Chaotic Flowers Bloom

[JM]: Dan, you may remember from a previous episode that we talked about the static site generator Jekyll being possibly abandoned, where there were spam issues that weren't getting closed and the last release

[JM]: was in January of last year.

[JM]: And then I said, oh, well, to be fair, Pelican, the Python based static site generator that I maintain also hasn't had a release since January of last year.

[JM]: So I can't really throw stones.

[JM]: Well, I have since rectified that problem.

[JM]: And as of yesterday, the latest release of Pelican, 4.12, is now published and available.

[JM]: Yay.

[DJ]: So you're declaring open season on Jekyll, basically, is what you're doing.

[DJ]: So bring it on.

[DJ]: What are your hot takes?

[DJ]: Tell us how much you dislike Jekyll and think Pelican is better.

[JM]: I have no bad things to say about Jekyll other than it's written in Ruby, and that's enough.

[JM]: And I kid.

[JM]: Ruby is a fine language for people who find its syntax comfortable and a good fit with how their brain works, but that's just not how it works for me.

[JM]: So Jekyll was never really something I was interested in using, in part because it's useful sometimes to know the language of the tool you're using so that you can mess around in its internals and understand

[JM]: make it do what you want it to do and that's eventually how I ended up working on Pelican in the first place so I am not here to curse Jekyll but to praise him or some other probably butchered

[DJ]: I think I come not to bury X, but to praise X, if I'm not mistaken.

[DJ]: But I had a feeling that this conversation would actually be a proxy war for Python versus Ruby, because I know how passionate you are about that snake-oriented programming language.

[DJ]: But for that matter, that's actually the reason I ended up using Pelican also was that I was already more familiar with Python and I wanted to hack on the static site generator I was using.

[DJ]: So it seemed sensible to try to look for a Python static site generator because I was using Jekyll.

[DJ]: And as much as I think Ruby is a cool language, I didn't know it very well.

[DJ]: And I was like, well...

[DJ]: Am I going to spend a bunch of time like getting familiar with Ruby just for this one use case?

[DJ]: Maybe I'll look for a Python static site generator.

[DJ]: And then coincidentally, it turned out my friend was the maintainer of one.

[DJ]: So here we are.

[JM]: I think it's a common foible of Ruby.

[JM]: software developers and engineers to pick tools that are written in the language that they tend to prefer, with the often misguided idea that, okay, well, this way, if I want to change how it works, I can have an easier time messing around with the source code and maybe submitting a pull request or whatever it is.

[JM]: And the reality is, most of the time, you should just pick the tool that does what you need to do.

[JM]: And the chances of you actually messing around with the source code are pretty small anyway.

[JM]: But this is just how we often are.

[JM]: And that's how I ended up using Pelican.

[JM]: And it worked out well, because I have indeed, since I've been maintaining it for over a decade, messed around inside of it quite a bit to a fault, right, where I spend way more time on the tool that I maintain, then I do actually

[JM]: using the tool to write content for my website, which in and of itself is probably the most software developer statement ever, right?

[JM]: Like focusing on tools instead of the thing you're actually trying to do.

[JM]: Yeah, guilty as charged.

[DJ]: I think it would actually be more honest as software developers to just admit and embrace the fact that we choose tools principally for our ability to tinker with them and not for their actual utility.

[DJ]: Yeah.

[DJ]: Right.

[DJ]: Like if you and I were going to be prolific bloggers, we'd be bloggers, not software developers.

[DJ]: But instead, we're software developers.

[DJ]: So we have a I think we have a blog mostly so that we can tinker with software.

[JM]: Yeah, you're totally right that we are software developers cosplaying as people who write pithy and interesting and insightful articles for the web.

[JM]: It's true.

[JM]: It's very painfully true.

[JM]: But nonetheless, it feels good to get a new release of Pelican out.

[JM]: Not a whole lot in terms of headline features.

[JM]: It's really just a year and change worth of small tweaks and fixes that

[JM]: that taken individually aren't very substantial, but taken as a whole is a significant release.

[JM]: And I'm glad it's out there now.

[JM]: And speaking of interesting personal websites, there is a site that I came across called bubbles.town.

[JM]: And the tagline says 4,641 independent personal blogs, one front page ranked by votes and freshness shaped by you.

[DJ]: This site seems to be a callback to, I want to say, Dig, Metafilter, like the sorts of sites that were more common before social media ate everything.

[JM]: I still feel like this format is fairly popular.

[JM]: You know, like there's Hacker News and other sites where people submit articles and things get upvoted.

[JM]: But you're right that it's not a new concept and it's been around for a while.

[JM]: And this seems like a continuation of that same format.

[JM]: But it seems also done well.

[JM]: Like sometimes if the format works, it's not necessarily a bad thing to keep it going and

[JM]: Unlike a lot of the ones that we're talking about, like the digs and the hacker news and whatnot, this one seems focused on independent personal sites, not Ars Technica or The Verge or whatever it is.

[JM]: big news publication produces articles that often make it into those lists.

[JM]: And that part is cool.

[JM]: It follows the same idea of various other indie web sites.

