TWiT+ Club Shows 756 Transcript - Off By One With Jeff Atwood #3
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
This is twit. Do we have a theme song for. Oh, we did. I made a theme song, but I don't think you liked it.
Jeff Atwood [00:00:07]:
What was the theme song? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I did not like that. Don't play that.
Leo Laporte [00:00:13]:
Actually, you objected to. I think it had a lot of great programming songs.
Jeff Atwood [00:00:17]:
Got a theme song for us? Just wait.
Leo Laporte [00:00:20]:
You have an action.
Jeff Atwood [00:00:21]:
Let me build my Pip boy. Come on. It's the wasteland. How can I survive without this thing?
Leo Laporte [00:00:26]:
This was the Salt Iron Choir singing off by one.
Jeff Atwood [00:00:34]:
And also, never say vibe coding ever again.
Leo Laporte [00:00:37]:
You don't like that word, that phrase? Well, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it's time.
Jeff Atwood [00:00:45]:
It is time.
Leo Laporte [00:00:46]:
Hold on. By one.
Jeff Atwood [00:00:49]:
Okay. Or can I fit boy? No, no, no. Okay. Can I request a song for the intro?
Leo Laporte [00:00:58]:
Well, you can't request anything that has a BMI ASCAP license.
Jeff Atwood [00:01:03]:
Well, give it a shot. If you go to my blog. I have a blog entry about this show. Scroll down past that.
Leo Laporte [00:01:10]:
I saw that. It's wonderful. Thank you for writing.
Jeff Atwood [00:01:12]:
It is. It is wonderful. And then scroll down past that blog post and you'll see an embedded YouTube video. It's all black. And just play it and see what you think. I'm going to try to fix this Pip boy coding.
Leo Laporte [00:01:26]:
Horror. Do you say horror or horror?
Jeff Atwood [00:01:30]:
Horror.
Leo Laporte [00:01:31]:
Yeah, I say horror. But that's because I'm from a far away land known as New England. You think that I can play this? Huh?
Jeff Atwood [00:01:40]:
Just give it a shot.
Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
Let's see. Anthony, watch.
Jeff Atwood [00:01:43]:
Just give it a taste.
Leo Laporte [00:01:44]:
Watch and see how long it takes before YouTube takes us. YouTube takes us down. Yeah. Just out of curiosity. So let's see. I'm scrolling.
Jeff Atwood [00:01:53]:
If that does happen, we'll. We'll fix it.
Leo Laporte [00:01:54]:
I'm sorry? Oh, it's still. Well, you can't fix it. We're no longer on YouTube.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:00]:
Really?
Leo Laporte [00:02:01]:
That's kind of what happens when. Are you serious? So called takes you down.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:05]:
Are you serious?
Leo Laporte [00:02:05]:
So you're saying there is a black screen with music, but I don't. I see the discourse sticker power of the paragraph. Is that what you mean?
Jeff Atwood [00:02:15]:
It's above that. Let me. Hold on. Let me make sure my Pip boy doesn't fall apart here. Hold on.
Leo Laporte [00:02:19]:
I don't think you actually.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:20]:
Hang in there, buddy. I got you.
Leo Laporte [00:02:22]:
Maybe YouTube got to it. Unfortunately, my mouse is being very.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:27]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:02:28]:
So unpleasant. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:30]:
Under my screen power the paragraph. Lower, lower, lower.
Leo Laporte [00:02:33]:
Hold on, hold on. I know you hate it when I. You don't see. He doesn't like on that if you dare turn this on. He doesn't like how I I scroll. So below. Power of the paragraph. Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:02:48]:
See, I'm scrolling, scrolling scrolling. I see. Written by Jeff Atwood.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:52]:
No, no, more. More scrolling, more scrolling. Wait, no.
Leo Laporte [00:02:56]:
Is it in the comments?
Jeff Atwood [00:02:57]:
Go to the root.
Leo Laporte [00:02:58]:
Go to the root, press the home.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:59]:
Yeah, there you go, Cody. Car at the top. Click the coding. Car logo at the top. Oh, oh. And then now scroll and scroll and scroll in.
Leo Laporte [00:03:06]:
I was on the actual entry. There was my mistake.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:09]:
Okay, that's fine.
Leo Laporte [00:03:11]:
Now power of the paragraph. Scroll. Thank you for being a friend. Scroll.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:14]:
Keep going, keep going.
Leo Laporte [00:03:15]:
Oh, you mean it's in the next one?
Jeff Atwood [00:03:16]:
Yes, that's what I meant. It's here.
Leo Laporte [00:03:18]:
Avastin in the sea.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:19]:
Collaborate and listen.
Leo Laporte [00:03:21]:
Is this again ask FMI licensed or is it.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:24]:
Just humor me and we'll see what happens. If it ruins everything, it's my fault. I take photoshops.
Leo Laporte [00:03:29]:
Oh, no, this is a real song. I can't play it.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:31]:
No, no, it's me singing.
Leo Laporte [00:03:33]:
I know, but I hear that music in the background.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:36]:
That.
Leo Laporte [00:03:36]:
Did you play that?
Jeff Atwood [00:03:38]:
It's.
Leo Laporte [00:03:38]:
It's. Did you write Come Sail Away? Did you work for Sticks at one point?
Jeff Atwood [00:03:43]:
Well, the song Renegade was written about me.
Leo Laporte [00:03:46]:
Really?
Jeff Atwood [00:03:47]:
The record?
Leo Laporte [00:03:48]:
Yeah, that was written about you.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:50]:
I wasn't even live. Hey, man. Oh, Humor me and play just a little because it something relevant I need
Leo Laporte [00:03:57]:
to talk about for people in Canada. It says this video contains content from Universal Music Group. Who blocked it from display on this website or application.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:04]:
Well, sucks to be kidding. Just humor me and get to like a little bit of singing.
Leo Laporte [00:04:07]:
No, no, I can't play it.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:08]:
Really?
Leo Laporte [00:04:10]:
You try it to the real world, Jeff.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:13]:
Wait, no, no, seriously, it kicked us off.
Leo Laporte [00:04:15]:
No, it will. If I play it, we'll be done. Like, it'll be the shortest off by one ever.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:22]:
The whole show will be ruined.
Leo Laporte [00:04:23]:
You don't understand how this works, do you? Well, there's this thing called YouTube. There's this thing called Content ID.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:30]:
I know that.
Leo Laporte [00:04:31]:
And as soon you want a lesson, you want a lesson in. In chilling effects. Let's see how long it takes. It's always interesting. It sounds like the original.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:43]:
I'm the singer. I'm very good.
Leo Laporte [00:04:53]:
Jeff, you sound very good. Well, is this the karaoke edition?
Jeff Atwood [00:04:57]:
Kind of set an open course. Just. Just get to the part where it starts getting awesome.
Leo Laporte [00:05:04]:
So those of you who love Discord, let us know if we get taken down.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:10]:
Maybe we won't because of the junk will tell us.
Leo Laporte [00:05:13]:
Fine. Maybe just A demonetization. Just. Well, we don't monetize this anyway, so that's okay, right?
Jeff Atwood [00:05:20]:
Just wait till we hit the. The Rockin Park. It's kind of interesting song. I have a point to make here. I swear. This is a great song actually. I like Sticks and Renegade was written about me.
Leo Laporte [00:05:50]:
Junk is typing. Okay, I should mention is Michelle, who is.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:59]:
You can kill it.
Leo Laporte [00:05:59]:
Jeff's sister. By another Mr. Aka his assistant. Well, no, no, she's my sidekick.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:06]:
Sidekick.
Leo Laporte [00:06:08]:
She's your sidekick.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:09]:
Sidekick. That's right.
Leo Laporte [00:06:10]:
Nice welcome.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:11]:
Yeah, it is pretty awesome.
Leo Laporte [00:06:12]:
How did you get in here?
Jeff Atwood [00:06:13]:
Business part. If I can ever fix this freaking pit, boy, it's driving me crazy. Okay, fine, fine. Good boy. You're gonna be like that.
Leo Laporte [00:06:19]:
Okay, back to the full screen of me and Jeff. What was the purpose of that song? Just out of curiosity, what do.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:25]:
Well, let me explain. So what happened is. So remember on last show I was talking about the blog post I wrote when the twin girls were born? Well, I got it wrong. The blog post was Farewell Stack Exchange. That's the same day I left Stack Exchange.
Leo Laporte [00:06:44]:
Because that was the day you decided to spend more time with your family.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:47]:
It wasn't so much a decision as like, you gotta leave because I was a lot. And when you have twins, that is a nervous breakdown all in itself.
Leo Laporte [00:06:59]:
Yeah. How old are the twins now? They're 14.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:01]:
14.
Leo Laporte [00:07:03]:
So that was 14 years ago.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:04]:
14 years ago. So that's the blog post. I was sitting outside crying, you know, my superpower. Pressing send on this blog post. So if you could bring up Farewell Stack Exchange. I'll tie this to the song because it has meaning.
Leo Laporte [00:07:18]:
Yes.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:18]:
And I want people to see. We're not going to read the whole post, but I want to show you something about it.
Leo Laporte [00:07:24]:
So for those who are just tuning in and going, what are we talking about? I should just. Oh, my stupid keyboard. I should just mention that we are talking to Jeff Atwood, the host of off by One with Jeff Atwood. Strangely enough. It's a question.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:38]:
No, no, you're the host, I'm the guy.
Leo Laporte [00:07:40]:
And this is a relatively new club show that we do. Jeff is the founder and. Oh, what happened to my screen? I did something with my keys. There we go. Is the founder and of Stack Exchange along with Joel Spolsky, the Stack Exchange Network, which includes Stack Overflow and Meta. Stack Overflow and all that stuff. And he's also. Let me turn the chat off here real quick.
Leo Laporte [00:08:05]:
He is also the creator of the co founder.
Jeff Atwood [00:08:09]:
I'm always co Founder.
Leo Laporte [00:08:10]:
Co founder of Discourse, which is the wonderful forum software you use at Twitter Community. And he is now in his third startup. He is doing the rural guaranteed minimum income initiative, RGMI Squared, where he has donated a significant amount of money to a experiment in rural counties in the United States to see how we can get people out of poverty and into living the life they deserve to lead. He's a very generous fellow, and he wrote this.
Jeff Atwood [00:08:46]:
I'm an amateur philanthropist, but I'm taking everything I learned from tech and using it.
Leo Laporte [00:08:51]:
What makes a professional philanthropist out of curiosity?
Jeff Atwood [00:08:55]:
Well, I mean, Betsy came up with that on her profile. I thought it was funny. Amateur philanthropist.
Leo Laporte [00:09:00]:
I like it.
Jeff Atwood [00:09:00]:
Betsy's hilarious. But I really am taking everything I learned from tech and those companies and applying it to, like, how can we take on poverty?
Leo Laporte [00:09:10]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:09:10]:
It's the truth.
Leo Laporte [00:09:12]:
That's fair. It's increasingly an issue in our gilded age. So let me just ask you. I have now your famous blog post, and I'm just curious.
Jeff Atwood [00:09:27]:
Right. The part I want to show you is there's a poem at the end.
Leo Laporte [00:09:30]:
Okay. Let me make this big. Oh, I just can't.
Jeff Atwood [00:09:34]:
You don't have to read all that.
Leo Laporte [00:09:36]:
Discourse is nuts. Not discourse. Now you have discourse. I have discourse on my mind. Restream is making me nuts. Oh, it's that one. Yeah, it's that one. There we go.
Leo Laporte [00:09:49]:
Thank you. We're fighting each other. All right, now I can go full screen on this now. Here it is from the 6th day of February, 2012. Farewell. And there's tears, actually on this.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:03]:
Oh, lots. Keep going.
Leo Laporte [00:10:06]:
I want a little CSS thing that could put tears dribbling down.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:11]:
And it's kind of about, like, when you're working so hard, you lose the experience with your children.
Leo Laporte [00:10:16]:
Yeah, I know that.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:18]:
Yeah. And you don't get that back. So it was a time to consider that, especially with twins. But the part at the bottom, if you keep going, I will miss you all terribly. I did.
Leo Laporte [00:10:30]:
Oh, I will miss you all terribly.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:33]:
You listen.
Leo Laporte [00:10:33]:
And here's the. Here's the. Sing the poem that you sang.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:37]:
Right. And come sail away with sticks is this same vibe.
Leo Laporte [00:10:42]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:43]:
And you know what else is based on you listening? It's about just exploring and learning together. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:10:48]:
I just learned.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:51]:
And this leads. So that's number two. When I left, I was like, that was my sign off. And look at the last line.
Leo Laporte [00:10:57]:
The last. The very last line. It was.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:59]:
Because the last two lines. Please read them.
Leo Laporte [00:11:02]:
Farewell, stack exchange. I hope you can understand that if it was hard on you at times. It was because I wanted you to be the best you could possibly be. It was because I loved you.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:11]:
And I still do a.
