[JM]: So in today's edition of "here is a fun but mostly useless thing that I'm going to share with you just because it's fun and useless" is drawafish.com.
[JM]: And you should go to drawafish.com so that you can, wait for it, draw a fish.
[JM]: And one of the cool things about it, if you can call it cool, is that when you draw your fish, you will be told in percentage terms how much the system thinks your fish is fish-like.
[JM]: Which is, you know, a fun thing for a draw-a-fish website to do.
[DJ]: Justin, I appreciate that you, like presumably the creator of this website, are not wasting a lot of time trying to convince the listener why they would want to draw a fish on the internet.
[DJ]: You're just like, given that insofar as you have been seeking a way to draw a fish...
[DJ]: Here it is.
[DJ]: And while we're here, we're also going to rate your fish drawing.
[JM]: Precisely.
[JM]: I do understand that the market for "I really want to draw a fish and be told how closely it looks like a fish" market is probably a little small.
[JM]: But I am here to serve not just all of the people on the planet, but also, you know, little niche communities like those people.
[JM]: So if you are one of those people, you should go and draw a fish.
[JM]: And then once you've drawn a fish, you should tap on the rank button and see a fish ranking page where you can sort by hot score date, random order, and you can see what other people have drawn.
[JM]: And let me tell you, this was for me a bit of a disheartening look at how creative and talented other people can be relative to the
[JM]: very pathetic excuse for a fish that I ended up drawing.
[DJ]: So are you going to tell us what your rating was?
[JM]: I think the funny part about that is it gives you a score in percentage terms every time you lift your finger from the trackpad.
[JM]: So for every time you draw a contiguous line, you're shown some percentage.
[JM]: And then you draw something else, and then that percentage either goes up or down, depending on how much of a fish your new version, the system thinks it looks like.
[DJ]: Is this more like a fish, it asks, or less like a fish?
[DJ]: Which is a question I think we've all been asking ourselves.
[JM]: Let's just say that the initial version that I do on my first draw usually comes out about 70%.
[JM]: And then when I start to add other embellishments, it tends to go down because I can't draw worth anything.
[JM]: Yeah, and on the fish ranking page, it shows scores that I don't really understand because those scores are not in percentage terms.
[JM]: So I can't tell, does that mean, like, it seems like it's a differential between upvotes and downvotes.
[JM]: So if you take the upvotes and you subtract the downvotes, that's the score you get.
[DJ]: So the score is like the people's score, whereas the percentage is some sort of dictatorial comparison between your drawing and a platonic ideal of some kind.
[JM]: Precisely.
[JM]: Or at least that's what I was able to glean from this very fun and frivolous website that you should still check out.
[DJ]: I love a good web site that raises more questions than it answers.
[JM]: This is definitely one of those.
[JM]: All right, moving on to some follow-up.
[JM]: I think it's really fun when I see things that are related to something we've talked about on a previous episode.
[JM]: And just today, the day we are recording this, I came across a two-fer, two things that we've talked about in the same thing that I came across.
[JM]: And that is on fivesongsdaily.com, which is something we've mentioned in a previous episode.
[JM]: One of the songs I noticed today
[JM]: is the Hostile Government Takeover song that we mentioned in a different episode.
[JM]: And that in and of itself is interesting.
[JM]: But then I also noticed that the song when I played it, I'm like, wait a minute, this is different than the song that I listened to when we originally mentioned it on the show.
[JM]: And after tapping around a little bit, I realized that after this EDM version, this EDM riff on the song went viral on TikTok and on YouTube, it seems like there was some collaboration, as far as I can tell, between the two people involved, right?
[JM]: Because originally there wasn't.
[JM]: Originally, it was some person walking through their house, filming themselves.
[JM]: acapella with this melody and lyrics.
[JM]: And then this other person remixed it, kind of made this EDM version and published it.
[JM]: And then it seems like the two of them collaborated shortly thereafter, totally unbeknownst to me and made like an official version.
