Bus factors & conspiracy theories

Where shall we begin with this Friends, Jerod? All Things Open? No…

All things closed?

All Things Open AI. Did you get that email?

Maybe.

Maybe you did.

I get a lot of email. Tell me what it says.

Allthingsopen.ai. Check it out.

Oh. Checking it out.

Also checking it out. So you have allthingsopen.org, which is where the conference lives… All Things Open.

Oh, it’s a whole new conference.

It’s a whole new conference. An AI practitioners and end users conference focused on technologies, processes, and people. Next year in March.

Save the date. March 17th and 18th in Durham, North Carolina. Very close to Raleigh, North Carolina. Darn near the same place, isn’t it? And I don’t know how that works.

Raleigh-Durham. I don’t know. I think they’re so close they merge… It’s kind of like Fort Worth and Dallas here in Texas.

Yeah. Or St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Yeah. I didn’t know Minneapolis was a different – was a city.

Oh, gosh…

I’m just kidding with you.

You’re going to offend some of our friends up there in good old city of Minneapolis. Well, I knew the Twin Cities were a thing, but I didn’t realize how actually touching they are until the last time I was there. Because I’ve been to Minneapolis a bunch of times, but I actually went to St. Paul, which is basically on the other side of a – not even a river. Is it a river? It’s a stream. I don’t know. There’s a small moving body of water that separates them. But you basically just cross a little bridge and you’re in the other city. You never know, unless there’s a sign that said “You’re in Minneapolis now”, or whatever it says.

The folks who live there know, though.

Oh, they know, because there’s rivalries and stuff, like which one’s better…

At one point I would just stop caring. Unless the rivalry is just like a way of life, I guess. That’s when it makes sense.

I think it is. I don’t think anybody really cares.

Because here in my small town, in Dripping Springs, we merge in and out of Austin all the time, and I’m not even like upset about it.

Yeah, but you’re more like a – that’s more like an attached to, you know…

My point stands, okay?

I think Dallas and Fort Worth is a better comparison, because they are two big cities that are probably competing in certain ways… But they’re also – do they merge? Can you tell the difference? Is there a blank space in between?

I’m not from there, so I don’t know for sure. But what I know is that people move from Dallas to Fort Worth to get away from Dallas.

Oh, they do. So it must be far enough that it feels like they’re away.

But then they realize that they can’t. Mainly, when they move there, it’s like “Oh, that’s 20 minutes away. I can’t have those friends anymore.”

Yeah, that’s rough. My experience with those cities is just driving through on my way South, and then eventually North, on my way back from the border, or at least the ocean, at least the Gulf.

Did you see this banner? There’s a banner on merge.changelog.com.

Oh, yeah. I put a banner there.

Where’d that come from?

Did I see the banner?

Have you seen it?

I am the banner.

This is the banner.

Yes. I put a banner up. You know, when you want to get people’s attention, you put a little banner up. Did you know that used to be hard on websites?

There used to be a JavaScript snippet, I believe, to do that, right?

Oh, absolutely. Throw a banner up… Do you know how easy that is now?

How easy is it?

It’s just one ChatGPT question, you know? It’s one div, and about six lines of CSS, maybe seven.

That’s it, huh? It’s just like - what, skew the div?

You’re just rotating it. Yeah, diagonal rotation, and it’s like position absolute, set the top, set the right, or the left… And then just futz with it. You open up your dev tools and you just futz with it till it looks alright… And then you move on with your life. The web is pretty awesome now, actually.

It is. It is pretty awesome.

There’s still things that are hard, like a blank web page that you have to put stuff on… But if you have an existing thing and you want to move stuff around or change things, it’s pretty easy nowadays.

Yeah.

So yes, we are having our sale. I just announced it on Monday. A year-end sale. That’s why you mentioned this banner. I thought you were talking about some sort of banner hanging over a road in Dallas, or something that made the news… You know, people are putting up a lot of signs right now.

Right. Well, this should have been in Dallas-Fort Worth, honestly; this year-end sale.

It should be. We’d probably get more sales if we put it there. They’d be like “What? What’s Changelog merch?” Of course, probably a lot of our listeners are wondering the same. What is Changelog merch? Well, we have some merch.

We’ve got shirts, we’ve got stickers, and we’re doing a year-end sale. So they are on sale now, through the end of the year, or until supplies last on this particular set of merch… And hence the banner, that rotated div. How do you like that, Adam? Pretty good?

320.

I also got a media query in there. As you go to a mobile phone, it stops doing that and it goes to the top. This is th kind of quality I’m bringing to my web div.

You are – you’re pretty good at this.

I’m not going to tell you how long that took me.

How long did it take you?

[00:08:14.08] [laughs] Honestly, seven minutes for the initial implementation, and then probably 20 minutes of tweaking things around, and then probably another 10 minutes to make sure it looked good on phones. And so I would say somewhere in the range of 30 to 45 minutes…

End to end.

…soup to nuts.

Yeah. This is not something you’re doing on the daily, though. If it was, then the next time it’s like 10, because now you know.

Well, next time I just copy-paste that CSS snippet and I don’t even have to ask an LLM. I just go do it.

Right.

I also ripped out a bunch of code that you wrote, by the way, so that was kind of fun.

Oh, gosh. What did I write?

[laughs] So I think you did the initial implementation of merch.changelog.com, with Cody, but your name’s on all the git blames… Because you know, I’ve got to be mad at somebody, and I go figure out who that’s going to be. And this one was you. Now, it might have been because you’re the one that checked everything into version control…

Potentially.

Or it might have been because you originally authored this code.

Potentially.

But that was three years ago. So that last commit was 2021. Now it’s 2024, and the web has gotten better. You just had stuff in there that wasn’t necessary mostly.

Ooph. Preach.

You had some modernizer stuff, which may have been necessary back then, but no longer is…

That was Cody.

Oh, it was?

Yeah. Like body tags, and stuff?

Yeah, just modernizing – like polyfills, mostly, for like different things. But the code that I actually removed and rewrote was jQuery was getting pulled in in order to adjust the quantity on the form when you click a button. And so it’s just a lot of overkill to accomplish what is essentially a single-click handler that adjusts the quantity. So I just wrote that in pure JavaScript, inlined it in the page, removed jQuery, removed modernizer…

JavaScript sprinkles, baby. Just put it right in there.

Yeah, just slim it down… It loads a lot faster now.

Can you tell the difference in speed, honestly?

It’s noticeable. Yeah.

What’s the speed difference?

I didn’t actually measure it. It’s like, you can see it with your eyes. I don’t know, naybe like 200 milliseconds, something like that.

Okay… It’s worth a deletion though.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, what’s jQuery? 30K, 60K? Who knows?

C’mon… Keep that stuff.

Plus it’s from a third-party CDN… So we were not drinking our own –

We can’t do that.

We are drinking our own malpractices, you know? I mean, in three years a best practice does become a malpractice. So I just modernized that thing by removing modernizer. And I could probably go further, but it’s just a merch site, so…

Yeah, there’s a lot you could do. Well, good for you.