Leo Laporte [00:11:14]:
That's nice, Jeff.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:16]:
So let me tie this together. Look up the vast and endless sea. It's that exact title. Because I know the ghost search isn't ideal. Like, remember the time we were typing 10 versus the number 10? It was like, totally different search. Not really. It's tough to compete with Google, man.
Leo Laporte [00:11:35]:
It is. I actually, on my blog, I used Google for a long time just because I didn't like it, but I just. Because there was no other easier way to.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:42]:
Okay, have a good search. And endlessly.
Leo Laporte [00:11:45]:
Yes.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:46]:
This ties that together as well. So scroll down to the bottom. Let's get to the point. It's like, what is your motivation? Scroll down. Keep going. We're going to read this whole thing.
Leo Laporte [00:12:00]:
Keep scrolling.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:01]:
Read that quote.
Leo Laporte [00:12:02]:
Antoine de Saint Auxberry from the Little Petit Prince. If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, Divide the work.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:12]:
No, no, no, no, no. This is a good quote. Give me just regular Leo, please, Please.
Leo Laporte [00:12:17]:
I think it's better in French. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Don't you think that's better in. No, like Pepe le Peu reads.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:26]:
All right, look, I'm gonna.
Leo Laporte [00:12:27]:
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. I think that's very.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:35]:
That is exactly what we did at Sec Overflow. And my dad died at sea intentionally.
Leo Laporte [00:12:43]:
Like, on a cruise. I mean, he wasn't exactly rowing.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:45]:
I know, but like, okay, I was like. He went back to the Vaston and the sea, man.
Leo Laporte [00:12:51]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:51]:
You know, and that is the motivation, right? Yeah. It's the exploration. It's the journey. It's like learning together.
Leo Laporte [00:12:58]:
So why is the fox jumping over some sort of rifle?
Jeff Atwood [00:13:02]:
Oh, that's. That's my love language. Is the M4A1 pulse rifle from the movie Aliens. That's my love language.
Leo Laporte [00:13:10]:
You just got that when we first talked, or you were about to get it. The fox is unrelated. That's just a fox jumping around in the. In the snow. Yeah, it's fox, but the rifle is not. And in fact, it's fully charged, so be nice.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:22]:
Well, it has 95 rounds. You don't load it fully because it'll jam. It's 99 rounds. But any good marine knows you don't
Leo Laporte [00:13:29]:
fully only put the first. That's good. Okay, good to know. Yeah, no, and now how is your Pip Boy working? Is it working pretty good?
Jeff Atwood [00:13:39]:
I want to show everyone the new one. So this is the Prior model.
Leo Laporte [00:13:41]:
Can you wear this on your wrist?
Jeff Atwood [00:13:43]:
Yes. In fact, I wore that as a Halloween costume. It's not properly. I have time to set this one up properly. This is a 3D printed one.
Leo Laporte [00:13:51]:
Oh, cool.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:52]:
You know, I gotta look at the model numbers. We need some real nerds in here, man. But I think this is Fallout 4 and this might be Fallout New Vegas.
Leo Laporte [00:14:01]:
Did they change the Pip Boy the way the Pip Boy looked?
Jeff Atwood [00:14:05]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:14:07]:
So here's The Pip Boy 3000 replica from Bethesda Gear, right?
Jeff Atwood [00:14:13]:
That's this one, the Pip Boy 3000 replicas here.
Leo Laporte [00:14:15]:
You'd think they'd tell you which Pip Boy that is, right? That's pretty cool looking. How much is it hefty on your wrist?
Jeff Atwood [00:14:24]:
I haven't actually worn this one. I just got it out to show everybody because it's just kind of fun. One of my little indulgences is I like the Pip Boys and I want
Leo Laporte [00:14:31]:
help you when you're in the vaults to have the Pip Boy.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:34]:
Well, you're assigned one at birth, right?
Leo Laporte [00:14:36]:
Like, oh, look, this one can play Missile Command.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:40]:
That's pretty cool. Yeah, I don't know the controls on this one yet, so I can't really. Oh, there you go. This one actually is the most advanced. It actually has a built in ui. This one is sort of a static screen.
Leo Laporte [00:14:50]:
Yeah, it has that kind of flicker which is cool glitching screen that you remember from Fallout.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:55]:
And the other one here is I got from a guy on Etsy and it has an Android phone, Apple, a
Leo Laporte [00:15:03]:
Pip Boy gallery in there.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:05]:
I even have a Pip Boy thing you can put on the Apple Watch Ultra. Check this out.
Leo Laporte [00:15:10]:
It's completely impractical because it is a rather big watch. So you put that on.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:14]:
I know it's completely impractical, but fun for a day or two. But it rattles a lot, which is really unnerving. And it is giant. Oh, that's hysterical fun, but not really practical, which you'd probably say about all this stuff. But I always love Fallout. You know, I kind of didn't really get into Fallout. The latest one that was like more massively multiplayer.
Leo Laporte [00:15:36]:
What was your favorite? Was it 77? Everybody seems to think 77 was the.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:40]:
No, I think mine was either three or four.
Leo Laporte [00:15:43]:
Four actually. You know, that's what I should have said everybody thinks 4 and 4.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:47]:
Yeah. 3 and 4, I think were really, really good. And Fallout 1, it's, you know, isometric. It's not even 3D. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, it's like grand Theft Auto. Yeah, well, it's more like an rpg. It's like, you know, tiles.
Leo Laporte [00:15:58]:
Right. Did you ever play gta?
Jeff Atwood [00:16:02]:
I got. No, not the early ones. I got into Grand Theft Auto 2 like everybody else because it was such a huge phenomenon.
Leo Laporte [00:16:09]:
So you were a pretty serious gamer.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:11]:
I was, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:16:13]:
How'd you find time to do that? And found three startups.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:18]:
I'm insane. I don't know.
Leo Laporte [00:16:20]:
You don't sleep a lot. I know that.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:22]:
Well, I. I've been trying to do better sleep because that's not.
Leo Laporte [00:16:25]:
You seem well rested today.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:27]:
Well, thank you.
Leo Laporte [00:16:29]:
Seam is the.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:29]:
I'm trying. So I. I just want to show everyone the Pip Boys because they're. They're fun. I like them. You can wear them. And actually, next episode I'll show you my Halloween costumes. Which one was a Fallout, you know, person.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:44]:
And I was wearing, actually this one. But that's a topic for the show because, you know, it's sad.
Leo Laporte [00:16:50]:
I will be on vacation this year. On Halloween, I will be out of country.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:55]:
So where are you going?
Leo Laporte [00:16:57]:
Southeast Asia.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:59]:
Oh, cool.
Leo Laporte [00:16:59]:
I'm going to refight that war. I think that it didn't.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:02]:
Might as well. I mean, we're. We're doing whatever now. I mean, who knows?
Leo Laporte [00:17:06]:
I'm going to visit a bunch of holy sites just by chance. It's a cruise. It's not really a holy site cruise, but we're going to start with Angkor Wat, and then we're going to go to the original capital of Thailand, Atunya, and then the Boro Bordur Temple. I think I'm saying that wrong. Some. Some really cool giant. So you're going to Thailand, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:34]:
Singapore is very cool.
Leo Laporte [00:17:35]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:36]:
We had a discourse.
Leo Laporte [00:17:37]:
That's not a whole website. What'd you have?
Jeff Atwood [00:17:40]:
Discourse Meetup. Discourse is a fully remote company. So we said every year we'll come together at one location where one team member lives.
Leo Laporte [00:17:48]:
Oh, nice.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:49]:
And it went like San Francisco, then Toronto, then Sydney, Australia, and then eventually, you know, we got Singapore. And I was really impressed with Singapore.
Leo Laporte [00:17:58]:
Just.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:58]:
It's a really interesting. It reminded me Costa Rica was like that too.
Leo Laporte [00:18:01]:
Where it's like, you told me you loved Costa Rica.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:04]:
It was so interesting. They don't have a standing army and La Pura Vida.
Leo Laporte [00:18:08]:
It's just Switzerland. Of Central America, which narrows it down quite a bit.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:13]:
If you get a chance to go, definitely go to Costa Rica. It was so cool.
Leo Laporte [00:18:16]:
Oh, I'm dying to go to Costa Rica.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:17]:
In fact, the culture was amazing. It was beautiful. It was like, I mean, it's everything you really want on a trip.
Leo Laporte [00:18:23]:
So I'll show you my to do list because you're on my to do list, believe it or not. And it says, ask Jeff about Costa Rica.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:32]:
Yeah, well, before we do that, let me. Let me do a little prop action.
Leo Laporte [00:18:35]:
So those signs, that's how seriously I take you. Ask Jeff about Costa Rica. You see that? Look at that.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:42]:
I'm just. If you get a chance to go, go. It's a remarkably unique country. It's beautiful. The people, La Pura vida, they say it, and they really live up to that. Let me grab this sign. So last show, I promised people this sign. Haha.
Leo Laporte [00:18:58]:
Ah, now, we didn't send out all 10 of them, I don't think.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:00]:
Not yet.
Leo Laporte [00:19:01]:
Yeah, I think we got six or seven people.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:03]:
Junk is working on it. My sidekick.
Leo Laporte [00:19:05]:
In this house, we believe passwords should be random. Data should be backed up if you want one.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:11]:
I think we've only sent out like
Leo Laporte [00:19:12]:
5, so anonymity should be the default. Dishwashers don't need WI fi. By the way, my dishwasher is on my WI fi. And and this is always a weird one for me, the drivetrain should be air gapped. Well, given that the drivetrain is in a moving vehicle, I think it's actually technically air gapped. No matter what, who would plug in a drivetrain?
Jeff Atwood [00:19:36]:
Well, they mean don't let people remote.
Leo Laporte [00:19:38]:
I know what they mean.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:39]:
Okay, so I want to show you. So this is. That was mailed to Junk. I was slowing getting it out. It'll arrive for Monday. This is her business card. Check it out.
Leo Laporte [00:19:48]:
Jink Executive Sidekick. Co conspirator.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:53]:
Scan to connect.
Leo Laporte [00:19:55]:
Oh, you just gave out her phone number.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:56]:
Yeah, 555-1212. Go ahead, call it.
Leo Laporte [00:19:59]:
I'm dumb.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:00]:
You think I am, man?
Leo Laporte [00:20:01]:
It's a phony phone number. You're good, man. I. You know, you're good.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:06]:
Basic infosec is good. I mean, come on.
Leo Laporte [00:20:10]:
Junk lives in Danbury, Connecticut. My son was thinking of moving to Danbury, Connecticut.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:15]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:20:16]:
Even though he has a restaurant in New York City. I said, well, make sure there's a train station. He said, yes, because then you can take.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:21]:
And she gave me this folder and I'll show it to you. First of all, I love Making weird versions of her name. I like Michelle Junker, technically. And I can't.
Leo Laporte [00:20:31]:
Yeah. By the way, Junk, I just wanted to say. I said I can't call you Junk. I'm going to call you Michelle. Shelly. Shelly Shelley.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:38]:
This is a reference to a band.
Leo Laporte [00:20:40]:
I know who it is. Yes, I know.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:42]:
Oh, you do? Good. Yes. Do you got no loot?
Leo Laporte [00:20:45]:
I got no loot, man.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:47]:
That's like the one song. It's like Greatest Hits. It was like, I don't think so.
Leo Laporte [00:20:50]:
Are you talking about Tony? Tony. Tony. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:53]:
Yeah, that. I was very proud of this one. And also the font is Papyrus Sands.
Leo Laporte [00:20:58]:
It's a beautiful.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:59]:
Worst of all worlds. It's actually my new favorite is Comic Sans combined.
Leo Laporte [00:21:03]:
There's a Comic Sans mono. There's a Comic Sans programming font that I love. Comic Sans Mono. That gives you the best of both worlds. But it's my. But it's a nerd font, so it's good.
Jeff Atwood [00:21:14]:
Those SNL skits on Papyrus are.
Leo Laporte [00:21:17]:
Oh, that's funny, isn't it?
Jeff Atwood [00:21:18]:
They're devastatingly funny.
Leo Laporte [00:21:20]:
What's that glowing orb above the fox?
Jeff Atwood [00:21:24]:
Well, that. That's. Oh. Oh, this thing with the California logo. I can't. This.
Leo Laporte [00:21:29]:
Yeah, it's glowing. What is that?
Jeff Atwood [00:21:31]:
That is. I'm blanking on the name of the company. I want to say Hyperspace Lighting, but the guy they work with, Meow Wolf, which is. I have some Meow Wolf bracelets on. I should mention for my mom. I'm wearing a bracelet my mom gave me which says stay gold and, like, binary. Or it's just really.
Leo Laporte [00:21:49]:
Wow. Is your mom a nerd? No, no.
