Chapter 1: What personal experience does Marco share about his injury?
i had a terrible cut this week i cut the the tip of my left thumb with a knife nice i thought you meant like you cut something out of the show last week and you weren't pleased about it oh i'm sorry to hear that that's something out of his finger and he wasn't pleased with it yeah fair enough well so the problem with cutting the tip of your left thumb is that well that's my phone thumb like because i you know i'm the left hander so like already now using my phone through like you know a band-aid capacitive band-aids
Yeah, well, I mean, it works. It just works terribly. And so it was like, first of all, the entire left half of the phone keyboard when typing text on the phone, that is now horrendous. And so I mostly just have to use the other hand and then trying to navigate the phone because I'm a left hand phone user. That left thumb is my dominant phone, like one hand navigation finger. So that's a mess.
And then I got to my Mac and that's the command key thumb.
Oh, yes, that's true.
I could switch which side is the space bar. I don't care about that. That I can deal with, but I can't switch the side of the command key.
Yeah, I would die.
Oh, my God. I thought about it. I'm just like, this is it. I'm like, should I go on vacation? I don't know. I can't do anything. Fortunately, I have now downgraded to a thinner bandage as the cut heals, and I'm almost out of this national nightmare, but man... But there is no worse finger to heavy cut than your left thumb when you are a Mac user. Oh, gracious. That is no fun.
Yeah. You know, it's so funny. I'm a pretty good typist. I'm not going to sit here and say... We did the typing test like two or three years ago. I forget which one of us was fastest. But I'm pretty good. I'm no Jason Snow, but I'm pretty good. But...
You ask me to spacebar with my left thumb or command with my right thumb, I'm sorry, gun to my head, I guess I'm going to get shot because I'd be doomed. I cannot do it.
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Chapter 2: How does Marco explain his lack of experience with data centers?
I think SLT, whatever it is. One of those tags is... an ID3 tag to specify time-synced captions to be displayed. So that feature exists in the MP3 ID3 spec, but I don't know of anything that uses it.
So if you were to support podcaster-supplied transcripts with dynamic ad insertion, something like that that comes with the file and therefore can be adjusted with the file whenever they insert and remove ads... That would be the only way to really do that.
But given that these platforms don't even – like the DAI platforms don't even support chapters, which work the same way, I'm not holding my breath on that. I think that's very unlikely for any of them to ever do. So because DAI platforms generally won't or can't do that.
And because almost all podcasts of medium to large size now are monetized with DAI, I can't imagine that podcaster-supplied transcripts are ever going to be that big of a thing. Now, this could be wrong. And another thing they could do is they could supply a transcript with timestamps that just don't include any ads. But then the real-time display of it will break it in the player.
Because if their transcript is just their content and doesn't have any of the ad content in it, which it wouldn't in this context, as soon as you reach a point in the show where they've inserted an ad for, say, two minutes, from that point forward, all of the timestamps in their supplied transcript will be off by two minutes.
And so the utility of that, I think, is always going to be significantly less than one that was dynamically generated in such a way that it can synchronize itself back to the ad inserted version of the podcast that you downloaded. So in that way, I think my transcripts are probably going to provide more functionality than many supplied transcripts will.
Because basically, yeah, if you supply a transcript and you have dynamic ads inserted, that's not going to play well together.
So even if you supply your own, I haven't fully made this decision yet, but I think even if you supply your own, I think I should probably also offer mine and maybe just have like, you know, like a tab picker at the top of the screen that says, you know, my transcript, their transcript, something like that.
Because I think if I don't do that, people might be disappointed if they are supplied a transcript that it has less functionality than my built-in ones do.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges and solutions discussed regarding Overcast's infrastructure?
No wonder we were confused. My apologies.