[JM]: I feel like I saw a comment recently where someone said, I feel like we need something that aggregates the indie web site aggregators.

[JM]: So that like, because Bubbles.town is not the only one.

[JM]: It's certainly not the first one.

[JM]: It's just one that launched a month ago.

[JM]: And so I'm sure that in some future episode of this podcast, we will be talking about some site that aggregates bubbles.town and the hundreds of other sites just like it that aggregate a bunch of indie websites so that we can have a...

[DJ]: But talk about not learning the lessons of the past because such a site would have a fanciful name like, I don't know, let's think of a ridiculous word.

[DJ]: Oh, here's a good one.

[DJ]: Google.

[DJ]: Like the idea of creating a master index of all the sites on the internet just leads us to the same web hostile world we live in because it's the whole point of what I think of as this like the indie web, you know, a.k.a.

[DJ]: the small web.

[DJ]: I think part of it is decentralization.

[DJ]: I think we should embrace I think those of us who like the small web should embrace the discomfort of knowing we'll never be able to find all of it in a way, you know, like it's I think that's actually a feature and not a bug that there's these weird little corners of the Internet where people can still have their weird little personal sites.

[DJ]: And I don't think we should want anyone to do a perfect job of indexing them.

[DJ]: Plus there's a sort of serendipity to like stumbling into, for example, this bubbles.town site, which I didn't know.

[DJ]: I don't think I'd seen it before.

[DJ]: And you stumble into it and go, oh, cool.

[DJ]: Here's a bunch of other websites I didn't even know existed.

[DJ]: So I for one say let a thousand chaotic flowers bloom.

[DJ]: Chaotic indie aggregator flowers.

[DJ]: That should be the official name for such websites.

[DJ]: They can have that for free.

[JM]: Perfect.

[JM]: All right, moving on to some follow up.

[JM]: I wanted to talk for a moment about hardware products that ship that require the latest version of an operating system.

[JM]: And I think we talked about this most recently as it related to Apple's new Apple Studio Display, which requires Mac OS 26 Tahoe in order to function.

[JM]: And my stance on this is I understand it when you're releasing a new product that runs that operating system.

[JM]: So for example, when Apple ships a new phone, or a new Mac, or an iPad, and expect them to support running any operating system other than the one that is most recent when that product ships.

[JM]: So if it's a phone,

[JM]: They always time it with the release of the operating system, they come out at the same time.

[JM]: With iPads and Mac computers, that's not always true.

[JM]: But whatever the most recent version of the operating system is, that's the only one that is supported when those products ship.

[JM]: And I understand that.

[JM]: And I don't really expect them to do anything differently in that case.

[JM]: But when it comes to something as mundane as a monitor, an external display that you plug into your computer, that to me just feels patently absurd.

[JM]: I understand that monitors are different now than they used to be.

[JM]: This is no VGA or an HDMI.

[JM]: These connections are different.

[JM]: They do different things.

[JM]: But I do feel like at a minimum, they should support the operating systems that they currently support.

[JM]: So for example, not just Sequoia, but whatever the previous one or two operating systems are, Apple still ships updates for those operating systems.

[JM]: And I think it's silly, particularly if someone were

[JM]: on a computer that maybe couldn't be upgraded to os 26 you're effectively telling them okay well to use this monitor you have to buy a whole new computer which i don't know that just to me is absurd but even if you set aside the question of the monitor it's the trend alone it's the it's the pattern that i object to and the reason that this came up for me recently is because the

[JM]: Months ago in an episode, I mentioned that I was traveling and I had purchased the AirPods Pro 3 that had just come out.

[JM]: And I gave a very brief review and just said that it seems like a decent upgrade and etc, etc.

[JM]: One thing I forgot to mention, but was already aware of when I mentioned that here on this podcast months ago, is that the AirPods Pro 3 requires OS 26 for certain features.

[JM]: And

[JM]: I recall being aware of that when I bought them and thought, okay, well, I saw what the features were and I didn't really care very much about whatever they were.

[JM]: But perhaps I assumed they meant new features and maybe that's not how it was written.

[JM]: Because what I learned very quickly is it's not new features that don't work on versions before iOS 26 or Mac OS 26.

[JM]: It is existing features too.

[JM]: So the things that I've noticed are

[JM]: If I open the case on my AirPods Pro 3, the little...

[JM]: pop up a modal that appears on the phone that tells you what the charge level is doesn't appear on my iPhone running iOS 18.

[JM]: So usually the only way I know that my batteries are running low is when it starts beeping at me when I open the case to tell me like, hey, your batteries are running low, I don't really have any other way of determining that.

[JM]: But the much bigger problem by far is the find my feature doesn't work either.

[JM]: So if I leave them

[JM]: in, say, a jacket pocket, and don't remember that I put them in that jacket pocket, I have to go hunting around, just searching everything in order to find them.

[JM]: Now, a sane person would just be like, okay, I didn't realize this when I bought them.

[JM]: This wasn't clear.

[JM]: I guess I'll just upgrade to I was 26.

[JM]: That's what a sane person would do.

