I (Git) Blame You

[00:00:00] Intro: Tired. So tired, over tired.

[00:00:04] Christina: You are listening to Overtired. That’s right. We are back. I’m Christina Warren, joined as always by my friends, Brett Terpstra and Jeff Severns Guntzel. Boys. How are you? It’s been a while.

[00:00:15] Brett: It’s good to be back.

[00:00:16] Jeffrey: Yeah, good. You’re going to hear birds. Maybe because I refuse to shut my windows for audio quality because it’s Minnesota and it’s warm, and so let’s do

[00:00:26] Christina: Absolutely.

[00:00:27] Brett: directional mic. It’s working

[00:00:29] Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. I also have a cat that has started walking across my keyboard. I, I call him the intern now because he sent an email and deleted another, so

[00:00:37] Mental Health Corner: Pets Edition

[00:00:37] Brett: You guys want a, a Yeti update?

[00:00:39] Christina: How How’s Yeti doing?

[00:00:40] Jeffrey: yeah, the old cat. How’s the old cat?

[00:00:42] Brett: So like yesterday I took him, he’s getting these shots. I can’t remember what they’re called, but they are supposed to help with like mobility and aging cats and, and they work for 'em. Um, But yesterday when I was in, I mentioned some specific problems he was [00:01:00] having and they were like, oh, this combination of him aging, dropping weight, and then these like basically stool issues, um, could be a really bad sign.

[00:01:12] Brett: So we would like you to make an appointment to uh, do some, do, do a consultation, do a full physical, and I paid like $400 for labs. And then we had to go in today and I was literally expecting the worst because like two cats in a row, we took Clovis in because his breast smelled bad. And they were like, oh yeah, it’s oral cancer.

[00:01:35] Brett: He has two weeks to live.

[00:01:37] Christina: my

[00:01:37] Brett: And you know, like this was a shock. And then we took Finnegan in because his meow had changed and we were concerned about like maybe something in his lungs or something. And he’s nine months old and they’re like, He, he’s got two weeks to live. So I have this like, fear of these appointments, but we went in today and they’re like, oh my God.

[00:01:58] Brett: Yeah. E even [00:02:00] Yeti’s, uh, kidney illness. Ha the scores have come down. Everything’s looking great. You guys are doing a great job. Uh, we’re gonna, we’re gonna treat a bladder infection and we’re gonna put him on some more meds for his, uh, his runny stool. But yeah, they’re like, you’re doing a great job. This, this cat’s doing great for a 19 year old cat.

[00:02:21] Brett: And I was like, oh. So relieved. It

[00:02:23] Jeffrey: amazing.

[00:02:24] Brett: it was because I was crying last night. I was preparing myself for the end of life, right? And so, like, I kept like, breaking down and I was like crying in front of Elle, just like trying to like deal with my, like, it’s time. We all know it’s time, but it’s mortality and it gets me.

[00:02:45] Brett: And then today was such a relief. I have a little more time with my boy.

[00:02:49] Christina: Yeah, that’s really good. That’s really good. I know. Yeah. And I know what you mean. Like having like that fear of like going to the doctor and hearing stuff because you’ve, that that’s the only experience you’ve had and like it sets you up. It’s, [00:03:00] you

[00:03:00] Brett: Every, every pet I’ve ever had has died of cancer. Like there’s always this late stage cancer discovery and like with, with Emma, like we, we found out she had cancer and had to put her down the same day, like it all

[00:03:16] Christina: uh, that’s the worst

[00:03:18] Jeffrey: no wonder you’re pre crying going to the vet, you know?

[00:03:22] Brett: I’ve had some trauma. Yeah.

[00:03:24] Jeffrey: Yeah. Wow. I’m so happy.

[00:03:27] Brett: you. Thank you.

[00:03:28] Christina: That’s wonderful.

[00:03:29] Brett: That might, that might even count as my mental health corner update.

[00:03:32] Jeffrey: There you go. You’re, are you stepping out of the corner? I.

[00:03:36] Brett: That’s me in the

[00:03:37] Jeffrey: Oh no. Oh,

[00:03:41] Christina: Uh,

[00:03:41] Jeffrey: It’s gonna be stuck in my head.

[00:03:43] Brett: I know, right? Have you ever seen the cat version of losing my religion where it’s just photos of cats and it’s like they illustrate like every line, like there’s literally a cat sitting in a corner and then there’s a cat, cat under a light

[00:03:56] Christina: no I haven’t.

[00:03:57] Brett: that’s me in the spotlight. And then [00:04:00] a cat in front of like a crucifix and it’s,

[00:04:03] Christina: really funny.

[00:04:04] Brett: it’s amusing.

[00:04:05] Jeffrey: So there’s a, there’s a great story from a, a wonderful photographer based in Minneapolis. His name is Alex. So, and he’s this like kind of international photographer. He makes these, he’d uses like large format, um, cameras, and he makes these just stunning portraits. And at a certain point he started being asked to do things for like the New York Times Magazine or other things like that, like kind of big market stuff.

[00:04:29] Jeffrey: And, and he was, he was told that Michael Steppe wanted to, um, wanted him to take his photo and, and he was at a point where he was just like not feeling, uh, this whole idea of like applying his art to celebrities. And so the photo he suggested, and ultimately the job was killed because of this, was that they, they meet in New York.

[00:04:48] Jeffrey: And that Michael Stipe stand two blocks away and they take this gorgeous, cuz the, the large format camera is like, every detail of what’s in it is beautiful. So it would be a really compelling [00:05:00] photo. But Michael Stipe would be two blocks away, or one block probably. And, uh, so that, that got killed. But anyway, the, the r e m story always reminds you of that.

[00:05:09] Jeffrey: I think it’s just a fun story. It’s not even snotty, it’s just like, he was like legitimately that’s just where he was

[00:05:14] Brett: I love that idea. I feel like, yeah, if I were gonna have, I would love that picture of me to be like part of something larger and not have it be all about me. I, I would, I would and, and I would think Michael’s sip, like from what I know of him.

[00:05:29] Jeffrey: You would think you’d be into it. Yeah. But like I, the, the cool thing, I’ll link this in the show notes, is that he has a photo, I think he was using as reference, which is this photo of a monk in the woods and the monk is just way off. Um, it’s just, it’s just the most amazing portrait. Anyway, I’ll pick up on the theme, which is just that I, I, I have this cat sitting next to me.

[00:05:50] Jeffrey: His name is Murphy. He’s totally my best friend and my favorite person. And when he was a kid and he ate my Zoloft, that almost died. Um, and I often think [00:06:00] back to that and I get this like, enormous wave of grief. Uh, even though he’s fine, he is three years past it, it’s fine. But, uh, I, it just. I mean, so here’s like a, another cat related mental health check-in.

[00:06:14] Jeffrey: I’ve started, I’ve started having a bed on my desk, like right to my right, which looks out a window. And my two cats, which are, they were they’re siblings. They were found, um, in a barn alone when they were little kittens. And so they, they’re like constantly together, constantly snuggling. So they actually, at this bed is really only big enough for Murphy, who’s the big boy.

[00:06:34] Jeffrey: And then my other cat looks like the runt of a raccoon litter. And, and they sit in here and they make a little, like little fur pile and they snuggle while I’m working, like almost all

[00:06:43] Jeffrey: day. And so if I’m having meetings that are stressful, I have one hand on this like giant fur pile, you know, and you can kind of feel the purring and feel the, the breathing.

[00:06:53] Jeffrey: And

[00:06:54] Brett: Our cat, nobody, uh, grew for a year and then just stopped growing. [00:07:00] So now she’s over two years old and still it’s the size of like, maybe even less than a one year old cat. She just, she’s a tiny, she’s a tiny cat. She’s a runt. She’s a runt of a, what’d you say? A raccoon litter

[00:07:13] Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s what, that’s what my other cat looks like and acts like. Does that name nobody, did it come from the movie Dead Man, or did it come from

[00:07:21] Brett: came from the graveyard book by Neil Gaiman.

