The wrong place to slap a person

I never understood the term eavesdropping, because this is more like eaves picking stuff up…

How do they know if eaves is like the ceiling things, like the roof things?

So you’re dropping stuff off the eave? Maybe that’s why it’s – like, they drop it and you pick it up. I don’t know. It’s a weird word, eavesdropping.

Yeah.

Let’s see what ChatGPT has to say about this. “The term eavesdropping originates from the practice of listening to conversations from outside the house, typically by standing under the eaves, the part of the roof that overhangs the walls, to catch the sound of conversations on the inside.”

That would be eaves catching.

I don’t disagree with you on the eaves catching.

“Eaves-hoping-they-drop-something.”

The word eavesdrop itself comes from Old English, which I can’t pronounce… Y-F-E-S-D-R. This E with maybe an anyo, and a P and an E afterwards… Which refer to the water that falls from the eaves of a house. So maybe it’s like that water drops.

So Nick had the eaves down, that was exactly what the reference is. I thought it was maybe the female rapper from the late ’90s, Eve…

[laughs]

Do a rap. Do a rap. I’m down.

Well, when Eve would drop things, she was also eavesdropping…

She was dropping things…

She would drop bars though, not raindrops.

I’m just thinking of Enya. I can’t think of Eve…

You can’t think of Eve?

No.

She’s quite a bit more hardcore than Enya, insofar as she’s an actual rapper, and Enya is more of a – what’s her genre?

See, I thought you were talking about Eve from the Bible. I don’t even know who these people are. I’m so non-cultured.

That goes way back. I’m talking about Eve –

I did listen to Enya in religion class. I remember that, in high school.

Oh, did you?

Yeah.

Did she turn the lights off, and light some incense and say –

Mm-hm. Like a little meditation thing.

Oh…

Mm-hmm…

“Who, can, say…”

Oh, my gosh…!

Don’t stop, Nick. Can’t stop, won’t stop.

Nick, Karaoke Machine. That’s the name of the show, Jerod.

Nick, the karaoke machine. When’s the last time you karaoke’d, Nick?

Amsterdam.

Tell him your favorite song, Nick.

React Summit, Amsterdam.

I know his favorite song. It’s Prince…

Don’t… Let him say it.

Okay, go ahead, Nick.

Well, Jerod and Adam…

And then you have to sing it. A little bit.

Okay. [laughs] My favorite one, because it’s memorable and it’s quick, it’s only like two and a half minutes… And it’s fun, because there’s no way that I can sing this properly… And that is Kiss by Prince. Because it’s all falsetto, and it just like starts off with like [unintelligible 00:05:35.09] and then you just like immediately go into it, and you just immediately drop down, and you’re like – you don’t even have to scream it. You can just be like “You don’t have to be beautiful…” You just like GO from there…

That is a good song.

And you’re never embarrassed by that, because you can’t achieve Prince’s level anyway, so why be embarrassed, right?

Exactly.

Like, you’re just doing your best.

Yeah. And you’re going and making an ass of yourself, and it’s it’s a wonderful… And then you can – I think that that primes you for conference speaking, and talking on a podcast. Like, you can just make an ass of yourself.

Or karaokeing by yourself with no music on a podcast.

He’s like “I couldn’t possibly embarrass myself more than I already have karaokeing, so…”

Yeah, that’s true.

“So I’ll just go on a podcast.”

There’s no limit to my embarrassment. I can go lower, for sure.

What’s your second favorite song?

Ooh, I’ve got – it depends on the mood, and the mood of the room, for sure.

Okay. Read the room.

You’ve gotta read the room. You’ve gotta work the room, too. You really – you’ve gotta have a wireless mic. If there’s a pool table, you’ve gotta be up on the pool table.

So you’re more about the show than the song.

Yeah. You’ve gotta go up to a random – the person who looks the most uncomfortable being there, and just like get down on one knee and just belt it right into their face. Get them into it, or not…

Oh, my gosh…

And you get everybody on your side that way.

Or you get punched in the face.

Yeah. It hasn’t happened yet… [laughter]

Not yet. Have you ever tried the Pee Wee Herman move? You know, get up on the bar and dance…

Ooh, not yet… That would be amazing. I haven’t been to like a setup that has that though… Like the bar…

Oh, hold on, hold on…

Oh, my phone.

Get your phone out of here.

Get out of here, phone!

Throw it. Just throw it.

Just chuck it across –

I’ve got two of them. I just threw them.

Weren’t we on a podcast where somebody did that, Jerod? They chucked their phone across the room. For some reason that’s like a memory in my brain.

Yes, but I can’t remember who. I know I threw mine on the couch last week…

Somebody just chucked it across the room. They’re like “It won’t stop [unintelligible 00:07:30.12] so he just chuck it.

That’s right. I think it wasn’t because it was buzzing, it was because it was ringing. Like, it wasn’t what Nick just did.

Okay, Nick. Continue.

You’ve got two phones, Nick? No, let’s stop. Is this like a daytime phone, a nighttime phone thing, so you’re always on offense, like that one guy?

Pretty much. I have a work phone and a personal phone, which I just upgraded to the 16 Pro Max…

Oh, wow.

The camera control button one.

You must have large pockets.

I do. To fit that phone in.

[00:08:00.00] That is way too suggestive. “I do…” [laughter]

“I have such large pockets…”

The Max, huh? Those Suckers are big.

It got bigger this year.

Did it really?

By shrinking the bezel, I think.

Okay, so same overall size probably.

Roughly… But yeah, shrinking the bezel. So it is slightly noticeably larger, reaching my thumb up to the top side. My work phone is a 14 Pro, so the smaller one. And so it was nice, I had both of them just to kind of compare… And I just like the screen real estate of the Pro Max. I’ve kind of – I have an iPad Pro, and I kind of like don’t use it anymore, just because… I don’t know, it doesn’t fit my lifestyle.

Yeah, I had multiple iPads and I discarded them all, or gave them away eventually, because again, I just never used them. It’s like, I have a laptop, and a phone, and there’s really not much room in my life for something in between. But I’m rocking the 14 Pro as my daily driver, as my singular phone… Although I am planning on upgrading, because I’m on an every other year upgrade cycle. But this is probably the first time where I was like “Do I need to go every other year? Because this phone I have is pretty stinking fine.”

I don’t know… You have two fewer buttons than I do.

That’s right, you have two new buttons. So there’s a camera control, and then the Action button. Now, of those two, I feel like… Why? Why the Action button? It just does one thing, right?

It can do one thing, or many things, depending on how crazy you wanna be.

Do you push it differently for each thing, or…?

No, actually, I don’t like that. You have to push and hold, I think, to get it to do whatever you program it to do.

The long press is back.

Yeah. But you can set it up to – like, on my 15 I had it set up to open the camera, because it was a nice and easy way to quickly and reliably get into the camera.

You don’t need that now.

Yeah, I’ve got a whole dedicated button for that. So I have it set right now, because I’m an old guy, I guess, to the flashlight.

Oh, the flashlight. I thought it just launched Vim on your computer.

[laughs] But through the magic of shortcuts, you could set it to run a shortcut, which could do some logic like “Oh, you’re at home and it’s 3.30 p.m. So that means you probably are at work, and you wanna run this action.” And “Oh, it’s 7 p.m., it’s at night, and you’re off work, and you wanna turn on Enya.” Like, you could have it set to do any of that.

Right. Like, at what time of the day should it just start Kiss by Prince, you know? Like 9.30 p.m. it’s just that song.

7.30 a.m., man. That’s the wake-up song.

Okay.

Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough by Michael Jackson is my wake up song.

Really?

Yeah. I downloaded that as a ringtone when ringtones were things that you would seek out and download…

Right, that was a fun time in life.

Yeah. Now it’s my alarm sound for waking up at 5 a.m.

That’s the problem. That’s why you never set your favorite song to wake you up, because you Don’t you hate that song, though?

Yeah, yeah.

That’s the problem. That’s why you never set your favorite song to wake you up, because you end up hating it.

I haven’t gotten enough yet. I don’t stop till I get enough.

[laughs] Well, let us know when you’ve had enough… I’d like to know; that would be a good social experiment.

I’m with you, though, Jerod, on this every two years, and now I’m like ish… Because I don’t feel – like, what made me upgrade last time was my phone had a scratch on it, and it was just driving me crazy… And then I felt FOMO of the island.

Oh, yeah. The island’s cool.

It is cool. And anytime there’s a major UI update that only a subset gets, which is the new, obviously, in most cases, I just felt like I was missing out.

Don’t you have Apple Intelligence FOMO? Because they’re limiting it to the new ones.

I don’t know. I don’t know if I do. I feel like – I wouldn’t mind playing with it, I suppose, but at this point, no.

At this point there’s not much, especially if you’re –

At this point it’s not there yet, right?