[JM]: Clearly, I am not a sane person.

[JM]: And instead, I just swear profusely as I search pants and jacket pockets throughout the house.

[JM]: But I just want to go on record as saying that I think this trend sucks.

[JM]: I am not here for it.

[JM]: And I wish that we could continue to ship peripherals that don't require the latest version of the operating system in order to use them to their at least functional level of utility.

[JM]: What do you think, Dan?

[DJ]: It is pretty obnoxious.

[DJ]: On the one hand, I understand the costs associated with supporting backwards compatibility to a fault, which is to say if you write an app and you only maintain backwards compatibility for a few versions of, say, the mobile operating system that you run on,

[DJ]: And at some point your users are like, oh, this feature doesn't work or there's bugs or whatever.

[DJ]: And you look into it and it's like, the version of your operating system you're running was discontinued five years ago.

[DJ]: We don't support it anymore because the resources required to...

[DJ]: maintain support for every version of software or every version of an operating system are enormous.

[DJ]: And there's a big trade-off to doing it, or rather there's diminishing returns to doing it because, well, frankly, Justin, you're a weirdo and most people don't behave like you.

[DJ]: You can just rely on the fact that they're on the latest version of their operating system.

[DJ]: But having said that,

[DJ]: the aggression with which Apple seems to withdraw support, maybe more so now than in the past, and in certain cases like the somewhat controversial release of their OS 26, which it wasn't just weirdos like you and I who didn't like it, really.

[DJ]: Although that being said, I also haven't heard any real indications that massive numbers of people are refusing to update to the new operating system.

[DJ]: Nonetheless, especially for things like a display, like I don't want to hand wave away the various complex technologies incorporated into the Apple Studio Display XDR, but it still does feel a little ridiculous to have an external monitor that has such like steep requirements on what system software you're running.

[DJ]: For that matter, and again this is is Apple's thing. It doesn't surprise me. Apple does not play ball with other manufacturers. I have an HP monitor on my desk, and if you plug it into a Mac, it works fine, and if you plug it into a ThinkPad it works fine too, but like try looking up the compatibility requirements for the Studio Display with a non-Mac computer.

[DJ]: It can hypothetically work, but it's much more complicated.

[DJ]: And of course, Apple is not inclined to make it less complicated.

[DJ]: Like they're not tripping over themselves to make sure that every PC vendor has great driver support for their displays because their goal isn't to sell a bunch of displays to people who don't use Macs.

[DJ]: Their goal is to make Macs even more attractive by shipping a really good display for use with them.

[DJ]: And I understand those goals.

[DJ]: And to some degree, I agree with them.

[DJ]: And as a Mac user, have been the beneficiary of them, right?

[DJ]: Because traditionally, we get much better hardware than the PC market a lot of the time because of all of that integration.

[DJ]: But a frustrating thing about that integration is that Apple can make choices like, OK, guys, well, if you want this monitor to work, you have to update your computer to the latest version of the operating system.

[DJ]: And we all go, why?

[DJ]: It's just a monitor.

[DJ]: That seems ridiculous and punitive.

[DJ]: But...

[DJ]: It's the way things are in the realm of Apple hardware.

[DJ]: The AirPods thing really does feel insane in what you're describing because you're describing a bunch of functionality that already existed, like it existed in previous versions of the hardware.

[DJ]: You know that iOS 18 or whatever you're running on your phone supports the capability to display the pop-up that shows you how much charge your AirPods have.

[DJ]: And so the idea that the AirPods Pro 3 refused to show it to you,

[DJ]: is maddening.

[DJ]: That one's particularly annoying.

[JM]: It is infuriating.

[JM]: I still have my AirPods Pro 2, and of course, when I open that case, the little pop-up appears, just as it always has.

[JM]: But the 3 refuses to do that.

[JM]: Find My on the 2 works just fine.

[JM]: I use it all the time.

[JM]: The 3, nope.

[JM]: I have to hunt around and find it on my own.

[JM]: Why would you break something that already works?

[JM]: I don't understand.

[JM]: It's not like Apple isn't releasing updates to iOS 18 either, by the way.

[JM]: Of course, they still are.

[JM]: So this is something that they could do.

[JM]: But they know that even though there are more people this year who, like us, are saying like, yeah, you know what?

[JM]: We're sticking with the previous OS for a while.

[JM]: Yeah, there's a lot more of us than there were in previous years, but not enough for Apple to care about.

[JM]: Not enough for Apple to decide it's worth it, clearly.

[JM]: But I'm still with you that it is obnoxious and infuriating.

[DJ]: Fortunately, OS 27 is coming out this fall, and I'm sure it will solve all of these problems.

[JM]: Unfortunately, I don't think that is in the cards.

[JM]: But in other news, Apple has a new CEO, and that is John Ternus.

[JM]: And I hope that John will approach these things differently than the outgoing CEO Tim Cook has done, but I don't think that's very likely.

[DJ]: No, I mean, Apple seems like the kind of company, and especially Tim Cook seems like the kind of CEO, where this transition will probably be as unnoticeable as possible.