[00:07:23] Jeffrey: awesome?

[00:07:24] Christina: so my, I guess, uh, in my updates, so this is a couple weeks old now, but my, uh, my sister’s dog, boo Bear, who we love, he’s definitely my sister’s first son. He, uh, he’s a poodle. Um, he’s whatever the, not the tiniest one is, which I guess is toy. He’s mini poodle, uh, or miniature poodle, whatever. But, but he, um, and, uh, and his twin brother, uh, P bear are, are not, um, and, and Pbe belongs to my mother-in-law.

[00:07:49] Christina: But, um, boo Bear has cataracts or had cataracts, um, And, and it got to the point that like, it was really, really bad and he was basically completely blind and he had surgery last week [00:08:00] and he went through it pretty well. They wanted to add the lenses, but the vet basically said that she didn’t wanna keep him under that long cuz he doesn’t do super well with being under anesthesia.

[00:08:10] Christina: So he didn’t have lenses put in, but the cataracts are at least removed. So hopefully he will at least get some of his, you know, vision back. Like, I think he’s gonna be able to see things from across the way, but he’ll still have a hard time with things up close. But I’m hopeful that that will at least improve some of his quality of life.

[00:08:26] Christina: Cuz it was really, really sad to see him not like he, he knows he’s been staying with my parents. Um, because my sister’s gone a lot during the day and he knows the layout to most of their house, but like, not all of it, like, he got stuck in like the bathroom in the bedroom that I stay in. It’s, it’s hard seeing, um, seeing animals deteriorate.

[00:08:43] Jeffrey: Sure is.

[00:08:45] Brett: All right. Well, we have some topics.

[00:08:47] Apple Savings

[00:08:47] Jeffrey: Well, do you wanna talk about the um, apple savings account? Cause I know you really wanted to hit on that.

[00:08:53] Brett: I just feel like everyone needs to know about this. So if you have an Apple card, you can [00:09:00] now, uh, sign up for an Apple savings account also through Goldman Sachs. And it comes with, and I assume this is true for everybody, it comes with like a 4.15 interest rate, and there’s no minimum balance.

[00:09:15] Brett: There’s no minimum deposit, there’s no yearly fee. It is a far better savings account than I can get through my local credit union. I moved most of my savings at this point into this Apple savings account, and instead of, instead of your cash back from your Apple card going to an Apple Cash account, it can now go into an Apple savings account, which is earning four plus percent interest.

[00:09:42] Christina: I was gonna ask you about this, cuz I’ve been looking at that cuz when they sign, when they uh, you know, introduced it, I, I signed up almost immediately cuz I had um, I think about a thousand dollars in Apple cash for various things. My typical thing is that I get like my, my Apple cash back. And then I usually let it stay in there, just kind of in [00:10:00] perpetuity.

[00:10:00] Christina: And then like, you know, once it reaches a high enough balance, I pay for something with it or I, I transferred to my, I transferred to my bank account, is usually what I do. And in this case, I just hadn’t, and, and I was wrong. It wasn’t, um, uh, it wasn’t a thousand dollars, I think it was 500 cuz I transferred $2,000 to my bank account.

[00:10:16] Christina: So I, I’d had like, I had like 2,500 in there and then I was like, I was like, I was like, I’m gonna put. Two, two. That was like back in my, in my, um, my checking account, which was probably dumb because what I was gonna ask you is cuz I have been considering like, I think that they let you put in like 20 grand, like on a, on a, a seven day period.

[00:10:34] Christina: But like, how hard is it, I guess to get money in and out? Because I wouldn’t be opposed to putting, like with that 4% thing, like you said, that’s better than a credit union. It’s better than I can get with Bank of America and they give me some pretty decent rates because, um, of, of how long I’ve been there.

[00:10:49] Christina: But like how, uh, how easy is it to get stuff in and out? Because if that’s the case, like I could see myself putting, you know, like, like 20, $40,000

[00:10:57] Brett: like your, whatever you pay your [00:11:00] Apple card with, uh, it’s automatically connected to the same bank account. Um, putting money in is seconds getting money out. Like, uh, I transferred money out of Apple savings for Yeti Vet Bills, and it took about 24 hours for the money to show up in my bank’s checking account.

[00:11:20] Brett: So I wouldn’t say it’s difficult, it’s not instant, but as far as bank transfers go, it’s not two to three days, it’s a day.

[00:11:28] Christina: Okay, cool.

[00:11:30] Crazy-Ass Google

[00:11:30] Brett: As long as we’re covering my quick hit topics. also wanna mention that Google’s tap level, domain zip is a horrible idea. Like right now, if you go to malicious content.zip, they have registered, I think there’s a blog called Malicious Content about, uh, Trojans and viruses and, and, and cybersecurity.

[00:11:54] Brett: Um, if you go to malicious-content.zip, Firefox will [00:12:00] download a payload.

[00:12:01] Christina: will Chrome and then, and what And, and what’s inside that is A P D F, which is also problematic, right? Because then, which honestly I have to say this is brilliant on the cybersecurity people who put that together because not only is the payload a zip file, which is bad enough, but then what’s inside the zip file as a P D F file.

[00:12:17] Christina: So these are two things that have been very, very exploited by, by viruses and macros and all kinds of other things. Like we’re, we’re Mac users, we’re typically more immune to these things. Um, not universally. Definitely people can create macro trojans, but usually not in, in PDFs and stuff, but like, this is, this is how, this is how you get ants as they say.

[00:12:37] Christina: Like, if you, do you want ants? This is how you could, ants

[00:12:40] Jeffrey: Yeah. A PDF inside a zip file is kind of like the turducken of, um, you know,

[00:12:45] Christina: Yeah. Like, like, like, like, like it was a, it was a doc file, not even Doc X, like doc, like, that would be like, like adding like, uh, uh, you know, the next level of, uh, of, of, of turducken ness. Like that would be like adding a, another, another piece of lobster or something.[00:13:00]

[00:13:00] Brett: what do you think Google was thinking when they made a.zip domain?

[00:13:04] Jeffrey: confusing cuz obviously it’s the first thing you think is like, this is no

[00:13:07] Brett: Yeah, yeah.

[00:13:08] Jeffrey: super smart. So why did they knock that concern

[00:13:12] Jeffrey: down?

[00:13:12] Brett: feel like, I feel like somebody would’ve said as a top level domain, this is, this is ill faded. Like they have AI experts, they have ethics experts.

[00:13:23] Christina: have massive security teams. What are you talking about? Like they, they, they literally have like one of the best bounty teams where they find other people’s vulnerabilities and report them to them. Like they literally, like Google has some of the most talented, you know, engineers working for them.

[00:13:38] Christina: We know that. But they also have very, very smart security people cuz they have to, and it’s so dumb. And the thing is, is like they also bought, uh, dot MOV domains, which is also a problem because QuickTime files.

[00:13:49] Brett: like a exe domain.

[00:13:51] Christina: It really is. I mean, and, and, and look, I know that there are purists out there. Cause I’ve seen these comments on various things like, well Calm was, was a file extension back in the eighties [00:14:00] and this and that, and I’m gonna be like, okay, fuck off.

[00:14:02] Christina: Neck Beard. No one had the web in the eighties, first of all did not exist. The people who had access to those things were like people who worked at universities and institutions or very, very eager hacker kids. And even then they couldn’t afford to buy domains. So it was, to me it’s just not even a comparable situation.

[00:14:22] Christina: Like the.zip thing is really bad because there are a lot of people who will have things hard coded in. And, um, I saw some, um, post who basically showed, like, because of some of the, the various, uh, unicode, uh, fuckery things you can still do with domains that, you know, the, uh, ICAN has still refused to address for years, despite being called on it for like literally years and years and years.