[JM]: Instead of it being like a minute or so, it's like a proper, you know, two and a half minute song.
[JM]: And it's now available on iTunes and Spotify and all these other places in addition to the original TikTok and YouTube and whatnot.
[JM]: So essentially right after we originally mentioned this on the show, it seems that this new song came out, went number one on iTunes, sold about 5,000 copies of it towards the end of February.
[JM]: And it just kept going and going.
[JM]: And over four days, it clips like 600,000 streams and really just seemed to pick up steam.
[JM]: And that's awesome.
[JM]: And I'm going to put a link to this new official version in the show notes so that if you haven't heard it, or even if you have heard the version that we originally linked to, you can now hear this newer, longer official version.
[JM]: Moving on to some more follow-up, I came across an article the other day and I thought, huh, well, what do you know?
[JM]: We talked about this very topic on our show.
[JM]: The title of the article is, Do Not Download the App, Use the Website.
[JM]: And we originally talked about this topic on our show in the context of how annoying it is when you're on a site in a mobile browser on your phone and you're bombarded with these banners that say, oh, this is so much better in the app.
[JM]: I'm looking at you, Reddit.
[JM]: Looking at you, at least 50% of the sites I seem to go to and how annoying it is and how I posited at the time, this can't be just coming from some perspective of, hey, we, the people who develop this product really think that the app is a better experience for you.
[JM]: And we really think you would benefit from using it because the way it just feels like they beat you over the head with it.
[JM]: Like this is so much better than the app.
[JM]: It just feels so insistent that at the time when we recorded this before, I said, I just don't buy it.
[JM]: Like this has to be because it's better for them because otherwise they wouldn't push it so hard.
[JM]: And this article dives into this topic
[JM]: and essentially reaches the same conclusion that we reached in that particular episode, which was we surmised that companies push you to use the app because they get more data that way.
[JM]: And this site says the same thing and says that this seemingly small action
[JM]: grants data about your contacts, potentially your location.
[JM]: Some apps can record audio.
[JM]: Some apps can tell what other applications you have installed on your phone.
[JM]: And there's this extra data that you get than you don't get when you're just looking at a site in Mobile Safari.
[JM]: And there's a whole slew of comments on Hacker News that support this concept.
[JM]: I don't know, it feels good to be vindicated, I suppose, to have our suspicions more or less confirmed that this is indeed why they do this.
[DJ]: Yeah, I can't say I'm surprised because to the point you made before, it's just, it's one of these, what's the line from, what is it, Shakespeare?
[DJ]: The lady doth protest too much or something like that.
[DJ]: Like if someone's going like, hey, you should do this, you should do this, you should totally do this, you should really do this, you eventually have to go...
[DJ]: I'm sorry, stranger.
[DJ]: I refuse to believe that you are so incredibly invested in my welfare that you won't leave me alone.
[DJ]: This must benefit you in some way.
[DJ]: This must principally be about how it's good for you and not for me.
[DJ]: And also, and maybe this will make me sound even more jaded and cynical.
[DJ]: The time when we were all super excited about smartphone apps ended glances at Sundial, what, like 13 years ago?
[DJ]: Like when smartphone apps first came out, there was this sort of sense of like, oh, wow, this is really cool.
[DJ]: But for the last, you know, 150 years, it's felt like the average smartphone app that you download is a kind of...
[DJ]: not very good version of a website anyway because it is because they're practically all built using web technologies because people who are putting some website on the internet are not also going to hire teams of both android and ios software engineers to build native app experiences so
[DJ]: You almost get the worst of both worlds at this point in so many cases where there's these sites that are like, hey, you should download our app.
[DJ]: And yeah, some of them you go to the website and there's just the banner at the top that says we also have an app.
[DJ]: And that's not so bad.
[DJ]: But I called out Reddit before.
[DJ]: And one of the reasons it gets on my nerves so much is that depending what device you use and what context you're looking, they find all these various elaborate ways of trying to force you to use the app.