Yeah, thank you.

Year-end sale up to 40% off merch.changelog.com.

Yeah. Get yourself some threads.

Support your favorite developer pods with sweet, sweet merch. Now, did you change that line, too? Wasn’t that changed?

I did. I adjusted some copy. There was some old copy on there.

Oh, gosh. What did you change it from? “Support your favorite developer pods with some sweet, sweet merch.” What it used to say?

Yeah. Git blame that.

Well, that might be in the Shopify admin.

Oh, I think it might be, yeah.

That’s one of the things to figure out, is where do we configure different things… Because it’s not all in source control. Or there is stuff that’s in source control, but actually gets pulled out of the admin, or overwritten, which is like settings, data.json or something. I had to figure all that out, because it’s been so long. I don’t remember what it used to say. It was just slightly outdated. I think it said like “Merch and threads for developers”, which was kind of going off of our podcast and news – news and podcasts… Which we don’t really say anymore.

Oh, yes, yes.

Oh, I think it might have said like “Support your favorite podcast by repping the merch.” Something like that. I don’t know. I just thought it’s time for a new little tagline. But we digress… What are we here to talk about?

The news! Maybe this is news. Is the Wayback Machine working again?

I think so. I think it’s back.

Yeah?

It was DDoSed, right? It was taken offline. They got DDoSed by some sort of hacking crew. Who attacks the Wayback Machine? It’s like, this is a cultural touchstone of the world. And they’re going to take it offline? Like, what, who, why, when, where and how? But yeah, I think it’s back now.

[00:12:14.07] Officially closing the loop. “Support your favorite podcast by repping the merch.” That’s what it said.

Which wasn’t bad, but it was up there for three years.

And then at the very bottom, it says “Merch and threads for developers.”

I changed that one, too. What did I change it to? I think it says “World-class threads for the world’s classiest devs.”

World-class, with a hyphen, merch.

Yeah, world-class.

For the world’s classiest devs.

Yeah. Are you a classy dev? Go get yourself some classy merch.

I don’t disagree with that.

[laughs] Alright. Good. My copywriting passes muster. The Adam test.

That’s right. What’s first on the list?

Well, we are here to discuss some goings on, and we have a long list. So we thought we would just take turns picking what topics to discuss out of this list of links, which is not sorted shortest to longest, unfortunately. However, it is sorted in a way that is readable. I would like to talk about this one. This is by Wei Yen. Wei, first name. Yen, last name. Wei Yen.

“Useful built-in macOS command line utilities.” These are useful, and they’re built in macOS. So our friends on Linux, take a bathroom break, or hang out and type “which”, the command, and see if it actually has an executable on your machine… Because these are macOS command line utilities, some of which I know and love, others I didn’t know about. So I thought we could talk through these.

The first one, the command is called security. Did you know about this? There’s a command called security, which allows you to access your Keychain programmatically. So we do this with 1password; the op command, you can pull secrets out of your 1Password. We used to do this with LastPass. They have a CLI where you can pull secrets out of your LastPass and use them for various scripting uses and utilities. And this security command, if you type security and then find-internet-password -s… I’m not sure what the s is for. Hopefully secure. And then you give it a website. It will return to you your Keychain-stored password for said website. That’s sweet, right?

If only I used Keychain. I guess I do use Keychain, right?

You do use it, man. Don’t you?

I mean, not on purpose, let’s just say.

Oh… When do you use it?

I definitely use it for operating system-level things like Wi-Fi passwords, and stuff like that… But I’m not trying to use Keychain purposefully.

So every once in a while you accidentally use it.

Well, you know, I’m a user of the macOS operating system… So it’s using it, so I’m using it.

There you go. Alright, so there’s one. That one didn’t impress you, because you’re a 1Password CLI person. Fine. Fair.

Here’s the one that impresses me. Or at least I didn’t know this. Caffeine. Caffeinate.

Yeah.

I didn’t know that Caffeinate was built in, and I just went to my favorite LLM and confirmed, if it’s not hallucinating, that Caffeinate, which is a separate, I guess, menu bar tool called Caffeine… I thought I might use Caffeinate. It’s like, it’s just this UI layer on top. It’s not. But Caffeine is cool, and Caffeinate being built in is even cooler.

Right. So Caffeine is, like you said, a menu bar utility. That is a third-party thing written, where somebody puts this little coffee cup in your menu bar. I think it’s free and open source. I know it’s free. I’m not sure if it’s open source. And you click on it. And when it’s on, your screen will never turn off. I think it will also never go to screensaver mode, but it certainly won’t dim. None of the power saving features. Like, it’s caffeinated. And of course, the cup of Joe, you know, fills up when it’s on. And you click it off - it just on/off toggle. And that’s what you’re referring to with Caffeine.

[00:16:21.07] Right.

Caffeinate is a command line utility. This is a built-in, which does the same thing. And so there you go. Caffeinate, if you just want to make sure your screen doesn’t turn off for a while. Maybe you’re giving a presentation, maybe you’re – I don’t know what you’re up to. But if you’re up to something, type Caffeinate. That’s a cool one. I did not know about that one either. Did you know about Network Quality?

No.

Yeah, Network Quality is a built-in speed test. It’s all one word, capital Q, which is strange… So that’s camel case…

But what’s the name of camel case when the first letter is not cameled? There’s a separate term for this.

Inchworm.

Inchworm case. It kind of does look like that. I’m going to roll with it. No fact-checks, please… We were told you weren’t going to fact-check. Network Quality, with the inchworm case - built-in speed test. I thought this would be fun.

It sounds funny to say that.

It does. I kind of like it. Let’s do a – let’s do a test here.

Okay.

Let’s both run Network Quality at the same time, and see who’s got better internet.

I’ve done it. Okay… Uplink capacity. Well, your report is probably not there yet. I’ll wait.

Oh, you already ran it?

I already ran it.

I was going to do a countdown. Alright, I’m just running it…

Sorry. I got excited.

You must have. Although our videos cutting out now, because I’m saturating… How long did yours take to run? Mine’s still going.

About 20 seconds.

Okay, done. Alright. First of all, who do we think is faster? I think I have better internet than you, but I’m not sure.

We’ll see.

Do you agree or disagree? I know mine’s more reliable. Yours might be faster.

Mine has been less reliable lately. Upload maybe slower, but… I don’t know. I don’t even know man. Let’s find out.

My Uplink capacity is 83.159 megabits per second.

Oh, yeah, you beat me then. Uplink for me is 2.653 megabits per second. So…

Downlink capacity - 511.325 megabits per second.

Man, you’re just like – you’re landsliding me here, man… 30.167 megabits per second download.

Now, I’m also – I think those are…

Oh, you know what though? Hang on a second… I do have Tailscale running, and I’m also tunneling through Homestead exit.

Oh, you’re going home?

Yeah.

Alright, get off Tailscale.

Let me see if I could do this.

I will say that those speeds, while very impressive and destroying your speeds, are not the fastest my network will go.