[00:11:56.29] Well, I was running the beta on my 15, and I decidedly did not want to run the beta on my new phone, mostly because I just want to experience “What’s this phone like when it achieves its full battery potential?” Because on the 15 Pro Max I was at zero by 4 p.m. every day, and I wasn’t doing anything with it. So it was just like draining constantly.

Really? That’s terrible.

Yeah. The Apple Intelligence features that it had, which were still limited, were pretty awesome. Like, the [unintelligible 00:12:24.13] of like text messages… I could ignore a text thread all day and get a quick summary, and it was kind of comical sometimes.

Are you getting FOMO, Adam? Is it working?

No, we’re in that camp of – summaries is still the killer feature for most AI-related things, I think, especially in that context. I don’t know, honestly. I feel like – if I saw it in practice, maybe. I think maps would be fun. Like, take me somewhere… I think Siri upgrades with voice would be where I would get FOMO… And if that’s what intelligence brings… Which I’m not even closely paying attention. I feel like it’s purposefully not paying attention to the details of their announcements so that I don’t get this FOMO.

Yeah.

But I talk to my phone a lot, and that’s the part I would be getting FOMO about. The intelligence of that speaking to something that’s tangible that it can do. Like “Take me somewhere.”

That’s the killer app, isn’t it? It’s better Siri. That’s what this thing is selling.

Yeah, at least it’s not quite there…

It’s not there yet, though. Well, they haven’t really released it yet, right?

No, I’m talking about the beta, and I’m not running that anymore. But on the beta, the one nice thing is you do get the new animation for Siri, which is cool… But then you also get – it holds some context, so I can be like “How old is this actor on TV?” And then I can say “Oh, what movie did they star in?” And I don’t have to say their name again. It remembers from the previous question that I’m still in the context of that actor.

Yeah, that’s important.

There’s dumb things that I ChatGPT, because who googles these days…? For example, I was reminding myself how many ounces was in a quart. And so rather than – and I don’t know if Siri would answer that one correctly. Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t. It’s hard to tell on that one.

It’s either 16 or 32.

16. Well… Yeah, I think 32 is in a quart. A pint, I believe, is 16.

[laughs] You’re gonna have to go ask again.

I’m gonna have to go ask again.

I knew it was one of those two, but off the top of my head, I wouldn’t know. I think it’s 32.

But I opened up a tab on mobile… No, actually, I opened up the ChatGPT app, and asked the app. And it’s like this ephemeral question you don’t ever want to go back to as a chat. So that’s kind of the thing I wouldn’t mind the Apple Intelligence, the [unintelligible 00:14:46.17] to give me those little quick hits. It’s like math, but harder. It’s not like two plus two, it’s “How many ounces is in a quart?” It’s not exactly like math.

Do you think that’s harder than math?

Well, it might be easily fetchable, but it’s not like two plus two.

No, that’s also a pretty basic math.

Right.

There are more complicated maths than that one.

Well, it’s words… Yeah, I don’t know if Siri has that – let’s test. Let’s test Siri right now. I don’t have Apple intelligence. How many ounces are in a quart? [It’s 32 fluid ounces.]

Drilled it.

Just wasting my time talking to ChatGPT in that app… [laughs] She’s already smart enough.

That one’s probably like embedded in RAM, you know? Enough people ask that.

Okay, touché.

I just asked Raycast – not Raycast AI. I just typed into the Raycast thing. One quart, and then OZ, and it told me exactly what it was.

Well, I mean, that whole deal is a lookup table. Like, one person coded that thing one time, and it’s just some sort of thing that just lives in memory on every device in the world, you know?

For everyone who ever needs to know.

[00:15:54.02] That’s the kind of stuff that humans ask all the time. I mean, I can’t remember that stuff…

I did see a video today that – I can’t speak to the validity of it… And I do have ChatGPT Pro, but I don’t have the advanced voice thing that they have. Do you remember, they announced that forever ago?

Yeah, where you talk to it like Her.

Yeah.

That’s not Scar Jo?

It’s someone else. Specifically someone else now.

It’s specifically somebody else. [laughs]

But I saw a video on Twitter today of somebody using that to tune their guitar. And so ChatGPT was like “We’re gonna tune this string first, and it sounds like this.” And then he plays it, and he’s like “How about that?” And she’s like “No, tighten it a little bit more.” And then she’s like spot on.

No way.

That’s cool.

Okay, that’s cool. That is cool.

FOMO… FOMO…

Speaking of voice impersonations and Scar Jo…

Oh, gosh.

…just left adjacent to Scar Jo is a guy named Jeff Geerling. Have you heard about this?

I saw him post on Mastodon about someone using his voice, but I didn’t read it.

Okay.

Is that what you’re gonna talk about?

I’m gonna reference it at least. I’m gonna lightly talk about it. Let me see if I can pull up the information quick enough.

Jeff Geerling, for those who don’t know, is a home labber/YouTuber… What’s his particular – he’s a YouTuber. He’s been on the pod.

I would call him an open source developer. I would call him a developer. I would call him a home labber.

But what’s his – his channel’s more about hardware and stuff though.

Yeah. But he’s got roots in the Python community, and Django… And he definitely has tons of open source out there too.

Anyways, keep going.

Yeah, I think his channel’s just Jeff Geerling. I don’t think it’s named anything. Anyways, there’s a company called [unintelligible 00:17:40.21] To my knowledge, they have several videos out there. When I say several, it’s more than one. I think it’s probably 10 or so potentially. And I think somebody told him about it, somehow he found out, and he shared a video on his YouTube channel, which we can link up in the show notes, highlighting the fact that – he’s like “Does this voice sound familiar?” And he plays it, and it sounds just like him. Just like him. And so, not that I’ve got a cool voice, or Jerod, you’ve got a cool voice, but our voice is out there a lot… I’m wondering, when are we gonna get Scar Joed?

[00:18:18.05] Oh, you want this to happen to you.

I don’t think I want it to happen, but is it gonna happen? We have influential voices. I mean…

I don’t know.

You know how this works.

I mean, I know how it works technically. I don’t know how it works in the way that you’re talking about it.

[laughs]

All I know is somebody’s gonna put it out there and finish that song Nick Nisi started…

That’s right, in the Nick voice.

Mm-hm. Just the falsetto, the Prince falsetto. Sing the whole thing.

Well, I do think it would be cool to tune a guitar like that.

Yeah.

That’s super-cool, actually. I mean, that’s a good example of tomorrow’s tech, today.

That sounded like a corporate advertisement.

Well, I mean, a lot of people don’t see it as like “This is here”, and it is, and that’s cool.

I would prefer to just hand the guitar to the robot and say “Will you play Kiss by Prince, so I can sing this falsetto?” That’s when it’s really here. It’s like, you go to a restaurant, and it’s advertised. Maybe there’s even a $5 cover at the door. Live music tonight.

Nick Nisi.

And you go to this restaurant, and you sit down, and you look up on stage, and there’s nobody on stage. Just a couple of laptops. [laughter]

A couple of laptops talking to each other.

And they’re hardwired into different instruments. And they just start playing songs, taking requests. And then get down on one knee at somebody and sing right in their face. I don’t know. It’s gonna be weird. It’s getting weird…

I would watch that, for sure.

Yeah, I’d probably watch that, too. That’s the problem, is we’re so easy. We’re like “This is dangerous and crazy”, and it’s like, “But I would totally participate.” [laughs] Aren’t we just kind of along for the ride this whole way? That’s the problem, right?

How can we stop it? I don’t know… There was also – I didn’t read about it, or I didn’t read the post, but I think there was a post by Sam Altman this week about we’re like 1,000 days away from super-intelligence, or something like that.

Yeah, I don’t really believe anything he says, though.

I agree, I agree…

It’s like Elon Musk, and then we’d be self-driving by 18 months from now.

Totally. And he’s completely invested in that being true…

Yes.

…and so highly motivated to say it’s gonna be true pretty soon. But…

Yeah… If it is true - let’s assume that we are that close. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. And there’s no one – I don’t know, it could just be devastating. Like, already we’ve put out all of the guitar tuning apps. They’re gone. We don’t need them anymore. We don’t need the – we’re just slowly going down this market, until…

Unless they evolve, though. I mean, that’s just one application. The thing I don’t like about ChatGPT is not what it does. It is its interface. In the web version of it, you can’t star things, and like use it as a resource you go back to for continued intelligence development for yourself.

And maybe that’s where other client applications apply, where it’s like, you’re an interface and an API away from a better ChatGPT. I feel like that’s where the tuning app that is not evolved can evolve, right?

Yeah.

Because it doesn’t have to die. It just moves – like Jerod has said a couple of times, it’s about changing your spot on the value chain. Say it, Jerod… What’s your soundbite, dude?

It’s about changing your spot on the value chain. [laughter]

That’s my paraphrased version of it. You’ve got to move around the value chain. It’s not that –

You’ve got to move up. You can’t move around. You can’t go down or sideways. It’s got to be up.

You can’t stagnate.

You have to be more valuable. Higher up.

