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

Hi, this is Alison Sheridan of the NoCillaCast podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, September 6, 2026, and this is show number 1,113. That number's getting long to say. Well, before we get started, if you're listening to this episode close to when it comes out, remember that Steve and I will be joining all of the other lovely NoCillaCastaways in our live chat room at Podfeet.com slash chat during the Apple announcement this Wednesday, September 9, at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Really hope to have you there. As always, we will not be talking in voice like we are right now in the live chat room, but we will be there texting with everybody else saying, hey, is your feed stalled and how much money have you got? Have you sold your kidney yet to get that folding phone? That kind of chatter is the kind of things we talk about there. All right. Remember last week when Alistair talked about his long and accomplished career as a programmer and his passion for technology? And how he walked us through his transition to accepting an AI assistant to help him code? Well, this week, we sort of have opposite land. After some earlier segments by Eddie Tonko and me, you're going to hear Adam Angst explain to me his long career of never becoming an accomplished programmer and how he also accepted an AI assistant and allows him to have the joy of creation of applications. Like I said, it's kind of the exact same story, but with the same happy ending. If you've been using a Mac for a while, you know that you can tap the space bar with any file selected to invoke Quick Look, the built-in previewing app for files. Image files show the images, music plays, videos play, PDFs render, presentation and word processing files render nicely, and plain text files render as, well, plain text. Even Affinity Designer files render their images with Quick Look. Now, you know I'm a fan of Markdown, which is a plain text format that has superpowers, when rendered by a Markdown interpreter. It uses hash marks for headings, asterisks or underscores for italics, and numbers for numbered lists and has kind of a clean format for how you do links. Sadly, Quick Look, when applied to a Markdown file, only shows that file as plain text. I put an example screenshot in the show notes of a recent security bits file in Markdown. The text is a tiny, monospace font, all the Markdown is showing and the indents look all wrong. I'd never thought to see if there was a solution to this. Just kind of accepted it. You know, a fact of life. But then I came across a thread conversation where someone who goes by the name of Piero Sierra wrote, hey Apple, can we get preview to render Markdowns? Okay, thanks, bye. So, several people chimed in with solutions, but the one that caught my eye was by our friend Mike Rose, who pointed to MarkedQL, written by another friend, Brett Terpstra. MarkedQL is an instant Markdown preview in Quick Look. The installation goes as follows. Get ready, right? Get ready to write this down. Ready? Install the app. Use the spacebar to Quick Look Markdown files. That's literally all you have to do. I put a screenshot in the show notes showing off how beautiful, and more importantly, more readable, security bits looks in Quick Look after installing MarkedQL. There's a left sidebar with clickable outlines of headings, and the main panel is rendered with nicely indented bullets and BU syntax highlighting for links. If we had any math, diagrams, or code in this file, Brett promises that would be rendered nicely as well. As soon as I wrote that sentence for the show notes, I knew I needed to at least test that claim with a mermaid diagram. Mermaid diagrams are created with plain text, and it's a pretty arcane and difficult thing to follow if you don't know the language's conventions. In Quick Look, without MarkedQL, you see things like B, dash, greater than symbol, pipe, daytime, pipe, space, C, square bracket, living room scene, close square bracket. Now, if you open that with MarkedQL, you'll see that it's a little bit different. If you open that with MarkedQL, installed in Quick Look, the diagram is rendered as a beautiful flow diagram with arrows, just like any other proper diagram. In the screenshot I included, again in the show notes, you can see a purple box with the words living room scene, and an arrow going to it with the word daytime over the line. This is the kind of magic the mermaid can create, but you can't see unless you're, if you're using Quick Look, you can't see it without MarkedQL. It looks fabulous with MarkedQL. If you open MarkedQL, you'll see that it's a little bit different. If you open MarkedQL, the only thing you'll see is the settings window, with options to set the Apex mode, which is Brett's own unified Markdown engine, and some fancy things I don't understand at all, like the ability to toggle on Enable Quarto Support, add custom styles, and change which preview style you like. I do understand that last one. The default is GitHub, which is what I've been using, but there's nine other styles to choose from. On the Preview tab of Settings, you'll find way more options. In fact, I had to use a scrolling screenshot. I'll show them all. I like seeing the table of contents and the syntax highlighting, but you can toggle either of those off. You can even toggle off mermaid diagrams, but I can't imagine wanting to do that. By default, the size of the text and images is fixed, but there's a toggle to scale the preview with the window size. Here's another problem MarkedQL solves, at least for me. Bart writes the security bits and programming by stealth show notes in Markdown, but he uses the application Obsidian to create his Markdown and organize his files. This tool adds a bunch of so-called front matter to the file, which he uses for that organization. Obviously very useful for him, but when I get the Markdown file, it has a whole bunch of lines at the top that, for me, are purely visual noise. With MarkedQL, by default, it hides the front matter, which is glorious. Now, if you do want to see the front matter, MarkedQL can present it as a code block or a nicely formatted table. I also want to draw your attention to a section at the bottom where you can pre-grant permission to images stored on your desktop documents and download folders. You don't have to check these boxes, but if you have a Markdown file that calls embedded images from a local folder, you'll be prompted to grant those permissions. I thought that was a nice little touch by Brett. Now, if you want to test out MarkedQL, you can download a free trial from markedapp.com, and when you decide you can't live without it, you can buy it in the App Store for $10, or it's available with your Setapp subscription. If $10 is too steep for you, and you don't have a Setapp description, follow the link to the threads conversation that I put in the show notes to see other open-source solutions to solve the same problem. Now, it makes sense that Brett would be the one to solve this, and elegantly at that, since he's the author of the app Marked. So this is MarkedQL. Marked is a Mac app that's a standalone preview app for your Markdown documents with advanced proofreading tools, beautiful themes, and powerful export options. Thanks to Brett for solving the problem, and to Micros for helping me out. Thanks for telling us about it. The important thing is that meaning lives in pauses, not silence. Here is the nerdy concept, but it is basically common sense once you hear it. Our brains do not interpret speech as a flat stream of sounds. We interpret it as a stream of intentions. A lot of that intention is carried by micro-pauses. The breath before an important clause. The tiny pause. The tiny hang before a reveal. The slightly longer pause after a name. The thinking beat before a correction. These pauses are rarely long. They might be a few tens or hundreds of milliseconds, but removing them can change what the sentence means. So the point of cadence editing is not to delete space. It is to shape space so the intention remains intact. This is MarkedQL. MarkedQL is also where editing speed starts to come from. The personal bit for me is that editing speed is not mainly about hotkeys. Hotkeys help, of course, but the real speed comes from rhythm. When I have a consistent rhythm for handling breaths, pauses, mistakes, pickups and transitions, I stop re-deciding everything. I develop a taste for what human sounds like in my material, and I repeat it. That is what makes the edit invisible. Not perfection. Taste. Which is annoying because taste is much harder to put in a checklist. There are two failure modes I listen for. Once I can hear these clearly, I can work much faster. The first is rushed cadence. Everything is clean, but the listener never gets to settle. The voice feels as if it is trying to get through the text, rather than live inside it. Common causes are deletion, every pause after a sentence because it looks long on the waveform. Trimming breaths too aggressively. Removing the tiny hesitation that signals a thought turning. The second failure mode is consonant blur. This one is not about processing. It is about cutting too close to speech. If I cut right up to the front edge of words, I can shave off consonant onsets. TKP, even the start of it. The line starts to feel less articulate, even if I cannot immediately say why. This is the editing version of the repair tool problem from last time. The starts of words matter. So I want edits that keep meaning and cuts that do not steal edges. I use minimum silence rules so I do not negotiate with myself. They're not rigid laws, but they stop me from over-editing. Within a sentence, micropauses are often meaningful. I do not flatten them by default. If I tighten them, I tighten gently. Between sentences, I usually want a little more space than I think, especially at audiobook pace. Removing too much makes the narration feel impatient. I remember that breaths are phrasing. I will control loud breaths, but I am careful about deleting the pause they sit in, because that pause is often