Running it again, sans Tailscale. Already demolishing your numbers…

[laughs]

It is a reverse landslide.

It’s a land push? [laughs]

Did you hear me call you out about that push?

Yeah, I was like “Why is he calling out my rug push…?”

I had to, man…

Oh, gosh…

It’s provocative. Okay, it’s not a complete landslide, but it’s definitely better. Uplink is now 24.439 megabits per second. Download capacity is three point – no, sorry. 399.163 megabits per second.

Nice. So much better. Now, are you wired into your local network?

Let’s see. I would have to walk around. Hang on a second.

Okay. The reason why I asked, while he’s doing that… Oh, he can’t hear me. I totally smoked him. Just destroyed. Embarrassment. It was an embarrassment.

Confirm… But I am wired in.

Oh, you are wired in.

I am.

So those are legit numbers then. I am on wireless here, and so I think mine’s capped by my wireless network card.

Do you have Wi-Fi as well, when you have wired in? When you are wired, I should say. Do you also run Wi-Fi?

[00:20:05.02] Hard to answer, because I’m pretty much never wired in. When I do, I’ll turn my Wi-Fi off, because I just want to make sure that sucker’s using the wire.

Okay, let me run this test one more time then.

Okay, did you have your – I don’t think it’s changing…

I don’t think it is either, but let’s just say. Here we go. Big money, big money, big money, no whammies… Oh, yeah. Upload capacity is… Not any better.

So I’m supposed to have a gig down and half a gig up, and I’m at 84 up, and half a gig down… So I’m pretty sure this is my WAN. Not my WAN, my wireless LAN, my WLAN, holding me down… And if I plugged in, it’d be faster, because I know I’ve run my UniFi device, my UDM Pro runs its own speed test each night. And it runs it and it gets about what’s advertised for my ISP, which is one down, and half of a gig up. Alright. Well, that was fun. So…

Nothing improved with removing Wi-Fi, by the way. As expected. But I had to confirm, because you know, going through Tailscale and using my exit node, which is not here locally - it’s external - because I don’t run a Pi-hole on two locations. It’s stupid.

Yeah. Well, let’s speed-run a couple more of these commands here for folks. So the open command - this one’s commonly known. I’ve been using this one for years, but useful if you don’t know. If you type open and then space and then a file name, it will launch the default associated application for that file type. So if it’s default to open up in Pages, for instance, it’ll launch pages with that file opened. If you do open space dot, it will open the current directory in Finder, which is the one that I use the most.

I use it all the time. All the time.

Yeah.

Take me here in Finder.

That’s right. And then copy-pastes are cool. pbcopy, pbpaste… So if you echo something, you can pipe it to pbcopy, throws in your clipboard… I think it’s Pasteboard, what they call it, hence the pb, and not the clip copy. Pbcopy – of course, you can pbpaste out of that back into other things. Super-useful. You can get UTC dates out of the date command, you can generate UUIDs, you can do mp5 searches, screen capture… All kinds of stuff.

I will highlight this one - say. Say is super-cool, especially now they’ve added a whole bunch of voices. Say will actually just take whatever text you pass to it and audibly say it with the built-in macOS voice. And you can customize that thing with command line flags in order to change to the various built-in voices. And because Apple has been expanding that set of voices mostly because of Siri, I believe, there’s tons of different voices available. And as a person who dabbles in audio and makes podcasts, I’ve used that quite a bit, especially for things like Horse JS, and acting like there’s somebody there who’s not there, or inserting a robot voice into a podcast… You know, that kind of stuff. So that’s a good one.

Alright, so shout-out to Wei Yan and these useful built-in utilities post. Links in the show notes. Adam, what do you want to talk about?

What is next on the list? I kind of want to talk about this slow death of a hyperlink. I feel like this is an attack on the Internet… It’s been happening for a while. It’s not that big of a topic, but it’s intriguing to me. The fact that - you know, Instagram has done this for a while, where you can’t link out to something. It’s like “Hey, we’re not going to allow the links to live”, and that’s not cool.

[00:23:54.02] Yeah. Well, Instagram was born that way. So at least they’re consistent, where they even from day one… Like, “link in bio” is very much an Instagram statement, because that’s the only place you are allowed to put a link. So at least they’re consistently anti web… Whereas now we’re getting a lot of previously pro web websites that are wanting you to stay in their silo.

I think this article that we covered in Changelog News was coming from a journalism-focused perspective, but it was speaking specifically about LinkedIn, X, whose algorithm was open source at some point, and you can clearly see that if you put a link into a post on X, that it will deprioritize that in the algorithm. And how the same thing is going on at LinkedIn, it seems like increasingly so. Facebook as well has turned their tide away from outbound links, and deprioritizing posts that include them.

And so this is just a huge bummer, and just against everything that I believe in in the web, as well as against small businesses like ours. So that’s my take on it. I think it’s lame. Obviously, they’re well within their rights to do it… I like small web, and the small web just keeps getting smaller, I think, because of reasons like this.

It’s like they want you to – they obviously want you to put your content there. Them be the hub, not the spoke, kind of thing.

They want to be everything. They’re like “Just post everything right here, and never leave.”

And that’s not cool necessarily. As you said, they are within their rights to do so, but… What can we do as developers? Can we just scream and cry? Can we – from within, if you’re one of these operatives on the inside as a developer making these platforms, can you push back on this idea that “Hey, this is not for the web”?

I don’t think that would really work, unless you were going to like sneak code in that does this… Because the argument is not strong in a pure capitalistic environment. It’s just not. It’s like “Well, we make more money this way. The more time you spend on my platform, the more money I make. Why would I link out to somewhere else?”

Mm-hm.

So that’s a really tough sell. I’m sure there’s people who are master debaters, who can probably give good reasoning to do that… But a lot of it is touchy-feely, in my opinion. Like, I don’t like it. I would forego more money in order to support a flourishing and diverse web… But when you have shareholders - I also own stock in companies, and I want those companies to return value to me as a shareholder. We all want that as shareholders. And so they are beholden to shareholders to do that. So it’s a really tough sell as a developer.

Now, what can we do? I think we build things that don’t do that. Just to be corny, “Be the change.” So you build the web that you want to see out there. And we’re doing that here at Changelog. Look at Changelog News, our main publication. It’s entirely a thing that links to other people’s stuff. Like, that’s entirely what it is.

It’s a redirect. Yeah.

It’s pointers. Now, it’s pointers with commentary, and taste-making, and all that stuff, which makes it hopefully good… But we’re building the web that we want to want to see out there. But we are like the scum they scrape off the scum. We’re nobodies. So does it really matter?

I wouldn’t say we’re scum, but okay…

Well, you know what I mean. From the perspective of the –

We’re small fish.

Yeah. We’re a barnacle on the –

That’s right. We’re krill.

…backside of a giant whale.

I’ll be krill. I’m cool with krill. I could be a krill.

You’re a krill?

I mean, that’s very small in comparison to the whale…

And the whale eats you.