[DJ]: Like, I'm kind of not expecting WWDC, which is kind of right around the corner, right?

[DJ]: It's not going to suddenly be different because they chose this moment to do something that they've presumably been planning for many years.

[DJ]: And likewise, if Ternus' CEO is going to have big effects on how Apple does its thing as a company...

[DJ]: Those effects are probably several years out because a company that big and complicated plans things way in advance, right?

[DJ]: That's the impression I've gotten.

[DJ]: People with more insight than I have pointed this out in the past, especially when you hear certain types of rumors about the company where it's like, oh, Apple is going to change something about this year's iPhone because of something that just happened.

[DJ]: And other people will point out that this year's iPhone design and a lot of its manufacturing was locked in two years ago.

[DJ]: So no, like this year's iPhone is probably going to be pretty much what they planned in 2023 because that's just how long these sorts of things take to change within a company of that size.

[DJ]: So I would not hold out a lot of hope for Ternus to massively change things away from how Apple's been doing it under Tim Cook.

[DJ]: I mean, from the little I've seen of him, he also doesn't seem like that much of a radical.

[DJ]: It's hard to tell from like your like stage performances and stuff in keynotes.

[DJ]: But the difference between like Steve Jobs and Tim Cook was very distinct.

[DJ]: And also, you know, unfortunately, that leadership transition happened because Steve Jobs died.

[DJ]: This one seems a lot like Tim Cook is being replaced by a guy who is probably not that different from him.

[DJ]: But I could be wrong.

[JM]: I hope you're wrong.

[JM]: Speaking frankly, I think that Tim Cook has done an excellent job for Apple shareholders.

[JM]: And I think he's done an excellent job of growing the company and producing

[JM]: a lot of great hardware, with the notable exception of the mid 2010s MacBook product line releases, which I think stand out as an anomaly compared to what has otherwise been a stream of very solid hardware products released during his tenure.

[JM]: But the software side of things, I think, has really suffered, particularly in the last five years.

[JM]: And also, I think in terms of product innovation, Tim Cook's lack of product expertise, he's just not a product person.

[JM]: And I think it shows in terms of the kinds of products that were released during his tenure.

[JM]: Lots of money was spent on a car that never shipped.

[JM]: There were rumors that Apple was going to release a television.

[JM]: Lots of new product ideas that Apple released.

[JM]: worked on, but never shipped.

[JM]: And I just think of the wide variety of products that Apple could have made and chose not to.

[JM]: And I'm not saying that all of those would have been successes, but I would much rather see Apple ship more things and fail more often than

[JM]: then play it safe and only ship things that have potentially huge markets and could be the next iPhone.

[JM]: And I'm hoping, probably in vain, that John Ternus is not cut from the same cloth as Tim Cook in terms of being more of a product person and also perhaps being willing to take greater risks in terms of shipping products that may or may not be huge money makers.

[JM]: An example that stands out for me is the Airport Express.

[JM]: I think that's what it was called.

[JM]: Maybe that's not right.

[JM]: The one I'm thinking of, that's probably not the right name.

[JM]: The one I'm thinking of is the time machine product that had a hard drive in it connected via Wi-Fi.

[JM]: And I set these up for friends because they asked me what kind of backup tool should I use?

[JM]: Like, how should I back up my computer?

[JM]: And if you have a family with multiple people in the house, you can set up one of these things and all of the computers in the house can back up to it automatically over Wi-Fi.

[JM]: It's a really cool product and I'm bummed that Apple gave up on it.

[JM]: And that to me is the kind of product that I would like to see Apple ship more of, where it solves a very real tough problem.

[JM]: And I think my concern is that during the Tim Cook era, there's been this big focus on services as this way of growing revenue for the company.

[JM]: And so why would you ship a product to someone where you only charge them $300 when you can instead charge them

[JM]: $10 a month for cloud backups and make vastly more money as a subscription for that customer than selling them a $300 product.

[JM]: But to your point, there's no evidence that John Ternus is going to be any different in this respect.

[JM]: But

[JM]: One can dream, and I will continue to hold out hope that this person will usher in a new chapter at Apple.

[JM]: You know, he's only just over 50, so he's got potentially a decade or more in front of him in terms of leading this company.

[JM]: He can make a really big imprint on it.

[JM]: And I hope he does in ways that diverge significantly from the Tim Cook era.

[DJ]: I hope so too.

[DJ]: One of the things that makes me less optimistic about that is that some of the problems that I perceive in the things you just said are systemic problems about the economy and the tech industry as a whole, not just about Apple and not just about its CEO.

[DJ]: Like the first thing I thought when you were talking about the airport time machine thing, I can't remember what that product was called either.

[DJ]: is where's Apple going to get these hard drives from, right?

[DJ]: Because we keep hearing about shortages in computer components because they're all being bought up for data center usage.

[DJ]: And the more grim predictions I've seen suggested about this trend point to a future where

[DJ]: More and more consumers don't own their own computers that run their own software at all, that instead you rent a smartphone in order to pay a subscription for SaaS or a chat app, like a chat AI app, so-called.