[DJ]: And it really gets on my nerves.
[DJ]: And again, when you actually condescend to download these smartphone apps,
[DJ]: There's often nothing better in the experience.
[DJ]: In fact, even to the extent that like a lot of these apps won't sustain a login session, which drives me completely crazy when it's like I open a smartphone app and it's like, please log into your account.
[DJ]: I'm like, no, no.
[DJ]: The point of having an app on my smartphone is that my phone's
[DJ]: biometric security is the thing that secures my, my app.
[DJ]: You like, you told me to download this app instead of using your website.
[DJ]: So you have to give me a better authentication experience than the one I get on your website.
[DJ]: And if you can't delete it for all those other reasons, because yeah, there's probably is just like, yeah, please download our app so we can, yeah, I don't know what, figure out what other apps are on your phone and then aggregate that data for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[DJ]: But it certainly isn't for our benefit.
[JM]: Definitely not.
[JM]: And moving on to our last bit of follow-up, in the very first segment of our very first episode, we talked about Google sunsetting its goo.gl URL obfuscator.
[JM]: And this week...
[JM]: There was talk about it because there's now one month remaining before Google turns off this service once and for all.
[JM]: And anyone who has links that would otherwise resolve via this service will no longer resolve anymore and will just become dead links.
[JM]: And Google would, of course, counter and say like, okay, well, 99% of the entries that were created with this URL obfuscator are no longer active or used or linked anywhere on the web.
[JM]: And I would counter with, okay, so 1% of...
[JM]: what massively big number equals some other fairly decent sized number.
[JM]: Oh, and also your Google, you have the ability to just run this thing forever with it not even being a rounding error.
[JM]: on any line on your profit and loss statement, it wouldn't be hard for you to do.
[JM]: And also you Google have a terrible track record of launching things and then killing them.
[JM]: I mean, the Google graveyard once again is something that exists and this is not helping your reputation.
[JM]: I love that John Gruber said, the whole reason anyone might have used goo.gl instead of something like Bitly is misplaced trust in Google.
[JM]: I trust Google with almost nothing long-term.
[JM]: And he's right.
[JM]: I can understand, I suppose, back when
[JM]: this URL office skater was launched, why you might trust them because maybe I don't know, the Google graveyard was a lot smaller than it is now.
[JM]: But if they launched something, you know, now, I just don't know why anyone would be Oh, okay, this looks cool.
[JM]: I'll start using this and put my data into this or integrate this thing into my workflow.
[JM]: I'm like, why you know, it's
[JM]: got almost no chance of sticking around for longer than five years, given their track record so far.
[JM]: And Gruber goes on to say, mark my words, they're going to do this with Gmail accounts eventually, which I thought was kind of funny in a way.
[JM]: Can you imagine just the sheer mayhem if they're like, all right, we're getting rid of Gmail.
[DJ]: For me and you and presumably many of the people who are hearing us say this right now, we know what the web is and how it's distinct from other things and we care about it.
[DJ]: And the lesson of the last 20 to 25 years is that these big companies like Google and Facebook
[DJ]: that started off I guess you could say like making things for the web turned out to be the enemies of the web it's not just that they don't care about the web it's that if they could snap their fingers the web would cease to exist forever because then they could just get you to use their services which is all they care about because that's how it works so the thing that occurred to me when he mentions like Google getting rid of Gmail and what an outcry there would be is I immediately thought
[DJ]: yeah I mean the big problem with that is that for most people the same way that they don't know what the web is they just think there's Google and Facebook they don't know what email is either do you know what I mean like I mean they don't know what email is in the sense that if Gmail went away and you said well you just need to just get another just get an email address somewhere else I think a lot of people would go what do you mean like they don't recognize that an email address was not invented by Google when they made Gmail.
[JM]: Good point.
[JM]: I think I would take the other side of this bet with John Gruber because I think that Google gets more out of Gmail because it's just this endless source of data mining opportunity for them.