Right.

I was going with barnacles, because they attach to the whale and they survive. The krill get eaten. The barnacles live.

That’s true.

But maybe they’re like down there in the armpit of the whale. Do whales have armpits?

Okay, I’m tracking with you…

Anyways, and the whale doesn’t even know we’re here. They’re like “Ah, I didn’t realize I had barnacles.”

[00:28:13.11] Oh, my gosh… What are you doing here, barnacle? I would say, to close this loop though, we experienced this personally, directly…

For sure.

…in the fact that our podcasts are more frequently listened to in a podcast client, which - they deserve to be there. That’s cool. That’s where it should be listened to. That’s where the best experience really is. And a lot of people even for a long time would say “I didn’t even – I haven’t been to changelog.com in basically never.” Or for basically a very long time. And so as somebody who puts a lot of effort into making the website possible, it’s not just a place you go, it’s a thing that serves. So obviously the client couldn’t get the mp3, or different content from it if the website didn’t exist. But you don’t have to go to Changelog.com, the hyperlink, the web link, the URL that we’re advocating for, to enjoy our content. You can forego that, indefinitely if you want to.

And we have no say in that, at all.

I guess this is how it’s supposed to be, right?

Well, it’s the way that it is, for sure.

While you’re here, y’all, go to changelog.com, and there you go.

Break: [00:29:23.08]

Alright, next up - “The GitHub plugin my co-workers asked me not to write.” The GitHub plugin. [unintelligible 00:34:46.06] wrote a GitHub plugin to calculate the bus factor or truck factor on GitHub repositories. Of course, we all know what a bus factor is. This is the minimum number of team members you can have on a project who can disappear before the thing becomes not driven anymore. It stalls out, or it fails, or it dies. And so the worst bus factor you could possibly have is one, and the best bus factor you could possibly have is infinity, I guess. I don’t know. One is bad. More than one is generally better.

That’s right.

Here’s a story. In 2015 or so Shea’s employer had layoffs. One of them was the only contributor to part of the codebase that made money for the company. He remembered reading about truck number - which is the same thing; it’s just trucks instead of buses - and thought it’d be fun to write a GitHub enterprise plugin that calculates who you can’t afford to fire. Shea found a research paper called the Truck Factor Research Paper, which actually went through this in a somewhat vigorous way.

“I started writing the plugin and talked five minutes on it at our Thursday afternoon lightning talks.” His co-workers said it would immediately hit Goodhart’s Law - once a metric becomes a measure, it no longer is a good metric - and they say they saw it as a way for management to easily calculate who you can fire. So all good tools can be used for good AND evil.

But long story short, I went out, I used this Truck Factor paper, which actually describes a way you can go about calculating this, at least fuzzily, to find out the key contributors to projects… And ran it against the Linux Founda– no, the Linux Kernel. Don’t run it against the foundation, run it against the Linux kernel. Found a way using the Linguist plugin to filter out documentation and third party libraries just to make sure it’s actually the people who are like working on the Linux Kernel, and found that not only is it small, even on something as large as Linux kernel, it’s going down.

Currently, Shea found a Truck Factor of 12. 12 people on the Linux kernel, down from in the 40s when it was run originally. So from 2015 till now, from the 40s down to 12. And his collaborator, M. Clare, who did some visualizations and stuff, also installed the plugin on her system. She got a factor of 8.

I’m not sure why there’s a discrepancy between the two. This is a developer’s blog post that I’m mining for this information. But yeah, so we have now this tool. I assume you can go take it and run it against other repositories. I would think, depending on the repository, it may or may not be accurate. Because if you have – probably the smaller the project, the harder it is to know that number for sure. But maybe you can know that number just by looking at the list of contributors in that case. But for large projects with thousands of contributors, you can actually understand how many of these are key in order to keep that sucker running. And it turns out, over time, it appears the Linux Kernel in particular has been going down, down, down. What are your thoughts on this, Adam?

[00:38:10.10] I’m looking at different angles… I also went to M. Clare’s blog. She has a parallel - to use a pun - I’ll bring up in a second. Not relevant in the moment, but it will be relevant here in just a second, I promise…

Stay tuned.

Stay tuned for the pun landing. She wrote a parallel blog post to this post, that has a bit more detail; different detail, I’d say. And the pun will land now. There’s one more built-in command to macOS that is kind of cool. Parallel. I think it’s built-in, because I’ve used it before. I can’t recall if I had to install the command, or a package to make it work. I think it works.

And so she mentioned when cloning the repos that it was very resource intensive despite passing a job count of 8 to Parallel. And so she used the command parallel-j 8 git clone, and the rest of the command to pull down tons of repos in this repo list that was in this .txt file. Kind of cool. So that’s the pun there.

Here is the closing of that loop… This is a third-party library, or tool, called Parallel. Hosted at savannah.gnu.org. So this seems like it’s an old GNU project.

Yeah.

It appears to be written in Perl. So an old thing that you can definitely use on macOS, but probably an apt-get install or a brew install kind of a thing.

Right.

Keep going.

I’ve used it before. That’s why I thought maybe it is built-in, because I’ve used it before, and I wasn’t sure if I installed something to make it work.

Fair enough. Yeah, no problem.

I think this is cool, honestly. I think it’s cool insofar as that I do agree with Goodheart’s Law, that it will just become this thing that you can measure against and use it in the incorrect way, so to speak… But I like the idea of being able to, as someone who’s trying to make choices to guide the ship, to have a bus factor or a truck factor number. It does resolve people to numbers, literally, which is not cool… But data, you know – they say make data-driven decisions. Hello, that’s data, right? I think it’s cool, but I think at the same time it could let some folks go. It’s like “Hey, I’m management, and Jerod is useful, and Adam is not.”

Right.

“Let’s let Adam go.”

Which would not be cool.

No, that would not be cool. But if it was deserved, maybe. Maybe it is cool. Not cool for me circumstantially, but totally cool in terms of project, or product, or direction.

Yeah. Efficiency and appropriate if somebody’s not bringing value.

Right. What I wish I had more time to do though was dig through this paper. The title of it is “A Novel Approach for Estimating Truck Factors.” It’s pretty deep.

That’s cool. That is the coolest part for me. It reminds me of Abi Noda’s subsection of our show with him, where he talked about measuring developer productivity… And I mentioned how hard it is to actually compare it with technical data, because you have quantitative measures, with money, and it’s just easy… And I kind of get fatalistic, I guess, with certain things that are hard to measure. I’m just like “Ah, we can’t measure that. Let’s move on.” I think it’s cool that people take the time and the effort, and do the research, and the novel ideas, and figuring out how to actually measure something… Which seems immeasurable, but really that just means it’s not easy to measure. And so that doesn’t mean it’s actually immeasurable, but most of the time you have to measure something that’s proximate to it in order to find this measure.

[00:41:56.15] So I think it’s just cool. I didn’t think about ever being able to quantify bus factor in terms of it being proven out, like “This project has a bus factor of X. And we know that’s true-ish, because we’ve done this novel approach.”