what makes the line feel natural. You can translate this into numbers if you like, and sometimes I do use numbers just to stop myself drifting, but the better rule is perceptual. If the edit is clean but the thought does not land, I cut too much. Then there is the question of ambience-aware fades. The other half of invisible editing is ambience. If I cut in a dead way, hard edges, mismatched room tone, sharp transitions, the listener gets that subtle edited feeling, even if there is no click. So the habit in logic is simple. Almost everything gets a fade. Tiny fades on the ends of regions avoid little clicks. Slightly longer fades help when I am crossing between different noise or room moments. And if I have cut around a breath or a noise, I am listening for bed changes, not just silence. In other words, I am shaping the floor as much as the voice. So what does cadence pass look like in logic? My cadence edit pass is not an attempt to sculpt the whole chapter in one heroic sweep. It's a rhythm pass. First, I remove obvious mistakes and false starts. The moments where I genuinely did not mean to say that. Second, and this is where logic's remove silence type tools can help get to a rough shape, I tighten long dead air. Anything genuinely empty that does not serve pacing. Third, I shape pauses rather than delete them. This is the real work. If a pause feels long, I shorten it slightly and listen again rather than nuking it. Fourth, I protect word onsets. When I cut near speech, I leave a tiny buffer. I'm not trying to cut at the pixel. I'm trying to avoid shaving consonants. Fifth, I check transitions. If a cut is technically clean but the sentence now feels as if it is leaning forward too hard, I put some time back. That sounds slow, but it becomes fast once the ear knows what it is looking for. It is much quicker to make the same good decision a hundred times than to have a fresh little crisis at every pause. Here is the demo. Awkward pause, rushed versus human. This is an excellent demo because the difference is not theoretical. So, take one awkward moment, a hesitation, a breath, or a long pause before a clause, and make two edits on it. Version 1 is clean but rushed. Trim the pause until it feels tight. Make it as short as you think it can be without sounding obviously chopped. And now you listen as a listener, not as an editor. Let's listen to mine. So, take one awkward moment, a hesitation, a breath, or a long pause before a clause. Often it will feel impatient, like the narrator does not trust the listener to keep up. Version 2 has human timing. Put some pause back. Not all of it. Just enough that the thought lands. Let's listen again. What changes is not silence. It is intention. The second version often feels more confident, even if it is tense. It is intention. It is intention. It is intention. The second version often feels more confident, even if it is technically slower. And that is the test. Cadence editing is not about speed. It is about the sentence feeling like a person said it on purpose. So, where does that leave us? The takeaways are simple. Do not delete every pause. Shape it. Fade like you mean it. Listen for rushed cadence. And listen for consonant blur. After a cadence pass, I listen to a few minutes at a time and ask one question. Does this feel like a human thought, or like an editor pushing it along? If the edit is clean but the sentence feels impatient, the edit is wrong. Next time, we keep it boring again in the best way because once capture and cadence are right, EQ becomes much simpler. Subtractive, minimal, and surprisingly effective. If you want to know more, come and ask me over in the Slack community at podfeet.com forward slash slack, where I and all the other lovely Nosilla castaways enjoy friendly, positive online conversations. Feel free to message me, Eddie Tonkoi, if you have any thoughts, questions, or techniques you're using. It would be nice to share ideas. You can also find our work at jerntonkoi.com, where you'll find Jern's character-driven queer love stories, the audiobooks I produce for them, and bonus material for our subscribers. I'll be back soon to talk through some more of my workflow, but for now, happy recording and happy reading. Are you the kind of person who brings an Apple TV with you when you go away on vacation? If you are, you might be a candidate for the gadget I'm about to tell you about. But first, the problem to be solved. When you go away from home for business or a vacation, you may miss being able to easily watch the streaming TV you're used to at home. Or maybe you have Sling or YouTube TV or another service to watch network TV shows when you're at home. How do you watch those when you're away? Perhaps the place you're staying has a smart TV? Technically, you could lock into your Netflix, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock, HBO Max accounts, but then you'd have to remember to log out of all of them before you leave. The Apple TV is pretty small at 3.7 inches square and 1.2 inches thick, so it's fairly easy to slip into your luggage. But you also have to bring the proprietary power cable that's nice and long and a bit thick. Oh, and an HDMI cable. And don't forget the remote. We've done that before. Now, somebody told me recently pointed out you could use the app on your phone to control your TV, but the remote is a little bit easier for us. If you've gone long enough or addicted to TV enough, this work might be worth it. Steve and I have done it quite a few times, and it works well. But for some trips, it's just not worth climbing behind the cabinet to unplug one of our Apple TVs and then to wrap up all the cables and get the remote. Often, we just suffer with lying in bed trying to watch something on my iPad Pro. It's not terrible, especially with the 13-inch model and its magic keyboard case, but it's kind of hard to balance in bed, get it up high, high enough for viewing and not have it pointed at just one or the other of us. On the Primary Technology podcast, or it might have been Mac Power users, Stephen Robles told the audience about an interesting solution. As soon as I heard his description, I immediately purchased the Ugreen Magnetic Wireless USB-C Transmitter and HDMI Receiver from Amazon for $70. The big picture is that the device lets you wirelessly transmit from your phone, tablet, or computer to a TV, projector, or other display, and it's very easy to use. So, I'm going to show you how to do that. So, let's get started. Now, Ugreen is a trusted company amongst the nerds, which is great. The product comes in two pieces, a wireless transmitter and a wireless receiver. The two units are palm-sized cylinders around, say, two and a quarter inches in diameter and only 0.4 inches thick. The transmitter plugs into your device via an attached USB-C cable, and since it's magnetic, you can just slap it on the back of your phone. Did you hear that? Wait, not loud enough. Oh, it probably would be taken out by my filters anyway. Even if it's on an iPad or a Mac, it just hangs out the side of the USB-C port. Now, the transmitter draws power from your device, so the transmitter also sports a pass-through USB-C charging port, which is really a nice feature. The receiver puck has an HDMI port to connect it to the display. It comes with a pretty short 21-inch HDMI cable. Now, the length isn't a problem because you're just going to hang this off the back of the TV anyway. The receiver does need power, which is supplied through USB-C to any power supply you have lying around, even as low as 5 volts and 1 amp. So, you know, like those really old, original iPhone chargers, you could just use one of those. Now, I made this sound complicated, but it's just these two pucks. One goes into the device sending the video, the other one goes into the device receiving it. When you plug them both in, the display will show a graphic telling you to press the button on the devices to pair them. You can also tap the button on the receiver to rotate the image on screen, which makes sense, especially if you use a phone as the transmitting device. Now, another use for the Ugreen transmitter receiver would be for doing presentations without having to hook your device to a projector. The transmit operational distance is 50 meters or 164 feet, so you could walk around a reasonable size auditorium with a phone to do your presentation. The video will only be 1080p at 60 hertz, no 4k here. That's still pretty good for most use cases. The Ugreen transmitter receiver is so small that we had room in our electronics bag to carry it to Europe with us. The Ugreen transmitter receiver is so small that we were way too busy most of the trip to use it until we got to Ireland to visit with Bart. We finally had some downtime, so we gave it a try. Now, we use YouTube TV as our network TV service, so I brought it up on my iPad and Steve plugged into the transmitter, I'm sorry, plugged in the transmitter and receiver, and it didn't work. Not because of the Ugreen device, but because YouTube TV said the local Los Angeles shows Steve had recorded were not available. We were surprised that the Ugreen transmitter receiver didn't work. Steve did some sleuthing with an AI's help and cracked the code. For some reason, on the iPad, I had location services enabled for YouTube TV. As soon as Steve turned those off, he had as long Los Angeles news items to watch. Then I made him put on headphones because I hate local news. Now, the bottom line is that with this Ugreen transmitter receiver, for 70 bucks, you can carry a device in a sandwich-sized Ziploc to bring your computer to work. The Ugreen transmitter receiver is so small that you can carry a device in a sandwich-sized Ziploc to bring your computer to work. You're streaming TV to the big screen. The only thing I can find wrong with it is that it doesn't have a snappy name. Bruce from the Lies chat room is telling me that it's $85 now, but it's still, that's really not that much money for what you get. Now, we had a chance to try out the Ugreen again when we went away for the weekend. The TV in the hotel was mounted to the wall in the corner of the room, and that was