Jeff Atwood [00:21:53]:
But she's very cool. She's a lot like me. I mean, just like a lot. But she's great. I mean, that's my shadow Mom. And look what? Junk gave me a folder. And look what's on it. Look.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:04]:
Take a close look.
Leo Laporte [00:22:06]:
Got Junk.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:07]:
Hold on. I want you to see this.
Leo Laporte [00:22:12]:
It's a Mediatek Companion. That's hysterical. Did I show you my Mediatek Companiono device? I have also.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:21]:
Yes, you put it on the. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:22:23]:
I have a Mediatek that's fallen into the crack, which is.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:26]:
I really love that terminal thing. That is. I really enjoy that. Let's just put that right there and.
Leo Laporte [00:22:33]:
Oh, my God. Is that the price of Apple stock? Good Lord.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:38]:
Yeah. We shall go back in time and buy a lot of Apple stock, I'll tell you that.
Leo Laporte [00:22:40]:
No, it's falling. It's tumbling.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:42]:
And the other thing I have for you is. You said you wanted A giant coding horror.
Leo Laporte [00:22:46]:
Well, Leo, I love the coding horror.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:48]:
I gotta be on camera.
Leo Laporte [00:22:49]:
I love the coding horror.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:50]:
Camera, baby.
Leo Laporte [00:22:52]:
Oh, my God. That's a little too giant.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:53]:
You want some of this?
Leo Laporte [00:22:54]:
That might scare somebody. Put that in your window and you will never be robbed. I could tell you that right now. Holy moly.
Jeff Atwood [00:23:01]:
All right, go to that doesn't get a rat. Okay. I have slightly smaller ones that are less ridiculous. Like, it depends how ridiculous you want to be. And, you know, there's this size. This is like laptop size on the front, if you want. Oh, that's put on my four MediaTek Companiono Chromebooks, which I still love. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:23:22]:
And I had. I had junk look up MediaTek contacts
Leo Laporte [00:23:26]:
because I'm trying to get them to rename it.
Jeff Atwood [00:23:28]:
I want to help them with the name because they need some. They got a great product with, like, the worst name I have.
Leo Laporte [00:23:33]:
Well, they've made it. They've made a deal to do a new processor, I think. Who was it with? Was it anthropic? And it's got actually, a very good name.
Jeff Atwood [00:23:46]:
Hopefully it's not quad.
Leo Laporte [00:23:48]:
No, it's AI processor. Let me look this up, because I'm
Jeff Atwood [00:23:52]:
not a fan of Claude. We don't need to get into that. But not a fan. Put it mildly. I like to say to people, kneel before Claude. No, that's pretty much their attitude. They think it's alive. You know this, right?
Leo Laporte [00:24:04]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:05]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:24:05]:
Not anymore they don't, because the president killed it. Oh, look at you. Like these foil things.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:10]:
Holographic, baby. Use right words. So this is an xacd. This is allowed to do because it's licensed. Right. I mean, he has a Creative Commons and it's sort of abbreviated because it's a big flight thing. It's like, hey, rather than yelling at each other online, why don't we just, like, meet face to face and, like, be reasonable?
Leo Laporte [00:24:26]:
People know you did that with his cartoon.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:30]:
Well, it's allowed. The licensing is there.
Leo Laporte [00:24:31]:
I know. He's great. I love him.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:33]:
No, he is great. And I did actually mail him as well.
Leo Laporte [00:24:35]:
Oh, good. I just want to show you the terrible names that MediaTek has for its processors. They're all bad. Okay, so they are making an RTX Spark. That's the company. It was. Nvidia is going to do the Genio. The Dimensity 9500.
Leo Laporte [00:24:58]:
I'm sorry, 9500 500s.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:00]:
These are like, parody names.
Leo Laporte [00:25:01]:
The MediaTek Dimensity 8500.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:04]:
These are like, the names you would make to make Fun of companies.
Leo Laporte [00:25:08]:
So the. Yeah, I thought that they had a good name for the. The thing they're doing with Nvidia. The Spark is Nvidia's name. But that's Nvidia's name. Let's see what the processor name is. Because I have a feeling. I thought that maybe I like this name, but now I'm wondering.
Leo Laporte [00:25:23]:
Well, I guess they just took. They took Nvidia's and By the way, 128 gigs of unified memory. Screw that. That's not enough. Go away. Anyway, I think that. I think it's might be a language.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:35]:
I want to connect with them and save them from this. This disaster of gaming that they're walking into. Like, I don't. You know, if you hadn't said to me what you said, I would never have looked at that thing. And speaking of, we're talking about the
Leo Laporte [00:25:50]:
Lenovo Chromebook, which is really the best Chromebook out there.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:54]:
And it's basically when I was looking
Leo Laporte [00:25:56]:
the fine MediaTek companion with a K processor, right?
Jeff Atwood [00:26:00]:
And I was like, leo's crazy. I gotta research this. That man has gone. He's lost his mind. He's lost his marbles.
Leo Laporte [00:26:05]:
If Meow Wolf had made it, you'd have loved it. But no Lenovo. Well, forget about it. But it is good, isn't it?
Jeff Atwood [00:26:12]:
One of the best reviews I found was in this site called Chrome Unboxed.
Leo Laporte [00:26:16]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:17]:
And rather than this, like, media site where it's just like, let's sell ads, let's pump content. It's this guy in the UK who just loves Chrome OS and Chromebooks. And he said about. That's the machine I go to over and over again. And that's when I was sold, when this man, who is clearly a passionate enthusiast, he's doing something.
Leo Laporte [00:26:35]:
He wasn't being paid by Lenovo for that.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:37]:
No. And his site is amazing. It was just like a delightful oasis of, like, not bullshit on the Internet. You know, not trying to sell you, not trying to, like, just. I love this.
Leo Laporte [00:26:47]:
I love those sites. Now, Jeff, I want you to gird your loins. How are your loins?
Jeff Atwood [00:26:52]:
Wait, who said gird loins?
Leo Laporte [00:26:54]:
I want you to gird your loins because I'm about to show you something that will maybe disturb you, maybe excite you, maybe blow your mind.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:04]:
Okay, I'm gonna pretend I didn't see that. I'm, like, looking away at the screen. It's like, okay, this is like when they made Homer Simpson a real person one year for Halloween. A programmer dressed up as My avatar, which I thought was a great compliment with like, the. The white. Like, he made his hair look like. You could do your horror.
Leo Laporte [00:27:24]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:25]:
And by the way, I have many sparkle ones. These are sparkly. It's hard to see, but yeah, it
Leo Laporte [00:27:31]:
is the best blog logo ever. Oh, and we talked about this last week, last month.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:37]:
This is holographic. Your buddy.
Leo Laporte [00:27:40]:
Yeah, I like that.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:41]:
Chrome Unboxed is a Comes from the code complete book.
Leo Laporte [00:27:45]:
It is one of the lowest.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:46]:
But I do want to. Anybody who likes Chrome OS and Chromebooks, that is an amazing site. It was by far the best resource. And he was head over heels with this machine. Like you, Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:27:55]:
I probably.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:55]:
He was like, this is a machine I go back to over and over again.
Leo Laporte [00:27:58]:
What's the name of this site again? Let me just.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:00]:
Chrome Unboxed.
Leo Laporte [00:28:01]:
Chrome Unboxed.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:03]:
And I'll confirm that. But. And I signed up and it's like a hundred dollars, and I paid him $1,004.
Leo Laporte [00:28:09]:
It's not Kevin Tofol.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:10]:
I like Powers. I like Powers of two. Yeah. Chrome Unbox.
Leo Laporte [00:28:14]:
Robbie Payne. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:15]:
Great guy.
Leo Laporte [00:28:16]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:17]:
You know, and he's just like, out there putting out really good information and not like, selling you things constantly, like. And subscribe or die.
Leo Laporte [00:28:27]:
Wow. The best Chromebook ever made is now $400 off.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:30]:
I love sites like this, though. Yeah, this is like an Antec early.
Leo Laporte [00:28:34]:
Oh, I agree. And I hope he's making a little money on it.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:37]:
Well, I paid him a thousand dollars for the membership. 1024. And I did that for your Twit membership as well, by the way. I extended y' all the same courtesy for the Twit Club membership.
Leo Laporte [00:28:48]:
You joined the club for a thousand dollars?
Jeff Atwood [00:28:50]:
I did.
Leo Laporte [00:28:51]:
Oh, Jeff, you didn't need to do that. Thank you.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:54]:
Well, nothing necessary, Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:28:56]:
That's very sweet of you. I mean, Jeff's been trying to convince me to give away memberships.
Jeff Atwood [00:29:03]:
Well, I'm doing some. And we have five left, by the way. I will gift. This is not. Leo, you're not doing it. I'm doing it and only.
Leo Laporte [00:29:12]:
I told you I don't want to do this because.
Jeff Atwood [00:29:13]:
I know, I know, but I want them to see the content and then decide for themselves.
Leo Laporte [00:29:17]:
They see the content. All of our content is available to the public.
Jeff Atwood [00:29:21]:
Yes, but Jeff Atwood, this thing's paywalled.
Leo Laporte [00:29:25]:
I cannot hear about you think on YouTube unless they took it down. No, we. We make this available to the public.
Jeff Atwood [00:29:34]:
I just want everybody to get the full experience. And like, you know, just when you.
Leo Laporte [00:29:37]:
The only Difference is the version you get on YouTube doesn't have ads. The version we give to the club doesn't have ads.
Jeff Atwood [00:29:44]:
I just thought it was a nice thing to do. It's a generous one time. I'm not gonna do this all the time.
Leo Laporte [00:29:49]:
Yeah, please don't. Because. Because the reason is I, who actually have a little celebration, have some skin in the game. I don't want people in the club who don't have skin.
Jeff Atwood [00:29:56]:
Believe me, if they don't like this, they're gonna immediately turn it off. That is not a problem. They're not gonna feel like I didn't pay for this, so I must watch it.
Leo Laporte [00:30:03]:
It's somewhat my fault because I think I probably when I said this is a club show, gave you the impression that only club members could see it. And normally that is the case for the club show. But for you, just for you, we decided to make this show open to all.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:16]:
Well, good. Cause like I said, I cannot be contained by any mere pain.
Leo Laporte [00:30:20]:
That's why when you go to twit tv, obo show, you don't have to be a club member to go to Twitter tv.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:27]:
It's still a courtesy. There's other great shows on here, so.
Leo Laporte [00:30:30]:
There are. There are. And everything gets in the public eventually within 30, at 30 after 30 days. Except for one thing, which we are not. We can't put in the public, and that is the particularly the Apple keynotes. But we don't do it with any keynote. But Apple will. Apple takes us down when we do their keynotes.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:49]:
So, yeah, Apple and Nintendo, two companies we just don't mess with.
Leo Laporte [00:30:53]:
Litigious.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:54]:
No, no, no, no, no.
Leo Laporte [00:30:55]:
Don't mess with companies. Yeah, you remember their great hit Hold Me Now, Sue Me Now. Sorry, that was a bad.
Jeff Atwood [00:31:07]:
When Thompson Twins. I prefer Lizard.
Leo Laporte [00:31:09]:
Tony. Tony. Tony.
Jeff Atwood [00:31:11]:
Well, that's true. And that is. Well, that's why Shelly Chalet. That was one. I was very proud of that.
Leo Laporte [00:31:19]:
How'd you feel about that? Junk again, I have a hard time calling her Junk. I feel like that's demeaning. I should call her Michelle. Junk is cool, but she has another name she uses in forums that I like better. What was that? Pips.
Jeff Atwood [00:31:34]:
Pips. Like Dice Pips. Like that?
Leo Laporte [00:31:36]:
Yeah, I like that. That's a good name. It's good to have a non gendered name if you're a woman.
Jeff Atwood [00:31:43]:
Pips. Junk had a lot of very positive comments about the way y' all set up the disc. She said it was one of the best she had seen in terms of organization because it tends to be like total chaos because it's chat and it's like the reason we had huge compliments for you all. I know that's like, Anthony, right?
Leo Laporte [00:32:02]:
No, it's me. I set up the Discord. The reason the Discord is the way it is is because it's our comment section for each show. So every show that we do has a Discord post when the show comes out so that people can comment on it. Because one of the issues we have as a small company is, you know, we had to turn off YouTube comments. There's. There's lots of places people can comment and it's hard for us to moderate them all. We just don't have enough manpower to do that.
Leo Laporte [00:32:29]:
So what I wanted, my thought was, well, let's have all the comments on shows be in one spot. So I can see. So everybody can see them. I can see them. But we can also moderate them. YouTube comments are notoriously horrible. So. And the other thing we do with that, because, as you know, comment spam is a problem, is you have to actually apply for membership to the Discourse and I have to approve you.
Leo Laporte [00:32:53]:
And that's how we keep spam off of there.
Jeff Atwood [00:32:55]:
So thank you for approving me. And I was the new user of the month on the Discourse. I built that.