This reminds me… I just read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my daughter, and her dad was – he was putting the lids on toothpaste bottles. And then times changed, and he had to evolve to be the repairman for the robot that does that. But what if he finds zen in just putting the lid on the bottle?

[00:22:15.07] There’s other ways to find zen… There’s many roads to roam.

Yeah. He can do it in his spare time, for free.

He could brush his teeth a lot. Just take the thing off, brush his teeth, put it back on… He’d have the cleanest teeth in the world.

And that’s why I still write TypeScript.

Zing.

That’s more like flossing, isn’t it? I mean… TypeScript is always going the extra mile, is it not?

It’s just table stakes now.

You must like typing. Not types, but like literally…

I do like types.

Because you type a whole bunch more than I do, and we accomplish the same thing. Just with regular JavaScript over here. Correct?

Yes, absolutely… [laughter]

Well, I close my case.

But do I type more, or do you? Like, when you go fix all of your type errors later on, you end up doing more.

Oh, I don’t do that part.

Okay. [laughs]

Yeah. Fix type errors? How am I gonna know about them?

Break: [00:23:11.10]

Well, AI is crazy. I am not – to summarize, I am not yet FOMOed by Apple Intelligence.

Well, wait till I get it in my hands and start showing you cool stuff it’s doing for a few months…

Just don’t get it before ATL. Maybe now is a good time to mention we’ve got some free passes… What are we gonna do – we’re gonna be there again.

Correct.

All Things Open.

All Things Open.

This is a staple for us.

Staple.

We love [unintelligible 00:29:52.20] the team… I’m trying to encourage Adam Jacob to come there, even though he wasn’t planning to come there, just to go eat steak with us, Jerod.

Okay…

I mean, I could say more, but that’s all I’m gonna say.

Alright, that’s all you’re gonna say.

I have experienced eating steak with both of you.

This is true.

Oh, yes. It is intense, right?

I would recommend.

We don’t mess around.

Yeah, we ate steak together at – where were we?

That Conference.

That Conf. You went to That Conf in Wisconsin, didn’t you, Nick?

I did.

How was it?

It was a lot of fun.

Bigger?

It was bigger, yeah, I think. Yeah, it definitely was bigger. It was more fun. I had my family there that time, so…

Right on.

They had like a pool party thing… After the water park closed to the public, they reopened it just for that conference, which was awesome.

That’s cool.

Shout out to Clark Sell, who runs that conference. The organizer of it. He always pushes back on that and says “It’s me and other people. A lot of people are part of the front of That Conference”, but it is literally called That Conference.

It is.

All caps, T-H-A-T, Conference.

Speaking of which, now’s a good time to let you guys know that at That Conference in Wisconsin, Clark – I just happened to have a solid state drive, and Clark gave me the recording from January. So…

No way.

Yeah.

We can finally publish that episode. I’ve asked – I was just like “Okay, we’re not gonna get it.” Was it Danny? It was Danny, right?

Danny Thompson. We interviewed him on stage.

Yes.

And then that was That… Conference…

That was that.

So he gave it to you just because you’re friends with us, basically?

Oh, he was like “Oh, do you want this, and do you have a means of taking this very large file?” And I just so happened to have a two-terabyte drive with me, and I was like “Yeah, let’s do it.” And then I forgot to tell you guys.

Hilarious.

He gave you our proprietary intellectual property, is what you’re saying.

Yes. And I reposted it under my name, and… [laughs] No.

Trained some voice LLMs on it… We might actually need to just do a redo on the Danny Thompson thing.

Yeah, I feel like at this point shipping that show is probably not gonna happen.

Although it was pretty good…

Let’s listen back to it and we’ll see if we actually like it.

Yeah.

Because sometimes we listen back and we’re like “That was better than I thought.” Other times we listen back and we’re like “That was worse than I thought.”

And we did JS Danger there on stage… Only half of it was recorded, and it was a great show.

Oh man, that was a great episode, actually. It came down to the final question and nobody could get it. And I think the final answer was something hilarious like –

It was.

Thunderbird, I think.

Thunderbird. The final answer was Thunderbird.

The mail client, Thunderbird.

Yeah, the mail client. And - I mean, the crowd went crazy. I thought this is an award-winning episode of Frontend Feud. Not JS Danger, Frontend Feud. Which is our Family Feud style, not our Jeopardy style game. And then I went to the – well, now we’re gonna start… Maybe we should stop here, because we’re gonna start complaining, but…

No, no, no. Nick, did he give you that? Did he give you that file, too?

No, I went up to the guys afterwards, the guys who were running the AV right there. Like “That was so awesome. Can’t wait to turn it into an episode.” He goes “Oh, you wanted to record that?” And I was like “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Yeah. Like, that was a big plan.

We’re podcasters. Always be recording. That’s our whole thing. ABR.

ABR, man. So today, for the first time in a very, very, very-very long time, I opened up Arc. Just because. Just because I was like “Well, I’ve gotta talk about a browser that isn’t Safari.” And so I’ve been in meetings recently. I’ve screen-shared with folks, and they’re sharing their stuff with me, and they’re navigating around, and giving me demos, and stuff like that…

Sure.

And at least on a couple occasions I was like “What’s that browser?” And it was Arc. It was kind of cool. That’s it. That’s it. I still can’t use it, though.

Why not?

It’s such a departure from standard web browser that – I don’t know how to use it. I’ve gotta like retrain my brain how to use a browser.

[unintelligible 00:33:56.08]

Yeah. That’s about it. I mean, that’s the reason – it’s just like Vim. It’s enough change…

Take that back right now…

I mean, for somebody who hasn’t vimmed… I vim –

Vim is totally worth it, though.

[00:34:08.17] But for someone who hasn’t, and they’re intimidated, or they have imposter syndrome, I can understand why it’s challenging to get over that hump to even be comfortable in Vim. And so I would say that Arc or a browser that is uniquely different like it is, has similar characteristics of the challenge that Vim has to capture users. And once you’re over that hump, maybe you’re like “I’m sweet, it’s great. I get it.” But for me, it’s like “Well, I just can’t get past this departure.” It’s hard.

I would say that’s true for any life-changing tool, like Vim, or… I wouldn’t necessarily say Arc, but Arc does have a lot of –

Are you saying Arc is life-changing?

No.

You’re not saying that. Okay.

And in fact – I think it’s funny that you came in right as they had like a critical CVE… Did you see this?

Yeah, they had something last week, wasn’t it?

Yeah.

What was the CVE? Spill the beans.

They could execute code on your machine without you even visiting a website, to like initiate it.

Who’s they? The people?

The attacker.

The bad folks.

I didn’t read it exactly, but I know that it was like some vulnerability through Firebase, or something, that like…

Yeah, it’s through Firebase.

But I don’t use it anymore, unfortunately, or fortunately… I just don’t like Chrome. And it seemed like a better Chromium to use, but…

Agreed.

Yeah.

I still use Brave as my better Chromium for now. Brave browser is just – I mean, it just is what it is. It’s basically rip out the Google parts…

And replace it with crypto parts though?

I mean, none of that stuff is on by default. There’s a VPN button that I don’t use, there’s crypto things that I don’t use… I do think the idea of the BAT token was interesting, but you don’t have to use any of that. And it’s just like Chrome minus the Google bits. And honestly, I use it for Riverside, and for development, and that’s it.

Same. I do want to clarify, just because we put this security mention out there… I pulled up the CVE… And the CTO, Hursh, I believe, of the Browser Company, the makers of the ARC browser… On August 25th there was an incident, and a fix was out the very next day. The loop to be closed is not the details of it, but that they say “No ARC members were affected by this vulnerability.” They did an analysis of their Firebase access logs. So they use Firebase to deploy and use certain features inside of the Arc browser, and so they trolled their – or I guess they combed. Trolled is probably bad. They combed their Firebase access logs and confirmed that no creator IDEs had been changed outside those changed by the security researcher. So TL;DR, at least on the breach, is there was no vulnerability. There was a vulnerability, but no one was affected by it.

Yeah.

I’ll link this up in the show notes.

That’s good. And I definitely – I brought it up because it was topical, but I don’t think it’s a reason to not use Arc. I don’t use it anymore because I’m forced to not use it anymore at work.

Why is that?

Because it’s not Chrome. And Chrome has enterprise tools that don’t ship in Chromium, apparently.

So you have to use Chrome by dictate.

He’s nodding his head, by the way.

Yes, I said yes.

And then he said yes. That was a dramatic pause for our listener, but not for us, as we saw you nod your head and approve…

And he smiled while doing it, too.

…the affirmation.

It’s true.

Is the Browser Company VC-backed?

Gosh, I don’t know.

What’s that website that’s like TechCrunch, but it’s just for – Crunchbase?

Crunchbase.

Is that where you would find that information?

Mm-hm…

If ChatGPT is to be believed, then yes. They have raised significant funding, including a $50 million round, at a $550 million valuation.

Google’s also correct. I googled that.

[00:37:59.04] Crunchbase also seems to confirm it.

We all did three different things to find that information.