cool because it had tons of room so you could walk around behind it instead of trying to shove your hand in sideways on a TV mounted flat against the wall. It was trivial to use the included HDMI cable, which I didn't mention was, it's actually really small. Like I said, it's short, so it's a nice little compact thing to fold up. Anyway, so we used the included HDMI cable to hook up the receiver to HDMI 2, leaving the normal feed on HDMI 1 alone. Figured, why mess with the way it was supposed to work if we didn't have to? Oddly, we were never able to get the TV to recognize the Ugreen on HDMI 2. I unplugged what I can only presume was a cable box feed from HDMI 1, and then the Ugreen was immediately recognized, so it was some other problem. It wasn't the Ugreen's fault. But then, we ran into a very odd problem. The audio was really, really loud. We were transmitting from my 13-inch iPad, and neither the remote control for the TV nor the volume buttons on my iPad's magic keyboard would lower the volume. The same remote had worked fine to control the audio level on the regular TV feed, but there was something about this setup that it wasn't working. We used the remote to mute the TV speakers, which luckily did work, and then we switched the audio output on the iPad to use its own internal speakers. We set the iPad on a table between us and the TV, and it sounded fantastic, probably better than the TV speakers. I wanted to add that little tidbit to the end of the review to make sure you know that fiddling with hotel TVs is always an adventure, but with a little creativity, you too can watch Star Trek Strange New Worlds with the Ugreen transmitter receiver. This week's hero is Drew, who made a very, very generous donation through PayPal. Not only did he contribute financially, he also wrote a lovely note that made me feel all warm and fuzzy, so I'd like to read you a little bit of it. He wrote, Thanks to DTNS, I've enjoyed your podcast for years. Sat app, countless other app recommendations, and the Mac Geek app. I pass your assistive tech info to my daughter, works with autistic children you reach beyond the individual. Isn't that wonderful? I love being part of the DTNS family, and I'm thrilled if anything I do here benefits those on the spectrum. It's also great to know, you know, just to know that Drew is out there listening. If you'd like to be a hero like Drew, head on over to podfeet.com slash PayPal and show your support financially. Maybe drop me a little note too. Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chit Chat Across the Pond. This is episode number 840 for August 26th, 2026, and I'm your host, Alison Sheridan. This week, our guest is Adam Inks of Tidbits Fame and Fortune. How are you doing today, Adam? And here to talk about iOS 26? No, sorry. Are you having trouble seeing the actual date now? Like, because of 26 and 27? I pause on the year. Which one are we? Uh, I will admit I've had trouble with, uh, ever since we went, got to 2020 because of the, like, we're just typing it. It's the two zero two. Like I, my hand, my hand wants to get, I do a lot of two, two zeros. Um, so been troubling me for years. 19 was there for a lot of our lives, right? And sooner or later, it's going to go away, this problem. But not in the first 26 years, sometime after that. Yeah, as soon as we're to 2030, I'll be, it'll, it'll be, I'm sure it'll be better. I'm doing fine. Nice to see you, Allison. Nice to see you too. So, uh, while I was gallivanting around the planet on vacation, you published a very interesting thought piece on Tidbits that you titled Decades After Hypercard, AI is Democratizing Development Again. And I found it a really great read. In the article, partway through, you started walking us through your programming journey. And I was wondering if we could start there and then bring us up to today's technologies. What made you muse back so far? My programming journey, which for the most part wasn't programming, because I kept failing miserably. That's right. A section is entitled A Personal History of Failing to Become a Developer. That's where I want to start. That's, that's a great title. Well, so, I mean, I'm sure everyone's, I mean, like, well, so, so, so I have to like start briefly here because we all, we've all heard these stories about, you know, the, the kid who finally manages to get a computer and picks it up and becomes this great programmer and everything without ever having been taught anything. I'm not that person. You know, I, you know, like I had a, I had an Atari video game, you know, you know, Atari VCS system, you know, adventure and space invaders and all those kinds of games. And I kind of loved them. I mean, this was early, this was early video games when they were just, unimaginably cool. And I could never, never, just could never really bring myself to deal with the arcades and their quarters. Oh, oh, just playing at home. I hate, I, yeah, I'm just, I'm, I'm way too, I do not like things that want me to pay, like regularly. It just makes me absolutely crazy. Didn't have a lot of money. And, you know, I was like, I could not deal with like, what, what if I, what if I fail? You know, what if I make a mistake early on and my game is over really quickly? I've wasted that 25 cents. So, so I really liked the Atari VCS because it let me, you know, let me play video games without, without stress. And, and so, yeah, so I was a kid and I thought, you know, wouldn't it be cool if I could make a video game? I mean, nowadays you can go to college for this, for goodness sake. But, but back then, you know, I mostly daydreamed about it while I was driving, driving around fields on our tractor while, you know, doing farm work, because that's what I actually did with my, my time during the summers. That's a nice, humble, beginning story. Yeah. And, and, you know, I don't have that tractor, you know, I don't, I mean, I don't have that tractor, but, but I have one that's only slightly newer, you know, probably 1959 or something like that. So we're not talking, we're not talking fancy equipment here. We're talking, you know, ancient hardware. Okay. So you're driving around and you're dreaming about someday you'll make a video game? Yeah, because like, I mean, I don't know, maybe people don't recognize, don't know this, but like when you're doing farm work, you drive very slowly. Like tractors don't go quickly. It's like driving a Zamboni or something. It's like, I mean, think about a lawnmower, right? You're, you're, you know, you're a riding lawnmower. It's about like that. And so, and, but you're going around a seven, eight, 15 acre field. Like it can take you 20 minutes to make a revolution. And you're just, and all you have to do is drive in a straight line. I mean, or, you know, like make, you know, turn when appropriate at the, at the corners. Like this is not a, this is not a, this is not a, this is not a something that takes a lot of mental effort. Okay. You got a few spare brain cells going on a few spare brain cells to work so yeah so i was like i mean i i wish i could remember what i actually was you know kind of designing in my head um back then um but uh i can't um no don't don't remember in the slightest but uh but you know it was definitely you know kind of along the lines of you know the kind of things that one could play on an atari vcs and and i had literally no idea how one made them and keep in mind you had cartridges you know you you plugged in these kind of eight track things into into the atari to be able to play them and so it wasn't you know there was no concept that you could write anything or do anything yourself and eventually you know we got it we got a computer i got a minute uh franklin ace 1000 um which was i've heard of that yeah it was a clone that um an apple 2 2 plus clone that apple sued out of existence eventually um and uh um but it was actually i mean part of the reason why they sued it out of existence is that in in a number of ways it was better than the apple 2 on the apple 2 plus because it was one of those things where they just like copied it and made certain things better and uh and i have no idea you know i didn't really know much about the history they were sold oh god where was it was it was at a at a video like a video store like the store you know you could go rent videos there okay and the people who who ran the store were sold and they were sold and they were sold and the store decided to take on this sideline of selling this particular computer i don't think i ever knew anybody who owned a clone i i heard of i heard tell of those stories but apparently i am i am the like the the weird computer or a person early on um because you know the franklin was great um you know i was able to play apple 2 games and you know like everyone else at the time mostly pirated them um you'd find someone who would who had one had a had a copy of the apple 2 you'd get a copy um but it also had basic and so you know i immediately thought oh i could build something in basic and you know what not so much that uh that the problem with basic for me was and we've talked about this before um that i can't really visualize things in my head um so i need something to be able to see to react to and so with basic um i had i had a hard time getting it to do much of anything interactively and um it was much more you know like i could get it to print stuff or calculate stuff or whatever hello world oh yep maybe a do loop to do it more than once yep precisely um you know for loops you know if the if then else is you know go to go oh yeah go to 10 i remember go to 10 yeah yeah precisely and so so you know like i could do that i did but i couldn't ever come up with anything that was interesting frankly and and so so i so i so you know i i'm again like i do now i used apps um you know and i was very good at using the apps and you know we had ace calc and ace writer um which were you know word processor and a busy calc clone and used those in high school and you know then my high school got ibm pcs like the original ibm pcs not pc ats or xts or anything like that but like the first ones which were pretty weak frankly but