Leo Laporte [00:33:01]:
Congratulations. You got your own.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:02]:
Yay.
Leo Laporte [00:33:03]:
Your own gold star.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:04]:
Well, it's like a new person comes in and is interacting. It's like, well, thank you. You know, you are a notable user almost immediately.
Leo Laporte [00:33:12]:
That's a nice. No, that's wonderful. You know, one of the things you really did nicely in Discourse is the badges and stuff. That really does encourage participation. I am sad to say, our Discourse is not very busy. Yeah. The trust levels are good too. And by the way, congratulations.
Leo Laporte [00:33:27]:
You were immediately moved to a trust level four. Like that.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:33]:
Well, thank you. And the Trust system is really interesting in that you come in and sort of like you're a new user and you're kind of sandboxed. You can do stuff, but not a lot of stuff. And you're kind of rate limited pretty heavily because it's like a stranger comes to your doorstep. You're like, okay, let's get to know each other and see if you can come in the house.
Leo Laporte [00:33:51]:
Prejudicious. Yeah. Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:53]:
Are you going to take your shoes off and ask you to, you know. Did you yell at me?
Leo Laporte [00:33:57]:
Did you learn this at Stack Exchange? Was this kind of some of the learnings from Stack Exchange passed on to the next.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:05]:
Yeah, because at Stack Overflow. You didn't have to have an account to post.
Leo Laporte [00:34:11]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:12]:
So it was pretty easy to come in and do stuff. So we had a lot of protection mechanisms. I believe deeply in sort of what I call designing for evil. You don't want evil, but you have to design as if people are going to come in and just completely trash your site. And even then, like we missed a lot of stuff early on, but it's good to have that mindset. Not that you're being attacked, but you want to protect everyone. Right. Even from themselves.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:38]:
And I was noticing there was a meme topic on the Discourse, your Discourse. And I posted I want to post again and said you have to wait 12.
Leo Laporte [00:34:48]:
Well, we're gonna wait more than 12 hours.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:50]:
My own software has defeated me again because it's a rate limiter. So you're not right. I like trying to chat. It's like leave room for other people to talk.
Leo Laporte [00:34:58]:
Yes. Was it you that turned that on or was it Paul?
Jeff Atwood [00:35:01]:
I don't know. But like.
Leo Laporte [00:35:02]:
No, Paul turned that on. Paul, Paul, turn that on. So you asked about our Discord discourse. You don't. So I should just kind of as preparatory to this. As I mentioned, Jeff was the co founder of Discourse and still on the board at Discourse. Although not involved in day to day operations. He hates Discord.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:25]:
Hate is a strong word.
Leo Laporte [00:35:27]:
He's not a fan.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:28]:
I don't hate it. And so model is they can rug pull you anytime they want.
Leo Laporte [00:35:33]:
Of course they can. Of course they can. And we run on. I should point out we run on your servers. We run Discourse. I don't.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:40]:
But it's open source. You could take your data and export it.
Leo Laporte [00:35:43]:
But I could. Absolutely.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:44]:
But you could.
Leo Laporte [00:35:45]:
Rug puller.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:47]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:35:47]:
Because I'm running on your servers and
Jeff Atwood [00:35:49]:
you actually have rights to your own content.
Leo Laporte [00:35:52]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:52]:
Remarkably, no.
Leo Laporte [00:35:54]:
I far. I far prefer. But here's why we have a discord. There's several reasons we have a discord, but one is for real time interaction. And I know you have a chat feature in Discourse, but it's not. I think they should be separate. I think the chat should be separate. Now it's interesting because in our club, Twit Discord, Darren Okey, who lives in Australia had a good suggestion.
Leo Laporte [00:36:22]:
Maybe there's a way we can do this. And I'll ask you. He says, actually let me put it up on the screen so you can read it. I'm having trouble with my multiple screens at this point. But I will pull this up so that you can read it because I thought this was a good question.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:39]:
Well, I'm a big fan of like engaging with the community and actually listening
Leo Laporte [00:36:43]:
and I think that's why we engage in two different ways. Right. Is this it? Yeah, I just wish the live chat got copied into the per show chat. I think he's talking about Discord at this point because the per show chat doesn't really get any responses as someone in a different time zone who couldn't
Jeff Atwood [00:37:01]:
often watch live transcript on discourse.
Leo Laporte [00:37:04]:
Yeah, well, it's. I guess we could do that. Yeah, maybe that's the way to do it.
Jeff Atwood [00:37:08]:
It's a yes. And I want to be clear. I don't hate Discord.
Leo Laporte [00:37:12]:
Well, we turned on and I don't like it. The the forum features of Discord, which I don't really like. I would far prefer to separate Discord into real time synchronous chat and then have discourse for the asynchronous, more thoughtful postings. And I agree with you, the best way to handle that would be to take the transcript of the chat and put it on the discourse, which I will investigate doing. But my team set up the forums on Discord, which I really don't like. And that's what you're complaining about, Darren, is is those forums nobody ever responds to because Discord is not a good place. It's a mixed.
Jeff Atwood [00:37:50]:
I'm busy typing as fast as they can and pressing Enter.
Leo Laporte [00:37:52]:
It's a mix. Yeah, it's a mixed message. I think there's a place honestly for synchronous chat, especially for live shows. All our shows are live and as I told you, I've been doing that for more than 30 years. I've always had a live IRC chat going because especially when I was in broadcast radio, it was the only way you could do two way. Right. I was in talk radio so people could call, but that's, you know, a very rate limited. So the way that anybody watching could immediately respond to what's going on is in an IRC channel, which was great.
Leo Laporte [00:38:25]:
I started doing that in I think 1994. But I think they're two different mediums that there is synchronous chat, real time with live. That's what I think Discord should be. And then as I said, more thoughtful, asynchronous chat. That's what discourse is perfect for. And honestly we should. I don't like the fact that we have forums. I don't fully.
Leo Laporte [00:38:53]:
We can trash them like they're not. Anthony's the one who set up the form. Our Chat. Like before, we were also. Like before the forums, we were. We had. Each show had its chat, and we would, like, swap it into live category and back and forth. And that was not an ideal situation.
Leo Laporte [00:39:13]:
I think we have now what just. We have live chat. We have general. General, Yeah. I think we could get rid of the show. We do have topical, but I think it's hard for me to say. I mean, what we do want is we want club members to feel like they have the features that they want in the club. So that's why the forums maybe there.
Leo Laporte [00:39:30]:
But I don't think it's as good a platform for forums as discourse.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:34]:
May I have the con for a minute? Because I like what you said, and I want to sort of elaborate on that a little bit. One thing we learned in discourse is you basically have a highway with a slow lane and a fast lane. The slow lane is good for ideating. It's good for, like, real time. And then the slow lane is good for, like, actually planning and thinking more deeply about what you're doing and writing paragraphs. So you kind of need both in harmony. I'm not. I don't hate discord.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:04]:
I don't like the way that they own you. That's what I don't like. And you know, Iris, as you point out, these chat systems have been around for a long time, and I don't want everything to devolve into, let's type as fast as we can and press enter. Because that, in my experience, is not always a great conversation. I mean, it's okay, but you want to have a place to slow down a little bit and ideate in chat. And then in discourse, we have features. Push the chat into a topic. Like, we've brainstormed in the chat, and now we're ready to get to business here and talk about.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:40]:
We're actually doing in some detail. And also the skill of paragraphs. In fact, I love it so much, I made a sticker about it. Well, I didn't. Hanagomo did. Discourse. The power of the paragraph.
Leo Laporte [00:40:54]:
Well, you're a writer. Not everybody's a writer.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:56]:
I think everybody can. You're gonna be talking to LLMs, buddy. You better start being a writer.
Leo Laporte [00:41:02]:
Okay.
Jeff Atwood [00:41:02]:
I mean, I'm just saying it's a skill that will help you, like, in so many aspects of life, being able to just form a narrative.
Leo Laporte [00:41:09]:
I know.
Jeff Atwood [00:41:10]:
It doesn't have to be long.
Leo Laporte [00:41:11]:
I'm not here really to preach to people. I'm here to give them an opportunity to interact with us and if they're more comfortable interacting in a chat, which
Jeff Atwood [00:41:18]:
they generally are, it's a yes. And I'm not saying shut the other thing down and do what I say because nobody's gonna do that anyway. But underscoring what things are for and what method of communication is really appropriate for what you're doing. Because chat is an end all, be all is gets really weird. Like, if you start with chat and build on it, it's, as you pointed out, it's just. It's a really a big mismatch in like, speed. Whereas in discourse you say, okay, we're too slow because there's these things called megatopics and forums where it's like 10,000 replies. I'm like, who is reading this? Answer no one.
Jeff Atwood [00:41:57]:
It's a proxy chat room. Totally right? Mega topics. Who reads all this? So it's an outlet for that kind of energy, but it lives slowly and fast lane. If you want to go fast, you can go fast. If you want to go slow and think more deeply about stuff, you can do that too.
Leo Laporte [00:42:13]:
This is where. Yeah, see, I really like our twit forums when it's just per show. I really don't like things like the memes thread. Well, there's a show that belongs in chat, to be honest, you can only
Jeff Atwood [00:42:27]:
post every 12 hours anyway. Leo, that one. Ask me how I know
Leo Laporte [00:42:32]:
it was you.
Jeff Atwood [00:42:33]:
It's okay to have some fun, but I agree that the focus should be on the shows.
Leo Laporte [00:42:38]:
Yeah, that's what this is.
Jeff Atwood [00:42:39]:
From there, that would increase the focus on the shows, in my opinion. And you're going to have a little bit more of a thoughtful discussion. You can't just type awesome and press enter.
Leo Laporte [00:42:51]:
Actually, that's a good idea, Paul. I like that geek nerd badge. Can we create new badges in discourse?
Jeff Atwood [00:42:59]:
Is that kind of. I don't know where that is at the moment, but I will tell you. We're going to be encouraging people to come to the discourse and people might give you something if you come there, like in the mail. Who can say, you know, junk might send you something nice, something fun.
Leo Laporte [00:43:19]:
Stop bribing people, dude.
Jeff Atwood [00:43:21]:
I just want to share Joy.
Leo Laporte [00:43:23]:
I am bribing no one, okay? It feels coercive, so I'm just telling you.
Jeff Atwood [00:43:27]:
Coercive.
Leo Laporte [00:43:29]:
It's coercive. It's called a bribe, dude.
Jeff Atwood [00:43:31]:
No, no, no.
Leo Laporte [00:43:33]:
You give people money for behavior, it becomes coercive.
Jeff Atwood [00:43:36]:
I want to send people who come to discord discourse a little sign that says I love you.
Leo Laporte [00:43:41]:
I know, it's wonderful. I know.
Jeff Atwood [00:43:43]:
That's what I want to send you.
Leo Laporte [00:43:45]:
So, Paul, you asked an interesting question. I'll tell you why we don't have invites from members to join the community. Because that got us in a lot of trouble on Mastodon, our Twitch social, because Russian bots got on.
Jeff Atwood [00:43:59]:
You mentioned this and I saw your Mastodon post about it and then like, a whole lot of nothing.
Leo Laporte [00:44:05]:
Well, there was nothing because I got rid of them.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:07]:
What's your preferred, like, social thing?
Leo Laporte [00:44:11]:
I don't do social.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:13]:
That works for me.
Leo Laporte [00:44:15]:
I actually don't do it. I used to do it in the early days of Twitter. I was very active. I joined Twitter in 2006 when it first started, and in fact, at one point I had more followers than anyone else on Twitter with a whopping 5,000 followers. And then Kevin Rose, and this was 2007, and I got in a battle over who could get to 10,000 or something like that. I can't remember what the battle was. And then Ashton Kutcher joined and destroyed the whole place. And after that it just went straight downhill.
Leo Laporte [00:44:55]:
Same thing. I was very early on Instagram. I joined Instagram on day one and I really liked it when it was a chronological list of my friends photos. I thought that was great, but I've. But all of these places have been completely becoming fied. They're all algorithmically driven to for engagement.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:15]:
You know, I love Corey, but I really dislike this term.
Leo Laporte [00:45:19]:
I just in shittify. You don't like it. You do not like it because it's coarse or you don't like it because it is accurate.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:24]:
It's stupid.
Leo Laporte [00:45:25]:
It's stupid.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:26]:
Well, I mean, it's just going to the least common denominator. It doesn't mean anything. It just means it got worse. And I have to say.
Leo Laporte [00:45:33]:
Oh, no, no, no, no. It's much more than that.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:36]:
I know, I've looked it up. I had a big argument with Corey on this on mascot. Believe me, I know it's not.
Leo Laporte [00:45:40]:
It got worse. We. That's normal. That's called entropy.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:43]:
Look, Corey has to sell books, man.