[00:14:44] Christina: You can make two files look identical, where one would take you to like a GitHub repo. They would have a zip thing and one would look the same. And if you clicked on like, okay, which one of these is legit? And like, if you clicked on one of them, it would like take you to like, there’s nothing here. And if you clicked on another one, it would download a [00:15:00] zip file.

[00:15:00] Christina: But one of them is not coming from a GitHub domain. It’s coming like it’s, all of this has been spoofed and, and it’s just like, like, you know, Unicode fuckery, this is really, really bad. But, but because of the, the way the, you know, they, they can, you know, modify this stuff with the.zip stuff. It’s just, to your point, they should know better.

[00:15:18] Christina: And, and this isn’t the first time they’ve done stupid shit with their, um, top level domains. Like, do you remember when they bought, they bought.app and then they bought.dev and.dev was, was, um, problematic for a lot of people because, um,

[00:15:33] Brett: testing domains. Yeah, I, I

[00:15:35] Christina: exactly. Exactly. So,

[00:15:36] Brett: of my, all of my local host domains. I had to change, instead of bt.dev to test my local website, I had to change to dev.bt and use an

[00:15:48] Christina: Right.

[00:15:49] Brett: t l d for all of my extensions. Yeah.

[00:15:52] Christina: Exactly. And, and so, so they’ve, they’ve done this before and like there’s a part of me that I’m like, okay, maybe if they had bought it preemptively, because you [00:16:00] know, they, they take on all these top level domains. It’s like, okay, well maybe Google did this is for a good reason and they’re not gonna roll it out to people and, and protect the internet.

[00:16:07] Christina: But no, they’re just like, no, well, we’ll we’ll sell 'em to you. Why not? It’s like,

[00:16:11] Brett: Oh,

[00:16:12] Christina: it’s like, shut up.

[00:16:13] Jeffrey: It’s amazing.

[00:16:14] Brett: do know. Don’t, don’t be evil. Yeah.

[00:16:18] Christina: Yeah. That, that was a long time ago.

[00:16:19] Brett: was a long time ago. It seemed so quaint in retrospect.

[00:16:22] Christina: It really does. And you know what’s funny is like there are a lot of people I’m most, I’m absolutely including myself in this, who really gave Eric Schmidt a lot of shit when he was c e o and chairman. And I don’t, not saying that that was misguided cuz definitely like the guy is, You know, weird and whatever.

[00:16:39] Christina: But if I compare him to like, what happened when he left, and then especially like Sundar, who just seems like the, the perfect combo of like incompetent and like aloof. Eric Schmidt at least had some balls. Like Eric Schmidt to his credit, pulled out of China, full stop. He said, we are making a business decision.

[00:16:58] Christina: We will not operate [00:17:00] in China. Period. Full stop. And then it was years after he left when they were like, oh, well this is a really big market. We really, we have to find a way to sort of, you know, operate, but not really operate. They kind of reneged on that. But like, I still, in my opinion, that was one of the most standout standup like business moves I can ever recall any company taking because no other tech company made that decision.

[00:17:21] Christina: And that was Eric Schmidt. So like, I’m, I’m sorry, Eric Schmidt. He, cuz he was the one who created Don’t Be Evil. I was like, I, I’m sorry for dogging on you. You, you suck, but you are better than, than our current crop of tech CEOs in re.

[00:17:35] Brett: In retrospect.

[00:17:36] Jeffrey: You got me thinking on the don’t be evil front. Like it’s not too easy to create a shared definition of what evil meant at the time. Um, but certainly you can, you know, sketch one together and I, I wonder how different our definition of evil used in the sentence Don’t be evil is, has changed between that time and now.

[00:17:57] Christina: Oh, that’s a great point. You know what? I bet, I bet in [00:18:00] some ways it’s gotten like things that we would not have considered evil. We do. And I bet in, in some ways that it, it, it’s reversed, right? Because Google, like a lot of those tech companies, and I’m sorry we’re going on a tangent, but like, I’m not talking like the libertarian like party like of Silicon Valley companies that were much more like small l libertarian.

[00:18:17] Christina: Like I’m not talking about like, you know, the, the, the people who, who claim those ideals. I’m not talking about like Connor from succession. I’m just talking about people who created the internet archive and the, you know, um, electronic frontal foundation and other kind of, I guess in some ways would kind of like be like liberal, like anarchists, right?

[00:18:35] Christina: Like they had like very specific ideas around freedom of speech and around accessibility of things and, and around like stopping, you know, government, um, inter intervention and things. And I think in generally in trying to kind of do the right thing as they define it, right? We feel it this way and we can do it.

[00:18:52] Christina: And that’s just not really the ethos. Anymore. Like that was not, I’m not saying that it was, it was absent profit motive, cuz it [00:19:00] absolutely wasn’t. But it wasn’t as tied into kind of the, the, the corporate greed cycle that we’ve had now. And, and so it’s, it, it, I I think in some ways things that they would’ve called evil, um, we now would maybe not feel as strongly about.

[00:19:15] Christina: Um, but in some things that they, they would be like, oh, this is fine. We’d be like, oh no, that is straight up evil.

[00:19:19] Jeffrey: Google itself.

[00:19:20] Christina: That, that’s an interesting topic. I wish somebody would write that. Yeah, well, exactly,

[00:19:26] Jeffrey: Yeah. Well also it was, I remember when I first read that, I mean in, in the actual days, uh, days of your, um, I remember thinking, oh, that’s cute. This, it seemed like kind of a cute statement. You know what I mean? Um, it didn’t seem like something that went through like, uh, several large committees cause they didn’t exist at that time.

[00:19:44] Christina: exactly. I was gonna say, they, they had so few people. It was, it was genuinely a startup. Right. And um,

[00:19:50] Jeffrey: I feel like there should be a Minister of Prophecy at all of these, um, tech companies so that when you’re creating these, these, uh, slogans or promises, someone can be like, um, just a second. We’re [00:20:00] gonna have to speak to the Minister of Prophecy.

[00:20:02] Brett: Notably, notably, no one since them has had a similar tagline.

[00:20:08] Christina: Yeah. I mean, I mean, the closest was, and it was obviously, um, different. It, it didn’t have like the moral, well, eh, a little bit, but like Facebook’s was like, move fast and break things right. And, and, and then they had to kind of drop that. But like that they are still dogged by that to this day. I think the two of them, I think that that was the lesson.

[00:20:26] Christina: Like, I don’t even know if you need a Minister of prophecies now. I think you just look at history and you go, everyone is going to use this slogan that you think is great and applies to your, you know, small, you know, few thousand, few hundred person company. It is going to define who you are when you become a trillion dollar company.

[00:20:46] Christina: Uh, and, and people are still going to like, hold it against you or, or a 500, you know, billion dollar company. If your Facebook, like, we’re, they’re gonna, you know, hold it against you in perpetuity forever. This will define you forever.

[00:20:58] Brett: I feel like the heat [00:21:00] death of the metaverse is a topic for a whole other show.

[00:21:04] Christina: Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. That is whole other show. Imagine if you named your company after the metaverse.

[00:21:10] Jeffrey: They meant metadata.

[00:21:12] Christina: Hey, good segue.

[00:21:13] Jeffrey: Oh yeah,

[00:21:14] Jeffrey: that’s true.

[00:21:14] Brett: let’s, let’s opt not to talk about Facebook or Elon Musk. Let’s talk about Jeff’s foray into ai.

[00:21:23] mundaneGPT

[00:21:23] Jeffrey: Now there are two levels to that. One is sort of working chat g p t into my normal, mundane, everyday life, and the other is far more exciting work with the a p I and deeper stranger

[00:21:34] Jeffrey: work.

[00:21:35] Brett: see what we have time for.

[00:21:36] Jeffrey: My idea is that we talk about the sort of, uh, working something like chat g p t into your everyday life and we save this big philosophical AI self-portrait conversation for the next

[00:21:48] Brett: Yeah, that works.