Which means it’s pretty reliable, unless two are using the one source, and they’re just – which they probably are. Crunchbase is probably the source, and Google and ChatGPT are probably scraping that.

ChatGPT gives links to Reddit and TechCrunch.

Okay. Well Crunchbase and TechCrunch are like the same people, I think. I could be wrong about that. So that gives me pause, in general, with browsers. I’m gonna stick with Safari until Ladybird can be used as my daily driver… And I’ll probably switch to Ladybird as – well, even if it can have [unintelligible 00:38:35.16] development, and I’ll swap Brave for Ladybird, and then eventually, hopefully, Safari for Ladybird. But I think if I’m gonna have like a large corporate entity that either is VC-backed, or publicly-traded or whatever, I’m just gonna stick with Apple, because I feel like their incentives for now are pretty well aligned with mine as a customer of theirs.

And the Browser Company - I appreciate that they’re out there innovating and trying to do new stuff. But for me personally, I just feel like there’s so many pressures on a company like that, when things aren’t going hockey stick in the way they have to, that there’s incentives to compromise my side of the equation for theirs.

Yeah. I don’t know, I don’t disagree with that sentiment. But when I logged into Arc, I saw some features, I believe, that were in… I think it’s like this Enable Max feature. And I don’t know all this stuff, what it does. And Nick’s nodding his head again, which I like. I like when you do that, Nick. And I mentioned this when we talked to Chris Wanstrath and Andreas, when we were talking about Ladybird, was I think if we can incorporate… I think Safari has done some base-level security things. And I believe, for the most part, Apple has my privacy in check. Maybe for everyone else, maybe not so much for them. Maybe they’re using a lot of my data, but they’re at least not giving it away, to my knowledge. Right to repair is a whole different issue; we’ll can that for now. But I feel like maybe this Max, Enable Max thing that Arc has might be things like what the Pi-hole does, in the browser; different security things you can do, and different features that make sense, that would be a paid feature, and that would be a for-profit company. Or at least a company that wants to make money to sustain, even if it’s not for profit; it could be public good company. I think when you raise money though, we’ve seen that ChatGPT was – OpenAI was once open, and now they’re not open… So there can be a rug pull, even in venture capital land.

The part I may disagree about a little bit - andl the jury is still out on this for me - is that while I’m not an Arc user, I can appreciate a browser trying to be sustainably capitalistic, and deploy features that are paid, that I may want, and may use the browser so I can pay for them because they’re not anywhere else. Or I have to cobble together some self-hosted stuff, which is kind of cool if you’re into that… But if you’re not, then making that readily available to the masses for 10 bucks a month or some fee may be kind of cool. I don’t know that that’s what they’re doing, but it’s something like that. It’s like, ask on page, five-second previews, tidy up tab titles, tidy downloads… These are things that seem to be free, so I could be misspeaking about these being paid features…

There’s a subscription model here? Is that what you’re saying?

Well, I think there’s room for one, because I speculated with Lady Bird that there could be some sort of subscription model to sustain it. There’s definitely room for the browser caring more about security and privacy. And the incumbents, Chrome – Google has had a bad reputation for user privacy. Apple has been on the fence of privacy-focused, but then they also have lots of things that are behind the scenes that get spoken about their practices that may be somewhat true or mostly true… And I still trust Apple. I’m not distrusting Apple.

[00:42:09.01] What I’m trying to say is I think there’s room for a browser to do stuff like this as a business model, that isn’t just “Here’s a Firefox clone, or Chrome clone, or a Safari clone, and we’re a new company, sustain us”, where they can deliver more innovation. And I think insofar as they’ve done with the browsing experience, which is the jarring part that I’ve said that’s hard for me to cross that chasm, there’s room for features, in my opinion.

Yeah. I think that there’s a lot of really cool things in Arc that are UI-level, fundamental changes to the way that you would browse. Specifically the things like a split view, being able to split into three different panels, and view things side by side. That’s really awesome.

Having the tab bar on the side, and hideable, and then you can swipe between multiple tab bars… So when I was using it, every project that I was working on had its own tab bar, and I could just leave those tabs open. If I wanted to go work on something else, I’d switch over to that one and go. Really nice. And you could rename tabs, too. So the 40th Google sheet that you open, you can rename it to be something memorable, so that you can actually get back to it. And that was all just like really cool stuff.

This Max stuff I have turned off completely, and that’s because it’s all just AI stuff. You want to search for something, it will generate a page that cobbles together a bunch of stuff from around the internet into one page for you. Or like smart things about tidying your tabs, or renaming them, or things like that. All of that, a) is not all that useful when – like, it’s just saving me one or two steps, which I could just do on my own when I need them… But then also, it kind of muddies things up, because a lot of companies don’t want these AI features in. They don’t want them bleeding into the workplace, because they don’t know how to control their data with that. And when it’s built fundamentally into the browser like that, then companies can overreact and be like “We’re just going to block that browser completely.”

Yeah, there’s a lot of AI hate.

Yeah. And I’ll say something potentially controversial… I don’t think that it’s all that valuable for them to be delving into this, because they absolutely need the VC money to be able to sustain the AI pieces, especially because it’s not – as far as I know, it’s not paid right now. Like, it’s a free feature for everyone. That stuff’s not free, and it’s not profitable. It’s not even profitable to the companies that are doing the AI. Like Copilot. Copilot is like a massive loss, last time I heard,for Microsoft or GitHub. It costs them like $30 a user and they pay – I pay like $10 a month for that. It’s just not that profitable, because it’s so intense to train these models.

Yeah, I misspoke assuming that Max was paid. It is not paid. Although there’s room for a version of this to be cooler than this AI stuff and be paid, and sustain, and potentially profit.

Yeah. I mean, that’s what I’m not seeing, is like where is the business model here.

Yeah.

And when you don’t see one, and you see 50 million plus dollars raised, and you see them going for “It’s free, free, free, free”, I just think the long-term ramifications of all those things usually end poorly for the end user. And so that’s why I’m skeptical. But - I mean, I would love for them to have a paid plan right now. And maybe they’ve talked about it and it’s just not out there. Like, they’re going to do that with Max.

I was skeptical of switching to Raycast when it was all free, because it was like “I don’t want to like build up my workflow around you and then you die because you couldn’t sustain yourself, and then I have to go crawling back to Alfred.” But –

[00:45:52.13] Spotlight, man. It’s right there, it’s built in.

[laughs] That’s true. Raycast does so much, though; it’s so nice. But yeah, once they had that – and it was for pretty simple features. Like, I have more than one Mac; I’ll sync between those. That’s totally worth it for me. And they have some AI stuff, which is pretty nice, too. That’s probably my primary interface into all of these chatbots, is like through the Raycast interface for that. But it’s also something that you can completely ignore if you don’t want to use it.

Do you have the AI feature then? He’s nodding his head again.

[laughs]

Nick, stop nodding your head. I’m just kidding with you. Yeah, I love this AI stuff. I use it. I think it’s a feature they could push further into. I talked to Thomas, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Raycast, on a podcast you can listed to, episode 587; go back a little bit. Changelog.fm/587. And I’m an advocate for them turning this into a full-on, not in Raycast chat app that’s like an AI chat app. Because you can interface with all the models, you can easily switch, you can favorite them, you can search them… There’s room to unify the world of AI chat into a single application. And I feel like they do that with Raycast, but it obfuscates it, because it’s like within this Raycast world, and you kind of have to adopt Raycast to get the chat app. And it’s like a sub app of it, it doesn’t have a full native app… I mean, it has a full native app experience, but there’s some unique non-native UX that comes with it. And if they made it a dedicated application, I think they could dominate. Like, be the single interface for all of AI chat.

Well, let me use this opportunity to mention a tool that I’ve found called Enchanted. Enchanted is an iOS and macOS app for chatting with private, self-hosted language models such as LLaMA 2, 3.1 as well, Mistral, Vicuna, using Ollama. And so this is open source… I’ve been using it for a while. It’s unified chat, switch your model up in the corner… I don’t know that it actually has a ChatGPT option where you can just put in your OpenAI API key, because it’s all about the open source side of things, but… That’s a good one. Well-written. I’ve been using it, I enjoy it… And so check that out, unless you are ChatGPT for life, because it is Ollama-based.

It looks really good.

And I think LLaMA 3 is good enough that – I only use ChatGPT now on my phone because I don’t have this on my phone. So I’ll go to this, and it answers, I would say 9 out of 10 things sufficiently. The other time I’ll use ChatGPT in the browser is when I want to use the DALL-E features and have it generate images. But for just asking my computer questions, chances are it’s a pretty good option, which I think is probably similar to what you’re thinking of with this breakout chat app for Raycast.

For sure.

So that’s a cool one.