[DJ]: And you do everything through that, which is a insidious surrender of some of the most important freedoms that I think we have with technology.

[DJ]: And so I certainly hope that there is pushback against those trends.

[DJ]: And hey, if Apple was going to lead the charge on that and be the last true consumer computer company, then my fandom for them would come back and in spades.

[DJ]: But I have a hard time believing that that's going to happen when we're talking about a company, like one of the most profitable companies in the world, and the pressure to continue delivering returns to shareholders may just be overwhelming.

[DJ]: I mean, Tim Cook, notably, a number of years ago—

[DJ]: He supposedly said something in some earnings call or somewhere where he – some investor like asked him a question about something.

[DJ]: I don't – and I don't remember what the details were.

[DJ]: But he basically said like if you don't like it, you can get out of the stock essentially because we're not going to compromise our principles.

[DJ]: But I think from perspectives like yours and mine –

[DJ]: The company under Tim Cook nonetheless did compromise a lot of principles in ways that we wish they hadn't done, like this focus on services revenue.

[DJ]: And so I'm not very optimistic that any given new CEO of Apple, no matter who they are, can hold back the tide if there are such massive economic incentives to, for example, keep turning all software into a subscription purchase.

[DJ]: But I hope I'm wrong.

[JM]: Obviously, this is a time where people are looking back at Tim Cook's legacy as John Ternes takes over in the months to come.

[JM]: And one of the takes that I read by John Gruber goes like this.

[JM]: I don't think you can argue that Tim Cook ever did anything for any reason other than what he believed was in the company's best interest, not his personal interest, not employees, not users, not shareholders, not developers.

[JM]: The company's interest always came first.

[JM]: There's a nobility to his single-minded focus on Apple itself as an abiding institution and his faith that what's best for Apple will ultimately prove best for everyone involved with it.

[JM]: Employees, shareholders, users, and yes, even developers.

[JM]: If he's made mistakes, they're errors in taste, not mistaken priorities.

[JM]: And I think there's a lot of truth in that statement.

[JM]: And I think that's part of what's always bothered me about the Tim Cook era, because the idea that he always worked in the company's best interest to me is part of the problem.

[JM]: Obviously, when you are the CEO of a company, you have to balance the interests of a lot of different stakeholders.

[JM]: But I don't know that putting the company's interests first is really what a CEO should do.

[JM]: And that's easy for me to say here, I'm not the CEO of a company.

[JM]: So this is obviously just my own take on this.

[JM]: But I feel like focusing on the interests of customers first generally results in

[JM]: in simultaneously also proving to be the thing that's in the company's best interest.

[JM]: Now, obviously, there's a balance in that you don't just ship a bunch of products below cost, because that would make customers happy.

[JM]: And then you as a company go out of business as a result, like that's to take a hyperbolic and absurd example.

[JM]: But I don't think Tim Cook really got that balance right.

[JM]: In my opinion, I think that

[JM]: The company has come first.

[JM]: So that part I agree with in terms of this analysis.

[JM]: But I feel like the interest of users hasn't been prioritized as highly as I think it should have been.

[JM]: And I don't have no reason to think that will change going forward.

[JM]: But I hope it does.

[JM]: Alright, moving on, I am a big fan of Mac window proxy icons.

[JM]: And just to explain what that somewhat complicated phrase actually means is, if you are using any kind of document or file oriented application on Mac OS,

[JM]: there should be a tiny icon just to the left of the title of the document or file you're working on at the top of that window.

[JM]: I don't think a lot of people realize that that icon is functional.

[JM]: It's not just decorative.

[JM]: And I use it in principally two ways.

[JM]: The most common is I want to operate on that file in some way by say opening that file in some other application that might be in my doc.

[JM]: So I will drag that icon

[JM]: from the title bar over to another application in the doc.

[JM]: And that application will then open it.

[JM]: Another use case is command tapping on that icon.

[JM]: And when you do that, you should see a hierarchy from its current location in the file system, all the way up to whatever drive it's on, and all of the folders that might be in between.

[JM]: And you can then let go at any point in that hierarchy.

[JM]: And it should open the respective folder in the finder that you selected.

[JM]: But I don't think most people know that this functionality exists, because it's not particularly discoverable, which is kind of funny, because I've been using this functionality for as long as I can remember.

[JM]: which is long enough that I couldn't remember just how far back I've been using this feature.

[JM]: So I looked it up.

[JM]: And sure enough, this feature has been around since macOS 8.5, which is part of the classic OS before macOS 10 came out.

[JM]: And I found some developer documentation that I will link to in the show notes from 1998.

[JM]: What about you, Dan?

[JM]: Is this a feature that you knew about, occasionally use, have never used, use all the time?

[DJ]: Yeah, I'd say it's an occasionally.

[DJ]: I did know about it.

[DJ]: It doesn't occur to me to use it all the time, but sometimes it does.

[DJ]: I'm trying to remember what I do with it the most frequently.

[DJ]: I want to say I use it to...

[DJ]: I don't know about open the file in another app, but potentially like move the file.