I think what it does let you do though, in terms – let’s forget the list of people you can fire aspect of this, and think of it more in terms of “How in trouble is your project?” How many open source projects out there could leverage this to its better advantage, its greater advantage? Because in the intro of the paper it says “A systems truck factor, tf, is defined”, as you said before, Jerod, “as the number of people on your team that have to be hit by a truck or quit before the project is in serious trouble.” And that is not a good thing for the project, obviously.

So if you have people who quit because of just natural attrition, maybe you’ve got the WordPress thing happening, and people are just considering being let go, or offered to leave for money, or literally just quitting, you have this opportunity to say “Well, this is how in trouble my project could be if things went sideways. If these things did happen.” And what you could do in the opposite of that is to insulate from that. It’s to say “Okay, let’s reduce that number”, or - I guess, what is the opposite here?

Well, you want to raise it.

So yeah, raise it. So you’ve got a tf of - what was it, like 40-something at first? And then now it’s down to like eight-ish…

Yeah. But what’s strange about this is that it seems like Shea got one measure, and then Clare got slightly less… So I’m not sure why they would change. He said running it on her machine got an eight, and these are – I don’t understand that. So maybe there’s more information to be figured out there, but… Yeah, call it single digits.

Well, now you have at least some measure to say “Well, we’ve got a…”

A declining bus factor.

Yeah.

I wonder who came up with truck factor and then who came up with bus factor… Because somebody must have thought it’d be a good idea to consider how many people on our project are going to get hit by a truck. Like, that’s just a very morbid thing to think. And then someone else was like “Nah, let’s just call it a bus. Like, maybe that’s slightly less –”

There’s probably more to it… But I would imagine that it’s more common to be hit by a bus.

I would think so.

Right? City streets, buses are more frequent than trucks… That’s why it’s called bus factor, because it’s the norm, not the anomaly.

And why wouldn’t you just call it like “leave the team” factor, righ? Why would we have to bring death into this? I do think there’s a reason for that, and I think it’s a fair reason. I think the reason is because a bus or a truck factor brings to mind the very real possibility that somebody could suddenly, without planning, leave the team. Like, that’s what you think of as like “Everything was great, until Fred got hit by a bus. And so now all of a sudden we don’t have time to like do any sort of preparation for this. Fred was going to be a BDFL. There was no plans of quitting.” And so I think that’s why death gets brought in, is because you have to think about it in a way of it could be a surprise. Anyways, that’s just my trying to read the tea leaves on the etymology of the term… Because otherwise it’s kind of a morbid term.

It is a very morbid term. I do agree with it. Suddenness. Maybe that’s why you, as you said, it’s pinned back to –

Sudden and unexpected.

I mean, it even went as far, in this paper – I might as well read the whole paper to everybody at this point… In section two it says “Truck factor. An example from the early days of Python. What if you saw this posted tomorrow? “Guido’s unexpected death…” Duh-duh-duh… “Has come as a shock to us all. Disgruntled members of the TCL mob are suspected, but no smoking gun has been found.”

Oh, that’s hilarious.

Yeah.

The TCL mob. So that’s a competing language, right? TCL. So they’re making up this hypothetical in which people from the TCL language community, the mob, somehow came and killed Guido van Rossum. That’s kind of funny, but also even more morbid… Surmising there’d be some sort of like inner language rivalry so harsh that they would execute a man.

[00:46:25.04] Wow…

Who wrote this paper…?

If you’ve seen Glass Onion, I believe? What was the first one? You know what I’m talking about…

Oh, you’re talking about the…

The pair of movies that are similar, but not the same. They’re not sequels…

Yeah, where they’re in the house – it’s murder mysteries?

Yeah, murder mystery. I love those movies. I mean, those are so good. We need more of those. It’s like, that’s the kind of thing. This reminds me of this, you know?

It’s killing me right now. What’s that movie called? Everybody’s [unintelligible 00:46:53.06] and they’re like “You idiot!”

Knives Out?

Thank you.

Glass Onion.

Thank you. Knives Out. I was googling that…

The easiest way to google something when you want to find something is Glass Onion versus. And it’s going to come up with… Knives Out. It’s going to come up with the opposite.

I was just typing Glass Onion movie. Ryan Johnson… There we go. I would have got there.

Now, if we want to talk about that quickly –

The problem was I got auto-completed.

Let’s bring that in as a topic, because I think that’s a good… Non sequitur. But it’s a good one. Glass Onion versus Knives Out.

Oh. Knives Out, hands down.

Have you seen Glass Onion?

Yeah.

Oh.

You must be the opposite. You haven’t thought about it before…

Yeah, I really haven’t, actually. Now that I’m thinking about it… There was a lot that I liked about Glass Onion.

I actually haven’t thought much about it. Obviously, I compared them after I saw Glass Onion. I compared it to the original in my head. But I haven’t had anybody ask me that, so that was my guttural reaction, was hands down the original.

Yeah.

But I don’t know, if you ask me like for reasoning, I’d just be like “It’s just better… I don’t know why.” I liked them both, first of all. So I’m not saying anything against the second one. Wasn’t the second one was very much like this hypothetical Elon Musk kind of character, who was like – was it Elon Musk that it was?

Was it based after him?

It was based off of some eccentric billionaire, right? I don’t know, we’re getting into areas where I flaunt how little I paid attention to movies… [laughs] They all go to an island. I don’t think it’s Epstein Island.

That’s who I was thinking about actually, was Epstein. Like, maybe it’s comparative to Epstein. Although it doesn’t – I don’t think it parallels - one more pun - very well to it… But I think it’s similar in the fact that it’s an island. Maybe that’s what it is.

It was a very – yeah, we’re in the weeds here on this, but my thoughts on it - I suppose both very good, and I really can’t say which one I like better, honestly. I think they were equally good in their own right. The Glass Onion movie had a really cool premise, whereas Knives Out also had a really cool premise, and I think you couldn’t see either of them coming. You really couldn’t.

Oh, they’re both well written, they’re both well executed. Great stories. I think Knives Out is a more classic whodunit, which nobody was making… I mean, Hollywood hasn’t taken a chance like that in a long time. It’s all like reboots, and sequels, and like the seventh version of this movie… And here comes a classic whodunit, with a brand new character, brand new storyline. So I really appreciated it for that.

Great cast.

Great cast…

Now that I think about it, Knives Out – they both had great cast though, but I think Knives Out had a more classically good cast. Like, it had a lot of actors that are not in their 20s or 30s. Like, 40s, 50s, 60s kind of actors and actresses.

[00:49:42.06] Yeah. So to close the loop on Elon Musk, I was right that everybody compared it to Elon Musk, people, especially because that came out right around the time that he bought Twitter. And there are dozens of articles comparing it, calling it a veiled dig at Elon Musk, because of the eccentric billionaire who is a major part of the story. However, Ryan Johnson says that that comparison was accidental, and merely coincident. He was not thinking about Elon Musk when he wrote it…But you be the judge, I suppose.

