he was just spending all of his time testing looking for bugs and dude you know messing around with details of the code and so he's coming to that same point but you you just hear people going no I didn't vibe coded I had Claudine helped me yeah you vibe coded that yes yes no I don't I don't I mean I don't love the term vibe code I mean I I know I get what it's supposed to mean but what I really come to realize is that and there's a there's an evolution to working with AI programming of course right that in me you start with little bits of data analysis where you ask something about a spreadsheet but what it's really doing is writing Python code behind the scenes like you don't know that but it's what it's doing and then you get into like little scripts can write

1:14:24me an apple script or a shell script that does this thing and you know and then you start getting into apps and you know and the apps can become you know more more complex as you go and but what I've sort of come to realize is that once you're into the apps it turns out that software as a profession like a professional development is done in a certain way for a reason that you know it really is better if you start with a spec and if you if you write those tests and you know and it's not that you have to do these things yourself but you got to but you got to work with the AI to do okay so you're really much more of like the high level product manager who says what we need is an app that does x, y and z for this audience and we're looking for it to run on these platforms and blah blah blah you know like all that kind of high level I have the vision stuff and then

1:15:29back in the not so much back in the day but you know and in a large organization my people will go off and do this for me right you know like support back sure you know go figure out the details of what language to use and you know how to how to how to how to how to architect at all and things like that and that's all good and so now if you're the product manager of your AI underlings there that you still it's still useful to have them do that kind of stuff sure because it keeps them keeps them focused shall we say well and I is not known for its focus I believe that it's probably very much like real life programming in that as a project manager you say I wanted to be able to do blah blah blah and blah blah way and I want to have it these interfaces and this inputs and this outputs and then the the underling slash AI assistant comes back goes here I did it and you go oh that's not what I met yep yep exactly like that except yeah assistant doesn't win at you yep but what you said

1:16:34well so I mean I wrote about this I bet I I've worked with developers in the past like I've hired developers and to do things for me and it's it's it's actually a situation which can be tense because if nothing else it's going to cost money time and money to have them do exactly what I want and so I'm trying to describe as much to the extent that I can exactly what I want but you know sometimes you just don't know until you see it you know and or or you described it really well but they just didn't understand who knows you can go both sides and you see what comes back and then you have to decide how what you're going to ask for in terms of changes given your time and budget right right absolutely and and sometimes the personal relationships involved you can't say what sucks well what were you thinking that wasn't well anything what I close to what I said

1:17:35or thought I said no are you polite to cloud nice about are you polite to cloud or do you say that's so I say I am yeah I am I mean only occasionally well I was like no that didn't work at all try again I only get usually it's I get in play when it does the same mistake it already did before no we've been here stop that I think that's where I'm supposed to pay for a better model right but that's all right that's always the hint of like get opus to do this so if you saw it you you're not smart enough to do it but yeah no I I usually am and actually usually the things that it has trouble with our visual things where it just doesn't know what it looks like right and so you know like I was I was working with a I wanted it to do a little for set shot I wanted to do a little export meant pop down menu and it was having the most trouble with the little carrot now I wanted to be it wanted it to be blue blue and I'm like there's no there's doesn't make sense to

1:18:36have this thing be blue like no one is not a link it's not it doesn't need a highlight color and and it took a little while to get it to the point when you know it's like okay so you know finally said I can't do that I have to do it differently and SwiftUI no problem and does it and the chevrons on the wrong side I was like why'd you put on the wrong side and it says well I didn't I didn't think I did and but oh it's this H stack problem yeah I'm gonna throw on a screen shot it's going look stupid this is except I don't say stupid precisely and I would and I just kept I kept I kept I kept showing it little there's a little screenshots of you know what it was doing and so so it wasn't I mean it it was a little bit of that like I'm doing this but I don't have eyes yeah tell me tell me if tell me if this looks okay and uh and or you know because I'm working with such that where I where I need to actually like change settings and whatnot there's a I'm acting a lot like it's hands you know where I'll say okay

1:19:38tell me exactly how we're gonna test this and I will you know I'll take the snapshot and I'll go change a setting and I'll take another snapshot because you know some of those things it can't it just can't do can't see yeah and I always feel like I'm valuable when I get to do stuff well and you know and and it is valuable because every time I do you know whenever I use the you know the more I use the app the more I'm like well why is it doing that that seems a little funny um you know and you know anytime it feels a little funny I say this seems a little funny what happened and uh and oh so yeah this happened and I'm fixing it so you feel very agreeable you've regained this power that you had with uh with hyper talk oh and and and more so partly because I mean my world is expanded right you know when I was using hypercard the internet barely existed you know we're talking 9600 modems and and you know now I'm living in in this world where we have

1:20:39you know you know complete interconnectivity of everything and and and and and super computers in our pockets and so you know the ability to do all this kind of stuff like my desires have grown over the years shall we say I feel like I'm getting greedy now I can do this I can do this I can do this you know one of the other apps I've written so so the set shot app that I I talk about um in a subsequent article mostly but but basically it's designed to let you determine what has what what either you or apple has changed in terms of your macOS settings over time okay and um and you know and that's um it's a it's an interesting complex app with lots of lots of interesting in my mind puzzles because you know it's stuff I know about you know where I'm like this is kind of you know but what about on max that don't have batteries how will those settings look different you know that I know about that not all max have batteries and yet macOS has lots of