Leo Laporte [00:45:45]:
No, well, yeah, to the death on that one. Corey's.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:48]:
And then he was caught. Caught using LLMs. They were all pissed off about that. Look, I like Corey, but I just. This term is so negative. It's like. I don't know. I would rather have a more positive spin of like, yes, there's a degradation, but it doesn't explain what it is.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:05]:
It's just. It's. It's badness. It's shitty.
Leo Laporte [00:46:08]:
It's like, no, I don't think you understand it at all. If that's.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:12]:
I have an LLM report on what it means.
Leo Laporte [00:46:14]:
Oh, there you go. Well, that explains it. So let me tell you very briefly, give you the perfect example of.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:21]:
I'll tell you. You want me to tell you I can prove that I know what it is. As services get bigger, they stop caring about the users and all they care about is growth and their own stuff and they degrade the experience at the expense of the users. Like lots of ads, like the features are very confusing. They're just trying to grow like a cancer.
Leo Laporte [00:46:40]:
Yeah, that's actually a simplified version, but it's actually a little more nuanced than that because there's stages. So like when Amazon started, it was all about, we are here to serve the user, right? Everything we do, all our purpose is to make the customer happy. Smile.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:58]:
Right?
Leo Laporte [00:46:59]:
And they do that for growth. And of course, as soon as they achieve a certain amount of growth, the next step is everything we do is to make the businesses who sit on us happy because they want to grow the number of businesses which they did very successfully. More than half of all the purchases on Amazon are through third party sellers. But at some point they've now locked in the users and by locking in these businesses, they've locked in business. So you cannot leave. And at that point extraction begins. And it's not that it's making it shitty, it's about extracting. So at some point the whole purpose goes from being about the customer, being about the businesses to being about extracting maximum value out of each.
Leo Laporte [00:47:42]:
And because you have now fallen for this and are locked into this, you don't have an exit path. And that, which you're right about, by the way, about Discord. But, but Discord is just one example of pretty much everything doing this.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:56]:
How about we don't have monopolies? How about that? I mean.
Leo Laporte [00:47:59]:
Well, I agree, we need, we need antitrust. We actually were having this conversation earlier. I was having this conversation with Anthony and Jason.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:05]:
Have you seen the ad campaign Etsy is running against Amazon? Buy from other Jeffs. The name Jeff is having a moment. Let me get a prop. Hold on, hold on, hold on. This is funny too, because Junk did something amazing. There's this book, Infinite Jeffs.
Leo Laporte [00:48:20]:
Yeah, it was our pick of the week two weeks ago.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:23]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:48:23]:
Because we have Jeff Jarvis on intelligent machines and I saw it first on your counter. Yeah, yeah, I love that all words
Jeff Atwood [00:48:31]:
are Jeff, but it's the text of Infinite Jest. By David Wallace, an amazing writer. So let me tell you what Junk did to me. Unbeknownst to me, she knows. She's listened to this famous voice actor for a long time. He reads a lot of stuff. She had that guy read a section of this book. Jeff.
Leo Laporte [00:48:52]:
Jeff. Jeff.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:53]:
You know, like, Jeff, Jeff.
Leo Laporte [00:48:54]:
Jeff.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:54]:
Jeff was like, what is he?
Leo Laporte [00:48:57]:
Jeff. Jeff.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:57]:
Jeff.
Leo Laporte [00:48:57]:
Jeff.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:58]:
Yes, yes.
Leo Laporte [00:48:59]:
Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:00]:
Old joke. And another thing that went on is I think I bought this for myself. Or no, wait, no, no, Greg Nous. One of our writers saw that I was down, bought this for me, and then it said, just say Greg.
Leo Laporte [00:49:16]:
Greg.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:17]:
I said, jeff. Chef. Jeff. Jeff. Jeff. Jeff. Jeff. Jeff.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:19]:
Sign Greg. Greg was having a little bit of a downtime, so I sent him the same book with a gift note that said junk, Junk, junk, junk.
Leo Laporte [00:49:29]:
Infinite Junk would be fun. It doesn't rhyme like infinite. Just Ray Porter to record it. Wait a minute. That's not just some guy. He got Ray Porter to record it.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:40]:
I know. I don't know who this man. Oh, but that's apparently impressive. Which was. He did a good job. I mean, it was junk.
Leo Laporte [00:49:47]:
I didn't know. Now I'm. Now I'm very impressed. Wow.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:52]:
I thought I sent it to you. If I didn't, I will that he's
Leo Laporte [00:49:56]:
the best of them all. He's a guy to the Martian. Although they later took him off and put Will what's his name on it. He also did.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:03]:
Well. Wheaton.
Leo Laporte [00:50:04]:
Huh? Yeah, Whedon.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:05]:
Whedon.
Leo Laporte [00:50:06]:
He also did a very good job with Project Hail Mary. He's a wonderful narrator. Ray Porter. One of my favorites.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:14]:
I'll have to talk to Junk. That clip might be suitable for public consumption. In terms of the fun.
Leo Laporte [00:50:20]:
Yeah, if she paid for it.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:21]:
They ambushed me with this very famous voice actor reading.
Leo Laporte [00:50:25]:
Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure she retained all. She retained all rights, just like we retain all rights to this song.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:40]:
Well, Buy from Other Jeffs is a brilliant campaign on Etsy. The name Jeff is definitely having a moment for some reason.
Leo Laporte [00:50:53]:
And it's short.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:54]:
Never even like the name that much. Not really.
Leo Laporte [00:50:57]:
You know, will Leo ever have its moment? I don't think so.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:00]:
Well, I think Leo is cooler than Jeff.
Leo Laporte [00:51:03]:
It's not even my name, as you know. It's. It's just. It's the. It's my professional name. Right. My real name is Raul.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:11]:
I do not believe you.
Leo Laporte [00:51:13]:
It's not. It's Leo.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:15]:
Yeah, I like the accent. And we preserve the accent in Clay Graham's art for the show. Just.
Leo Laporte [00:51:20]:
Thank you for.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:20]:
I made sure.
Leo Laporte [00:51:21]:
I. I really appreciated that out of
Jeff Atwood [00:51:23]:
respect for my man.
Leo Laporte [00:51:24]:
I loved that Leo.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:26]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:51:27]:
But I was told that I shouldn't really be Leo when I first started working radio in San Francisco, ironically. And I. And I'm not going to say what they said. They said it sounded a little effeminate, shall we say?
Jeff Atwood [00:51:43]:
What year was this?
Leo Laporte [00:51:46]:
1984. 8087 was.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:48]:
That was a whole different lifetime.
Leo Laporte [00:51:50]:
It was a different time.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:52]:
Yeah. I don't think there's a different place.
Leo Laporte [00:51:54]:
And I said, well, I could be Leo. I mean, it's kind of what it is. On my license, driver's license, it says Leo. So I guess that's my name. By the way, I just want you to know you've driven me to the giant wad of thinking putty today.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:07]:
Oh, that's the magnetic one.
Leo Laporte [00:52:08]:
This is the magnetic one. It comes with a super powerful ceramic magnet, which it then forms itself around over very.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:18]:
Yeah, I have some here. It's right here. I have some. Let me give my putty.
Leo Laporte [00:52:22]:
Do you have the big one, though?
Jeff Atwood [00:52:23]:
Hold on.
Leo Laporte [00:52:24]:
The big one.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:25]:
What do you think, buddy? So what do you think?
Leo Laporte [00:52:27]:
I. So my daughter gave me my first. You were into this. I was going to give you.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:32]:
Why you gotta disrespect me like that?
Leo Laporte [00:52:34]:
My daughter gave me this.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:36]:
Oh, look, this is oil slick, I think.
Leo Laporte [00:52:39]:
So my daughter gave me this little one for Christmas and I thought, oh, this is really cool. And I looked on Amazon, I said, I'm gonna get some more. I didn't know that the normal size can is this. I thought I was ordering this.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:50]:
Call that the normal size. I don't know.
Leo Laporte [00:52:52]:
It's full size.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:53]:
The thing. Well, first of all, do not let the putty touch anything other than your hands or the container or you will really regret it. Because it doesn't come back from that. No, no, no. And there's actually a number of, like, hand exercises you can do with it.
Leo Laporte [00:53:07]:
You recommended this in a blog post.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:09]:
I have it in a blog post.
Leo Laporte [00:53:11]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:11]:
Which has like the hand exercise stuff and it's just fun to mess with. You can make bubbles, you can pop it. You can like just. Again, do not drop it in a bunch of cat hair.
Leo Laporte [00:53:21]:
Cat hair would. And don't eat Cheetos when you're doing it either.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:27]:
Well, just don't eat Cheetos in general. Probably.
Leo Laporte [00:53:29]:
Probably in general.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:29]:
So much orange. It's like out of control. I like them.
Leo Laporte [00:53:32]:
But, Jeff, I want you to refer to your list of bullet Points of things you wanted to talk about.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:37]:
Well, I think I went through them all actually.
Leo Laporte [00:53:39]:
Oh, that's good news because we're almost
Jeff Atwood [00:53:41]:
done with our ridiculous E Ink thing that attaches to your phone.
Leo Laporte [00:53:45]:
I have it.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:46]:
You have it. Of course you have it. I'm like, why do I need this? I don't know.
Leo Laporte [00:53:52]:
And like you don't need it. It's the stupidest thing ever. You know it's funny though, you know about the third party firmware that makes it useful?
Jeff Atwood [00:54:00]:
The app had a two star.
Leo Laporte [00:54:03]:
Yeah, they had the worst. The worst software. But they. But there is a third party. But here's the sad thing. Talk about inshidification. This is the X. I really just
Jeff Atwood [00:54:13]:
like that word every time. I hate.
Leo Laporte [00:54:15]:
And there's. And.
Jeff Atwood [00:54:16]:
And there.
Leo Laporte [00:54:17]:
You can use the web USB interface in Chrome to download new firmware which is much improved. But here's the latest from the fine folks at XTE Inc. They're blocking it.
Jeff Atwood [00:54:31]:
What?
Leo Laporte [00:54:32]:
They're. I can't recommend this anymore because they're blocking the. The. The firmware. They were third party firmware.
Jeff Atwood [00:54:40]:
Huh? I had mine do like a. Like a. I didn't have time to load anything on it for you. But also, speaking of ink, I wanted to.
Leo Laporte [00:54:48]:
I have quicksilver loaded on mine.
Jeff Atwood [00:54:50]:
I wanted to defend the Mudita E Ink phone a little bit because we didn't explain this well enough. It does every phone function. You can even take pictures which are color. So you're taking a picture which is black and white. It's color on the other side, which is like, am I on a Game Boy? It does everything.
Leo Laporte [00:55:08]:
Is it 3D?
Jeff Atwood [00:55:09]:
You can side load an E Ink browser on it. I do think that's a mistake, but I want to tell you it has every app you would want for like normal phone use. And it comes with some neat stuff. In fact, I have a box here for Leo. For you, my friend.
Leo Laporte [00:55:24]:
Whatever you do, don't send it to the United States Postal service.
Jeff Atwood [00:55:27]:
Ah, my pip boys.
Leo Laporte [00:55:28]:
What is the man who makes this? The Moo Moo.
Jeff Atwood [00:55:30]:
What name did I write on this?
Leo Laporte [00:55:32]:
Leo? Look at that. It's a little gift pack. Is there anything with Tiffany blue on it in there?
Jeff Atwood [00:55:38]:
Hold on. I don't know what that is.
Leo Laporte [00:55:40]:
What is it? Is it Mugen?
Jeff Atwood [00:55:43]:
Hello? Is that the right direction?
Leo Laporte [00:55:45]:
Yes. Perfect.
Jeff Atwood [00:55:47]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [00:55:47]:
It's an accent Degue or an acute accent.
Jeff Atwood [00:55:49]:
Funny story. I was in Montreal and I don't know French. I know a little bit Spanish. I was at a store buying something and the lady behind the counter goes voila. And I was like, did a magic just happen? That means there it is. It doesn't mean anything. There it is. Is this like a flourish?
Leo Laporte [00:56:09]:
And you know what abracadabra means?
Jeff Atwood [00:56:12]:
That just means there it is.
Leo Laporte [00:56:13]:
Yeah, I know. Isn't that funny?
Jeff Atwood [00:56:15]:
That was very funny. But I want to show you the thoughtfulness that really goes into this. I feel like we, we undersold it because first of all, it comes kilo bag and it comes with meditation cards. Like, like meditation cards.
Leo Laporte [00:56:27]:
Oh.
Jeff Atwood [00:56:28]:
And like it's, it's trying to sort of get you to like have a better relationship with your phone. Like I feel like, yes, the browser thing, but you were very dismissive and I didn't defend it.
Leo Laporte [00:56:38]:
By the way, Mudita Compact is almost as bad as Mediatek Companio.