Well, social media was involved, right? And putting someone on – well, I guess it was YouTube, or a version of YouTube. I can’t recall if it was like literally YouTube or not. But social media for sure.

Let’s move on before we have to use our spoiler horn.

Oh, my gosh. Yes, that’s true.

Alright. Next up - Arc is a dead browser walking. Arc. The Arc browser.

Yes. I was actually going to go there, so I’m glad you did.

The sons of guns killed it, man. They killed it.

Is this news? Did it die?

Well… Okay, I’m being dramatic. No, it’s not dead. But the CEO and head person has moved on to a new browser.

Oh, okay…

It’s been put into maintenance mode.

What an absolute shame… For the people who use it, really. Wow, what a shame to begin to adopt something, begin to be excited about something, and then it just not work out. Okay, so this website is why I turned on my Tailscale – not sponsored by the way. I do love Tailscale. And then I enabled my exit note because I don’t have my Pi-hole here at the studio. I have it at home. And so I don’t – this website is just full of ads. I can’t even enjoy the content or find the content because there’s just so many ads.

Yes. This is the howtogeek.com website.

I’m sorry y’all have to do this to sustain your business. It’s an absolute shame. The web shouldn’t be like this. This is not the web I’m fighting for. I’m fighting for your freedom to publish, of course, but not your freedom to put all these ads everywhere. It’s just – like, come on.

So I actually didn’t notice that, because I’ve got built-in ad blockers and stuff, and NextDNS… That sounded like a brag. I didn’t mean it to sound like a brag. But the reason I was saying it is because I linked to this in news, and we tend to not link to sites that are yucky. Like, we don’t like that.

Yeah, this is yucky.

And so I’m kind of apologizing to a certain extent, because I didn’t notice how bad it was on howtogeek.com. So I agree with you a hundred percent, I probably should have linked over to The Verge, which generally has a much classier website…

Yes.

…and does a better job of coverage as well. But I’d just found this one first. This is the the article I linked to in Changelog News when I wrote about this a couple weeks ago. But just – I don’t know, I feel validated, because last time we talked about browsers I was like “I don’t just trust a VC-funded browser that doesn’t have a clear business model. I just feel like it’s going to go away.” And I didn’t expect to be correct so quickly… That’s what shocks me is. And I get it, you’ve got to move fast if you’re a startup. So why keep working on something… Even though we were impressed by their adoption; lots of loyal fans of the Arc browser. But not fast enough.

Yeah, they changed the – I wonder what really happened here… So I’m going to read a little bit, because this is… We haven’t closed the loop fully on what exactly happened here, because we’ve been meandering a bit. Maybe my fault, in terms of the ads and stuff. But it says the Browser Company, best known for the Arc Browser, is developing a completely new browser. The company’s been working for years on a browser unrelated to Arc. Arc won’t be abandoned, but the new focus will primarily be on stability updates and bug fixes. That’s kind of like… It’s not abandonment, but there’s no –

That’s maintenance mode, like it’s done.

Yeah. It might as well be abandoned. There’s nothing new here, and a new thing, so what’s the point of the new…?

[00:53:37.07] Yes. So that’s the story. And the reason was because they did not think they could take Arc to mass adoption, to the masses. And their goal is to make a browser for the masses. I’m somewhat reminded of Ryan Dahl with Deno, because I had Ryan Dahl on the show, I don’t know, a couple months ago, around the Deno 2 launch. And we talked about how he’s very much had to be pragmatic with his choices with Deno… Whereas when he started it, as the big rewrite, the second effort, after having made all these regrets with Node.js, he was going to do things differently, and better, and he took a very pure approach at first to Deno, in order to eschew backwards compat, and to leave Node.js behind. But he said he wasn’t happy building a runtime for a small group of people. He wanted to build something for the masses, and he realizes that he will not get mass adoption unless he goes back on some of those ideals and compromises.

Point in case is the eventual adoption of the Npm ecosystem, and all the work they had to do inside Deno in order to make Npm support happen. Ryan was very torn about that. He did not want to do it, but he just had to, he felt like, in order to meet people where they are and to build software for everybody. And that’s kind of what Arc is trying to do, right? They’re trying to create a browser for everybody, and they just feel like the current one they built was too power user-focused, it was too esoteric, and too many knobs and switches and things you had to relearn… I was somewhat turned off because of how different it was for me. And they’re “It’s never going to get there.”

Now, Ryan’s taking Deno and changing it, and he thinks it can get there. And time will tell… But with Arc, they’re just like “Nah, this browser is never going to get there. We’re going to start with a new one”, which is totally cool. They can go ahead and do that. I’m just not going to try it. I’m out. There’s enough browsers out there. I don’t need to use one by somebody who’s going to rug pull me again.

I do think the premise they have for this new version has some legs, so to speak…

Well, they got some stuff out there about it?

Same article, just more hints at what the future could be. It says “The goal for the new browser is to turn the browser into an app platform that is proactive, powerful, and AI-centric.” What is not AI-centric these days? “The goal is to make the initial user experience seamless, to attract a larger audience to explore its capabilities.” And then it says “The company’s –” I’m just passing by some of those details. Oh, I should read this part. “The goal is to make the initial user experience seamless and to attract a larger audience”, which I just said, “to explore its capabilities, with an interface that more people are used to with horizontal tabs. The company’s vision for the new browser involves using AI and machine learning to automate tasks like data transfer between enterprise applications, or retrieving order numbers for customer support.”

That seems kind of niche, but I like the idea, I suppose, of more smarts in the browser. Let the other people deal with web standards. That’s what Chrome is doing, right? Safari is doing. Put a layer on top of that that is familiar to the person, not crazily different like Arc was… I love the adventure, though. I applaud their courage to do something so different than a typical browser. Because maybe that’s actually what got them a lot of the – like this shiny object kind of thing. “Oh, what’s this?” This is the purple cow aspect that Seth Godin talked about, right? …is that here you have this factor of a brand new browser that isn’t just simply trying to be faster, better etc. it’s like just literally different in terms of user experience, and starkly different compared to horizontal tabs.

Right.

I could never get past the – and I’m a power user. I think I am at least. Or I aim to be. Or I try to be. [unintelligible 00:57:43.26]

You aspire to be a power user.

[00:57:48.05] I’m an aspiring power user… And I really tried Arc, in earnest, several times, and I was just like “I just can’t get used to this experience.” I liked other aspects about it… But to my point though, and to their point, is I like the idea of something that builds on top of, where the browser is more of a platform, in terms of on top of the web. I like the idea of like automating some things, but how does that actually translate? I don’t know. We’ll see.