[DJ]: Like I'll often like with the file open, the nice thing about the proxy icon is you can drag that icon somewhere like in the finder, for example, as though you were dragging the file itself.

[DJ]: I have occasionally found that convenient.

[DJ]: I remember one of the controversial changes, or let's just say changes that was disliked by the types of nerds who know about proxy icons in OS 26 is I believe it conceals them by default.

[DJ]: They still exist, but you have to actually go to the empty space where they are and click on it to see the proxy icon.

[JM]: It actually started a few years ago.

[JM]: I can't remember which.

[JM]: If it was Big Sur or somewhere in there, you're right.

[JM]: They started hiding them.

[JM]: And then you have to...

[JM]: I forget what you have to do in order to bring it back.

[JM]: But whatever it is, I did that the moment that they started hiding it by default.

[JM]: And so I've had it visible once again ever since.

[JM]: And so the reason that I...

[JM]: even thought about the whole topic of window proxy icons in the first place is that I am experimenting in this shift from Mac Vim, which is a text editor, to Neovide, which is another Mac application to edit text.

[JM]: using Neovim instead of Vim.

[JM]: And Neovide is a cross-platform application.

[JM]: And so it's not really very Mac-focused.

[JM]: They continue to add some Mac-specific functionality.

[JM]: So for example, in the latest release, you can open new documents in Mac-style tabs instead of

[DJ]: Instead of Chrome-style tabs?

[JM]: Instead of more Vim-esque buffers.

[JM]: But there's still a lot of things that really just feel like you're running Neovim in a terminal session and...

[JM]: Does it feel at all like you're using a Mac application?

[JM]: And the distinct lack of a window proxy icon is one of those things.

[JM]: So I filed an issue in the Neovide issue tracker saying that, hey, this feature has been around since Chex Notes 1998 on Mac OS.

[JM]: It would be really cool if we're also here in Neovide.

[DJ]: I'm sure that you as an open source maintainer

[DJ]: can tell exactly how welcome the sort of passive-aggressive insistence on pointing out how long the missing feature has been around on the target platform will be to Neovide's maintainers, and how I'm sure they will fall all over themselves to go, oh, well, if the feature was first introduced in 1998, it's terribly irresponsible of us to overlook it.

[DJ]: So good luck with that, Justin.

[JM]: I sincerely hope that it doesn't come across that way.

[JM]: It's definitely not how I meant it.

[JM]: I was really just like, oh, wow, this has been around even longer than I thought.

[JM]: That's really the way in which I intended it.

[JM]: I mean, when I pulled up the documentation for this, which, by the way, was not easy to find.

[JM]: Like, I was just searching for any documentation of window proxy icons.

[JM]: I was just trying to figure out, okay, where can I find a succinct description of what this feature is?

[JM]: So I could link to it so they would understand what on earth I was talking about.

[JM]: Well, there's no page anywhere on Apple's site that I could find that describes, oh, this is a window proxy icon, and this is how you use it.

[JM]: And if you're a developer, this is how you should work with it.

[JM]: That existed back in 1998, but I cannot find anything current, and I couldn't even find anything at all originally.

[JM]: And then I happened across...

[JM]: some post on Daring Fireball that mentions it from five years ago, linking to some mirror of some 1998 developer documentation that doesn't even work anymore.

[JM]: So you go there and you see nothing.

[JM]: So I'm like, okay.

[JM]: So I go to archive.org and I tried to put in the original URL for the developer documentation in it.

[JM]: It's there if you search around long enough, but without any of the images in it.

[JM]: So you can't actually see the proxy icons that they're describing in the documentation.

[JM]: And I'm thinking, man, am I just going to be like out of luck here?

[JM]: And then I thought, okay, well, what if I put in the link to the mirror in the Wayback Machine?

[JM]: Maybe the link to the mirror, this is a real like, you know, archive inception here.

[JM]: Maybe that will show up.

[JM]: And sure enough, it has the

[JM]: images in it.

[JM]: So I really enjoyed, maybe enjoyed isn't the right word.

[JM]: I found it gratifying to at least arrive at having found this documentation so I could link to it in this Neo Abide issue.

[JM]: But I also really enjoyed being able to find it with the images because, man, it just looks so great to see these windows from classic Mac OS.

[JM]: It is just such a breath of fresh air to see what I think was a

[JM]: UI design aesthetic from a more civilized age.

[DJ]: Oh, I see.

[DJ]: I see.

[DJ]: That makes you sound like a weird old man who lives in a desert somewhere.

[DJ]: Who, me?

[DJ]: Although I totally agree with you.

[DJ]: And just incidentally, if anyone who was listening, if you found Justin's harrowing tale of how he eventually tracked down this website on an archive of a mirror...

[DJ]: to be at all moving, then I will strongly suggest you donate to the Internet Archive.

[DJ]: Because seriously, folks, they are really the night's watch of the Internet at this point.

[DJ]: Just keeping the whole thing from washing away into the sea.

[DJ]: I'm always a fan, and it never surprises me.

[DJ]: I was looking at this URL in our show notes and noticed that it was a mirror-linked

[DJ]: to developer.apple.com.