[00:21:49] Christina: Yeah.

[00:21:49] Jeffrey: So I, I distinguish now because I do use chat g p t kind of all the time. I, I pay now so that I can use, so I can add, ask 25 things [00:22:00] of G P T four in every three hours. Um, goes fast. Uh, but anyway, um, so there’s that. And then there’s also sort of forays, thank you, Brett, into using the api, which is more of the topic for next week, but is has become much more interesting and exciting to me.

[00:22:19] Jeffrey: And it’s so easy to do. They have such great cookbooks, just to say. OpenAI has great cookbooks for doing all the various things, um, with their api. So anyway, I, um, I think we talked about this before and what, what I was doing at the time was I was experimenting with writing, um, scripts using Chap G p t,

[00:22:39] Brett: Scripts meaning automation.

[00:22:41] Jeffrey: writing a Python script to parse text and make basic changes.

[00:22:45] Jeffrey: And.

[00:22:45] Brett: so not like a movie script, which would make you a, a picket line breaker.

[00:22:51] Jeffrey: Early on. Yeah, that’s right. Early on, a friend of mine sent me something cause I had said something absurd to him in a text and he, using chat g p t, he turned it into a [00:23:00] Seinfeld kind of vignette where everyone gets a line. Um, anyway, so yeah, no, like writing a Python script to parse text or just whatever I was writing.

[00:23:08] Jeffrey: Uh, working with APIs, I would just say, you know, here’s the, you know, I use whatever service I’m using. Like, how would I do this in the da da da api? And it would tell me, and as long as the API hadn’t changed since whatever the date is, that is the cutoff for chat G P T or G p t, um, it would do a good job.

[00:23:25] Jeffrey: And I, and it, it kind of helped me with computational thinking because I would, you know, ask it a question. It would write an initial script. We would do a lot of stuff to fix it. But then I’d start over and I’d ask the question informed by. What I had learned in the previous chat. So I was like, the learning ai, right?

[00:23:44] Jeffrey: Um, and it would write, you know, it would write, uh, scripts. You put 'em in, you get errors, you put it, you know, give them the error and it’s deciphering errors, which is amazing. So anyway, so that’s that part. But I’ve also just been testing out kind of the various other [00:24:00] exercises of my, my, uh, profession. So I write a lot of records requests, and they’re usually state level records requests, which means that, you know, whatever state you’re requesting in, let’s say you’re requesting emails from the state probation, uh, department or something, right?

[00:24:16] Jeffrey: You have to know and cite. Nebraska’s, uh, public records law, which will tell you in which you then assert, you know, here’s how long people have to respond to you. You know, they have to respond to you by this amount of time. They can’t charge you in on this unless this right? And so I’ve got it writing public records requests for me, which was previously something I did using text expander.

[00:24:39] Jeffrey: So I just have all that kind of text framing. But what I’ve found is that when I ask chat g p t to write a record request based on where I’m going to send it, it writes a more interesting and more legally thorough. Records request, then I would’ve otherwise written. So that stuff’s been [00:25:00] interesting. And then, um, I’ve just been using it.

[00:25:02] Jeffrey: So, uh, on our kind of board of directors at the organization I’m part of. Every time we have a meeting and we have meeting notes, I run it into chat, G p t and ask for a summary as for a couple different kinds of summaries, a bulleted summary, a summary of the most important actions or topics, just to see how it works.

[00:25:20] Jeffrey: And it generally works quite well. And then I’ve also been feeding it my raw notes from phone calls or other kinds of meetings or interviews. And my raw notes, meaning like my trashy raw notes, like incomplete sentences, spelling errors, no real clear sense of when I’ve gone from one subject to another.

[00:25:39] Jeffrey: And it does a shockingly. Good job of inferring what is absent. Um, and, and kind of summarizing based on that. And then the, the other way I’m, I’m using it right now, and again, none of these, I’m never leaning on it as the main thing. Right? Everything has. My kind of review, careful [00:26:00] review, test it again, review whatever.

[00:26:03] Jeffrey: But, uh, here’s what is a concern that’s come up for me. Um, so if I am creating documents that will ultimately be historical documents for my organization, or if I’m doing research on, like, I have all this research on a ancestor of mine fought in World War I, and I have this like bulleted information, and I asked chat, g p t, like summarize this.

[00:26:25] Jeffrey: And then I said, now give me like the context, um, for this person’s unit. Now tell me what changed in the Midwest between 1917 and 1918, you know, when he left and came back. And, um, and I’m adding that into the document. And what I fear is that. The fact that this was generated by ai, which I’m noting and the fact that I am well aware that I can’t just depend on this might get lost down the road in, in the years that come, someone looks at this in 50 years and they’ll be like, oh, here’s interesting research on how the Midwest changed [00:27:00] in this period.

[00:27:00] Jeffrey: But in fact, it was generated by AI and I didn’t fact check it. I just wanted to do it to see what it would do. And like that actually brings up a big question I have for both of you. Like imagine that. Problem. Imagine it in many domains. Um, one example actually could be if I’m having summaries of meeting notes from chat G p t and it actually isn’t quite perfect, but I either don’t notice cuz I’m moving too fast or, um, or it just gets past me, right?

[00:27:29] Jeffrey: That becomes the record, right? Like, because the record, so if there’s one sentence off, it could one day be much more meaningful than that sentence is now. Right? It might mean I might blow by cause I’m like, well it doesn’t matter that it got that wrong. The rest of this stuff is great, right? But then I also think more in the case of being a researcher, being a reporter or whatever else, like if I imagine, you know, my story, uh, folders being in a historical society someday because I donate them just cause I feel like why not have all these Minnesota stories here?

[00:27:57] Jeffrey: How do we, how do we, what do we [00:28:00] do short of, I mean, beyond metadata, I guess to say, hey, point at it and be like, Hey, hey, hey.

[00:28:08] Christina: So, so that’s interesting. So it’s actually this great topic. I actually had a conversation, um, yesterday. With, um, a designer at Microsoft. Um, so Microsoft Build is next week, and I’m, I’m co-hosting and I was doing some pre-interviews, um, before the show. And this is actually gonna be a session, um, at, at Microsoft Build.

[00:28:25] Christina: Um, that was just recently out of the, to the schedule. And then Curtis and I are going to be talking, um, afterwards or, or before, I’m not really sure on the timing, but he, he’s a designer who’s been working on, um, basically thinking about, okay, what is the design language and what are the things that we need to build into these large language models and these interfaces, a, to help people use them?

[00:28:46] Christina: And then b, exactly what you were talking about to like, let people know about sometimes these things hallucinate sometimes the things that these things output are incorrect. Like what, what do we put into place there so that people don’t become overly reliant? [00:29:00] On these results. Exactly. To your point. And so I do feel like metadata is definitely part of it.

[00:29:05] Christina: Right. I think that’s a big and important part of it. And, and hopefully metadata can persist across file formats and generations and technologies and whatnot because, uh, that, that’s always a concern, you know, that that stuff can get stripped or, or lost or whatnot, and then you lose all context. Um, but I think there’s another part of it too, which is, and I hadn’t, and I have to admit, I hadn’t, I, I think I’d read the blog post that his team put out, um, uh, like a month or two ago about how they were approaching designing, um, for, for lawyers language models.

[00:29:34] Christina: But I, I, I hadn’t really, um, it hadn’t really fortified in my mind the same way, which was, okay, what are the design decisions that we need to do to let people know what’s up and what the truth is? And I feel like, you know, Even like in the notes, like in addition to having metadata, like it might need to be something where something is just called out, right?

[00:29:55] Christina: Like, might have to be that explicit being like, this is from, this was [00:30:00] generated from AI and has not been fact-checked. Like, but we ha But I think we have to think about everybody who’s designing these systems, how are you informing people and, and ensuring that the correct context is there because it’s so close, so often enough that it is incredibly easy to just become reliant on the results.