uh but we had a we had a we had a programming class and i thought oh well maybe maybe i just need a class that's of course i went to i went to a small school there were no weren't really choices in the classes you took when you were like me you you just took the hard classes that were available okay because there was only one and it was like the next one that and so when i was you know in this class with all these people that i knew pretty well and a number of them were better at it than i was the programming and this gave me a shot you could you're a reasonably bright fellow i was valedictorian okay i had the best grades in class in the school okay although the uh there there was uh there was one one girl who was who was always quite upset at me because she had taken band or something like that and and it hurt her gpa slightly oh no and she was not pleased about the fact that she was salutatorian because of this so she claimed um this was back when you know you got your report card you know three weeks after the school and school year ended as opposed to now when kids can check it in real time to three digits three digits of precision so it was a little bit more random what you actually got and how that was going to affect you right right okay but uh but so yeah so like as i said i you know it was it was a little sobering humbling perhaps even if such a thing could be possible for a 16 and 17 year old uh that that you know these friends of mine were just better at it than i was no i could do it i got a's in the class you know it wasn't like i was no you know i was completely incapable but it was clear there was just something about it that didn't fit with my brain okay so a spark or a a puzzle solving or well i don't i yeah i don't i don't like solving puzzles ah you know i i'm i'm capable of it but you know how you know there's always like uh some some some magazines will have like the back page puzzle or something and it's you know i don't various different kind of kinds of puzzles i never do those because i don't enjoy them okay you know crossword puzzles sudoku puzzles yeah i can do them i mean i'm capable i'm just not i'm just not interested and and i think it's some of the same kind of thing that it just feels i don't know like spinning your wheels you're not going to get anywhere at the end the puzzle will be done but it's not like anything's changed in the world so many people today just live and breathe for their wordle score and i just don't get it i i i don't dislike doing it but it just feels like a waste of time to me i liked wordle during the pandemic yeah for a little while we had so little else like right precisely that was like oh and and you know and there were you know fam you know friends and family you know who we were all talking about it like it it was about the only thing yeah yeah but as soon as we started to be able to like you know the pandemic started to ease up i was like yeah fine whatever i got other things to do with even the few minutes of my life that it might take you know and then of course you got a hard one or whatever and then it was like more than a few minutes like i can't believe i wasted 25 minutes on this stupid game other people see that as time invested and you know really enjoy it i'm not one of them yeah yeah so so you so these kind of puzzles of figuring out programming wasn't did light you up it it felt like it was the same kind of thing that uh that you know the the algorithm was really a puzzle and you know how what what was the and in particular when you got into like what was the best way to do something you know that that uh you know i guess modern day coding interviews are like that you know where they walk basically it's a programming puzzle that you're supposed to solve during the interview yeah um and make people absolutely crazy if you're not good at doing things on demand as opposed to sitting down and working through it on your own so um so so the next computer i got um was an atari 1040 st as i said it was an atari 1040 st and i was like oh my god it did not apparently go mainstream for quite a while and with that one um i was i got that to uh to go to cornell wait what is that yeah something called gem and it was its own thing okay but it was kind of like a mac um it was a 68 000 based computer um with a windowing operating system you know mouse and everything but it had full color and large and a larger screen and so and did midi really well the atari 1040 was actually super popular with musicians because of its midi support oh so uh um but uh you know again it was it was sort of like it was a direction where things could have gone um you know instead of the mac but atari was not the company to make that happen so you know they they they tried um and it wasn't a bad computer uh it had issues but you know no no really no more so than an early mac i don't want to offend your your cornell sensibilities here but uh i worked with a guy at hughes aircraft was uh one year out of school out of grad school from cornell and uh he got offered a job to run the robotics division at atari and i looked at him i said okay you're a year out of school sweetie you're a real real bright kid though you're real smart but who are you gonna learn from you don't know anything about i'm gonna go do it and they folded you know like six months after they hired him i was like this should have been a red flag that they would hire you for this job you're right right precisely uh just because i mean well i mean to be fair back in that day the fact that you'd gone through grad school was more than like most people hadn't even gotten college to do computer stuff yeah right this was robotics so engineering you had been engineering maybe yes but robotics much in the way of robotics programs at that point yeah yeah that's true i mean he wasn't gonna be the one to invent him either apparently not no i mean i i worked i worked with a guy at cornell who'd done his internship at apple um who i wasn't very impressed with as a um as a as a as a student shall we say and um his internship was on the apple fax modem oh yeah which i'm like these things match up pretty well so but any event so i had this 1040 st and i decided i wanted to um uh my major um i decided on sophomore year was going to be in hypertextual fiction in the college scholar program what does that mean well so college scholar program was something cornell did for like if you wanted to do something that wasn't satisfied by any of cornell's many many many majors and hypertextual fiction is basically you can think of it as fiction on the web nowadays so where there's a different pay a different web page for each chunk of text using hypertext right use hypertext to move around and um in kind of the academic uh aspect of it the story that you end up with is different depending on the text on the links that you have clicked the path you've taken through it make your own adventure game that was a very primitive approach to the same kind of thing yes okay and so so as part of this because i didn't have once you once you're in the college scholar program you have no requirements for classes right because that's the whole point you know the major majors have their requirements because they know what you need to take but you've designed your own major so and uh and so i didn't have any any any specific requirements so i thought this is going to be a computer related thing i mean this has to be on the computer hypertext has to be on a computer i should probably learn how to you know learn how to program because i'll be it'll work out much better this time because you know i'm at cornell not at not at rook valley high school um i think it lasted a week so the problem was is at the time computer science 100 cs 100 was taught um in light speed pascal on a mac because cornell wasn't early was one of the one of the very first mac sites um that apple had seeded and light speed pascal was an early compiler and so the way the course uh catalog and it was a catalog back then like a phone book like thing um described the class it sounded like i could use my you know a pascal compiler on my my atari um i think it was called personal pascal and uh and so you know i got personal pascal and i i went to the class and the first the first assignment was they just gave you some some some code to type into light speed pascal to see that you could use it and i was like oh my god i'm gonna use it i'm gonna use it you could compile and run it okay that makes sense and i typed it in to let personal pascal and it didn't work at all and so i started looking at it and i figured out why it wouldn't work at all it took me quite a while to get it to compile had to rewrite most of the code and this seemed like it was going to be a problem so so i went because like if i you know if i had to if i had to like do that much work just to get this type in and you know compile uh project working so i went to talk to the professor who was compiling the code and i was like oh my god i'm gonna use this completely unsympathetic i may have to say oh really and basically said no the class is light speed pascal on a mac and that's what the the the tas will be grading oh okay so so not for you just can't can't use something else just because it's pascal it's apparent pascal is apparently not pascal in everything in the same way everywhere i don't know maybe maybe it was true maybe it wasn't um didn't seem to be true to me my first pascal was well my own she know there were two of them uh was mac pascal i wonder if that's later maybe a little later in time i don't know what year would this have been 85 oh no 86 fall of 86 okay all right so so did you buy so clearly i couldn't take this class because i was not willing to go to a public computer room to do all my work oh okay i had a computer in my dorm room which was not that common at the time yeah did you have connectivity in the dorm room a modem um uh yeah modem phone phone line so um to talk to the ibm mainframe for instance so yeah so in any event it's just you know it became clear that you know programming was really not going to be my thing and since i didn't have to