Jeff Atwood [00:56:43]:
No, this is better name. Not bad at all. I mean, it's okay. I mean it's just, it's a little, it's a little bit KT Eco Hippie, but it is neat. And they have a new phone coming out that has like a physical keyboard as well. And they have some other products like for meditation that I actually signed up for.
Leo Laporte [00:57:02]:
I love the idea of a physical.
Jeff Atwood [00:57:03]:
But let me show you the app so you can see there's actually, you know, there's some stuff on here. Yeah, I mean you can do your E ready. You got your camera, you got your maps.
Leo Laporte [00:57:11]:
So let me ask you, is this your daily carry as the kids say?
Jeff Atwood [00:57:14]:
No.
Leo Laporte [00:57:15]:
No. Okay, I rest my case.
Jeff Atwood [00:57:18]:
Well, I give it to parents. I've given one to a local parent.
Leo Laporte [00:57:21]:
Oh, good. You're torturing your parents. Nice.
Jeff Atwood [00:57:24]:
No, no, no. Other people's kids because.
Leo Laporte [00:57:27]:
Oh, for kids.
Jeff Atwood [00:57:28]:
Maybe their kids are just too digital.
Leo Laporte [00:57:29]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:57:30]:
Pull them back a little.
Leo Laporte [00:57:31]:
Yeah, no, that's actually not a bad idea. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:57:34]:
So I just want to defend it a little because it is a really well designed, neat product and like they've had good updates and you can side load the browser and it is, it is fun.
Leo Laporte [00:57:44]:
So I think paying $400 for a phone you don't use is perfectly reasonable.
Jeff Atwood [00:57:49]:
Well, I'm going to give it to someone, you know, I'm not going to let it sit here collect us.
Leo Laporte [00:57:55]:
I'm trying to decide to be honest. You know, by the way, I hate this, but a part of my job requires, and I try not to every year. And Lisa makes me buying the newest iPhone and the newest, usually the newest Google phone. Although I've stopped now because I don't have, I don't feel Like, I have to really worry about Android anymore. I have to buy it every year. I don't want to buy another iPhone every year. But I do have to hashtag first world problems. Oh, it's a huge first word problem.
Leo Laporte [00:58:22]:
But it's also a drain on the pocketbook.
Jeff Atwood [00:58:25]:
Well, true. And one thing I will say that the iterative camera improvements have been really amazing.
Leo Laporte [00:58:32]:
Additively, pretty good camera.
Jeff Atwood [00:58:34]:
Like the camera is insane. Now on Discourse, there's a certain size of image and we had to keep upping it because like the. The cameras were getting so good. And I went on the yo yo forum, which is run on discourse. It's yoyoexpert.com great place for yo yo stuff. And I had a yo to show you. Oh, the titanium, which I referenced last time, but I wasn't supposed to because it wasn't out yet. This is the titanium version, Ultra state.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:02]:
Yeah. So it's.
Leo Laporte [00:59:03]:
So now it makes my state Gold one be kind of.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:06]:
Well, that's the sea gold. That's the seagull.
Leo Laporte [00:59:08]:
Oh, I have the other one. That's the stakeholder.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:09]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:59:10]:
The state gold one in the box.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:12]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:59:13]:
It's going to be valuable someday. That is beautiful.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:15]:
Play with it. No, don't be like that.
Leo Laporte [00:59:16]:
I'm just kidding. That is beautiful.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:18]:
Those are good. But one of those was mass produced in. In China, which is fine and like just pumped out. And the other one's like made by two guys in Eugene with like actual loving grace.
Leo Laporte [00:59:28]:
So the. The yo yo factory is a Chinese firm.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:31]:
Well, they just do the traditional thing, one drop. Who makes those Yo Yos? That's the only company making Yo Yos in the United States right now. And titanium is so cool. I don't know if I can. At least I can do this for you. It sings.
Leo Laporte [00:59:48]:
So it's a. It's a singing bowl. Yo Yo.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:51]:
Well, titanium just has a property.
Leo Laporte [00:59:53]:
Yeah, I love titanium.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:54]:
When we visited, we were doing college trips up north and they were machining it. And the machinist guy, Sean, he was so fun to watch. He loved building things. And he told us that titanium is tough to machine because it vibrates while you're machining it and you have to like. And it's also a lot tougher metal down. But titanium is just super badass. The Ultra State, which is another play on, you know, deep, deeper, deepest ultra. And we have something else coming that I can't say what it is, but it would be compatible with the word state.
Leo Laporte [01:00:27]:
Thank you for not making me edit last week's show because you mentioned the Titanium. Yo. Yo.
Jeff Atwood [01:00:32]:
Oh, no, no, that was okay. I mean, that wasn't a big I
Leo Laporte [01:00:35]:
appreciate break or anything.
Jeff Atwood [01:00:37]:
I mean, I don't want to have those kind of things. I don't create work for y' all at all, for sure.
Leo Laporte [01:00:42]:
God knows the last thing we need to do is work more. Exactly.
Jeff Atwood [01:00:49]:
You mentioned you wanted to talk about common work.
Leo Laporte [01:00:51]:
Oh, so there is a. So Markdown is having a day, isn't it?
Jeff Atwood [01:00:57]:
It's like Jeff now again.
Leo Laporte [01:00:59]:
Yes, yes.
Jeff Atwood [01:01:00]:
Why? What happened?
Leo Laporte [01:01:02]:
AI happened.
Jeff Atwood [01:01:03]:
It's the what happened?
Leo Laporte [01:01:04]:
AI. It's the lingua franca of AI. It understands markdown. Humans and AI both are very comfortable with markdown.
Jeff Atwood [01:01:12]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:01:13]:
So, you know, it's funny because Aaron Schwartz and Jon Gruber.
Jeff Atwood [01:01:18]:
Thank you for mentioning Aaron, by the way.
Leo Laporte [01:01:20]:
I started with Aaron because John takes so much of the credit for this and I think Aaron and I like John. Yeah, I have nothing against that, but
Jeff Atwood [01:01:27]:
make sure I totally took what I did. So let me briefly interject. I just wanted it standardized because it was such a pain in the ass as programmers to deal with all these edge cases and all these different.
Leo Laporte [01:01:40]:
John Gruber driving crazy a very weak Perl implementation of his spec.
Jeff Atwood [01:01:45]:
I wouldn't say weak. It's just. Look, when you're talking about programming languages, that's like real computer science. Like, that's not stuff you wing it on. I can't do that.
Leo Laporte [01:01:54]:
It was probably a bunch of if statements on it. Yeah, if you see an asterisk, then now make it italics.
Jeff Atwood [01:02:00]:
Anyway, some of these rules had indeterminate behavior, so they would vary by implementation and like, ah.
Leo Laporte [01:02:05]:
Although code is in many respects the best spec in some ways, but it. But it wasn't an easy spec to implement, so there was a move to standardize it called common Mark. Was this because. Of course.
Jeff Atwood [01:02:20]:
Well, kind of, yeah. Because I was so sick of dealing with these annoying edge conditions. The best thing we had was something that would run it through 20 implementations of Markdown and see which ones. Well, that was just had to do consensus reality.
Leo Laporte [01:02:36]:
That wasn't really Jon Gruber's fault. Right. Because GitHub had its own flavor. Everybody made their own flavor. I guess if the spec is loose, then that allows that to happen. But that can happen anyway.
Jeff Atwood [01:02:48]:
Well, some of the stuff was good. Like spoilers comes up a lot code blocks. There was an alternate way. So languages do evolve. Like Java has different versions.
Leo Laporte [01:02:58]:
Look at Perl.
Jeff Atwood [01:02:59]:
Yes, it's okay to evolve. And it was frustrating because John really took it as an attack. Like, you're stealing my thing. And I'm like, I love your thing.
Leo Laporte [01:03:09]:
Yeah, we just need to steal.
Jeff Atwood [01:03:10]:
I'm trying to make your thing better.
Leo Laporte [01:03:11]:
Right. And this was the common mark. So you started it. There were a number of people involved as well, right?
Jeff Atwood [01:03:17]:
Yeah. John McFarlane, who is a genius, right. He does Pandoc. He's a pandoc, like just doing 20
Leo Laporte [01:03:25]:
jobs like my Pandoc all the time. In my email.
Jeff Atwood [01:03:28]:
Yeah, tell John McFarland. Write him an email and tell him because, well, he is an outstanding human being. Again, that's no way we could have gotten where we got without this, man.
Leo Laporte [01:03:37]:
It's going to have its day because of LLMs. So it turns out LLMs markdown is okay, but JSON, actually, my LLM prefers CSV and there have been some people pushing for HTML, plain HTML, and says, what are you doing? It understands HTML as well as anything else. It's all language.
Jeff Atwood [01:03:55]:
What's the goal here? We're just talking.
Leo Laporte [01:03:56]:
Well, that's the problem. The goal is to have something that an AI can understand clearly and a human can understand clearly. And that's why Markdown is kind of winning on this.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:07]:
But it's words.
Leo Laporte [01:04:08]:
I mean, it's just words. Words, but. But it's structured.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:12]:
Why do we need.
Leo Laporte [01:04:13]:
AI wants some structure. Right.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:16]:
Okay. I wasn't aware this was like a big controversy.
Leo Laporte [01:04:19]:
Well, it isn't a. It's just having its moment and it isn't quite a controversy.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:24]:
Well, so is the name Jeff?
Leo Laporte [01:04:25]:
Yes, just like Jeff. And in fact, my friend Paul Thurat, who hosts our Windows Weekly show, is a big fan of Markdown and is about to write a book on Markdown. And so Jon Gruber has immediately kind of put his arm around him, saying, let me tell you all about Markdown.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:41]:
So I want to make sure that John McFarland.
Leo Laporte [01:04:43]:
Yeah, I will tell.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:45]:
There is no way we can talk to.
Leo Laporte [01:04:47]:
Talk to McFarland. Yeah, he's at Berkeley without him. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:50]:
He was so pivotal. He's such a nice person.
Leo Laporte [01:04:53]:
Pandoc is an intermediate format for these things. Or what is.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:58]:
You got to understand, John McFarlane is an absolute genius. I. I can't even. Like, he's working at a much higher level than I am. I know for sure I'm not an elite coder.
Leo Laporte [01:05:08]:
When I'm working in. Org mode, for instance, and I want to write HTML, often the easiest thing is for Emacs to convert it through using Pandoc. So it's kind of a. It's A document converter, basically.
Jeff Atwood [01:05:20]:
Paul should definitely talk to John McFarlane. I think that's.
Leo Laporte [01:05:23]:
Why don't we get Paul on our. I mean, John on our show at some point.
Jeff Atwood [01:05:28]:
Jon gruber.
Leo Laporte [01:05:29]:
No, McFarlane.
Jeff Atwood [01:05:31]:
McFarlane. Okay. I was a little scared there for a while.
Leo Laporte [01:05:32]:
No, I've had. I just had Gruber on. I mean, we. I know Gruber.
Jeff Atwood [01:05:36]:
I like Gruber. I mean, we basically made up, but. And then he's saying all this stuff and I'm like, that's not how I remember it. This is like the movie Rashomon now.
Leo Laporte [01:05:46]:
Well, I think we. There was a loss here because of this battle. We didn't get Common Mark, which I really think Common Mark deserves to be.
Jeff Atwood [01:05:54]:
Well, it did, actually.
Leo Laporte [01:05:55]:
Is it the standard?
Jeff Atwood [01:05:56]:
Almost everybody implements it, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:05:57]:
What does GitHub. Because GitHub has its own flavor now.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:00]:
Well, they added one or two things on top of it, but that's the baseline spec.
Leo Laporte [01:06:04]:
Okay.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:04]:
So you guarantee that stuff will always work.
Leo Laporte [01:06:06]:
So GitHub markdown is common mark plus a few things.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:09]:
And I think we adopted some of their stuff because it was just so prevalent. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:06:13]:
Well, that's the other thing.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:14]:
It's been a while since I left.
Leo Laporte [01:06:15]:
GitHub is also having a moment because of AI. Every AI uses GitHub now.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:19]:
Well, I think the world is having a moment because of generative AI and LLMs. I mean, I think that's like a world thing.
Leo Laporte [01:06:25]:
Well, that's what I'm saying is whatever the AI decides it likes, because suddenly the flavor. For instance, for some reason, AI keeps choosing the MIT license. And so Everything now on GitHub is MIT licensed. Everything. Not that it's the best license necessarily, but it's just what it is. And at this point, who knows where it came from? It just is.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:50]:
One thing I want to tie into
Leo Laporte [01:06:52]:
this is, did you, when CommonMark, were you aware of GitHub's org mode when you did CommonMark?
Jeff Atwood [01:06:57]:
Oh, definitely. And we had a person from GitHub, this is pre Microsoft acquisition, working with
Leo Laporte [01:07:04]:
us because Org mode predates just by a hair Markdown. And it's very similar to Markdown. And I always wondered how much of Markdown was influenced by Org mode, which is a ascii. ASCII mode in Emacs.