[00:30:19] Christina: And that’s the same thing that happened with Wikipedia in the early days, right? Like early Wikipedia. Early Wikipedia was garbage. It’s a lot better now than it was, but it was garbage. But we had access now to more information than we’d ever had access to at any previous time. So it was really easy for people to overly rely on it.

[00:30:36] Christina: And then I think people went and over-indexed the other way, which was like, you can never cite Wikipedia as a source. And I’m like, okay, maybe not. But you could take some of the sources that they cite, right? Um, and, and I think that, I think that, so I think that might be part of it too, which is I think that we have to do a good job of tagging things.

[00:30:53] Christina: I think we have to do a good job of in the products themselves, making clear what’s happening. And then I think there’s another [00:31:00] UI aspect where I think maybe some of these places, when they’re coming up with these claims, they have to add in footnotes as part of the output,

[00:31:08] Jeffrey: kind of if you, uh, if you paste a highlight from like Apple Books, you get this long Yeah. Footnote. Mm-hmm. Man, that makes me think of a couple things. One is the importance of text files becomes, uh, relevant all over again because any kind of, I would imagine people watermarking like a Word doc or something like that, all that stuff can be stripped.

[00:31:32] Jeffrey: And of course anything can be removed from a text doc, but at least if it’s all kept in good faith, you can find a way to maybe kind of bracket the, the kind of AI stuff. And like you said, to come up with like a standard footnote. Maybe you’re, you’re, you’re including what, you know, what version of the, of the model you’re using and how are you setting up that environment?

[00:31:57] Jeffrey: What instructions are you kind of coding in? [00:32:00] That makes me wonder if the best way at the moment to do this, if you can do it faithfully, is to do this work in a Git repo and maybe there’s, there’s a push that’s just, I added the AI

[00:32:14] Christina: So you had that

[00:32:15] Jeffrey: so that you can click

[00:32:17] Brett: audit trail.

[00:32:18] Jeffrey: and you can go to the, then you can go to the link just before it to be sure you’re looking at only, you know, I mean, you have to really trust the person who did that, but

[00:32:27] Christina: Yeah.

[00:32:28] Brett: sure. But the audit trail makes a lot of sense. Like

[00:32:32] Christina: I agree.

[00:32:32] Brett: we can’t expect. All of the uses of generative AI to be called out. Um, like the web is already flooded with, with generative ai, but for like in a research scenario, having a pull request and a merge history that shows like, this is where it happened and you can like get blame whoever was [00:33:00] responsible for incorporating AI into

[00:33:03] Jeffrey: Get, get blame. Should be a command. Get blame.

[00:33:05] Brett: it is,

[00:33:06] Jeffrey: it is.

[00:33:07] Jeffrey: Oh, I didn’t know. Whoa. Is that, is that a deep cut or

[00:33:11] Christina: one of, it’s one of the best

[00:33:12] Jeffrey: heard of it.

[00:33:13] Brett: I mean, it’s, it, it’s, uh, it’s more common than get bisect, which I feel deserves a lot more attention than it gets, but,

[00:33:21] Christina: Bisect is great. Yeah. Get but, but, but get blamed that the hub Burnett, I think,

[00:33:25] Jeffrey: Is this stuff that, is this stuff that comes up in collaboration and rather than if you were doing a solo repo or Tell me about get

[00:33:33] Jeffrey: blame.

[00:33:33] Brett: Oh, for sure, for sure. Yeah. Get Blame is all about like figuring out whose commit broke what.

[00:33:40] Christina: who did

[00:33:40] Christina: what.

[00:33:41] Brett: it’s a way to, it’s a way to figure out like where a bug was introduced and absolutely blame the blame, the responsible party.

[00:33:50] Jeffrey: Wow. That’s awesome.

[00:33:52] Brett: Yeah. So like we, we, oh my God, my cat just walked away with [00:34:00] a long chain in her mouth.

[00:34:02] Brett: Um, so, uh, like I, I moved our publishing workflow at Oracle to be all GitHub based. Uh, because we could do everything through poll request, we could comment line by line, and we could go back through any article and see who added what, who edited what. And it was a way better process than like passing around goo uh, word documents with change

[00:34:31] Christina: Absolutely.

[00:34:32] Brett: um, like it was all in one place, one canonical document with a full change history, and you could see exactly who did what and, and I feel like that’s perfect.

[00:34:44] Brett: That’s a perfect way to introduce AI into any kind of textual. Conversation.

[00:34:51] Christina: No, I totally agree. And I would go one step further and I would be curious on your take on this, Brett, cause I know you’ve played around with it a little bit, but I feel like this would also be a really useful place for using things like [00:35:00] Jupyter Notebooks. Um, because, because that would be like a great way, I think, to organize things.

[00:35:05] Christina: And, um, you could also have code blocks if there, if, if those things are there, and then you get the added benefit of having the tracking aspect too. But no, I fully agree with you, you, Brett. Um, I think I’ve talked about this on this show before, but I’ve, I’ve long had this dream, and I still think this is a great idea, where I’m like, okay, but what if you had like GitHub for office files?

[00:35:25] Christina: Like, and people are like, oh, that’s track changes. And I’m like, and I’m like, no, it’s not, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about, I wanna see every line of, every single change, every single commit, everything that happened in the structure of a document, which you technically could do with, with the way that the, the, the XML in, in those, in those structures work.

[00:35:42] Christina: And I, I don’t know. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Like I actually think that that would be a freaking killer product that if, if I, if I were, if I had enough money and enough, um, ability to focus my attention, I would like want to start something and like hire people to build. Cause I do [00:36:00] think that that could be like, if you were going to create like the next killer like collaboration platform, like that would actually be what it would be.

[00:36:06] Christina: Is, is, is that it? Cuz it’s not the sharing aspect. It’s not the both people typing at the same time. That’s great. But, but the real thing is that granular focus on who did what and be because cuz that’s the thing that I think that people don’t understand the power about get is, is just how useful it can be when multiple people are, are working on something that you literally have this fantastic view of, of who did what.

[00:36:28] Christina: And you can in, in many cases, you know, pick and choose what, what things you want to, to take and what things you don’t.

[00:36:34] Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s the key thing cuz like Google Docs does an interesting, I think a pretty good job of this kind of versioning, but it’s not, it’s not great at all and it’s really hard to pick out. The kind of, you know, if you really want to, like, if you’re looking at a get history, you can just, it’s so easy to just be like that

[00:36:49] Brett: Yeah. It’s all about history. Like Google,

[00:36:52] Jeffrey: diffs, right? Like it’s about histories and seeing the diffs, right? Like that’s,

[00:36:56] Christina: Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s what’s so funny. People, people will tell me whenever I, I [00:37:00] comment on this on Twitter cause I do this every six months or so, and I’ve been doing this for years, and people are like, oh, well just do this, just do that. I’m like, that is not what I’m talking about. That is not version history.

[00:37:08] Christina: If, if, if tell, tell me you’ve never used version control and really seen what it can do without telling me you’ve never used version control. Right. Because, and, and, and, and that’s not me like even trying to like flex. I’m just saying like, you don’t know until, you know, and I, I, that was one of those revelations for me.

[00:37:24] Christina: I was like, I don’t know until, you know, and to your point, Brett, like you’ve essentially built a c m s. You know, using, you know, GitHub as, as your method. Um, I met a guy at GIT Merge last year, um, that the annual kind of like conference for the GI contributors who talked to, like, that is actually what they’re trying to do.

[00:37:40] Christina: They’re trying to build a C M S on top of Git, but, you know, kind of abstract the GI part for, for norm’s. But, but that’s what they’re doing. Which I, I was like, he and I had a great conversation. I was like, I fucking love what you’re doing. That’s my dream.