take it being a college scholar and having setting my own requirements i dropped it like a hot potato and moved on with my life um but but so this is you know so i continue to get obviously more and more and more and more and more and more into computers and using them and helping people with them and and all of that and you know i worked in the computer rooms and managed people who worked in the computer room so i became you know extremely expert in you know early mac stuff and networking and desktop publishing and all that kind of stuff i could make laser writers do things um you know even even figured out how to write a post script is a programming language of course right and when you printed something on a laser writer it was really writing a little post script program and what most people don't know is that laser writers had passwords and so you actually had to when you with the printer driver had the password built into it and so the password is always zero um and so it would know it would just give the password you know as part of the print job it's a password but it's always zero it's a password but it's always zero yeah and so someone figured this out and changed the password on one of our laser writers the public ones this was a bad thing because it meant that you couldn't print to it unless you knew the password which no one knew and it was a number between one of those uh you know number between you know zero and i forget how many bits it was but it was you know 24 24 000 something one of those kind of numbers and um and so the problem was that you had to the only way to test this you had to write this it's very simple loop to write the program to you know see if a password would work and change it you know and and but it was eeprom um that you were writing to that password was stored in this erasable programmable read-only memory and so there were a limited number of rights oh which was less than the number of password possibilities okay so what does that mean so basically if you tried to said oh maybe the password's one let's write one and see if that works nope let's write two and let's see if that works you couldn't query it you just had to test it and you couldn't test it more as many as there were options precisely and it took nine seconds per try and so figuring out like how many times that was gonna how long that was gonna take it was gonna be i don't know weeks if not months um of of testing so the solution turned out to be defined we end up um we made it clear that someone had basically broken our laser writer and we were going to have to get a new motherboard for it um and uh uh some someone's friend said oh the password is such and such i think they realized they had actually they'd kind of messed up and we were going to be very angry so probably just having fun but because they could yeah probably but i mean we just like laser writers down you know we're going to take it away if we can't use it so any event that was my that was my the closest i had to like any kind of programming win you know a very very simple loop and postscript which someone helped me with so so at this point you're enjoying helping other people use the computers more than than making it sing to do something for yourself yeah and i mean because a lot of it i mean there is obviously great joy in being able to make a computer do things even if you're within the constraints of what the app allows you know so i remember helping uh helping this grad student keep in mind i was you know i was a junior or something um you know helping this grad student who was impossibly older than me impossibly older did she say yes i mean she was a grown-up right okay and uh and she was converting her thesis from multi-mate to word perfect on a pc because you had to have your your your dissertation and your thesis and your thesis and your thesis and your dissertation in word perfect format for the thesis secretary and um and and this turned out to be a non-trivial conversion and i was in charge of a computer room for the summer with almost nothing happening so she would come in and i would go and sit down and help her you know like explain to her how to do this stuff because converting files was was a non-trivial process back then and getting all of the code the like the hidden codes right and word perfect that was actually a real problem was the codes were really messed up in word perfect and thesis secretaries were dragons like if you didn't get your your thesis completely uh formatted perfectly they would reject it okay so yeah so so getting the like the hidden codes cleaned up in word perfect and all that after like six years of of school and you get rejected because it's not formatted properly your margins are wrong right yeah precisely so so so in any event um you know so doing that kind of thing you know like basically kind of going into the underbelly of word perfect and then you're like okay i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this you know what these codes were doing because you could end up with you know numer it was like html right numerous dusted codes and you never quite knew which one was going to take over from which other one and you know cause some formatting change to happen so you were helping her do the conversion yeah okay clean up from the conversion really oh okay um so but the point being that like there were plenty of challenges in using computers um they just for me were not programming so i could work within someone else's world but i couldn't create my own until hypercard and then hypercard so for the children and for those of us who didn't pay much attention beyond playing mist uh that was in hypercard right yes i think it was missed uh explain what hypercard was so hypercard was this amazing system from bill atkinson who was one of the you know early you know the the the founding mac apple programmers um who created the mac i mean he wrote quickdraw you know early you know the the the founding mac apple programmers um who created the mac i mean he wrote quickdraw for instance that allowed us to put stuff on the screen um for the mat allowed the mac to put stuff on the screen he also wrote mac paint um and mac uh mac paint you make draw i can't remember um but but certainly you know like some of the early apps um you know just amazing stuff out of him so he comes up with this idea and this was actually bouncing around a lot of the time right that it was pretty clear that being a programmer was going to be a big deal and so you heard a lot about it and things like that and and and there was a lot talked about about making it easier i mean that was the entire point of basic to be you know be frank right was that it was easier than assembler or some of the other languages we had at the time you know fortran apl pl1 you know these kind of insane languages that did specific things basic was meant to be easier for non-programmers right was i mean well because you sort of wrote in english englishy i mean like go to 10 you could understand what go to 10 did and uh and if then else you know it was it was it was semi-englishy but not so much you know like for anything more involved um than you know than than simple stuff so what hypercard did is it it it with bill atkinson what he does he rethought the concept of development and keep in mind he's working in the mac paradigm so everything else was just still kind of really command liney for the most part at this point that you were typing at a i mean you were typing at the command line and you know what you what the response would come back on a screen or i mean there were still computers that used were teletypes they would actually print on paper what their response was i remember that a little freaky right and so he wanted something where someone could make a real mac thing i don't want to call it an app at the moment um and without having to get into the the nitpickiness of the code and so i mean it did need a language and it had a language called hyper talk which was even more englishy than than basic by a long shot but what it did is it said the concept is here is that you have a stack that was what he called it where it's a it's a bunch of cards just like a stack of playing cards and each card can have information on it or controls on it so it could have graphics or it could have a field containing text uh or it could have a button or it could have a checkbox or a radio button things like that and then you could on each one of the objects on a card you could attach a script written in this hyper talk language and so the script would then do something when you clicked the field or tabbed in it or if you tabbed into a field or you clicked a button or you selected a checkbox something would happen so that sounds like hypertext but it's more than hypertext because it's actually executing a script yes right i mean something and and and keep in mind it's i mean it could just jump to another card and certainly plenty of stacks did that you know you click a button it would you know go to next right basically shows you the next page so that was a very simple way to do things but hyper talk was a fully capable language like you could do a lot of different things um in hyper talk and so what this enabled was that people who had significant expertise or desire to communicate programmatically could do so so it became really popular in schools so it was accessible to more people yes so you could be a ninth grade science teacher and you know and and whip up a hyper card stack that would i don't know you show how electrons uh orbit and orbit orbit the nucleus or something like that you know um and basically there were just you know tons and tons of these kind of not once i necessarily personal because they were often had small audiences but they weren't widely distributed stacks that allowed someone to encapsulate their expertise in some form or fashion like where your expertise is understanding how electrons orbit around the nucleus but but it isn't on programming right right precisely you have no idea very little idea how to program but you can make a hyper card stack that explains you know basic basic