Jeff Atwood [01:07:18]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [01:07:19]:
As you know, I'm an Emacs guy.
Jeff Atwood [01:07:21]:
But I want to be clear that when we started Common Mark, we tried to bring in a bunch of people from different companies, not just Jeff and whoever, but to. To. To come together and decide, you know, to make it sane just so that
Leo Laporte [01:07:34]:
there's a standard, so that discourse can. So now, does discourse adhere to common mark? Like, if I write in common.
Jeff Atwood [01:07:40]:
Oh, definitely, yeah. I mean, there might be some additions on top for some stuff, but even those eventually kind of get folded and spoilers comes up all the time. It's really interesting how often spoilers are important. It really is. Yeah. That ends up being an important feature, believe it or not.
Leo Laporte [01:07:53]:
How about Mastodon? Does it use common mark?
Jeff Atwood [01:07:57]:
I don't know. But I do know they support markdown in the. Because I do italics and stuff with it. I would assume. So they have a spoiler. It's widely considered the baseline implementation. It's the only. There is no other standard.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:08]:
What standard?
Leo Laporte [01:08:09]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:10]:
You know.
Leo Laporte [01:08:11]:
Yeah. So I think more people should know about common marks. That's one of the reasons I was going to ask you about that.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:16]:
Well, thank you. And I think a lot of people do. And I want to tie something into this. So Ben Dumpke is a person I hired early on in Stack Overflow. He's in Berlin, and there was an opportunity to give a talk in Berlin.
Leo Laporte [01:08:29]:
I listened to his interview. That was fantastic.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:33]:
Wasn't that amazing?
Leo Laporte [01:08:34]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:35]:
And that is kind of the stuff we're going to get into. And if you don't mind, may I read the synopsis of the talk? Because it's funny.
Leo Laporte [01:08:42]:
Please.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:42]:
This is in Berlin in, like, two weeks, so. And everybody's coming up. Shut up about how awesome Berlin is. I get it. Berlin is awesome.
Leo Laporte [01:08:49]:
You're going. You're going there for this.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:51]:
Yes. Nice. You know why? Because I owe Ben that. That's why I'm going. And also because it's very timely for a lot of reasons to do this, but primarily I'm going for Ben, and it's actually on his birthday, part of that trip.
Leo Laporte [01:09:05]:
Oh, nice.
Jeff Atwood [01:09:05]:
And you know what we're going to do on his birthday?
Leo Laporte [01:09:07]:
What?
Jeff Atwood [01:09:08]:
Talk to the Mastodon people at User Interface.
Leo Laporte [01:09:10]:
Nice.
Jeff Atwood [01:09:11]:
Because I donated them. And Imani, the designer, was going to come, but she's too busy building the product, which I can totally relate to.
Leo Laporte [01:09:18]:
But Felix, Jeff won't mention this, but he was a big donor to the Mastodon project.
Jeff Atwood [01:09:22]:
Well, because we got to have an alternative. What do you complain all the time? That doesn't fix things.
Leo Laporte [01:09:26]:
Thank you. I'm a big fan of Mastodon and I'm very glad that you helped.
Jeff Atwood [01:09:32]:
And there's a lot of room for improvement. But. But how does it improve if we don't, like, get it there? Right. And Then we're just back on someone's property that they own us. I mean, we got to break the cycle, man.
Leo Laporte [01:09:44]:
Is federation the solution to that?
Jeff Atwood [01:09:47]:
Well, that's a whole different topic. Let me. I want to read this.
Leo Laporte [01:09:51]:
Yeah, let me. Let me hear his. His thing.
Jeff Atwood [01:09:54]:
Yeah, it's not long. It's like a title and a synopsis. Do something funny while I look this up.
Leo Laporte [01:10:02]:
Okay. What's his last name?
Jeff Atwood [01:10:07]:
His name got longer. Okay. The title is okay. When we launched Stack Overflow, my blog entry was titled Stack Overflow. None of Us is As Dumb as All of Us.
Leo Laporte [01:10:17]:
I love that.
Jeff Atwood [01:10:19]:
And there's a Despair. Org poster.
Leo Laporte [01:10:21]:
It's just funny.
Jeff Atwood [01:10:22]:
And I bought that. It's actually out there, the. The licensed version with the printout of the change, because I'm weird like that. But the title of the talk is none of Us is as Dumb as All of Us. Community and knowledge go Hand in Hand. So it's another joke. But the good part is the synopsis. Let me read this.
Jeff Atwood [01:10:42]:
And Ben and I worked hard on this, and a lot of this is Ben, because really, collaboration is fun and it ends up better. So Ben and Jeff met in 2010, when Jeff hired Ben straight out of the nascent community forming on Stack Overflow. But to Jeff's surprise, Ben was not actually a professional software developer, yet he was a curious tinkerer, a hobby programmer who loved figuring out how things worked, building things, and learning from others. But what is left of the community that helped Ben become successful? How do the curious tinkerers of today form communities to learn what's beneath the surface of the simple LM answers? We must continue to build a public commons of programming knowledge that benefits everyone, especially at a time when LLM providers dream of monopolizing that knowledge. This is deeply true, and that is what Ben was getting at. His idea was software freedom. And I was like, I like it, but we gotta, like, narrow it down. And really, it's about building commons.
Jeff Atwood [01:11:47]:
If you're spending all your time talking to an LM privately, what happens to the commons? How does anyone else learn from that?
Leo Laporte [01:11:55]:
This is commonly considered the reason Common Lisp failed is because everybody wrote their own personal libraries. And so while there were a million libraries that were all unmaintained, and that's kind of what's happening now with LLMs. Everybody's writing their own little tools, and even if you share them on GitHub, they're all so personal, they don't really build the commons. So I think you're exactly right. This actually I think people consider this was the reason Common Lisp failed. And by the way, I should mention this was the podcast you turned me onto. It was quite good. The co Recursive podcast.
Jeff Atwood [01:12:33]:
That is amazing. I had forgotten a lot of that. I changed Ben's life. We changed each other's lives.
Leo Laporte [01:12:40]:
Yeah. It's a great story about him working
Jeff Atwood [01:12:42]:
at St. Eko, all the April fool stuff.
Leo Laporte [01:12:44]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:12:45]:
And it was so good. My man was the Michael Jordan of website. April Fool's jokes. And I will stand beside behind that statement 100%.
Leo Laporte [01:12:54]:
Yeah, yeah. The Michael Jordan of April Fool's jokes.
Jeff Atwood [01:12:58]:
And he's just an amazing person in general. Like, he's not a programmer, but he's like curious, interested, persistent.
Leo Laporte [01:13:03]:
Well, he's a programmer now.
Jeff Atwood [01:13:06]:
Well, he was a hobby programmer, kind of. Yeah, he was a technical German way of describing it, because he's German. But if I can make Ben laugh, that's a good laugh. Because you know how hard it is to get Germans to laugh. Yeah, it's really difficult.
Leo Laporte [01:13:17]:
They don't have much of a sense. Well, they do.
Jeff Atwood [01:13:19]:
It's just they're, you know, it's a different. I like it, actually. I like the different cultures.
Leo Laporte [01:13:24]:
And where is his talk gonna be? It's in Berlin. But where at what?
Jeff Atwood [01:13:28]:
It's the. The website is. We are Developers World Congress. We are developers dot com. So we are Calm World Congress. Oh, they put the session up. So there's a link for this. Okay, I'll just send this to you.
Jeff Atwood [01:13:44]:
The signal. I got it.
Leo Laporte [01:13:45]:
It's right here.
Jeff Atwood [01:13:46]:
Oh, yeah. No, no, no. Oh, and go to my profile.
Leo Laporte [01:13:50]:
This is his talk. And so he'll be speaking at this event if you are in the Berlin area next month, 8th through 10th July.
Jeff Atwood [01:13:59]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [01:14:00]:
And so will you be joining Ben on stage?
Jeff Atwood [01:14:02]:
Yes, we're doing it together.
Leo Laporte [01:14:04]:
That's very.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:05]:
And I required that. I was like, I'm not going to go unless Bengos, we do it together or not at all.
Leo Laporte [01:14:11]:
So you're both going to do this. And you did a blog post on
Jeff Atwood [01:14:13]:
this stack overflow and then came back.
Leo Laporte [01:14:15]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:16]:
Compliment. That is from a German. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:14:19]:
And he. And he has a great story about what it was like coming back. And it's also about how you organize companies. It's really. It was a very interesting podcast.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:28]:
I like kind of advocating my. He was kind of trying to take my role there, you know, and advocating for these things, but he didn't have the power.
Leo Laporte [01:14:35]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:36]:
You know, and it's not disastrous or anything, but you Know, Ben is not there, so that should tell you something. But if you'll humor me, go back to that site and bring up my speaker profile, please,
Leo Laporte [01:14:49]:
because this is funny window. But I will bring it up right now.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:55]:
I just want to share a little funny anecdote I think we're gonna do on stage as well. I was talking a bit about. I wasn't sure. So Jeff.
Leo Laporte [01:15:07]:
Okay, I'm gonna look right there.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:09]:
There I am.
Leo Laporte [01:15:10]:
There's his hair.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:11]:
Okay, Right, Okay. So why do I look like you have no shirt?
Leo Laporte [01:15:14]:
Why are you not wearing a shirt in this picture?
Jeff Atwood [01:15:16]:
So whenever I get asked for speaker pictures, I send a picture of me with a no regerts fake tattoo. From where? The Millers. And they're supposed to say, haha, Jeff, where's your real picture? Well, the Germans don't do that. They're like, yeah, this is your picture. I'm like, what? Like they're supposed to say no. And I sent them the real picture. It's supposed to be funny. But you're doing.
Leo Laporte [01:15:38]:
I don't see the tattoo though. Where's the tattoo?
Jeff Atwood [01:15:40]:
Well, they cropped it.
Leo Laporte [01:15:41]:
Oh, is it on your chest?
Jeff Atwood [01:15:44]:
I think my speaker card has it. Let me see. Hold on.
Leo Laporte [01:15:47]:
That is really funny.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:50]:
That is funny because like I said, Ben's like, did you know? I was like, no, I didn't know that.
Leo Laporte [01:15:56]:
I was like, no regrets.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:58]:
I always do that little joke.
Leo Laporte [01:15:59]:
I'm like, oh my God, there it is. Junk. Had Just, just put it up in our discord. Holy cow.
Jeff Atwood [01:16:05]:
There you go. That's my, that's my speaker badge. But it was supposed to be a joke.
Leo Laporte [01:16:11]:
Well, they know that. They're not stupid. They think it's funny. Well, I don't, I don't know if they know the Millers, but I think they, it's, it's funny.
Jeff Atwood [01:16:20]:
I gotta bring the tattoo now.
Leo Laporte [01:16:22]:
It's some sort of statement about code.
Jeff Atwood [01:16:24]:
Let me write this down. I gotta bring the tattoo and on stage I'll just like, you know, I don't know, pull my shirt down. No regurts, you know, whatever. That would be funny too.
Leo Laporte [01:16:33]:
We could have named this show no Regrets, but we decided to call it
Jeff Atwood [01:16:36]:
off by one is announced. We did that.
Leo Laporte [01:16:39]:
You made it up and you get all the credit. It is the best name for a
Jeff Atwood [01:16:43]:
show especially I don't remember, like a
Leo Laporte [01:16:45]:
show featuring Jeff Atwood, who is off by one.
Jeff Atwood [01:16:49]:
This is off by one person, which is me.
Leo Laporte [01:16:52]:
It's a coding joke. It's. It's everything. It's the it's the best name of any show.
Jeff Atwood [01:16:57]:
It's a really good name. And the art Clay did.
Leo Laporte [01:17:00]:
Oh, let's give Clay some credit for
Jeff Atwood [01:17:02]:
the art, because it really is Clay Graham. Yeah, make sure you listen on the page, too. Clay Graham, art.com. because his stuff is stellar.
Leo Laporte [01:17:09]:
Did we not understand? There it is. Thank you, Anthony.
Jeff Atwood [01:17:13]:
So the way we did this, I want to mention we started ideating with LLMs, and then clay had to tap me on the shoulder, go, hey, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. You don't ship the LM stuff. I was like, you're right.
Leo Laporte [01:17:22]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [01:17:22]:
So then we iterated on that and came up with this, which is, I mean, spectacular. Yeah, he did. And we were just riffing on it. And it has, you know, your name spelled correctly. Leo.
Leo Laporte [01:17:32]:
Leo. La.
Jeff Atwood [01:17:34]:
And almost had choose from infinite endings. But Rob, another writer, was like,
Leo Laporte [01:17:40]:
people are kind of. Maybe, though I hope not a little disappointed.
Jeff Atwood [01:17:45]:
In what sense?