Even as I look at the screenshots, what I like about it is when you go to the GitHub repo, it has the link to the app store, download on the app store, which is - this is a Mac app. And as I’m going through the screenshots, it has similar characteristics. I mean, how much different can you make a chat app, really? So I’m not even knocking them necessarily, but like it has similar characteristics of what I like about Raycast AI chat. And Thomas, if you’re listening to this show, or anybody from your team’s listening to the show, you may be doing this already, but - gosh, strike the gold while it’s hot. Be the single application. And I guess maybe Enchanted might have a leg up, because they – what’s the license? AL v2? Apache license version 2? So…

Yup.

…liberally-licensed open source… Permissively-licensed open source? What’s the better way to say that, Jerod?

Oh, permissive, I think.

Liberally, permissively… They’re probably interchangeable, to some degree. I’m sticking to my guns. Great job, Enchanted, and whoever’s behind this. AugustDev. Fantastic work. This is free. You just download it. What do you do to get access to the – you have to have like a token, is that right?

[00:50:04.03] No, so this is like an interface for Ollama. And Ollama is an open source project that will run these different LLMs that you have the models downloaded on your machine. And so if you look at the repo for Enchanted, it’ll say things “You must have Ollama running first.” And so there’s a little bit to do there. It doesn’t actually embed or download the models for you. So Ollama’s really cool as well.

So you’re running Ollama as like a Homelab thing then?

Just on my laptop.

Yeah. Well –

It’s not really a homelab, it’s just –

That’s exactly what homelab – it kind of is.

No…

It’s a single machine homelab.

That’s my work computer. It’s my only computer. I’m running it here on my laptop, and so there’s – I can’t remember how I installed Ollama. Probably brew-installed Ollama.

Brew install, yeah.

And then I picked Mistral 3.1 latest. Or sorry, LLaMA 3.1 latest, not Mistral, in Enchanted. And Ollama is running as a service on my laptop, that starts when my laptop starts. And so Enchanted talks to that backend.

This would be a good chance for you to mention your post on LinkedIn, which is where I learned about this… I actually learned a lot of things about you on LinkedIn, Jerod, if you didn’t know…

Wow. I didn’t know that.

You mentioned your stack for - I think it was Ollama. And I don’t think it was Enchanted at the time. Was it something different? Do you recall this? Maybe three weeks back you mentioned your stack for – you’re removing ChatGPT and you’re moving to something else…

I was using it from the command line at the time, just talking into my command line. I can’t remember if I had a tool for that, or if Ollama provides a command line UI… Oh, I think I found a TUI.

Oh, yeah. I’m gonna quote you. Do you mind?

Oh, cool. Yeah, I like this.

“Ollama 3.1 is good enough to ditch ChatGPT as my daily LLM driver. Current toolkit: Ollama and Enchanted. Also interested”, and it said something else, like a TUI, or whatever. So maybe that was a TUI you were mentioning.

So it was Enchanted at the time.

It was, yeah. I didn’t think it was. That was a month ago. So you’re 30 days ahead of this podcast mention.

I love it.

So to summarize, you have a Mac app installed, that speaks to Ollama running locally on your machine; not on your network, but on your machine. Can you network Ollama and make Enchanted just be like the network-driven, like everybody who can install Enchanted? Is that a possibility?

Yeah. If you go to the Enchanted settings, the first thing it asks you for is an Ollama server URI. So you can definitely run it on the network, and connect to a beefier machine, or something that you have. Now you’re a homelab; now you’re self-hosting.

You transcended the singular machine and you went straight on homelab.

That’s right. And you could probably post it, you could probably have a Fly server out there, or a Digital Ocean…

Get it. Preach, brother.

Run an EC2 instance and run it there, and then…

No EC2… I’m just kidding. I’m just hating a little bit. We’re not paid to hate. We’ve just got a little bit of hate in our hearts, okay? That’s how it works. That’s cool… I had to learn how to self-host in the cloud better, which I don’t have experience there. My confidence would come from past success. I don’t have past success.

You have past success. I mean, look at the old Digital Ocean box that you set up, that we –

Well, yes, I suppose.

That’s what that is.

Is that it? Just a little bit of UFW and that’s it?

Yeah, man. Load up Ubuntu on a machine, get a VPS, load up Ubuntu, install some stuff on it, expose a port and an IP, and start connecting your stuff to that.

And that’s it, huh?

It’s so easy Nick could do it.

Okay.

[unintelligible 00:53:51.09]

I might make it a project.

What have you hosted, Nick, historically?

Just websites, mostly.

Running Apache, or Nginx, or what?

[00:54:05.21] Yeah, Nginx. I did – and probably Apache. Because I kind of stopped doing it. I was hosting a WordPress site for a friend, and it [unintelligible 00:54:10.23] and it got really – there’s malware everywhere. All this extra PHP code… I had to manually go change a hundred files. And this was like – I was not smart enough at the time. I was in college, so I didn’t use any kind of version control, so all of the files got modified, and I had to manually go unmodify them…

That’s funny. Did you know that I once set up my own little intrusion detection system on a WordPress install using Git and a shell script? So I didn’t want it to change unless I change it. And so I had WordPress installed, and I just initialized a Git repository on all the PHP files, and then – like, initial commit. And then I assumed that none of these files are gonna change, and so I wrote a shell script that basically ran git status, and if it had any modified files, it would email me. Like “Hey, there’s a file here that’s changed.”

That’s awesome.

And that was pretty eye-opening, because… [laughs] WordPress sites get files changed arbitrarily, or seemingly arbitrarily, more often than you would want them to. “Oh, there’s a new file here”, or something. Of course, you have to ignore certain directories, like caches and stuff, but… Yeah, it was like a little intrusion detection, the dumbest one you could possibly do, because I didn’t know how to run IDSes, and stuff, so…

That’s clever.

It worked, yeah. The problem with that, and with every intrusion detection system, is false positives, where it’s like, it detects something and you’re like “Oh, that makes sense.” And then my only tool is Git ignore. Whereas, if you have smarter tools, you can obviously fingerprint much better, and say “This part of a file makes sense to change”, or whatever, whatever. It was dumb. Literally, a dumb solution, but good enough for what I needed at the time.

Mm-hm.

Break: [00:55:58.20]

But speaking of WordPress…

Okay, Adam here in post production. I just wanna jump in here real quick before we open up this WordPress topic, because there has been a lot of details uncovered since we recorded the show. Not that we didn’t talk about a lot of good stuff, but some of what we talked about went stale. Some of what we talked about speculated, and some of the stuff we talked about didn’t get talked about at all. So there was more to uncover. There’s lots of things happening around this drama, this topic, this feud, this war… And I just wanna let you know that we didn’t cover everything. So there you go.

Should we segue?

Did you mention WordPress?

Nick mentioned WordPress.

Are we allowed to mention WordPress? Or is that like some kind of –

I think we have to.

Oh, shoot. Are we violating trademark if we do that?

I think we might get a cease and desist, honestly.

Let’s just call it WP.

Okay, WP.

Alright, so I was driving this engine… Let’s just call it WP engine. And I won’t tell you what open source software I was running… Okay, so for those who don’t know, there’s a lot going on between some large players in the WordPress community, the largest probably two players… One being Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, and owner of Automattic, which is a company that capitalizes WordPress through hosting… And WP Engine, which is another company that capitalizes WordPress through hosting. Both of which have contributed to the open source WordPress project, lovingly hosted at WordPress.org… But from what I can tell, not to an extent that Matt Mullenweg is happy with on WP Engine’s behalf. So Matt started this brouhaha by calling out WP Engine at WordCamp US 2024. Guys, hop in here and correct me if anything I’m saying that’s wrong.

I’m not hopping in because it’s all correct so far. Great job, keep going.

Okay. So I’m really just trying to summarize what I know. We are not WordPress community members. We are very much just watching… We know Matt, we’ve had him on the show once or twice, but we don’t know him very well…

[unintelligible 01:02:30.12]

And I don’t know anybody at WP Engine. So… Very much just reporting the news that we’ve read. So Matt called out them for two reasons, one of which is that they agreed to contribute more, or they agreed to contribute, I guess, at a pace that was somewhat equivalent to automatic… And then they didn’t. This is Matt Mullenweg’s report, not mine. And then the second reason is that they change core functionality of WordPress when they host it. And they change it for reasons that he does not like. Specifically, he pointed out that they will disable revision control, which is, according to Matt Mullenweg, a core aspect of what WordPress offers, since it is a content editing system, and it has built-in revision control for many years. WP Engine disables that feature. Matt Mullenweg says in order to save money on hosting, they don’t have to host all those different versions of every post or page.

So those are the things that he said. And he said it live on – he said it from the WordCamp stage, so it was kind of like a public call-out. I mean, it literally was a public call-out. So WP Engine then, their lawyers got together and sent a cease and desist to Automattic, for –

[01:03:55.06] WP Engine - they responded, I think, the next day or two days later with a pretty lengthy, I guess, cease and desist. [unintelligible 01:04:03.17] straight up.

Yup. Literally a cease and desist, saying Automattic must stop doing what? Slandering them, the WP Engine trademark, or something?