atomic structure or um earth science some you know some earth science thing or you know and also because of the like if you think about the the the cards in the stack essentially a database so it was really easy to make little databases in hyper card so you could make a database that that uh you know had all your record albums in it oh and with an image of each record album okay you know that if you if you could get a picture of it somewhere you know that kind of thing so so there was the the sky was literally the limit in terms of what you could imagine and do in hyper card so now you became a programmer yeah pretty much really um that that in that in fact i did do quite a lot and that's where tidbits started because tidbits was a hyper card stack for the first 99 issues really oh wow so the so because so basically tidbits was you know say we had five articles it was a stack um that every week would come out with five cards and the idea was that um you know you could read you know and i think there was a i'd have to go back and look it's been so many years um you know i think there was a it was a sidebar that listed them so you could click on one to go to you know go to it uh and then it would load that card and it was a scrolling text field so you could scroll and read the whole article so how did you distribute this then so i'm i'm just somebody who you met the internet on the internet yeah but so i had to have a mac and i had to be running hyper card in order to open it right but yes hyper card because of bill atkinson being who he was was bundled with every mac right okay and so everyone did have hyper card at this point in time guaranteed and that's why it was a sort of a safe development and it was a safe development and it was a safe development environment and so yes so so distributing distributing is a whole nother ball of wax but basically they were binary files so they and and they had to become so i wanted to compress them uh because it was very important for very slow speed connections to have it be as small as possible but then the problem was is that um all of the gateways between systems at the time only spoke text seven bit ascii text and so binary files would be corrupted if they went through and so they were all stuffed compressed with stuff it and then bin hexed and bin hex was another kind of a conversion program that took a binary file and turned it into ascii and so that's a really faint bell bin hex and then so when you received it it was dot hqx was bin hex so you received your dot hqx file and you would you would have to de-bin hex it and then unstuff it and then you had the stack that you could open in hypercard and so you know yeah it was super easy um and um you know so there were uh there were sites like infomac um that maintained archives of things and so i sort of learned i knew some of this stuff but i learned you know i learned about you know the net heavies the people who were sort of um more important on the internet because they controlled major machines um and uh you know and so you had to get their permission to do certain things this is humans or companies humans oh yeah humans huh they were mostly academics um because it wasn't actually wasn't companies at all it was all academics um because the internet at the time was almost entirely there was almost no commercial use at all all it was all uh um government and military and primarily uh academic so again we're talking 1990 here you know this is the national science foundation uh running stuff okay i mean i was using it in a way that i think is work environment and in a play environment in the early 80s i'm a little confused 80s well 1984 was when i got my first mac right but there wasn't there wasn't much in the way of internet at that point so like cornell was on bitnet and usenet might have started a little bit but arpanet would have been would have been limited to universities and military sites okay um so so i mean yeah okay specifically from the networking standpoint i see what you're saying yeah yeah so so in any of that so i mean yes there were internal networks certainly um although pretty limited ones even still um i actually i know the guy who put the first apple site on the internet fdp.apple.com who was a 2ci running on running under mark johnson's desk yeah developer technical support uh so um but that was later in the 90s i wasn't you know the apple didn't have anything until then but um there were also a lot of commercial services so compu serve delphi bix genie um apple apple had um oh gosh apple link apple link and then e-world and so when we were distributing tidbits we actually had to distribute to all these different sites it took me quite a while you know every week to actually go to the log into each one on my modem and uh and then bin hex the thing and and upload the upload the bin hex file wow so it was something else but uh but any event so so so yeah hypercard hypercard is really cool and so sorry the real reason why it had to be in hypercard was the archiving feature because keep in mind my mother was a was an archivist and it was really annoying to not be able to search for anything there were no search engines there were no search engines and magazines came on paper right you couldn't search anything sure and so with tidbits every week you got it and you clicked a button and it archived itself into into the your your stack containing all the previous issues oh that's kind of cool and then it was searchable okay and not only that but one of the things i also did was manually i may add typed in the reviews in mac user and mac world and mac week with page numbers so like oh ram doubler in mac user july you know july 1991 page 22 so and so wait so you were referencing these reviews in mac user and then talking about them we're just saying go literally indexing them so that if you wanted to look up a you could search on ram doubler and it would tell you that it was reviewed in that issue of mac user so you could go find it in your collection because you had no way to find it in your collection no other way of knowing which issue of mac user it would be in even if you were a subscriber and had all of them okay i thought we were talking about tidbits when did we switch to talk about mac user so this was an article in every issue of tidbits was about tidbits indexed all the paper magazines oh geez for reviews okay so yeah um um so yeah so that's that but that's kind of why the archive was so important because it was an in fact the only way to search the paper magazines of the time that's crazy well you still had to go and like look up the article of course but uh but it would tell you where to find at least where to go look okay yeah yeah did you enjoy figuring that out that was he oh writing i mean writing the tidbits the tidbits the tidbits uh stack was a whole lot of fun um but i made a mistake oh this is this was kind of one of the big the big problems actually and partly why we moved away from tidbits was that and i can't quite remember the like the technical details but it had something to do with all the different layers in hypercard where when i when i did the archive i i i brought more layers from each stack that needed to be into the into the archive um and as a result the archive got too big oh no and so after you know 99 issues it was something like 10 megabytes in size that's massive back then precisely that's really really big i mean this was back when like 40 megabyte drives were a thing and and it was starting to slow down and you know all this i mean just so many problems and but because of the way i had architected it not quite anticipate not anticipating this at all not even quite just totally not anticipating it um it it it you know became too too big for itself you know it it was not a good design and and um and so um we our last issue in hypercard was issue 99 and after that we switched to a structure enhanced text which is sort of a precursor to markdown i'm going to correct a little um audio typo you did a second ago you said that's why we moved away from tidbits i think you meant that's why we moved away from hypercard oh yes yes sorry we moved away from hypercard just in case anybody was worried they were not following this plot correct oh yeah we just stopped tidbits after issue 99 i don't know what's been going on since then um so yeah yeah it became clear this was not a this was not a long-term solution um because of this problem of of the way it was growing and everything and keep in mind there was all that stuffing and bin hexing right wouldn't it be nicer if it was just a text file sure and so that was the structure enhanced text format allowed us to do that and then there were apps something called easy reader in particular easy view in particular that allowed you to get the same kind of interface of a sidebar and clicking on things and searching and all of that um with the structure enhanced text format the c text file the structure enhanced text file any event a lot of history but the point is is that like building that stuff in hypercard was really kind of neat and i did others i did a bunch of other things as well and you know because like oh here was one you couldn't like let's say you had um 10 button 10 10 check boxes on a on a on a card there was no way to align them and you couldn't even select multiple oh you cannot imagine um and so and so you know there was so like and i think you couldn't select multiple things at once so what i so i actually remember writing some utilities for myself essentially to allow myself to to do these like selecting everything and aligning them and that kind of stuff so you know again it was it was it was it was beyond a simple stack but it was far from becoming like real code there were god what were they called x commands i think they're called x commands there were ways of writing things that would extend hyper talk so you could actually get more commands and i had no idea how to do that that was real programming but anything in hyper talk i could do um i was pretty good at hyper talk and so that was uh that was about but that was the end of it as soon as you know because