So Josh Miller is the CEO of the Browser Company. And I’ve DM’d, I believe, on Twitter/X, and I’m sure that we emailed trying to coordinate. So Josh, if you’re listening to this, or somebody who knows you - let this be an open invite to dig in. Let’s talk about it. Let’s go deep on what happened with Arc, what lessons did you learn, how are you reformulating your idea and plan… Because it is a 2025 plan. It’s early 2025. So this is not Ladybird’s 2026 beta. This is – it says “The new browser is expected to launch at the beginning of next year, but it’s not set in stone, and may be pushed further into 2025.” But their plan is soon, and they’ve been working on this other thing in parallel. So… Come on here, Josh. Let’s talk.

Yeah, 100%.

Break: [00:59:09.25]

Are you on, officially, Blue Sky?

I am not.

Do you have an account?

I don’t think so.

I don’t think I do either. I could have sworn I created an account.

I know that Changelog.com is on there, and I’ve coded against their API, and our platform posts our new stuff there.

Right.

And so if you want to follow Changelog on Blue Sky, by all means, please do. But I’m not personally on there. And I know that they’re getting massive adoption all of a sudden, at least in terms of brand new social networks go. They’re getting a huge uptick, and people are raving.

I would love to see a comparison of Blue Sky, because the reason why I ask this is there’s a headline that you covered, I believe, in news… Blue Sky crosses the 15 million user mark, which is - it’s a lot of people. It’s not billions.

No. It’s nowhere near Threads.

I mean – yeah, exactly. So cross-examine that against, obviously, X/Twitter, Threads, and then Blue Sky. Is it truly worth – I think the thing I think about is less “Is X for me or is Threads for me?” and more “Is Blue Sky worth giving any attention to?” It’s almost synonymous with Arc, in the fact that they’re trying to do something different, but kind of the same. Blue Sky is not much different. How much different could you make a social media application though, or a platform? It’s not drastically different. Like, even True Social. I think Trump did that, didn’t he?

[01:02:07.29] Mm-hm.

I’ve never been on there. I have no idea. But every time I saw it in the news, it was like a copy and paste of Twitter/X posts. Like, there’s not much you can revolutionize there.

That’s what Blue Sky is, for the most part. There’s a few things that set it apart, technicalities, but for most people, it’s going to be like “Twitter minus Elon Musk and crew”, for the most part. And that’s what it looks like, at least. And I think that it’s not very big, because 15 million – while they’ve had 700,000 coming on a week, is what I read on The Verge, or in the last couple of weeks; probably not a week, but recent weeks… It’s not how many people are there, it’s who’s there, to a certain extent. And I think that a lot of developers are going there, which makes it interesting. And creatives. But Threads has something like 275 million people on there. And so 15 million in that light is a barnacle… [laughs]

Very much a barnacle.

A large barnacle, grant you…

Good throwback.

…but a barnacle. Lots of people are talking it up. Twitter used to be a nice place in the early days, and it feels probably like that. I don’t think there’s anything inherent in there that makes it not become what Twitter became eventually anyways… And so I think resistance is futile, to a certain extent. And I’m at this point in my life - and maybe this is foolish as a podcaster, but… I’m just ready to opt out of the next thing. Like, let’s put change log on there, but… Do I want to be on Blue Sky personally? I just really don’t care anymore. I’m kind of over it all. [laughter]

“I’m kind of over it all.”

Social media, I’m talking about. New, short-form text platforms.

Right.

Like, how much value do they bring to our lives, in reality?

Well, the value is distribution of ideas. Obviously. You know this. I’m not speaking to the choir. Or I am speaking to the choir.

Please, keep speaking.

Right. So to state the obvious, the value is distribution of ideas. And so I think so long as you would like to distribute your ideas, then they do hold a use, whether it’s personally or corporately. And we do the job of spreading and distributing the ideas as a corporation, or corporately. We’re not literally a corporation. I guess we kind of are.

I feel you on that. I’ve sort of opted out, in a way, to a lot of these things, I think to the betterment of my mental health… I didn’t do it because I was like “Oh, I’m mentally taxed. Let me get off of Instagram.” But I can tell you that if you had like a CAT scan on my brain whenever I scan Instagram, comparative to life without Instagram, as an example… This is the one I for sure opted out of. It’s just all vanity. Vanity is everywhere out there, and it just drives me crazy. It’s all comparative, all vanity, and I just… I’m like you. I just opted out. And I almost feel like X is the same. Like, I don’t have much to share there, aside from the things we can share… And anything more than that is just like, I’d rather just share it on like Zulip, or Slack, or something that’s just a bit more focused and a bit more personal.

So I haven’t really been in the zone of my life where I want to speak to the masses ad nauseam, and just like “Yeah, here’s the ideas. Take them [unintelligible 01:05:34.19]

Right. And there’s lots of people who remember fondly the early days of Twitter, and I am one of them…

Me too. I remember that very well. I loved it.

And I definitely made a lot of friends that way. I mean, if you look at our lives’ paths crossing, Twitter played a role in that. Blogs played a role in that. So I got involved in the Changelog because Wynn Netherland read my blog, and I read his blog, and so we were blog buddies, and we were Twitter friends. And Wynn, of course - Adam, you know; I’m not telling you this. I’m telling everybody else. Wynn was one of the original creators of The Changelog, and was on the show for a couple of years before moving on, getting a job at GitHub, moving on… In which time I stepped in slowly and became your co-host.

[01:06:21.16] But that all happened because of Twitter plus blogging. And that’s radically changed the course of my life. And so I don’t want to discount that. So maybe that’s what I’m doing, I’m discounting those kinds of things… Because tons of friends and colleagues and interesting people have been met that way. I just don’t know if I’m ready to do it all over again. Like, I was in my twenties then, and didn’t know a lot of people… And like, now I’ve met a lot of people, and… I don’t know. I’m ready to maybe let that be a different person’s game. But Changelog should still be there, which means I have to be there to a certain extent, which also means maybe I have to read stuff, and then I get sucked in, and I’m just back at some point… Like, “I’m back! Blue Sky is amazing!”

Well, I think there’s a different version of being back. There’s a back where you consume/lurk, and there’s a back where you do that as well as create.

Right.

And I would say that’s different, for sure.

Well, I could go Justin Searls mode. So Justin automates everything, to all the social networks, and he reads none of them. So it’s very –

That’s the way to do it, man.

It’s broadcast only.

Gosh…

And I feel like there’s something lame about that. And I’ve told Justin this to his face, so I’m not calling him out here on the show. He knows I know this. It’s kind of lame, because you’re just like “Here. My thoughts are interesting, but yours aren’t.” It’s like “Here, read my stuff. But I’m not going to read yours.” It’s antisocial. But it’s also probably – I mean, for him, because he’s obsessive-compulsive, he says it’s an absolute necessity, because he gets obsessed with these things, and he can’t check them all the time. And so because he’s unable to regulate that, he has to just turn it all off, and that makes 100% sense for him.

But it’s definitely a technique. But if we’re all just broadcasting our voices into the void, then what are we doing here? Which brings us to… Maybe we close with this: Dead Internet Theory.

I wanted to actually say two things on that.

Okay.