Leo Laporte [01:17:46]:
Because there isn't a choose your own adventure. I. I thought you actually meant that literally. Well, we could, like, we would. We would pause every five minutes into the show and say, okay, now,
Jeff Atwood [01:18:00]:
well, why don't we want to go down the holiday show?
Leo Laporte [01:18:04]:
The holiday show.
Jeff Atwood [01:18:04]:
We'll have Holiday. That's a perfect place to pull.
Leo Laporte [01:18:06]:
It's a lot of work to do A, choose.
Jeff Atwood [01:18:08]:
I am so excited. Leo invited me to do a charity holiday show.
Leo Laporte [01:18:13]:
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Don't overstate it. I said I'm willing to explore the concept.
Jeff Atwood [01:18:18]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:18:18]:
I have not A, invited you. We have B. We haven't agreed to do it. I'm ignoring the notion, Molly.
Jeff Atwood [01:18:27]:
I mean, you could get Jonathan Colton
Leo Laporte [01:18:32]:
every year. Do our anniversary, our annual Christmas show.
Jeff Atwood [01:18:34]:
You can get John. We had John Hodgman thing for you.
Leo Laporte [01:18:37]:
It would be John Hodgman, Jonathan Colton.
Jeff Atwood [01:18:39]:
Nothing illegal.
Leo Laporte [01:18:43]:
I'll ask him. I don't know. What is Colton up to these days? I don't know. But it would be fun to have him play code monkey, wouldn't it?
Jeff Atwood [01:18:50]:
Code monkey and baby got back. That version is like, I love that.
Leo Laporte [01:18:54]:
I love that. It's funny. He also does bills, bills, bills.
Jeff Atwood [01:18:58]:
And then he did a song about your children, which I quoted in my post about the children. Your children ruin you in the most delightful way. And he said it was interviews. Like, you kind of come out like a vampire on the other side with superpowers. And it was such a delight the way he framed it.
Leo Laporte [01:19:15]:
Jonathan Colton and I and Veronica Belmont and a few of us and Molly White performed the theme from Portal on the stage. Where was that in San Francisco, the Great American Music Hall. It's on YouTube. I'm going to find it for you. On GarageBand instruments.
Jeff Atwood [01:19:46]:
Nice. Portal was just such a masterpiece. And I know some of the guys that worked on that.
Leo Laporte [01:19:53]:
Oh, yeah. Here it is, ladies and gentlemen.
Jeff Atwood [01:19:56]:
They went to Valve.
Leo Laporte [01:19:57]:
Here it is.
Jeff Atwood [01:19:57]:
So this is.
Leo Laporte [01:19:58]:
I know we've already done this song tonight, but I feel like would be wrong if we didn't do it again this way.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:05]:
So that's Cowboy Leo.
Leo Laporte [01:20:07]:
Right. And that's me in the cowboy outfit. And I think that's Merlin Mann on the drums. It is, but I just want to point out I am not a musician and I never played garage band in my life.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:21]:
No, this is Rock Band. The game.
Leo Laporte [01:20:22]:
Rock Band. Pardon me.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:25]:
I worshiped Rock Band.
Leo Laporte [01:20:27]:
Do you? I wish you'd been there.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:30]:
I was ridiculously deep on Rock Band
Leo Laporte [01:20:32]:
because I had no idea what I was doing and I kept bombing. But here's the funny thing, which I'm going to point out very briefly before we begin, is they've reversed the positions. So Veronica's guitar fret is on the right and mine's on the left. So it looks like I'm doing great and Veronica's blowing it. It's quite the opposite, ladies and gentlemen. It looks like I'm actually doing it right.
Jeff Atwood [01:21:04]:
Well, it looks like you're doing nothing, actually.
Leo Laporte [01:21:06]:
Well, if you think the fret behind me.
Jeff Atwood [01:21:08]:
I know how the game works.
Leo Laporte [01:21:09]:
I know. You can see she's actually doing something.
Jeff Atwood [01:21:12]:
This isn't like Robert Palmer's Addicts to Love, where they're just like.
Leo Laporte [01:21:15]:
And there goes Merlin on the drums. He's doing fine. But watch when it kicks in, I'm just gonna blow it for them. But fortunately, no one knew it was me. And this was one of my most embarrassing moments. And I don't want to relive it, so I'm gonna stop it right there.
Jeff Atwood [01:21:32]:
Well, I don't think it's that embarrassing because, like, unless you know the game somewhat well, I mean. And it's about having fun. Most people eventually.
Leo Laporte [01:21:40]:
I didn't know the game. That was probably a mistake. I should never have agreed to it. By the way, here we are with our matching.
Jeff Atwood [01:21:47]:
What is. Who is creating these images and how can we stop them? I want to know how to stop this person, whoever this is. Is it a rope?
Leo Laporte [01:21:54]:
This is why we have a discord. Is this open so that it doesn't go into discourse? It just floats off into space like this. Show off by one. Which is.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:05]:
Now I need Some rain bleach. Now,
Leo Laporte [01:22:09]:
ladies and gentlemen, we'll this again in a month. Jeff wants to do it in three weeks, but I explained to him, well,
Jeff Atwood [01:22:15]:
I got to go to Berlin stuff.
Leo Laporte [01:22:17]:
Good. Because our calendar doesn't.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:19]:
I love this channel.
Leo Laporte [01:22:19]:
It's either weekly, daily, or monthly. There's no three weeks.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:24]:
Who makes up these rules?
Leo Laporte [01:22:25]:
I do.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:25]:
We do. We do.
Leo Laporte [01:22:27]:
You know why we do that? So that people can remember when the show is off.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:32]:
The show is called off by one my friend.
Leo Laporte [01:22:34]:
That's true. It should be every three weeks it's
Jeff Atwood [01:22:36]:
on brand and you know, I didn't
Leo Laporte [01:22:38]:
even think of that. Yeah, then no one would ever watch it because they'd never know when it was on.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:44]:
They're going to watch it because it's fun.
Leo Laporte [01:22:45]:
It is fun and it's always a
Jeff Atwood [01:22:47]:
pleasure and it's a very warm show. When I was writing about it, I was like, this is happy. Like we're.
Leo Laporte [01:22:51]:
I love your blog post. It was positive.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:53]:
Like, we're not tearing people apart. We're just like we're now.
Leo Laporte [01:22:58]:
This program is sponsored by staygold. Us.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:03]:
Well, thank you.
Leo Laporte [01:23:04]:
Yes. Everybody must go there now and read about income inequality in the United States and what we can do to make it better. Staygold Us.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:14]:
Can I show you one thing that's new? Go to the top.
Leo Laporte [01:23:16]:
Yes, go to the top.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:17]:
This was just put in about two weeks ago. Go to GMI the dropdown and do research at the bottom. Oh, and scroll down and you'll get to the counties. We have preliminary data back.
Leo Laporte [01:23:29]:
Oh, this is great.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:31]:
Yes. The three Keep Going RX Kids is amazing, by the way. That's an incredible program. Mercer County. Keep going. That's what last time I saw my dad live. And then Beaufort, like, just click overview for now. I don't think they have the deep leaks working, but my God, this is Edward Tuft level quality.
Leo Laporte [01:23:47]:
Oh, look at this. This is beautiful. I gotta tell you, if they didn't do this with AI, then I would be shocked. But okay.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:55]:
No, Tia and her team, they don't do that. I hate to tell you, Tia is incredible.
Leo Laporte [01:24:00]:
This is Give Directly. He is wonderful. I was thrilled to meet her.
Jeff Atwood [01:24:05]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:24:06]:
I had a great time meeting the three people from. What's the name of the group that's doing this?
Jeff Atwood [01:24:12]:
So it's Give Directly on the execution side. And it's Open Research on the research side.
Leo Laporte [01:24:17]:
Open. The open. Open Research.
Jeff Atwood [01:24:18]:
It's really, you know, sort of a Neapolitan ice cream thing.
Leo Laporte [01:24:22]:
Open Research. There. There is their website right and they
Jeff Atwood [01:24:26]:
also did the largest study in the US and one of the largest in the world. You can read that as well. Yeah, but some of the preliminary research data is back because the goal is to.
Leo Laporte [01:24:36]:
I met Tia and I met Patrick, and I met Karina. At your house. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:24:40]:
And Karina lives in Detroit, and I got her to see the Robocop statue.
Leo Laporte [01:24:43]:
She came out from Detroit and she went to the Robocop statue. What did she say?
Jeff Atwood [01:24:48]:
Well, I mean, Robocop's awesome. I mean, just the first movie. Don't watch any other movies.
Leo Laporte [01:24:52]:
But, you know, this statue, they raised the money to build it 20 years ago, I think, and nobody would take it. So it's now in the parking lot of some amusement complex.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:05]:
You know what, though? Robocop is a great movie.
Leo Laporte [01:25:08]:
I started watching it the other night.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:11]:
It's quite good. Because when you see the fear in his eyes. RoboCop, his eyes literally reveal that you see the fear. That is the most human moment in that movie because everyone turns on him. The police force turns on him. The corporation turns on him.
Leo Laporte [01:25:25]:
Is there a shower scene in that one?
Jeff Atwood [01:25:29]:
Where are you going with this? I'm gonna gift you the Steam game shower with your dad simulator.
Leo Laporte [01:25:35]:
It's time to put the thinking putty away, ladies and gentlemen.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:39]:
I will, too.
Leo Laporte [01:25:39]:
Here, put it back in.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:40]:
By the way, I like the iridescence.
Leo Laporte [01:25:42]:
That is beautiful. Now I have to order another giant jar.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:45]:
Do get the iridescent ones. They're outstanding.
Leo Laporte [01:25:50]:
Thank you, Jeff Atwood. Again, it's all at staygold Us. That's where you can see the research under GMI and read all about it. What they're doing is really right.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:59]:
Let's use tech to solve poverty. How about that? Guys, come on, let's do this.
Leo Laporte [01:26:04]:
Then I don't have to redesign my discourse.
Jeff Atwood [01:26:08]:
And we will help you with that.
Leo Laporte [01:26:09]:
I don't want to. I like it.
Jeff Atwood [01:26:11]:
No, no. Discord. You guys got it.
Leo Laporte [01:26:13]:
Oh, that's right. Discord is the one I need help with. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:26:17]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:26:17]:
Thank you, everybody.
Jeff Atwood [01:26:18]:
Two words here, buddy. One is about fighting Discord. One's about talking discourse. I know they're similar, but.
Leo Laporte [01:26:25]:
Oh, that's a good point. That says it all, doesn't it?
Jeff Atwood [01:26:28]:
Well, it was. It was a gaming thing first.
Leo Laporte [01:26:30]:
So we can either have discord or we can have discourse.
Jeff Atwood [01:26:35]:
Discourse is a better word. And I got ahead of that curve. Like, I got that word early, and it became popular later. But discourse is like, let's talk.
Leo Laporte [01:26:44]:
We're very happy. And by the way, discourse was a sponsor on our network. They have a business plan and they host it and they do a great job. And a special thanks to Paul, who is my volunteer moderator over there. He does a great job keeping that place nice. And if you're not a member of either of our two social networks that are open to all, the Mastodon is at Twit Social and the Discourse is at Twitter.
Jeff Atwood [01:27:12]:
And talk to Junk if you want to.
Leo Laporte [01:27:15]:
I don't know. Cool. Junk is in there.
Jeff Atwood [01:27:17]:
Yeah, she's in both places. Junk is in there everywhere, all at once.
Leo Laporte [01:27:21]:
And thanks to the Club Twit members who make this show possible. If you're not a member of Club Twit, Twit tv, Club Twit, you don't have to join the Discord, but you can. And maybe you want to chat with us. Maybe you want to see all those AI images that Darren OKE and Pretty Fly for Assist Guy and others make. Maybe you want to see them.
Jeff Atwood [01:27:45]:
Slow Lane and Fast Lane are good, man. I'm not saying that's kind of what I like. Yeah, both good.
Leo Laporte [01:27:51]:
Yeah. I'm honestly, I was sad that we had to shut down the irc, but we couldn't do the IRC as a club benefit, a club perk. We can do that with Discord, and it turns out you've told me that we could do it. Memberful also supports Discourse, but it's a little far down the road at this point to change that. So we're going to just stick with Discord.
Jeff Atwood [01:28:12]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:28:13]:
Sorry, Jeff, but we do have our wonderful Discord.
Jeff Atwood [01:28:16]:
No, no. It's a yes, and it's a yes,
Leo Laporte [01:28:18]:
and that's my fault. I love them both. I do.
Jeff Atwood [01:28:21]:
Just hope they don't decide to take all your stuff away, because they might.
Leo Laporte [01:28:25]:
I'm sorry to say we only have 15 seconds to comply. Ladies and gentlemen,
Jeff Atwood [01:28:30]:
Discord just told us they're. They're shutting everything down.
Leo Laporte [01:28:35]:
Have a great one. Take care, Jeff. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time on Off By One.