like we moved away from hypercard with tidbits in 1992 um and then in by 93 94 i was basically gone because apple stopped bundling it so this is like 30 years ago this this fun was taken away from you and in those 30 years did anything and twisted i am i'm telling you bitter and twisted still bitter and twisted but but something has has brought you back after these 30 years yeah as as you well know the addictive nature of ai assisted development right because i mean think about it so what was what hypercard did and what made it special and and nothing has nothing has come even close since is that it provided the combination of the environment and the easy language and frankly the ubiquitous distribution and because everyone had had had hypercard on their mac so that you could you could sort of guarantee that everyone could look at something and everything after that And frankly, they usually tried to make it too hard. The real programmers got involved and they're like, oh, well, it would be much more powerful if it did X. Well, yes, it would, but now people can't do it anymore. Right. But they didn't care because they could do it. They didn't care. They can do it. Right. I mean, they weren't thinking this, but it was job security. Right. But like, I mean, remember FileMaker used to be, people loved FileMaker back in the day. And then it got bigger and it went relational and there was FileMaker Server. And now it's completely a developer tool. I mean, to the extent that it still exists at all, which is always a question. But even when it was big, it just kept getting bigger and bigger and more. And, you know, and you were a FileMaker developer. Right. That was a whole job. You didn't just make a database. Right. It was a whole job. It became, you could be a consultant for that. You know, so like everything moves in that direction. And so, so with HyperCard, you never, I mean, even HyperCard kind of moved in that direction, honestly, because Apple sold it for a while and that never succeeded and et cetera, et cetera. But what was neat was that it. It didn't, it gave you a new way of specifying what you want, like creating what you wanted. It wasn't about the code. It was as much about the interface as everything else, as anything else. Okay. Because you started from what you could see. What you're. put a button down on a card and then you attached a script to the button you know and and then the button did something like it went plink you know because you said you said that you said that the button should play this sound when it's clicked and it did and you're like oh now i know how to make a sound you know and then you'd move on to the next thing and so you could just kind of work your way up so fast forward past all this stuff all this other stuff it's sort of done made it easy and then always went and got harder html right html used to be super easy everyone could make a web page now you have to be a full stack developer i mean come on i mean it's just like if it's not if it's not you know dynamic css and who knows what javascript you're not allowed to make a website that anyone will actually use so so what ai has done is it's taken away all of the programming and just made it about the creation how do you convey everything and how do you make it easy and then always went and got harder html right html used to say what you want to the programmer behind the scenes so just as with hypercard when you were putting a button that may play to sound on on the card you were in essence telling the little programmer on the inside hypercard to do this thing sure and it it wrote all of the it dealt with all of apple's apis for playing sounds and all of that kind of stuff you didn't have to know any of that it just played a sound when you clicked the button now ai you just tell it what you want and it goes and writes some code for you to do that and you see if it works the way you want so do you feel when you're doing it do you feel like you're programming you feel like you're creating though i'm creating but i'm not programming right i i'm really pretty uninterested in the actual code don't really care one bit don't care what language it's in don't don't care if there's i mean actually i care if there's bugs from the like i want it to work but it's not like i'm looking at it going well you're missing a semicolon there you know you could have structured this more efficiently or anything like that couldn't care less couldn't care less um you know that languages don't interest me um i mean some people love them i mean some some programmers are like oh let's check let's let's try haskell or erlang or you know whatever the rust is the you know the latest hotness in high performance language is so much faster than pi 3.0 couldn't care less don't don't don't know don't care um i'm finding it interesting there's two identical reactions but one is in denial um and that is people who don't code being very very excited about being able to create a tool that's all that scratches an itch of their own and that's you and and i'm sort of on the fence between these two camps and the other is uh real programmers who do this for a living trying to say that they're not vibe coding as they're describing how they vibe coded like um i listened to the accidental tech podcast and and uh listening to marco armand just begrudgingly keep admitting that you know how well and then and now he's after listening to him for a while now he's like oh man i had this thing partially written i couldn't get it finished i i had it sitting there languishing and i just said fable just go finish it for me write it the way i would have written it just just go do that for me and right now i'm like oh my god i'm like write a bunch of tests that i never would have written before and so now he's head over heels in love with it because he's getting to create again where he was just spending all of his time testing looking for bugs and you know messing around with details of the code and so he's coming to that same point but you you just hear people going no i didn't vibe code it i had claude help me yeah you vibe coded that yes yes no i don't i don't i mean i don't love the term vibe code i mean i i i i get what it's supposed to mean um but what i've really come to realize is that and there's a there's an evolution to working with ai programming of course right that i mean you start with little bits of data analysis where you ask it something about a spreadsheet but what it's really doing is writing python code behind the scenes like you don't know that but it's what it's doing and then you get into like little scripts can you write me an apple script or a shell script that does this thing and you know and then you start getting into apps and you know and the apps can become you know more more complex um as you go and but what i've sort of come to realize is that once you're into the apps it turns out that software as a profession like a professional development is done in a certain way for a reason that you know it really is better if you start with a spec and if you if you write those tests and you know and it's not that you have to do these things yourself but you gotta but you gotta work with the ai to do okay so you're really much more of of like the high level product manager who says what we need is an app that does x y and z for this audience and we're looking for it to run on these platforms and you know like all that kind of high level i have the vision stuff and then back in the not so much back in the day but you know and in a large organization my people will go off and do this for me right you know like support back sure you know go figure out the details of what language to use and you know how to how to how to how to architect it all and things like that and that's all good um and so now if you're the product manager of your ai underlings um there that you still it's still useful to have them do that kind of stuff sure because it keeps them keeps them focused shall we say well ai is not known for its focus i believe that it's probably very much like real life programming in that as a project manager you say i wanted to be able to do blah blah blah and blah blah way and i want to have these interfaces and this inputs and this outputs and then the the underling slash ai assistant comes back goes here i did it and you go oh that's not what i meant yep yep exactly like that except the assistant doesn't whine at you yeah but what you said well so i mean i wrote about this i bet i i've i've worked with developers in the past like i've hired developers and to do things for me and it's it's it's actually a situation which can be tense because if nothing else it's going to cost money time and money to have them do exactly what i want and so i'm trying to describe as much to the extent that i can exactly what i want but you know sometimes you just don't know until you see it you know and or or you described it really well but they just didn't understand who knows you can go both sides and you see what comes back and then you have to decide how what you're going to ask for in terms of changes given your time and budget right right absolutely and and sometimes the personal relationship between you and the person involved you can't say well that sucks what were you thinking that wasn't what anything what close to what i said or thought i said no are you polite to claude nice about it are you polite to claude or do you say that so actually i am yeah i am i mean only occasionally well i was like no that didn't work at all you know try again i i only get usually it's i get in play when it does the same mistake it already did before no we've been here stop that i think that's where i'm supposed to pay for a better model right but that's all right that's always the hint of like get opus to do this so if you sonnet you you're not smart enough to do it um but yeah no i i i usually am and actually usually the things that it has trouble with are visual things where it just doesn't know what it looks like right and so you know like i was i was working with a i wanted it to do a little for set shot i wanted to do a little