Yeah. One copy runs on every Mac mini. I select I assign each one like which because the the Apple speaks transcription API only supports three languages being installed at once on the system.
for reasons i don't know maybe that made sense on the iphone for some reason it's also enforced in the mac but anyway so it supports six languages but only supports three of them being installed at once so i have a simple picker on top to choose which three languages they all do english and then they all kind of split the other five languages because there's just there's way more english than any other ones um
So that's what that is, and I pick how many jobs I want, and I run them. And if this app ever crashes or if the computer reboots, no problem. LaunchD just starts it back up again, and it's totally fine. And then this app checks in with my main servers.
each one of these checks in like you know once a minute or something like that and it reports its stats of how many jobs it has done uh in the last minute or whatever um you know so that way how many minutes of podcast has it transcribed that way the servers can then kind of watch out for anomalies so if for instance one of the mac minis doesn't respond at all it will alert me and i can go reboot it or something that doesn't happen very often um but also if one of the mac minis
is reporting like a suspiciously high or suspiciously low job count per minute or transcription minute rate per minute. I can then go take a look and see like something might be wrong there. And then the app itself, the Overcast Transcriber app that you see here, that app also tries to monitor itself.
So if, for instance, it can't get jobs for a long time, for more than a few minutes, or if a job never completes and it never refills its jobs after a certain amount of time, it will quit itself. and let Longstreet restart it.
So if something weird has gotten wedged somewhere, this kind of thing doesn't happen at very high rates, but when you're running 48 instances of them 24-7 for months, they do occasionally need weird things like that to sometimes happen. So anyway, that's what that app is.
That's very cool. And I'm glad you provided a screenshot, which we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Aaron Dibner wrote, given that Marco now has a 48 Mac mini cluster, while they each only have 16 gigs of RAM, it is possible to spread LLMs over multiple Macs these days.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the new Apple Business Manager announcement?
It doesn't need Apple's help to do any AI stuff. People are doing it anyway. But Siri is the one thing that the world can't make better. Only Apple in the way that they never mean it. Only Apple can do that, which is we're all stuck with Siri until Apple fixes it.
That's so true. With regard to development tools and things like that, I think there's a couple of things that I'd really look forward to, but I'm skeptical that any or all of these will happen. Number one, I would love them to start really leaning into documentation even more. They've been doing They've been doing better. They really have.
You make fun of me with Mac Pro Hope.
That's true. You're right. You are not wrong about that, John. I really want to argue with you, but you are 100% correct.
That's like hoping for lower app store fees. Good luck.
You're both right. You're both right. I cannot argue. But a man can dream.
um so yeah so i mean i'd love them i mean i don't think they would ever come out and say hey we're actually going to write documentation now but it would be cool if they you know just did a better job and again in their defense they've been getting better and better over the years but there's still a long way to go yeah getting better isn't better right exactly getting better is a direction but it does not express the position yeah speaking of documentation like just one of the things that's been bothering me lately because i've been
really like sort of digging down to some really minor stuff in my apps because I'm not adding major features and just looking for like really obscure bugs and stuff. Can you imagine if Apple wrote in its documentation what threads things happen on in the functions they provide and the APIs they provide?
Oh my God.
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Chapter 5: How is Marco managing his fleet of Macs effectively?
Toolbars are the same thing at the bottom of the screen where you have buttons in the bottom. With Liquid Glass, there are no bars anymore. Your content just blurs and scrolls under everything. That's not helping anybody.
And when most people have trouble with liquid glass, either conceptually or really like in terms of reading it, that's like the number one thing on the hit list is the lack of solid or mostly solid bars and having to blur text under other text, which makes it difficult to read. That is not an easy problem to solve.
With the design language they have chosen, that's going to require a decent amount of design to really – to go back to some kind of defined bar with a defined edge. And then the bar itself maybe is made of frosted glass or something and pretty heavily frosted hopefully. And that would alleviate almost the entire problem. Like if they just made bars –
a defined area with a border that ended and a background that is mostly mostly solid you fix this problem i would be shocked if they did that but if you uh look in mac os 26.4 they did do something that you can see in system settings app lots of people used to post uh you know screenshots of the system settings app which has a search field on top of the left sidebar
And as you scroll the left sidebar, the left sidebar has text items like general sound, whatever. That text would scroll underneath the search field. And as soon as you scrolled anywhere other than at the very, very top where basically where there was any text below the search field, the search field has placeholder text that says search.