[00:37:53] Brett: there was a great Mac app called Draft Control, um, that has since

[00:37:59] Christina: You told me about [00:38:00] this. It’s going

[00:38:00] Brett: but it used GIT bundles, um, to, to create a change history for any document you were working on. And it would track foreground documents, so whether it was Word or a text editor or you know, text edit, like whatever you were working on, R T F files, docx files, text files, and it would just create, get bundles every time it noticed a change and you could see diffs for the entire history of a document.

[00:38:33] Jeffrey: Wow.

[00:38:33] Brett: And it was, it was pretty brilliant. And, and it just kind of died at some

[00:38:39] Jeffrey: What was it called?

[00:38:40] Brett: Draft control.

[00:38:42] Christina: I remember this. Now remember you telling me about this and in this Yeah. That was a really, really cool, like genuinely a really great app. I That sucks. I bet it die because the, the developer just couldn’t make enough money off of it. Um, I’m looking it up right now. It looks like it [00:39:00] was in the Mac app store, so that didn’t help.

[00:39:01] Christina: And it was only 10 bucks.

[00:39:03] Brett: Yeah.

[00:39:04] Christina: Um, yeah, that’s, that’s not gonna unfortunately sustain that sort of development.

[00:39:09] Brett: To this conversation. I just want to add that while I don’t use, like I have GitHub co-pilot, I have code, um, and I have, there’s a new extension for integrating both of those into Xcode, which is, which is very good, but. Like, I don’t use it for a lot of code generation, but I have found it amazing for documentation.

[00:39:34] Brett: Like I can just select a function, I can say document this function and it will add, you know, code appropriate comments before the function explaining literally everything. The function does way more detail than I would ever bother to go into myself and like talk about all the parameters, all the outputs, and explain exactly what the function does.

[00:39:57] Brett: And I can do that with a click [00:40:00] and that’s, that’s awesome to me. I love it for that. I did, I, I post dad jokes to, um, to Macedon. I, oh, my social media. Let’s, let’s be honest,

[00:40:13] Christina: Yeah. Your dad, I was gonna say you

[00:40:14] Christina: do.

[00:40:15] Brett: I did the, I, I posted this dad joke that was Panda. Walks up to a bar and says, Hey, can I get a rum and dot, dot dot.

[00:40:23] Brett: Coke and the bartender says, of course, but what’s with the big pause? And the panda looks ashamed and says, I was born with them, but they really blew up in my teens. And the bartender says, I’m sorry, that was really rude to me to point it out. And the panda says, that’s okay, man. They’re hard not to notice.

[00:40:40] Brett: They hit it off and after last call, they had to hit his place. That was the post. And then someone was like, I couldn’t stand that. It ended there. And I was wondering about the fate of the two G P T comes to the rescue and spoiler alert, I was relieved to hear that they pivoted to online orders and workshops creating bamboo infused [00:41:00] drinks during the pandemic.

[00:41:01] Brett: Um, that’s from a Andrea Adrian Nik, but. Like chat g p t as a responder, like I can write a cur, a Kurt terse email in response to something and then I can just real quick run it through

[00:41:18] Jeffrey: Yeah.

[00:41:18] Brett: p t and say, make this friendly,

[00:41:21] Jeffrey: Uh,

[00:41:21] Brett: make, make this response friendly, and it will nail it almost every time.

[00:41:26] Jeffrey: That’s a good everyday mundane use. I realized that I got a so off topic of like, what, how else do you use it?

[00:41:33] Brett: Yeah,

[00:41:33] Christina: No, no, I think that’s a great one. What I’m gonna say, um, uh, the waiting list is we’re letting people off the waiting list all the time, but, uh, the waiting list is still really long. But I would be curious when copilot chat comes out, um, to see what your take on that would be, because that I’ve been using. For a couple months now, and it basically puts in, um, a chat window in, in VS code. Um, this is only in VS code right now. Um, because we have the, the Neo Vim [00:42:00] extension, that’s how people have been able to create extensions for things like Xcode and, and other stuff. And, and we’re, we’re obviously hoping to be able to bring some of these other, um, experiences to other things, but it’s, it’s difficult.

[00:42:11] Christina: But, uh, the co-pilot chat, basically you can like ask a question. It’s got kind of its own sidebar, kind of get a list of topics, um, where you can explain something. You can say, fix something. Hey, I’m having a problem with this line. Can you fix the bug online? Whatever. And you can interact separately from where your code is, but you can then move stuff back and forth.

[00:42:31] Christina: So if I said, you know, write me a, um, you know, write me a code to do this, it’ll create it and then I can put it in my, my document and then I could say, okay, convert it to this. That’s one of my favorite use cases, uh, right now is, is like having it like convert one block of code that’s in one sinex into another.

[00:42:48] Brett: yeah. Well, and check G P T can analyze error logs in context and tell you how to fix errors, and that’s outstanding.

[00:42:57] Christina: Well, that’s the whole thing, right? I think that’s, that’s what [00:43:00] what, uh, people sometimes miss about when they, when they hear about like these, like things like chat, g b t and, and co-pilot, which uses the same technology and, and some of these other services, is that the ones that are really good are the ones that know the context of what you’re talking about, where you can ask those follow on questions and that’s what makes it different than just auto complete.

[00:43:17] Christina: It is fancy, auto complete, but it’s auto complete that has like a history log and, and that understands, and, and even like in the case of like copilot, like if it sees all the files in your project, it can analyze all of those things. So it’s not just looking about like the document you’re in right now and, and that that’s, I don’t know, that’s the stuff that to me just like makes me super happy.

[00:43:39] Jeffrey: me, you made me realize, as you said that, that I now go to chat g p t with errors to interpret them before I go to Stack overflow.

[00:43:46] Brett: Yeah.

[00:43:47] Christina: Yep.

[00:43:47] Jeffrey: everybody. I mean, recognizing that it might be

[00:43:50] Jeffrey: wrong.

[00:43:50] Brett: and chat. G P T four with web browsing is amazing for replacing Stack Overflow. But before we get to gratitude,

[00:43:59] Podcast Swap: Mac Break Weekly

[00:43:59] Brett: I [00:44:00] want to tell our listeners about a couple of podcasts. First, we wanna talk about Mac Break Weekly for IMAX iPhones, iPads, apple watches, apple tv, uh, and the ins and outs of Apple, shaking up things in tech.

[00:44:15] Brett: The Mac Break Weekly podcast covers it. Joanne Lela Port with Jason Snell, Andy ico, and Alex Lindsay on the Mac Break Weekly podcast. They dive into new products, future innovations and everything Apple related. I think you’ve been on the show, right, Christina?

[00:44:32] Christina: Oh yeah. I’ve been on, I think I was actually, I think I was actually on the very first

[00:44:36] Christina: episode.

[00:44:37] Brett: regular contributor,

[00:44:38] Christina: Yeah. Is, and, and, and, oh, look, you’re literally talking about like four of like the best like Mac people ever, you know, Andy, Leo, Jason, Alex. Like, they’ve been around forever and they know everything and they all have really good perspectives of different things.

[00:44:51] Christina: Like, like Alex, especially during the pandemic stuff, like his experience with doing video production and, and conferencing stuff. Um, especially on your Mac, [00:45:00] really good info. And, uh, you know, Jason, Leo, and, and Andy of like, they’re, they’re heroes.

[00:45:06] Brett: is the only one I’m not familiar with, but Andy, Jason, and Leo, I have followed since the early two thousands. So, uh, get it, get a new episode of Mac Break Weekly every Tuesday by subscribing on Apple Podcast, Spotify pockets, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we also wanna talk about the short game.

[00:45:28] Brett: The Short game. The Short game. If you like video games but can’t remember the last time you hit the end credits, check out the Short Game podcast.

[00:45:37] Christina: I love

[00:45:37] Podcast Swap: The Short Game

[00:45:37] Brett: The Short Game is a weekly podcast about games that takes just a few hours to complete from the latest narrative indies to brief, but brilliant classics.