[DJ]: But then that mirror itself was being referenced from web.archive.org.

[DJ]: And so the enormity of your journey became clear to me.

[DJ]: So bless the Internet Archive.

[DJ]: Long may they reign.

[JM]: They are indeed worthy of our financial support.

[JM]: I second that wholeheartedly.

[JM]: All right, moving on to other news.

[JM]: Anthropic recently released Claude 4.7.

[JM]: And one of the things that I found interesting about this release is that we've become accustomed to these models getting better and better.

[JM]: But even a few months ago, I remember seeing the idea that we were getting diminishing returns, and that the models are not improving as much with new releases as they did in the past.

[JM]: And that seems to be true here as well.

[JM]: The move from cloud 4.5 to 4.6 was

[JM]: not particularly significant in terms of its capabilities from what I've read.

[JM]: And 4.7 seems to be even less significant in terms of going from 4.6 to 4.7.

[JM]: But I think the most notable thing about this news is not any additional capabilities or lack thereof of the model itself, but instead, an interesting way of

[JM]: to increase the price of your product without increasing the price of your product.

[JM]: Because one of the things that they noted in their news release is that Cloud 4.7 consumes approximately 30-ish percent more tokens than 4.6.

[JM]: And I think this works out really well

[JM]: for Anthropic in a way, because while this news isn't particularly welcomed by people who are paying for their product, I think it would be much less welcome if they had said 4.7 is released, and the price is now 30 ish percent higher, because you can't really do this with lots of other products, right?

[JM]: Like imagine if your electricity company tells you that they're going to charge you 30% more next month,

[JM]: You're not happy about it, but you don't really have a choice.

[JM]: They can't really do it any other way, right?

[JM]: They can't say like, okay, we're going to charge you the same amount, but you're going to get less electricity.

[DJ]: Right.

[DJ]: They can't do that with electricity because you would notice.

[DJ]: But it sounds like that basically is what Anthropic is doing.

[DJ]: But I think mostly people won't notice because it seems like essentially what they're saying is by not raising their prices, you'll get less for your money.

[DJ]: So if you pay $25 a month to use the basic paid Claude subscription, you get a certain amount of usage.

[DJ]: And if you've been a really heavy user, you will have run into rate limits where at some point Claude says, you're done for the day, buddy.

[DJ]: Go take a nap.

[DJ]: Or at the very least, like you have to use an older model or something.

[DJ]: You're going to hit those rate limits faster in this case, I presume, because 4.7 consumes more tokens.

[DJ]: So if they're not increasing the price of their subscription, presumably they're just going to lower.

[DJ]: Well, it's not even that they lower their limit.

[DJ]: You'll just hit the limit faster because all of your queries through 4.7 use more tokens than they used to.

[DJ]: And that's subtle enough that many people may not really notice.

[DJ]: And most people won't be affected, right?

[DJ]: Like I'm guessing most paying users of the product probably rarely have ever hit the limits.

[DJ]: And then there's a small number of really heavy users that regularly hit the limits.

[DJ]: And eventually what Anthropic wants from them is for them to pay for the more expensive subscription where the limits are higher, right?

[DJ]: So it is interesting to consider the analogy to a utility like electricity, where if we happen to live in a version of society where it was acceptable that you could semi-regularly run out of power on the 21st of the month because you'd blown through your budget for that month, then we might actually be accustomed to that.

[DJ]: But instead, you pay for usage of your electricity.

[DJ]: You can use as much electricity as the grid can withstand.

[DJ]: You'll just have a higher bill.

[DJ]: from the electrical utility.

[DJ]: And if you go, why is my bill higher this month?

[DJ]: They will just point at the increased usage, right?

[DJ]: It's all fairly straightforward.

[DJ]: So I am curious over time if something similar will happen with these LLM services.

[DJ]: I'm also interested, as you pointed out earlier, in the way it felt like in the last couple of years, we were getting the best of both worlds with a lot of these model releases where they would get better and cheaper

[DJ]: Like there were definitely some model releases from Anthropic and or OpenAI where it was like, check out GPT 4.1 or whatever.

[DJ]: It's better than the previous one.

[DJ]: And by the way, it also costs less.

[DJ]: Like it uses fewer tokens.

[DJ]: And I wonder if we are running into, you know, long predicted laws of diminishing returns on model capability where now the

[DJ]: Only or the best or the current best way to improve model performance is just to crunch more tokens.

[DJ]: And if that continues to be the case, I wonder what the outcome will be for these products, like if they are just going to get more expensive and or more limited over time.

[JM]: there's long been this argument that we are getting this subsidized product here, that the price that we're being charged for the subscriptions are nowhere near the actual costs that these services are running at gigantic losses, and that we should enjoy the gravy train while it lasts, because it's not going to last.

[JM]: And so there is

[JM]: an argument to be made that this is part of this slow shift towards something that is possibly sustainable on a long-term basis, much like services like Uber and Lyft started out with very affordable rides, potentially undercutting prices that traditional taxi companies were charged.

[JM]: And then once people got accustomed to using these rideshare services and

[JM]: A new generation of people basically never took cabs anymore.