And then you could also read whatever the item was that was underneath it.
from the sidebar that had scrolled up there and so it was like search with a word superimposed on it and then you would type into that field and it was terrible in 26.4 the search field is a lot more frosty and you can no longer read the text underneath it you can still see some of the text through it you can tell the text is there you can see a black shadow scroll by as the text goes underneath it because it's real important that you do that for some reason but you can't read the text anymore so that's my guess of what they'll do in 27 is
Not actually have a defined bar, which I agree would be way better. But my expectations are set at the 26.4 level, which is like, no, they're not going to bring back bars because they're too stubborn and it would be too hard. But what they will do is crank up the frost dial and make it so that you can't literally read text that's underneath the controls.
I mean, that will help. It is not a solution. It is a Band-Aid.
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Chapter 6: What are the latest developments in AI tools at Apple?
I'm just making up numbers. That will happen. And I think because the Neo has so little RAM, it is definitely in danger of being the first... line of Macs to be dropped from a software revision.
Obviously like with the process of transition, like the Intel ones get dropped or whatever, but just look at like Apple support, like how far back they go on the, on the MacBook pros for various versions of Mac OS versus the MacBook airs versus the minis and stuff like that. Uh, Apple will drop hardware when it becomes unfeasible, given their software plans.
And so I don't think Apple will feel constrained by the Neo. And I think there is a potential for the Neo to fall off the end of the supported list longer than, let's say, its contemporary M5 MacBook Air with 16 gigs. I think that one will last longer than the Neo for multiple reasons. So, yeah, I'm not optimistic about Apple feeling constrained by the RAM size.
And I don't know if software people are cursing Apple's hardware choices, but I have to think some of them have to because it's like you have all these grand vision. And, you know, when we got the big Apple intelligence dividend where all the Macs went to 16 gigs, like, finally, finally, we broke out of that 8-gig jail and we fell back into it.
I'm not slamming the Neo for it because it makes sense on the Neo. Like, I understand that. But one of the things...
that is going to hold back, especially this first gen Neo is it arrives at a time where eight gig is the, especially with the Ram crisis and everything, it rhymes at a time where eight gig is, it's the only choice for that machine, given the prices and given the current Ram scenarios, like it could have been way worse.
And currently eight gig is a little bit under what you would want from even the low end machine, but it's just, it is what it is. Now, when the next one comes out, presumably with 12 and the A19 pro in it, 12 is a little bit better.
It would be better if this one had 12, but it doesn't like, like I feel, I feel like if Apple continues to use the a series chips and does not adjust their a series chips to be up to 16, like to try to keep, you know, cause it's possible they'll do that because we all know the max gets stuck at the base Ram for way too long.
And right after the base RAM on the Macs gets bumped, that's the best time ever. And as time goes on, we're like, we all love the MacBook Air 16 gigs of RAM. In 10 years, we're all going to be complaining that the MacBook Air has 16 gigs of RAM in the base model because Apple just does not change the base RAM to keep up with the times. And so there's that curve they're going to walk.
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Chapter 7: What are the pros and cons of using passkeys instead of traditional passwords?
I will put a link in the show notes though, um, who had helped me a lot, both in terms of his website, which is excellent. And, um, in terms of, you know, actually some kind of personal email support, which was very kind of him. Uh, I have sent him some ATP stickers as a thank you. Don't worry. Um,
But that and Alex on Tailscale's YouTube channel has really, really opened my eyes into a different way of approaching this. And I'm actually really, really happy with it. Now, ask me again when this poops itself tomorrow and I lose everything. But sitting here now, it's been going really, really well and I'm really happy with it.
And if I decide to get rid of the Synology and go a different route entirely like in Unas, I think I am mostly ready to do that, leaving aside, you know, transmitting or transferring all this data and so on and so forth.