So I was actually paying attention to this closely, because hey, if you didn’t know, we now use Zulip as our community chat.

True.

We’re trying it out. It’s not officially the one. However, shout-out to Nabil for posting this new topic in general called WordPress Drama. And so I’ve literally been using our own source as a source. Don McKinnon’s in there, I’m in there… Nabil’s back in there, [unintelligible 01:04:39.24] There’s some link-ups. And so on September 23rd - today’s the 25th; we’re recording this on a Wednesday, in the morning. And so on Monday, bright and – well, bright and late. 5.52 p.m, WP Engine on X/Twitter posts “Today WP Engine sent what is called a cease and desist letter”, blah, blah, blah, all that good stuff. And then the chef’s kiss to this was that it was a PDF from their council, and the PDF lives in /wp-content/uploads, which was just… Yeah, right? Cool.

And then I believe the response back from Automattic was September 25th, or maybe the 24th. Automattic sends WP Engine its own cease and desist. Like “Hey, I’m gonna cease and desist if you cease and desist over WordPress trademark infringement.” And I think Matt mentioned this in his talk, because I skimmed a lot of that talk, where they use the term WP. And I’ve gotta agree… I think – I know, because I’ve been in the community for a while, to know that it’s not WordPress official. But being called WP Engine, it is pretty closely aligned to the trademark, so much so that you feel like it’s as official as it can be, without explicitly saying between the parties “This is official.” You would almost assume as a passerby user of WordPress - and of such there’s many; it powers a lot of the web. It’s not that these people are not smart, they just don’t generally take the time to dig into some of the details that may not matter to them. And I think this may be one of those details you’re like “Yeah, cool. It’s one of the most trusted hosting companies out there for WordPress, so… It’s probably pretty good.” So long story short, Automattic is second on their cease and desist, while WP Engine is first.

Gotcha. And the WP Engine cease and desist letter has some pretty shady stuff in it, it seems, that Matt Mullenweg has done… Specifically which seems kind of extortative. Is that the word, extortion, or is it…? I don’t know.

It does seem like that, right?

Because it’s kind of like you’ve got a nice business there, and it’d be terrible if you lost it, that kind of thing. It would be terrible if something happened to it.

Yeah.

In fact, they claim – now this is all claims now. None of this has been adjudicated in a court of law.

Yeah. We should say allegedly… That’s the term that mainstream media uses. Maybe we should use that term here. Allegedly.

Yes. So we mentioned that he originally called them out at WordCamp US during his keynote. Well, allegedly, WP Engine’s lawyers allege that in the days leading up to Mr. Mullenweg’s September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US convention, Automattic suddenly began demanding that WP Engine pay Automattic large sums of money. And if it didn’t, Automattic would wage a war against WP Engine. This demand was accompanied by allegations about WP Engine’s business that were not only baseless, but also bore no relation to the payment demand.

[01:07:56.11] So they go on, of course… They’re gonna lay out those kinds of things. My assumption here is this is like “Hey, you are infringing on our trademark. You’re also doing other things I don’t like. If you give us a bunch of money, then we will basically license you”, or I don’t know what the exact agreement would be. But so much so that he’s sending text messages to WP Engine’s CEO, whose name I don’t know, leading up to the keynote, and saying like “Hey, I don’t have to do this. Let’s make a deal.”

He even says in this text message that they include in the document “If I’m going to make the case to the WP community about why we’re banning WPE, WP Engine, I need to do it in my talk tomorrow. Your delaying is just trying to remove that”, and he says some other things as well, which you can read, too. We’ll link up to the PDF, but… This is craziness.

Yeah. So I’m not a lawyer, I’ll start there… And we’ve said the word ‘allegedly’ a couple of times, enough so that what I’m about to say is allegedly true or not true. What this cease and desist from WP Engine does not share – it only shares the one side, insofar as I know.

Yeah. It’s their side.

Like, all the screenshots I saw were from Matt Mullenweg to the existing CEO of WP Engine… And you didn’t mention it yet, but part of the thing I think that – and I don’t think this is the place you state these concerns on Matt’s side, but part of the issue he takes is that it’s a private equity firm, that acquired a previously more purposeful company/entity called WP Engine. Like, WP Engine has been around for 15 years or more. I don’t even know. It’s an institution at this point to the WordPress community. It’s exchange hands or change hands has been acquired by a private equity firm that has assets managed, which… To my taste it doesn’t matter how much assets under management you have, but it’s big. It’s billions.

His issue that he takes in his talk is that – I couldn’t find the video and the title of it, but it was like “Private equity is eating the world of X”, or something like that. It’s like something bad to the WordPress community. And so part of the issue is that.

And so what we don’t have - and to zoom back out again, is like we only see in their cease and desist to Automattic/Matt and team or whoever this is to, their counsel, is the texts from Matt to them, that are pretty damning, if you ask me. Like, they’re damaging. But we don’t have context. We don’t know what the other part of the conversation is. But the issue I think that may have started this was that “Here’s this–” I want to say, for a good company called WP Engine that was acquired by private equity, and has less for good… They have this thing, this terminology - audience correct me on this; Nick, if you know… I almost called you Matt. Is there’s this thing where they commit to giving back, almost like a tithe back to the WordPress community. So Automattic does this. They’re a for-profit company. Matt Mullenweg is also, I believe, the chairman of the board for the WordPress Foundation. They allege he has more access to the community than he should, he has more power than he should, and so his words weigh quite heavily… But there’s this idea of giving back to the open sourceness of WordPress, of which Automattic invests heavily, of which WP Engine historically, at least recently historically, does not.

Yeah, Matt gives numbers on that. He says that Automattic, which is a similar size company in terms of revenue to WP Engine, contributes back 3,915 hours a week to WordPress, the open source project. WP Engine, under this new ownership, contributes back 40 hours a week.

Yeah. [unintelligible 01:11:45.18] one person. And so that’s where I go back into Zulip. Because I scanned this document the moment that Don MacKinnon shared this: “Things are getting spicy” and he links up this X post with the cease and desist to Automattic’s CEO.

[01:12:08.10] And I said “Scanned. If this is even close to accurate and those screenshots are true words that Matt shared with WPE, then that’s pretty damaging. Not sure what this percentage is behind the scenes being referenced, but that wasn’t discussed by Matt in the keynote.” And so if you watch the keynote, Matt talks from one side, too. There’s context missing on both sides.

Here’s the clincher for me on this… And I don’t know what your mileage is on this. I say “If open source is free in all the ways that free is free, then WP Engine is also free not to contribute, or contribute very little. It’s not cool, but they are free to act as such. That’s why open source is so powerful. You are free in every way to or not to participate. It’s not cool to only give 40 hours, but they can do it because it’s called open source. That’s how it works.”

So zooming out again, like private equity, siphoning off dollars from the community, Matt’s argument… I think it’s a sound argument or even a prerogative to have or an opinion to have. I don’t think the stage in which he shared it and the way in which it was shared was necessarily right. Again, we are missing some context, so maybe that context is pertinent to course-correcting that feeling I have, but… I just don’t feel like you do that. That’s like a Will Smith all over again and Chris Rock, man… You don’t go up on a stage and slap somebody, okay? It’s just not how you do things.

So you think Matt Mullenweg said “Get the name WordPress out your mouth”, is that what you’re saying?

[laughs] “Get the name WordPress out your mouth!”

[laughs] Nick, your thoughts on the matter. You’ve been silent as we review and correct each other on the details…

Lots of details here. We may not have it – like Adam said, there’s probably missing context on both sides for us, but still.

Yeah. I actually heard about this on Sunday. I don’t know when WordCamp actually was, but I heard about it on Sunday, from a friend who works at WP Engine, and was telling me “Oh, did you see this drama where they were calling us out on stage?” And I was like “Oh, that’s interesting.” I’m like “I haven’t heard of it, because I’m not really in the WordPress scene…” But from what I do know from the periphery about like WordPress and Automattic and Matt Mullenweg - he seems like a really nice guy, so it seems out of character to be like disparaging, like singling you out specifically. And I can’t remember if he said that they like escorted their booth away, or something, like made them get off –

Really?

They were a sponsor of WordCamp, it seems.

$75,000 they spent to be a sponsor.

So a large sponsor of WordCamp. And so I do think that Matt probably hits some sort of a boiling point here. As I said in the beginning, Adam and I have interviewed Matt a couple of times. He is a very nice guy. He’s soft-spoken, he’s very thoughtful… He’s been very successful, and brought a lot of success to a lot of people. I don’t know him personally, I don’t know if he – a lot of very soft-spoken, nice people also have tempers, and can just go off… Maybe that’s him, I don’t know. But this does seem like an out-of-character thing. Or it was a surprise to me when I heard about it.

And they definitely have a good reputation, too. I’m not a WordPress user. I don’t want to ever use WordPress, to be honest…

Ooh, dang.

[laughs] Fair.

It’s not for me.

You’re a PHP guy though, aren’t you, Nick?