[00:45:47] Brett: Every episode starts spoiler free, so you can listen without fear. And with a nine year back catalog, they’ve probably covered your favorites like Under Tail, Hades, Celeste, and [00:46:00] Vampire Survivors, they’re only rule. The Game must be short. The Short Game is hosted by Reagan, Kelly, Shane, Kelly, and Laura Nash.

[00:46:10] Brett: And Nate Heininger for time. Poor 30 somethings who prove you can be a parent, a professional, a full-fledged adult, and still love games. You can find them by searching for the short game on any podcast platform or head to short game.fm for all the links and buttons, the short game podcast games that respect your time.

[00:46:34] Brett: That’s short Game fm

[00:46:38] Christina: Nice. So I, I’m assuming they’re not gonna be talking about the tears of the kingdom.

[00:46:43] Brett: I, but everyone else is, so it’s

[00:46:46] Jeffrey: I gotta get started. It’s happening in this house. I gotta get started before I

[00:46:49] Christina: I was gonna say, are your boys playing it? Cuz I, I I have to, I have to imagine like your, your, your, your sons are all about it.

[00:46:55] Jeffrey: Yeah, they’re both playing and loving it and I, I played through, uh, breath of the Wild and [00:47:00] so I really wanna

[00:47:00] Christina: Yeah. So fun.

[00:47:02] Jeffrey: now.

[00:47:03] Brett: All right. Crap, dude. Can I kick it off? Mine will be

[00:47:07] Christina: Please do, do it.

[00:47:09] Brett: So there’s this service called Ground News. That’s the web address ground news that offers current headlines from, it’s like all sides if you’ve ever seen that. But it offers it from all, all points on the political spectrum and ranks each story based on how many right wing or left wing or centrist, uh, organizations reported on that headline and then ranks each one based on its factuality and says, you know, generally fable or questionable and gives you a way to take the current news stories, which are probably anybody is getting in their bubble.

[00:47:52] Brett: So they’re getting their bubble’s idea of this story, and it gives you a chance to kind of break out of your bubble and [00:48:00] see what other sides are saying. I have, I have gotten my my mother into using this. And we have found common ground on articles that normally she would’ve come to me infuriated about.

[00:48:13] Brett: Uh, but she’s able to see, oh, there are multiple sides to this problem. And, and you’re able to see like maybe this news article that got you incensed, maybe it’s questionably accurate and be able to see, okay, sure. Uh, my left wing news sources are reporting this in a, in, in one way. In my right wing sources are reporting in another.

[00:48:37] Brett: So just for an unbiased take on news, uh, ground news is my pick of the week.

[00:48:44] Christina: Uh, very nice. Very nice. I like that a lot. And, and I like they have a browser extension as well. Um, which is, which is rad. I, I’m going next because, um, uh, Jeff’s section is, is hell along, but hella awesome.

[00:48:56] Jeffrey: won’t be, I, I have a short version of my section.

[00:48:59] Christina: Well [00:49:00] go, no, go as long as you need to. Um, uh, I was gonna pick Sky, which is like a, a wrapper for, for Blue Sky, for for Mac Os that I quite like, and I will have that in the show notes. Um, we haven’t talked about Blue Sky, but we’re gonna talk about that, um, at some point. Uh, it’s pretty awesome if, if, uh, if you’re there.

[00:49:14] Christina: Um, uh, all three of us are there. I think I’m probably the most active, but it’s, it’s a fun place. Um, but so, so Sky is, is good. And I also have a GitHub repo in my stars. I have a collection of, of a blue sky goodness, similar to my Mastodon. Collection just of, of cool projects that I run across. But the thing that I’m gonna talk about, because I just saw this on Restless, that he didn’t talk about is default folder X six, because I didn’t even know, I knew that that, um, um, uh, he had been, um, working on it.

[00:49:43] Christina: So I, I’m a huge fan of default Folder X. I’ve been using it for, I don’t even know how many years. It’s one of my favorite apps. It’s one of those apps that I love it so much that I do this weird thing where I usually buy it. But then I use the setup version as my installed version. And I do that because I want him [00:50:00] to get it in them, I guess the team to get like the recurring revenue of my usage from setup.

[00:50:04] Christina: But I also feel like. I, I need to pay for it. You know, like, it, it’s one of those things I, I really do get that much value out of the app. I feel like I don’t pay enough for it. And so just looking at like the, the, um, like list of like new features that are coming to it, this looks like this is gonna be really, really great.

[00:50:25] Christina: Um, and, uh, and then for people who aren’t familiar, default folder X basically makes it really easy for you to have default folder commands. It’s kind of like a window overlay of like the, the, the save as dialogue and, and all Mac apps. Um, you can, um, have, uh, you know, set folders for certain file types or for, for certain locations.

[00:50:44] Christina: You can have favorite folders, pens, so that you can easily access them. You can also do things like, one of my favorite features is to have, um, uh, uh, hot keys to go directly to a specific folder that I wanna go to. Anytime I’m in the Finder. I know you could use like a million other apps for that, but I really like.

[00:50:59] Christina: [00:51:00] Default folder X. Um, and it’s just, it’s really good. And it looks like, um, one of the, and, and you are the one who put it on here, Brett, so I’ll let you talk about it too. But it looks like one of the big things, a uh, finally you can sync your, your settings between two max. And so I’m not gonna have to like copy my p list files anymore, which is what I’ve been doing over the years.

[00:51:20] Christina: That’s really cool. But b, it looks like it’s got kind of like a, um, a launch bar, uh, slash alfred slash like a raycast quick search, which any app that wants to adopt that paradigm. I’m, I’m a big fan of, and, and I’m one of those people who like, I don’t think I can have too many, like, as long as I, you know, know what my, my shortcuts are for it.

[00:51:38] Christina: Um, I’m a big fan, so,

[00:51:40] Brett: Yeah, everyone should just adopt command shift P. But yeah, the quick search is cool and they just added spotlight, like a fallback. If you use the quick search to go through like all your recent files and favorite files and you don’t find what you’re looking for, it can fall back to a spotlight search.

[00:51:58] Brett: So it’s becomes [00:52:00] kind of a universal quick search for files and folders. I would say the one other thing that I love default folder X for is just its basic UI tweaks that it does, like expanding fields, making, making certain inputs bigger, uh, allowing, uh, file tagging on any save dialogue. Like just little, little tricks that it pulls on the ui, uh, that when it’s not present, it’s immediately noticeable to me.

[00:52:32] Christina: I was gonna say, it’s one of those rare, rare, like, um, mac like, um, modifications that I actually, uh, really prefer the modifications than what like the default Apple thing is, which is almost never the case to the point that, yeah, to your point, it is literally one of the first apps I ever install on a New Mac because I can’t deal with the, with the normal save dialogue and stuff without it.

[00:52:55] Christina: Like, I genuinely can’t. It’s one of those things I’m like, this is, this is not gonna work for me. [00:53:00] Like, I remember that with, with one like beta, like Mac os version. A few years ago there was a problem with, with default folder X and, and it like completely like ruined. The beta for me because I was just like, I can’t, I can’t not have, you know, this, this overlay and have like these expanded fields to your point and, and this other stuff.

[00:53:18] Christina: Like, I’m like, this is, this is not good.

[00:53:19] Brett: When you, when you pull down the dropdown to like go to parent folders, the, the one UI tweak that I love the most, uh, that default folder X adds is every folder in that list has a, a right arrow and you can go into the subfolders of any of those folders and you can just like navigate to any directory off the, off any point in the parent tree of the current folder.

[00:53:46] Brett: And I find that ridiculously useful.

[00:53:50] Jeffrey: Awesome.

[00:53:51] Christina: Yeah. Especially cuz we all have this situation where you need to put it in a specific file and a specific thing. Because many times like to to to your, like as we were talking about [00:54:00] before with our virgin control and other stuff, like we’re, we’re storing things in different places. We might be having them on various cloud drives or other things.