export pop-down menu and it was having the most trouble with the little carrot i wanted to be it wanted it to be blue blue and i'm like there's no there's it doesn't make sense to have this thing be blue like no one is it's not a link it's not it doesn't need a highlight color and uh and it took a little while to get it to the point where you know it's like okay so you know finally it said i can't do that i have to do it differently in swift ui no problem and does it and the chevron's on the wrong side i was like why'd you put in the wrong side and it says well i didn't i didn't think it was and but oh it's this h stack problem yeah i'm always throwing up screenshots going look stupid this is except i don't say stupid precisely and i was and i just kept i kept right i kept i kept showing it little these little screenshots of uh you know what it was doing and so so it wasn't i mean it it it was a little bit of that like i'm doing this but i don't have eyes yeah tell me tell me if tell me if this looks okay and uh and or you know because i'm working with set shot where i where i need to actually like change settings and whatnot there's a i'm acting a lot like it's hands you know where i'll say okay tell me exactly how we're going to test this and i will you know i'll take the snapshot and i'll go change a setting and i'll take another snapshot because you know some of those things it can't it just can't do can't see yeah and i always feel like i'm valuable when i get to do stuff yeah well and you know and And it is valuable because every time I do, you know, whenever I use The more I use the app, the more I'm like, well, why is it doing that? That seems a little funny. And any time it feels a little funny, I say, this thing seems a little funny. What happened? And, oh, so this happened. I'm fixing it. It's very agreeable. You've regained this power that you had with HyperTalk? Oh, and more so. Partly because, I mean, my world has expanded, right? You know, when I was using HyperCard, the internet barely existed. You know, we're talking 9,600 baud modems. And, you know, now I'm living in this world where we have, you know, complete interconnectivity of everything. And supercomputers in our pockets. And so, you know, the ability to do all this kind of stuff, like, my desires have grown over the years, shall we say. I feel like I'm getting greedy now. So, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. You know, one of the other apps I've written. So, the Setshot app that I talk about in a subsequent article, mostly. But, basically, it's designed to let you determine what either you or Apple has changed in terms of your macOS settings over time. Okay. And, you know, and that's, it's an interesting, complex app with lots of interesting features. Interesting, in my mind, puzzles. Because, you know, it's stuff I know about. You know, where I'm like, this is kind of, you know, but what about on Macs that don't have batteries? How will those settings look different? You know, that I know about, that not all Macs have batteries. And yet, macOS has lots of settings that change whether or not you're on battery or on power. Right, right. Right? And so, there's a lot of that kind of stuff where it does require my, require really my expertise. To understand how to do this. Not that someone else couldn't do it, but not many people. I mean, you do have to be pretty deeply aware of how the Mac thinks about settings and the number of them and how users, users think about that kind of stuff. But, but anyway, so where I was going with that was another app that I've done is a timing app, which, you know, takes video of a race finish line. And as people cross the line, you push a button and it records. It records a picture, a timestamp picture, and also video. And it's got, it even starts and stops the video when no one's in the picture. Oh, wow. Very cool. And someone, you know, I was just barely gotten to this point. And, you know, one of my timing friends was saying, oh, you know, and could it, you know, could it automatically record people? And I was like, yes, it's going to be, we're going to have a line on the screen. And when they cross the line, it's going to OCR their bib number, you know, and if they can see it, like. And you can really do this. That's impossible now. Yes. Wow. I mean, as I've gotten everything up to the automatic recording and OCRing and that, you know, that's probably just another half hour with Claude. So, you know, then there's a lot of testing because it's hard to test this stuff not in the real world. Sure. Get your friends to just run back and forth wearing bibs. Precisely. Sometimes upside down to see if you can mess with people. Oh, believe me, runners will make every imaginable mistake possible. Wearing it as a hat. Oh. And it's, it's, it's, it's on their shorts, on the side, it's on their back. The things that people will imagine, you know, oh, it was on my coat. I took that off somewhere back there. Oh, geez. So it, this is backup timing. This is not meant to be high precision. Okay. But, but nonetheless, it is still, it's still, it's just kind of a neat idea that you could just, you know, point an iPhone at a finish line and get a list of mostly everyone who finishes. That's amazing. This has been really. And that's, that's. Like, that's doable. Like, how cool is that? Is that like science fiction or what? I like, you're thinking way outside of the box of the kind of stuff I think of. All of my, all of my app work is always about time. Adding, subtracting, what time is it in New Zealand? You know, I, I, what time will it be in New Zealand when I'm awake and they're awake? You know, I, I, it seems to, I seem obsessed with time, but I love. It does seem that way. Adding it, subtracting it. I've, I've seen your app. I've used your app. Oh, how exciting. Yeah. Yeah. Now, because in, in, in the running world, sometimes you need to like extract a portion of a run. Oh, good. So in Strava, in Strava, you can, you can quote unquote crop it. So you move your start point, you move your end point, and then you read the times and you put them into your app. Oh, very nice. I like it. I was excited. That's exactly what you want. Steve used it when filming the eclipse that he was trying, what he was trying to calculate was how the, the sun would move diagonally across the frame of his camera. And he needed to figure out what time the center of that was going to be, you know, or to get the center at the right spot to know when to start recording and when to stop recording to figure it out. And he ended up using my app. So there's, seems to be a lot of interesting little uses. See, people care about that. Time is, time is really, really hard to calculate with. It really is. It is. Well, this has been a really fun, I like the walk down memory lane because you don't do it in the classic nerd where, where you've got to talk about how many megabytes of RAM. You had on this and, you know, into a lot of the nitty gritty, but the, the why and how it made you feel. And I think that's one of the, the big things that you wanted to talk about was the empowerment that you have today. Right. And, you know, and, and it really is, you know, it really is most of what I see people making is stuff for themselves, you know, that say, Ooh, could I do this? Yes, you can. And that's, that's kind of important. That is that. We really haven't, we haven't had that. And, you know, when I talk about democratization, you know, someone was like, Oh, not everyone can, can think about, you know, can like specify all the stuff that needs to be like, no, but anyone who wants to can. Right. Yes. Anyone who wants it badly enough, because if nothing else, these chatbots are nothing if not conversational. Right. Yeah. You can try. They're happy to talk to you at whatever length you want about your app. And, and so whatever. It is that, you know, that, that, that's, you know, whatever itch you've got, you know, you're going to be able to scratch in some way, shape or form. And, and I do think it's probably important that you like, you don't think that, Oh, it has to be in the app store or you have to sell it or something like that. No, it can be something you run on your machine. Sure. Totally fine. Sure. You know, these are essentially even the phones, personal computers, like they should be what, what you want them to be. Not what. Adobe and Apple and all these other companies want them to be, because let's face it, our desires are not usually aligned these days. Not, not at all. Not at all. Well, I think I want to end us with your, your statement there that, uh, yes, you can is really the theme of everything that you've been talking about today. This is, this has been so much fun, Adam, as I expected it to be, as it always is. Indeed. Indeed. Good to chat. Well, I always love talking to Adam, but this is going to wind us up for this week. Don't forget to come to the live chat room at podfeet.com slash chat at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, September 9th for the Apple announcement. So you can chat to us at all of the other lovely new Scylla castaways. But for now, did you know you can email me at allison at podfeet.com anytime you like. People do it all the time. Answer questions, dumb questions, smart questions. It's a lot of fun. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeet.com slash Mastodon. If you want to actually see Steve and my podcast work on YouTube. You can go to podfeet.com slash YouTube, but you should really go see Steve's eclipse video at YouTube.com slash SP Sheridan. We're going to have a chit chat about how he made it, and it's going to be a lot of fun. If you want to join our conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com slash Slack, where you can talk to me and all the other lovely new Scylla castaways like Eddie Tonkoi and Alistair Jenks and Bart. All kinds of people are in there. It's a great time. You can support the show at podfeet.com slash Patreon. With a one-time donation at podfeet.com slash donate, or you can use PayPal like Drew, podfeet.com slash PayPal. 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