I’m starting to be more… But I would go –

By force.

Do you have a Lambo yet?

Not yet. [laughs]

Okay. You should work on that.

But they’ve come in and – Automattic, or maybe somewhere around that vicinity owns Tumblr now, right? And Day One, the journaling app… And you know, it seems like “Oh, that’s a good, trustworthy company to be stewarding these apps”, that otherwise might just die off. And a lot of people –

And Pocket Casts. They bought Pocket Casts.

Did they?

And they open-sourced it after they bought it.

What?! I just switched to Pocket Casts, so that’s interesting.

I’ve always appreciated Matt Mullenweg’s investments. He invests in things that I think are cool… And then he, a lot of times, will open-source them after investing.

That’s awesome.

[01:16:13.14] I didn’t know that Pocket Casts was open, though. So when you go to their website, it’s not very clear that it is. Which kind of is a bummer… But I agree with you, Jerod. I think it’s super-cool that when he does – like, Day One, I was a fan of Day One… It was probably one of the best Mac apps to journal personally. Such a cool application. And Podcast Evolved, and a whole different show, different idea… I think it was called The Industry Radio Show, back with Drew Wilson and Jared Erondu. A different Jared, Jerod. Sorry. We podcasted with the creator of that back in the day. It was like an indie startup that got acquired by Automattic, and then it was open-sourced, I believe, too. Simple Note was part of that…

He’s got a track record of doing the right thing, I think… Which - I do think it’s surprising, his seemingly harsh way to put this cat out of the bag, or push it out of the bag, or let it out of the bag… There’s some context, I’m assuming, that’s missing, because this doesn’t seem characteristic of his past behavior.

Yeah. And it seems like – I mean, we all should be rooting for Matt, and the WordPress side, the open source side. Because that’s what so many people that we know try and do, is like, find some way to fund open source in a meaningful way. And this is the same thing. WordPress is a massively successful project, but at the end of the day, it is an open source project that needs funding, it needs people to work on it, it needs all of that maintenance… Because as I personally found out, it’s quite easy to get in there and hack. Now, that wasn’t WordPress’ fault, probably. It was probably just poor security on my Linode instance.

Surely, surely, man.

I’ll blame myself for that.

What was this feature that they disabled, Jerod? I was reading something while you were sharing that context.

Revision control.

Revision control.

So every time you make an edit, it saves the version.

Which would be database costs on WP Engine’s side.

Yeah. I mean, at their scale it’s probably significant savings. This does sound like a private equity move, would be like to go in and cut costs; that would be one way to cut costs. Now, having said that, this is not changing the way WordPress works. This is a WP Config option that is default to on, that WP Engine, the company, defaults now to off.

And so I think you can go back in - I would hope that you go back in through their interface… Surely, you can configure your WordPress [unintelligible 01:18:31.01] and turn it back on again. But this is just totally a private equity thing to do. It’s like “Let’s cut costs. Here’s one way to do it.” And I can see where that’s a legit move by them as a business, but it also offends Matt Mullenweg as the creator of WordPress.

But it is a config setting, and it makes total sense to me, especially if it’s – I don’t know, because I don’t use it, but if it is something that you could easily just go flip on, then it seems totally acceptable. If you’re actually someone who cares, it’s not gone. It’s right there.

But yeah, I don’t know, this seems like a new angle for sustainable open source, which is just attack. And I don’t know if that’s the right way.

Right. Litigation. I mean, the trademark thing is murky, like Adam said. But then here’s a challenge to you… You’re going to start up a WordPress hosting company… What can you call it?

Flywheel.

Well, they don’t exist anymore.

Exactly. I mean, they did very well [unintelligible 01:19:28.23]

And then they got bought by WP Engine?

I don’t know who [unintelligible 01:19:31.09] I think they probably did.

I think they did.

Yeah, they did.

We know Flywheel well, because Flywheel’s an Omaha company. Did you know that?

Yeah, I did know that, yeah. And that’s part of the beauty of a startup, too…

For sure.

…is that you don’t have to be named adjacent or similarly to be successful. Flywheel did a great job. They were very innovative early on, and they ran WordPress websites very fast. And they were competitive with WP Engine.

Yeah, they were a great company.

Nick, you said that we should be on the side of open source; we should be on the side of WordPress. I mostly agree with that.

[01:20:05.28] We should.

I’m not against open source, I want to be clear with that.

That was very foreboding, wasn’t it?

I’m for the freedom. I’m for the freedom. Again, I don’t think it’s cool that WP Engine doesn’t give back… There’s some context maybe we’re missing there. Maybe it’s a private equity thing. Maybe we haven’t done – maybe they’ve got a good reason. Maybe they have a reason, period. That’s their prerogative. But that is the freedom and free of open source, in my opinion. It is not cool… Does that elicit this kind of response? Like, for the founder or the creator of WordPress to go on stage and say “You guys are jerks”? Is this that egregious of an offense? I think it’s not cool… I don’t think it’s the place for the stage of the WordPress or the WordCamp keynote. It could be a blog post, like “Hey, private equity siphoning off money, WordPress open source… Help me get behind this… Not so much ban them, but like “This is not cool. Can we convince them to change their behavior?” Versus “Get out of here. You’re not welcome here anymore as a sponsor. You’re being banned.” If we want to have a free world in terms of open source, we have to have a free world in terms of participation as well.

I don’t see the difference between a blog post and a WordCamp keynote. I think the level –

It’s a big difference.

Why? Do you think a blog post isn’t going to also create an entire news cycle around this? I mean, of course it would.

Okay, so I’ll give you that. So my lens on that is that somebody else said “We would rather hear about community updates and changes to WordPress and roadmap and direction, versus this drama.” So that’s my reasoning for it. I don’t disagree that they would both have similar amplification… I think it’s like poor taste. It’s kind of poor taste. It’s not the place. Again, Will Smith going up on stage, slapping Chris Rock. That is not the place to slap Chris Rock. I mean, you shouldn’t slap him anyways, but you certainly shouldn’t do it at the Oscars.

I didn’t read Will Smith’s blog post on this situation, so… [laughter] It carried more weight being on stage.

I don’t think there is one.

I don’t think she’d let him write one.

No. Ooh, Jerod…!

[laughs] Alright, that’s fair. I think there’s probably some taste to that. I think it speaks to the level of his anger. I don’t have a problem with the WordCamp keynote. He created WordPress, he’s there to give an update, he can say what he wants. I think he’s earned that right. For me it’s like the “Give me a bunch of money and I won’t do this thing.” That is where it’s super-dicey.

Yes.

Like, no, that’s not integrity at all. Like, why all of a sudden if you pay me a bunch of money does it not matter anymore? I mean, isn’t he already uber rich? Why would he – that whole deal, and like “I’m about to do this.” To me, that’s where he loses me, more so than the venue. But I do understand your argument there about not the time or the place. I do go back to this, though… Like, whose side do we have to be on? First of all, what does it matter what we think? But secondly, I agree that WordPress.org – I think we should all be on the side of WordPress, the open source community. And when we look about these two corporate entities, both of which are making billions of dollars in revenue… So there’s no small dog here.

At least millions.

Didn’t he say?

I think he said 500 million ARR…

They do have about a half a billion in revenue. Okay, so half a billion on top of WordPress.

Two years later it’s a billion, so you’re mostly accurate.

Yeah, sure. What’s a billion between friends…? WP Engine is contributing back one developer, one full-time developer.

Meanwhile, Automattic is employing 97.875 developers full-time on this open source project. That’s an astounding amount of investment. Almost 100 people working full-time on an open source project? I think they’ve earned their bona fides for that. I mean, I think these two things are not comparable. It’s like comparing a million dollars to a billion dollars. And the difference is like roughly a billion.

Okay, let’s do some other math here… So if it’s 100 people – let’s just round to 100, based on the hours. You’re doing that math based on the hours, right?

Yes.

[01:24:15.04] Or is there a literal number of developers? It’s like, 3,700 hours per week?

3915.

Okay, let’s just say 4,000. That’s rounding up. And let’s round up to 100 developers. That’s pretty accurate, right?

Yeah.

Let’s do the comparative math here. If it’s one developer, let’s just give them a potentially a low average of 100K per year for a developer. It’s probably somewhat-ish… Maybe an average brings it down to 100K. Maybe it’s 150k. But let’s just use round numbers of 100K. If you’re employing 100 developers at $100,000 a year - this is pretty basic math - that’s $10 million a year in terms of a salary expense.

Right.

If you do that for one developer for the entire year - well, that’s pretty easy math Like, one times one is one, right?

Right.

One times 100,000 is… Tell them, Nick.

What…? [laughter]

[unintelligible 01:25:03.26] Nick dropped the ball.

100,000, Nick. That’s the right answer.

That’s what I said.

He nodded his head…

So do me this math then, Nick, since you’re sharp here on the pencil.

Fire up Raycast.

Yeah, I have it ready. [laughs]

Get Siri out. That’s Apple-Intelligent Siri. 10 million minus 100,000.