1:21:44chains settings that change whether or not you're on right right and so there's a lot of that kind of stuff where it does require my um require really my expertise to understand how to do this not that someone else couldn't do it but not many people I mean you do have to be pretty deeply aware of how the mac thinks about settings and the number of them and how users users think about that kind of stuff um but but anyway sort of going with that was the another app that I've done is a timing app which you know takes video of a race finish line and as people cross the line you push a button and it records a picture a timestamp picture and also video and it's got to it even starts and stops the video when no one's in the picture oh wow very cool and someone you know I was just barely gotten to this point and you know one of my timing friends was saying oh you know and could it uh you know could it automatically record people I was like yes it's going

1:22:46to be we're gonna have a line on the screen and when they cross the line it's gonna OCR their bib number you know and if they if they can see it like and you can really do this a bull now yes wow I mean I said I've gotten everything up to the automatic recording and OCRing and that yeah that's probably just another half hour with plot so you know then there's a lot of testing because it's hard to test the stuff not in the real world sure get your friends to just run back and forth wearing bibs precisely sometimes upside down to see if they you can mess with people oh believe me runners will make every imaginal mistake possible uh wearing it as a hat oh it's it's it's it's it's on their shorts on the side it's on their back the things that people will imagine you know oh is on my coat I took that off somewhere back there oh yeah so it this is backup timing this is not meant to be high precision okay but but nonetheless it is still it's still it's just kind of a

1:23:48neat idea that you could just you know point an iPhone at a finish line and get a list of mostly everyone who finishes that's amazing this is really and that's that's like that's doable like how cool is that is that like science fiction or what yeah I like you're thinking way outside of the box of the kind of stuff I think of all of my all of my app work is always about time adding subtracting what time is it in New Zealand you know I what time will it be in New Zealand when I'm awake and they're awake you know I it seems to I seem obsessed with time but I love seeing that what adding it subtracting and I've I've seen your app I've used your app oh exciting yeah yeah now because in in the running world sometimes you need to like extract a portion of a run oh good so in Strava in Strava you can you can quote unquote crop it see move your start point you move your endpoint and then you read the times and you put them into your app oh very nice I like it I was excited Steve used it when filming the eclipse that he was trying what he was trying to

1:24:51calculate was how the the sun would move diagonally across the frame of his camcorder and he needed to figure out what time the center of that was going to be you know or to get the center of the right spot to know when to start recording and when to stop recording to figure it out and he ended up using my app so there's seems to be a lot of interesting little uses see people care about that time is time is really really hard to calculate what it really is it is well this has been a really fun I like the walk down memory lane because you don't do it in the classic nerd work where you've got to talk about how many megabytes of RAM you had on this and you know into a lot of the nitty gritty but the the why and how it made you feel and I think that's one of the the big things that you wanted to talk about was the empowerment that you have today right and you know and it really is you know it really is most of what I see people making is stuff for themselves you know that say oh could I do this yes you can and that's that's kind

1:25:56of important that is that we really haven't we haven't had that and you know when I talk about democratization you know someone was like oh not everyone can can think about you know can like specify all the stuff that needs to be like no but anyone who wants to can right yes and even who wants it badly enough because if nothing else these tap outs are nothing if not conversational right yeah you can try happy to talk to you at whatever length you want about your app and and so whatever it is that you know that that's you know whatever it's you've got you know you're going to be able to scratch in some way shape or form and I do think it's probably important that you like you don't think that oh it has to be in the app store or you have to sell it or something like that no can be something you run on your machine sure totally fine sure you know these are essentially even the phones personal computers like they should be what you want them to be not what Adobe and Apple and all these other companies want them to be because

1:27:03let's face it our desires are not usually aligned these days not not at all not at all well I think I want to end us with your your statement there that yes you can is really the theme of everything that you've been talking about today this is this been so much fun Adam as I expected it to be as it always is you're empty didn't eat good to chat well I always love talking to Adam but this is going to wind us up for this week don't forget to come to the live chat room at podfeed.com slash chat at 10 a.m. on Wednesday September 9th for the Apple announcement so you can chat to us at all of the other lovely no silly castaways but for now did you know you can email me at ielson of podfeed.com anytime you like people who do all the time answer questions dumb questions smart questions it's a lot of fun remember every the good starts with podfeed.com you can follow me I'm master on at podfeed.com slash master on if you want to actually see Steve in my podcast work on YouTube you can go to podfeed.com slash YouTube but you should really go see Steve's eclipse

1:28:04video at youtube.com slash sp share it in we're going to have a chitchat about how he made it and it's going to be a lot of fun if you want to join our conversation you can join our slack community at podfeed.com slash slack where you can talk to me and all the other lovely no silly castaways like eddie donkoye and allister jinx and Bart all kinds of people are in there it's a great time you can support the show at podfeed.com slash patreon with a one-time donation at podfeed.com slash donate or you can use paypal like drew podfeed.com slash paypal and if you want to join in the front of the live show head on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic no silly castaways thanks for listening and stay subscribed