703: Part of a Healthy Breakfast

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Accidental Tech Podcast 2h 32m 4 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 1 month ago
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What feedback did the hosts receive that sparked the discussion about Overcast’s clip‑sharing feature?

Casey Liss 0:00
Yes. His name was Adam Filemaker.
Marco Arment 0:22
Yes.
Casey Liss 0:23
Yep, exactly right. That was incredible. We had another incredible piece of feedback that was sent to all of us, but was really for you. Can you tell us about this? Because this was just chef's kiss amazing.
Marco Arment 0:37
I think this might be my favorite feedback I've ever received on a podcast. Yeah. I think my favorite piece of follow-up I ever heard on someone else's podcast was once, I believe it was an old episode of Connected. Mike said his birthday on an episode, and somebody wrote in the next week to say, you got your birthday wrong. This is your actual birthday.
Casey Liss 0:57
Incredible. And it was correct.
Marco Arment 1:00
That, I think, is my favorite piece of podcast follow-up ever. Somebody correcting Mike on his own birthday and being right. so good but i think this might be my second most favorite so a million years ago when overcast first made um the clip sharing feature this i can't even remember how many years ago this was well let me ask you take a guess what episode of atp was entitled automatic kicking machine just so we're currently in the low 700s i'm going to say maybe it's somewhere in the 400s
Casey Liss 1:31
I would have thought the same, Marco. Actually, John, do you know?
John Siracusa 1:35
I mean, you already spoiled it by saying it's probably less than 400. I don't know. 210.
Casey Liss 1:41
Number 34. Wow. Number 34. Oh, shoot. Wait, wait. I'm a big liar. We're going to have to fix it and edit. 324 is what I meant to say. Oh, yeah. That's a pretty big difference. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Price is right rules. I win. Yeah. John wins. Price is right rules. My apologies. So I take the show notes that we share, and then I generate the ones for public consumption. And I had a typographical error, and I dropped the 2 and 3, 2, 4. I'm so sorry. I was not trying to set you up for failure. That was a genuine whiff on my part.
John Siracusa 2:12
Also, don't say generate, because people are going to think you used AI to do it.
Casey Liss 2:14
Oh, no, no, no. I create them by hand. But anyways, May 3, 2019 was when we last spoke about this.
Marco Arment 2:21
Yeah. So that was when I wrote clip sharing in Overcast, I was using this API, like this AV asset writing kind of API to generate video from a UI I was rendering. That's how those clips were created. And I dug through the docs at the time and This was obviously many iOS versions ago and many years ago. And the problem I had was that the system I was using, which as far as I knew at the time was the only way to do this with Apple's APIs, every so often it would just stall when exporting a video. And I realized that if I just... If I detected that it wasn't progressing and I just canceled the task and shifted the first timestamp by like, you know, 0.1 in either direction and just tried it again, oftentimes it would succeed the second time.
Marco Arment 3:12
Sometimes it would take... two or three times to succeed and you would see this as you like and this is actually still in the current app store version of overcast as you export a clip you could see you would see like the little pie chart progress meter get like most of the way through and then stop for a couple seconds and then start over at the beginning What I had built was, as I described it, an automatic kicking machine. If you kick it and make it reset, it would often succeed. So I just built, when I shipped the feature, an automatic kicking machine that would just detect when it was stalled, kick it, and start it again until it succeeded. Well... David Watson wrote it a couple days ago to say, hey, I believe I plus ChatGPT and Claude figured out what was going wrong with your clip generation system in Overcast.
Marco Arment 3:58
I'm honestly quite frightened that it was possible for AI agents to find this. Now, what David did was it looks like he did was have AI decompile my binary, which is a thing people do. I haven't gotten to that point with AI yet, but it's a thing that's happening and it's helping people find bugs and stuff. So it's great. And he said, you're using this one API call to composite the graphic. And if you use this other one, it works.
What? Incredible.
Marco Arment 4:26
So I tried it. It took one or two minor other lines of code, changed around it to use this other function, this other API for compositing the image.

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