900,000.

No. [laughs] 9,999,000… Yeah.

[laughs]

The difference is 9.9 million. 9,900,000. That’s the difference.

It’s two orders of magnitude. It’s 100 times more.

It is. If that’s accurate. If that truly breaks up into 100 people.

Well, I mean, it’s not 100. We rounded it, and stuff.

We did. Fine, I will take it to 97.

No, this is napkin math. It’s fine.

Okay, 9.7 million, versus –

We’re all with you.

Yeah. I’m joking around. It’s for a podcast. It’s a difference… It’s a big difference.

It’s a huge difference.

It is a huge difference, for sure. But I don’t know… I keep coming back to – like, how many companies are massively profiting on the backs of open source developers, and contribute nothing back?

Well, that there is the rub, Rick.

[laughs]

How many things are you going to call him that’s not his name? Rick? [laughs]

Leave it in, fine. I was going to call myself… Rick! Nick-Rick…

That’s the rub, Rick.

That’s the rub, Rick. I was doing two R’s there. I got tongue-tied.

Rick Rubin.

That’s the rub, is that this is a call-out moment, without enough context. They are both equally generating similar ARR. That stands for annual recurring revenue, for those – I’m just kidding with you. I know you know that, Nick. You’re smart. You got this. [laughter]

Don’t assume things…

Yeah, I don’t know… You got very condescending there for a moment. “I know you know this…”

I know you know this.. And that’s where the argument I believe is. But we’re camping in this world of lack of context. And potentially, the wrong place to slap a person, okay?

Show title. The wrong place to slap a person. Alright, well, that’s how it stands right now. And then you have our comments on the matter. I think we’re starting to circle the wagon… So let’s not camp out here any longer, to reuse Adam’s pun… This will be figured out in the court of law, it seems, unless there’s a settlement… Because now they’re both suing each other, and it’s gonna get nastier from here. So maybe we’ll talk about it more.

At least there’s some threats.

Yeah.

[01:27:45.21] I did DM Matt prior to cease and desist letters being shared, on X… We have exchanged DMs in the past. I don’t know why he’s being so silent. I’m just kidding, I totally know why. And I did email Matt, asking for - and this is, again, in both occasions prior to the cease and desist. And I will email no longer, because I know why there’s no response… Because when you have legal issues or concerns, or exchanged legal details, it gets spicy. I can see that my email has been opened, because that’s how I got it.

It’s okay.

There you go.

He can leave it to the experts on WordPress like me to talk about this.

That’s right. That’s right. So, did we give away those ATO tickets, Jerod?

Did we?

Did we? I don’t think we did. We mentioned it.

I still have them right here.

How many you got? Can you fan them out, like money? Can you make them rain, these ATO tickets?

I can. There are 10 of them. We have 10 free passes to the in-person, All Things Open 2024 in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the end of October. These are ours to give to whomever we please.

Yes.

And so we’re going to give them away here soon, to members of our community in our new community chat, which lives in Zulip. Don’t slack it to us…

No…

Slack has been slacking, and we are now in Zulip, chatting in a much more organized fashion, and we’re enjoying it quite a bit. Keyboard-driven, open source, indie…

Built by hackers.

Bootstrapped, right?

Yes. Not so much anti-VC, but VC-resistant.

So far no VC.

VC-resistant.

Straightforward business model. I’m not even against VC literally, by the way…

Me neither.

I’m against VC with “We’ll figure out the business model later.” That’s what I’m against. Anytime it’s like “We’ll make it up in volume”, that’s where it ends up being advertising is the only answer, and now you are not incentivized with your end users. I don’t mind VC to bootstrap a company that otherwise wouldn’t exist otherwise… That’s too many otherwises. But have a business model. I think that developer tools and developer communities have a much more straightforward line, than something like a browser, a consumer product… Because we’ve seen it - hosting is a straight line, as WordPress has proven out… And freemium is a straight line, as many dev tools have figured out. You build these extra features not around a single individual user, but around a team, which means they’re backed by a company, hopefully a company that’s making money for itself, and has money to spend. And so I think a lot of these venture-backed dev tools companies - I don’t know if Raycast is venture-backed or not. I guess it is.

They are. Yeah.

A lot of our advertisers are venture-backed, and that’s why they have some money to spend on getting their name out there, right? And so that’s a straightforward thing. I don’t know if Raycast is a freemium based on a pro version, right? But a lot of these are going teams. When you have a team, there’s our business model. Warp is doing that, Zed is doing that, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that’s a pretty straightforward line. That doesn’t bug me.

Of course, there’s still the question of “Can you actually make enough money with that model, to make money for your investors and thrive, and all that?” But at least it’s there, and it’s obvious, and it’s not like “Well, we’ll just figure it out later.” That’s my biggest concern with venture-backed.

What about those ATO tickets?

10 free tickets… [laughter]

A little sideways monologue there, I liked it…

Thank you for getting me back… Well, I was trying to clarify my stance earlier.

No, I like it. I like it.

I’m not just a hater of –

I have a retort. Can I retort?

What about these tickets?

Well, that was partially my retort. I have a retort to your stance.

Alright, go ahead, and then we’ll do the tickets.

What bothers me in the marketplace is when an up-and-coming, maybe even a company that’s using venture capital in a way that has sustainability behind it cannot generate revenue, or is completely wiped clean because a behemoth, of the FAANGs, potentially, decides to make their thing free. And I think just maybe in the case of our friends at Zulip, you’ve got Teams, that is generally given away. It’s paid, there’s a paid version of it…

[01:32:11.29] There’s a lot of it where they’re able to give away so much for free, because they’re so big, and you have a hard time competing. That’s another challenge, too. I’m not against – but again, in the world of commerce, you kind of have to be flexible, you know? But I agree with you on there’s healthy ways to take venture capital, and there’s unhealthy ways to take venture capital. And there’s things that unhealthy venture capital does to you as a leader of your product after you take the money; things that get forced on you. That’s my simple retort. Okay.

Alright, fair.

I have an idea for how we can give these tickets away.

Okay.

I think you might like it. Do you mind if I share it?

Only if I’m gonna like it. I will give you the option to reserve the right to veto my idea.

Okay.

Okay? Cool. We pre-discussed this, so it’s not far off from pre-discussion. What if, maybe around this WordPress drama, maybe not to dive into the WordPress drama topic, but hey, hop in Zulip… We’re gonna give you a URL to go to; hop in Zulip, and give us the best pun against this WordPress drama. Or just something funny to say back about what’s happening here. I don’t know. Is that an idea? What do you think about that idea? Like, I said, we’re gonna camp out here for a bit… Maybe there’s some other –

That’s probably – we’ve already used the best one.

Oh, okay. It’s like the number one option on Jeopardy?

Here’s my concern with “Provide us a pun in our Zulip chat”, is that… That’s just a lot of friction.

Okay… [laughter] He’s vetoing it, fine.

I just wanna get those 10 tickets out there for people. Make it easy, you know?

Introduce yourself. How about that? That’s a good way.

Introduce yourself in Zulip and say “I’ll take a free pass to ATO”, something like that.

Yeah.

And it’ll be yours. First 10 people to do that, bam.

There is an Introduce Yourself topic inside of the channel called General.

Which Nick hasn’t done yet.

I haven’t.

Gosh, Nick.

I like this, though.

Do you like this?

Press your luck, drop a word into Zulip, and see if – and then camp out in there…

You can’t just keep reusing the same puns over and over again, Nick. You’ve gotta add something to the mix.

You don’t know me, sir… [laughter]

You don’t know Nick. Not well, if you don’t know he will repeat himself.

I’m very used to this. Ahoy-hoy… Yeah, there you go. Let’s do it that way. If you put a pun in there…

Bonus.

…you’re gonna get so many reaction emoji. Nick will be all over it.

He might even camp out in there with you. In fact - I’ll just put it out there right now. If you have a good pun, Nick will put on your post every single emoji in the list. Trust me, he has time.

[laughs]

He’s gonna flex his scripting skills on this one.

Actually, there is a way in the Zulip API, which I’ve been coding against this week, to add reactions to a post. So actually, Nick, you could code that up if you wanted to.

I could. And it’s not something that is past me, for sure. I mentioned that I actually worked at Flywheel for three months, and on my first day there, did I learn about WordPress? No. I set the record by, day one, adding 3,754 new emojis to their Slack.

Gosh. What a contribution.

Wow.

Did they give you a raise?

They didn’t fire you the next day, huh?

They didn’t. I had metrics, you know? I created impact on day one.

[laughs] That is day one impact.

It’s called noise, not signal.

No, that’s metrics, though.

That’s good. Good job.

Everybody knows Nick is here.

He’s bringing song and emojis. Watch out. Is that it for this show? Is this the Friends episode? Is this over?

Did we start recording?

Not your track. We don’t need yours. We’ll drop you out in post.

That’s fine.

Alright. See you in Zulip. Bye, friends.

Bye, friends.