[JM]: Well, at some point, the music stops.

[JM]: Investors get tired of funneling more and more money into your money losing business.

[JM]: And you've captured enough customers and enough mindshare that you can just start charging prices that actually are profitable.

[JM]: And this could be a similar shift where we're just now starting to see the beginnings of a shift towards something that is not wildly profitable.

[JM]: unprofitable and slowly moving towards something that is sustainable.

[JM]: It's just interesting to me, the levers that they have that other companies don't have, like electricity was probably a poor example, like maybe mobile phone bandwidth was

[JM]: could be a better one, where you usually are paying for it as a set fixed amount every month, based on how much bandwidth you want to consume, how much data you want to use.

[JM]: And if you decide, okay, well, this five gigabytes a month is not enough, I'm going to pay more, so I can get 20 or whatever your case may be.

[JM]: But the thing that they can't do, the anthropic can do is essentially change the definition of a gigabyte of data.

[DJ]: Right.

[DJ]: They can't make it so that the YouTube video you're streaming takes 50 percent more data than it did last month.

[JM]: Precisely.

[JM]: They can encourage you and they do encourage you to use your data for new, different and higher bandwidth things so that you are incentivized to upgrade to a higher data plan.

[JM]: But they can't say that the same thing that you were using yesterday is now going to consume more bandwidth than it did today.

[DJ]: No, they can't say that because it doesn't make any sense, Justin, but I understand your point.

[DJ]: As soon as I said that, I was like, okay, well, you get the idea.

[DJ]: You just got to roll with it.

[DJ]: You're a professional podcaster.

[DJ]: Just let it go.

[JM]: Yeah, exactly.

[JM]: So yeah, Anthropic's ability to charge you more and or change the limit for what you get in terms of how much usage you get and or...

[JM]: changing how much tokens are consumed for the same prompt.

[JM]: Because when I said 30-ish percent higher, that's for text.

[JM]: If you are using their image analysis, Opus 4.7 consumes three times the number of tokens compared to 4.6.

[DJ]: Wow.

[DJ]: Presuming that it doesn't do three times the better job of analyzing your photo, that seems like a regression, not an enhancement.

[DJ]: I feel like the real analogy here in terms of getting less for your money is actually to what you see with goods in the grocery store, where you have like a box of cereal, let's say, and the box is a certain size and labeled on the box is 640 grams and it costs $8.75 because I buy bougie cereal from Whole Foods.

[DJ]: And

[DJ]: A couple of months later, quietly, the box that still costs $8.75 and the cardboard is still the same size, but now the number on the box is like 540 grams.

[DJ]: And you're just getting less product for the same amount of money in a way that makes it hard for you to notice.

[DJ]: That's what this feels like.

[JM]: It does feel like shrinkflation.

[JM]: You're right.

[JM]: Because traditionally, the way you got more money was to either increase the price or sell more of the thing that you sell, sell more volume.

[JM]: But you're right that a third vector is to reduce the amount you're providing without the customer noticing or caring enough to change their consumption patterns.

[JM]: Right.

[JM]: Much like Reese's recently decided that using actual chocolate in their Reese's peanut butter cups was, you know, eating into their bottom line.

[JM]: So they replaced the chocolate with something that is chocolate-ish.

[JM]: Until enough people complained, because again, going back to, you have to do it to a point where people don't notice or change their consumption habits.

[JM]: And guess what?

[JM]: People did.

[JM]: And so they backtracked and said, okay, I guess we'll put the chocolate back in.

[DJ]: Yeah.

[DJ]: Notably, the complaint I saw was from a descendant of whoever it was originally created Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

[JM]: Yeah.

[JM]: The grandson.

[DJ]: Yeah.

[DJ]: In the same way that there's a notorious newspaper article, I think from the 1970s, where the original Colonel Sanders went to a KFC location and was so upset by the quality of

[DJ]: of the food being prepared there that he wrote an incredibly scathing, like profanity-laced article.

[DJ]: And that just makes me happy for so many different reasons.

[JM]: Well, I expect to see your profanity-laden screed sent off to Anthropic regarding the excessive Opus 4.7 consumption any day now.

[DJ]: But here's the problem.

[DJ]: The problem is that like the this sort of change is happening under the same leadership as the original thing.

[DJ]: So it's not like the original anthropic founder or CEO can come out of the woodwork and be like, I've just been living on my private island and happiness.

[DJ]: But have you seen this opus 4.7?

[DJ]: It's crap.

[DJ]: Wave their cane in the air.

[DJ]: I am outraged.

[DJ]: Yeah, wave their cane in the air.

[DJ]: When I started this company 100 years ago, people had principles.

[DJ]: It's like, no, no, I'm sorry.

[DJ]: This company is a product of the 21st century tech industry.

[DJ]: So no such criticism will be forthcoming.

[JM]: All right, everyone, that's all for this episode.

[JM]: Thanks, everyone, for listening.

[JM]: You can find me on the web at justinmayer.com, and you can find Dan at danj.ca.

[JM]: Reach out with your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.