[00:54:06] Christina: And like where Macel West stores, that is often not what you would think and you have to go into a folder of a folder of a folder, you know? So yeah, I totally agree with that.

[00:54:16] Brett: All right. Jeff, what you

[00:54:17] Jeffrey: Okay, so I, I’m gonna, it’s not what I have in the show notes, everybody, just so you know. Um, but it’s the, it’s, it’s what caused it. Um, okay, so I am, mine is actually this Firefox extension called Foxy tab. And I, I, I, I’m just gonna blow your minds with this one, but the reason I came upon it was I was just looking for a way to merge all of my, um, Firefox windows, uh, when I’m ready to clean up my desktop, and I use an extension for that and, uh, or package for that.

[00:54:45] Jeffrey: And sublime text. A lot of lot of apps have it built in Chrome and Safari, have it built in. I’m super glad Firefox didn’t, because once I. Got to Foxy tab, I realized it does all these things I didn’t even think to dream. Um, and so I’m just gonna run [00:55:00] through, uh, some of the like amazing functionalities.

[00:55:03] Jeffrey: Okay. So I’m literally, I’ve pulled up the, you know, foxy tab, like dropdown menu to do work on a tab, and it starts with, it could save the tab as P D F, which is awesome. Um, there’s a screenshot option. That’s great. Um, then you can actually, like, there’s a copy option. You can copy the tab title, the tab ip, the tab url, uh, you know, like all of these different, uh, bits of the tab, which is totally awesome.

[00:55:29] Jeffrey: And then there’s like a bookmarking thing. Uh, there’s a thing where you can, if you’ve got a million tabs up and you can close just the ones that are already bookmarked, um, which to me is just genius.

[00:55:40] Christina: That’s awesome.

[00:55:41] Jeffrey: Yeah, cuz between duplicate tabs, which you can also deal with between duplicate tabs and tabs that are bookmarked, like that’s probably 50, 60% of what’s open half the time.

[00:55:50] Jeffrey: Um, and then there’s like this whole bit where you can sort your tabs by U R l ascending or descending by title, by last, accessed by [00:56:00] domain, um, which is totally awesome.

[00:56:03] Brett: It has a, it has like a close all to the left or

[00:56:06] Jeffrey: Yes, exactly. Yep, it does. And then this is huge for me. Pin all pin to the left, pin to the right, and then unpin all unpinned to the left, unpinned to the right. Like I get my pins become just this really, like, really weak way of saving something until later. Um, and so being able to do that is huge. Uh, and then of course the reason I came merge all windows.

[00:56:31] Jeffrey: It’s just like an awesome, awesome, awesome, um, extension. So I really like, again, I, I knew these were problems that I needed solved, but I didn’t think to look for the solution

[00:56:41] Christina: No, I love it. And, and, sorry, sorry, what’s the, what’s the extension called

[00:56:44] Jeffrey: Foxy tab.

[00:56:45] Christina: Foxy tab. Okay. That’s, I, I was looking Tabby for some reason, Foxy tab. I wish, now I’m like, jealous that this doesn’t exist for other browsers. Like, this is almost enough of a thing to make me wanna use Firefox

[00:56:56] Jeffrey: yeah,

[00:56:58] Brett: Does it not exist for, [00:57:00] I suppose it’s Fox? It’s

[00:57:01] Jeffrey: yeah. It’s got Fox in it.

[00:57:03] Brett: I would recommend, um, I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at it, but I’ve talked about it on the podcast before. War koa.

[00:57:10] Christina: Yeah, I have.

[00:57:11] Brett: Um, I use War KOA on Firefox and Chrome, and it is just spectacular for managing, uh, tabs in context. So I like open up my general context or I open up my, uh, overtired context and it loads all the tabs that are related to that thing.

[00:57:32] Brett: And then when I’m done with that thing, when our podcast is over, I just close the overtired, the context, all those tabs close. But next time we start podcasting, I just click it

[00:57:43] Christina: You do it again Yep. Yeah, I use my, my, um, I’ve looked at work before. Um, I’m not opposed to paying. I just don’t know if I would use it enough to pay $7 a month is my thing.

[00:57:54] Brett: pay it. I

[00:57:55] Christina: Well, no, totally. Which I, which,

[00:57:56] Brett: Yeah,

[00:57:57] Christina: no, which I, which I totally understand. I’m just saying, I [00:58:00] don’t know. Based on like knowing my own like patterns of usage, like I would have to really get myself in like the zone of being like, this is my primary use case for something and then I think it would totally be worth it.

[00:58:11] Christina: What I do that is similar is I’ve been using, um, ar, the ARC browser a lot.

[00:58:16] Jeffrey: Yeah.

[00:58:16] Brett: Sure.

[00:58:17] Christina: And, and that I have set up in a very similar way where I have like certain, you know, tabs for, uh, different personas and different things and different things tagged and, and stuff to go there. But for me, that’s still different than like what, um, Foxy Tab is doing because there are times when I’m not in those contacts and I just wind up having a shitload of tabs where I start a research thing and then I’m like trying to use one tab and organize them all.

[00:58:40] Christina: And like using my, my Apple Script things where I get like a markdown, um, uh, list of, of every open tab, like, you know, across browsers. So I have like, um, I have like a, like a Semicolon Links I think is for, uh, for Chrome’s. eLink is Edge, Flinks is Firefox. Slinks is [00:59:00] Safari. And then, um, and I, a links I think is, is Arc.

[00:59:03] Christina: So I’ve got like all those things, you know, done. But, but then I, the merge windows stuff, that is the thing, like I, I struggle with all the time where I’m always trying to look up like, what, what is the shortcut? Like what is like the, the extension? Like what is the, the key command to merge windows or to transfer things from one to the other?

[00:59:20] Christina: Because sometimes I have like these two giant monitors and I’ll have like, I don’t know, a hundred tabs open across things. I’m like, okay, but, but I need to put them all here. Yeah.

[00:59:30] Jeffrey: then being able to prune, cuz like my old, my old like, you know, press to launch was if I needed to close my browser, I just did save all these bookmarks in a folder called inbox. Right. Like, uh, and that’s so imperfect. Um, I what

[00:59:46] Jeffrey: I

[00:59:46] Brett: ever, did you ever

[00:59:47] Jeffrey: No, but you never go back to them. Right? That’s the point. And so what this allows me to do is prune, right?

[00:59:51] Jeffrey: And I, that’s what I usually need to do. And like Brett, to the point of, I dunno if I’m saying it

[00:59:57] Jeffrey: right, but, um, for me, [01:00:00] like why this is. Is better for me than what Kona is, is that it is a big red button and I need big red buttons. And, and like an example of that too is like I, I use moo, you know, the window management thing for all kinds of stuff, but the most important thing is when I get started for the day, I lay my windows out how I need 'em for whatever I’m doing in the beginning of the day, I take a quick snapshot that is assigned to a keyboard shortcut that I always use the same one, so that throughout the day when things get messy and I need to just reset to the, to this layout, I don’t have a layout that I use every time.

[01:00:33] Jeffrey: I just have this like snapshot for what, how I wanted it to be in the morning. Um, it’s another big red button, right? Like I, I would love, I’ve used work, I would love to be a good user of work, but I’m, I find that my disposition is, is, is really like geared towards red buttons. Like slam it with my hand, you know?

[01:00:55] Jeffrey: Anyway. Good stuff,

[01:00:57] Brett: right. Should we call it

[01:00:59] Jeffrey: let’s call it.

[01:00:59] Christina: [01:01:00] Let’s call it,

[01:01:01] Brett: I, uh, I have to pee so bad right

[01:01:03] Jeffrey: Oh, yeah. Well, let’s definitely call it.

[01:01:06] Jeffrey: All right.

[01:01:06] Brett: Um, you guys get some

[01:01:08] Jeffrey: I get some sleep.

[01:01:09] Christina: Get some sleep.

[01:01:11] Jeffrey: Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

[01:01:13] Outro: The.