I do want to say Dead Internet Theory, but I also want to say “You should go to conferences.” So I think a somewhat segue could be - well if you don’t want to lurk/non-participate in social media, participate in IRL. And the best way to do that is the hallway track. And then my other thought was - yes, the Dead Internet Theory, and are we creators of this dead internet? He just admitted to having bots out there, essentially; automated posting to X, literally X and other X’s in terms of variable.

Right.

So many puns today. Wow, sorry about that. Yeah, we’re part of the bots. This Dead Internet Theory. What is the Dead Internet Theory, Jerod?

So to outline the Dead Internet Theory for folks… If you’ve been listening to Changelog News, I brought it up probably three or four times in the last year, because I guess I’m a conspiracy theorist in that way. Because this is a conspiracy theory. Aren’t we all conspiracy theorists in our own special way, by the way? Here’s something I’ve noticed, aside… Everybody, left, right and center, up, down, whatever place you are, we all do this. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…” and then we launch into our newest conspiracy.

Well, as humans, we are also very prone to believing and listening to conspiracies.

Well, we’re trying to figure stuff out.

It’s a mystery.

We’re trying to figure out the world. It’s totally natural. But I just like how everybody has to preface their new theory with this disclaimer first, like “Listen…”

“I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…”

“I don’t normally dabble in conspiracies. I don’t want to be labeled as a crazy person, but let me tell you about this theory.” I just think it’s funny. We all do it. I’ve certainly done it. And so here’s one theory: the Dead Internet asserts that due to a coordinated - maybe that’s where the conspiracy really comes in… An intentional effort, the internet now consists mainly of bot activity, and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.

[01:10:14.04] Now, having read the paragraph again, I don’t 100% believe that. I don’t think it’s coordinated and intentional. I think some of it’s probably intentional. I don’t think it’s coordinated. I just think it’s incentives working themselves through the human race. I do think it’s happening though. I do think that more and more and more and more, and even more so, we are out there, the few, the proud, on the internet, talking to robots, who are talking to other robots and to humans, to a point where we’re just like completely disconnected from actual humans. And how would we ever know?

We used to escape by going onto the internet.

Yeah.

Now we escape by leaving the internet.

Going back to the real world.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s a good point.

A different version I have… This is from the LLM. I asked it to TL;DR it for me. And so it says different versions of it, but it says –

Sure. Mine was Wikipedia.

Yeah. And that’s probably just fine. What’s the good part to read here…? “Proponents of the theory believe that government agencies and large corporations are responsible for creating fake content and interactions to manipulate the public opinion, control information, and inflate engagement metrics.” I mean, there’s a lot of fake content out there.

I wouldn’t be surprised.

There’s a lot of – I mean, especially on TikTok… I mean, I’ve kind of ejected from TikTok. I was listening to that episode we reposted a little while back… It was a really good episode. Let me go and find what that one was again.

10,000 hours?

Yeah, “Lessons learned from 10,000 hours of programming.” Now, I’d actually scan that episode, because it did not have chapters. That’s how far back it was. And you should go listen to it, by the way, listeners. Episode 613. Changelog.fm/613. And I said on there – I think this is the early days of me mentioning Silicon Valley on this podcast…

Because you mentioned TikTok a bunch, and I was getting sick of hearing about TikTok?

And you – yeah, there’s actually… Okay, here. It’s even better. I earmarked it. There is a chapter for this.

Oh nice.

I will tell you what it says. It says – and you’re gonna laugh, Jerod, if you didn’t pay attention to this yet… Chapter 15: “Jerod provokes Adam.”

[laughs] I like this. What did I say?

You basically said “You have to mention TikTok every show”, or something like that. I’m paraphrasing. It was something like a dig, because it was definitely early days of me mentioning Silicon Valley.

I remember your TikTok phase.

I feel like there’s just so much information there… Maybe that’s why I believe this theory, or this conspiracy theory at least, of this dead internet… Because I think there’s a lot of content on there that’s just like “Somebody is employing somebody just to generate this content, so that it can go viral, and so that it can affect a mass amount of people to believe a new thing.” Like chickens, for example. I’ve asked this question a few times… My idea or my awareness of this conspiracy theory that if you begin to cultivate – I don’t know, what’s it called when you farm chickens? Do you – you don’t farm chickens. You raise chickens?

[01:13:13.00] Yes.

Right? That’s the term for it.

Yeah.

What’s weird with a spider is it’s husbandry. If you caretake a spider, male or female, doesn’t matter, the process is called husbandry. Anyways…

I think husbandry speaks to the production process.

Maybe.

Anyways.

So you’re raising some chickens, next thing you know you’re questioning all of life, because you realize that the eggs you’re getting from these chickens is nowhere near the eggs you’re getting from the chickens at the store, unless you’re buying the really expensive ones, that are cage-free… And even then, you’ve got all these marketing terms that sort of like curtail the idea of what an egg is.

Oh, yeah.

Anyways, you start doing all this other stuff. Now you’re living off the land…

You’re in deep.

Yeah, you go deep.

Once you take the pill… Question everything.

The chickens are the pill. Yeah, the chickens is the gateway.

I think that’s fair. I mean, my brother and sister-in-law raise chickens, and we eat their eggs, and they’re epically different than what you buy at the store.

And they probably have opinions, right? They’re like “Oh my gosh, don’t ever eat the –” If you had an egg in your hand from the store –

100%.

…they’re like slapping it out of your hand.

Yeah, slap that egg.

[laughs]

It’s the right place to slap an egg. Yeah. No, I get it. I think that that’s – is this your theory, or did somebody give you this one?

This chicken theory? No, it was given to me via TikTok. That’s the point.

Oh, they gave you that theory.

Yeah. I became aware of this theory on TikTok, so it could be –

Oh, they planted it.

…this idea was planted so that we now look at things differently. I mean, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…

[laughs] Here we go…

…parts of this dead internet theory ring true to me.

Yes, I agree. Definitely parts of it. Shades of gray on how much of it’s true. But it definitely feels like if not the intentionality, but the effect is 100% true. Like, there’s just way more – there’s way more noise than there ever has been on the internet. And I think a lot of that noise is manufactured, because it’s so easy to manufacture noise, and easier than ever to manufacture noise that looks like a human.

Well, I think it could be where they literally are using real humans… Like, it doesn’t have to be generated. It could be –

Well, they use people as vessels. For instance, whoever wanted to get this chicken theory out there, they got Adam Stacoviak, and look what you’re doing with it, dude. You’re spreading it far and wide.

I’m spreading it. So many places.

You are a pawn, and I think that we should close right there.

I believe so.

Go to conferences, shout out to the author of that post… [unintelligible 01:15:47.23] Great domain, great website. Shout-out to Sophie for writing that one… And that’s it. We’ll throw the other links, that we didn’t talk about in the show into the show notes, in case you want to do some more reading. I think there’s two or three that we passed on… But why not? Share them as well, just in case you want to dive a little deeper.

I have one for a Plus Plus audience. Can we do that?

Alright. Let’s say goodbye to our friends, and we see you all next week. Goodbye, friends.

Bye, friends.