[JM]: And of course, they don't allow end-to-end encryption because if they did that, they wouldn't be able to see the contents of your email and thus they wouldn't be able to use it for all of that data mining purposes.
[JM]: and thus fine-tune their ad tracking based on the kinds of email that you send and receive so i don't think that they will kill gmail i feel like it serves them i feel like it is something that is probably like a net benefit for them in terms of them being able to mine that for their ad tracking purposes
[DJ]: I agree.
[DJ]: I think there has to be an explanation for why they've run Gmail for free for so long.
[DJ]: Because again, and maybe this is like the cynicism episode or whatever, but no, let's just play it like it lays.
[DJ]: Like giant publicly traded companies...
[DJ]: have their behavior massively influenced by the need to keep their stock price going up.
[DJ]: That's not a value judgment.
[DJ]: That's the way our civilization works, for better and for worse.
[DJ]: So there is just generally no such thing, or at least it's vanishingly rare, for a company to do something like run the world's most popular email service for free just because they think that that's like a public good that should exist.
[DJ]: I mean, come tell me that I'm wrong, the CEO of Google.
[DJ]: But like I don't think it's in Google's mission statement that like every person in the world deserves to have an email account for free and therefore we principally make money off ads so that we can supply the world with free email.
[DJ]: As far as I know, that's not part of Google's thing.
[DJ]: That's not why they're around, which means that the causality has to go in the other direction, that Gmail exists to serve Google's bottom line somehow.
[DJ]: Like that's why goo.gl.
[DJ]: Sidebar, maybe they're retiring it because who actually wants to say that out loud?
[DJ]: Like they created this URL shortener and then they realized like, oh God, no one can bear to say goo.gl.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: Visit my website at goo.gl slash, you know, and someone's like, wait, hold on.
[DJ]: I'm sorry.
[DJ]: Did you just, did you experience like a cerebral event just then?
[DJ]: What was that sound you made?
Yeah.
[DJ]: But, you know, at some point, Google must have thought that having a URL shortener served their ends as well.
[DJ]: And again, I can see it because there is a degree to which Google's deal over the kind of from their founding was like, they're the way you navigate the web.
[DJ]: But over time, they've like like most such companies, like they have tried to supplant the web.
[DJ]: Essentially, they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
[DJ]: Just spend all your time here.
[DJ]: Don't even visit websites anymore.
[DJ]: We've got an AI driven thing that just tells you the answer to your search query.
[JM]: Right.
[JM]: We're going to make your search results worse on purpose so that you spend more time here.
[DJ]: Spend more time here.
[DJ]: Exactly.
[DJ]: Because, well, and again, like they that sort of economic bargain that so many of these sites have made.
[DJ]: It's tempting to treat like Google and Facebook as villains and they behave like villains.
[DJ]: So like, yeah, give them hell.
[DJ]: But at the same time, there is a certain degree of like, we are all trapped in the same system together, me and you and also Google and Facebook, where, you know, that because we complain about the whole well, you know, if you're not paying them, then you're the product and they're selling your data and da da da da.
[DJ]: And it's like, that's all true.
[DJ]: But the fact of the matter is, in 1998 or whenever Google launched, if they'd launched their search engine and said, hey guys, unlike AltaVista, we have this great search engine and it'll just cost you $10 a month to use it.
[DJ]: And then when Facebook started to launch, they said, hey guys, we're expanding beyond the Harvard campus.
[DJ]: If you want to use Facebook, you just have to pay us $10 a month.
[DJ]: Then neither of those companies would exist.
[DJ]: So I don't know what the solution to this is.
[DJ]: There are these things that seem like if they if they rely on things like network effects, I don't know how they can come to exist without starting off as saying like, well, hey, guys, you can use this for free.
[DJ]: And we'll just don't ask us how we're going to stay alive.
[DJ]: We'll figure it out.
[DJ]: Don't worry about it.
[DJ]: And then, you know, here we are.
[DJ]: But I don't really know what the alternative is, frankly.
[JM]: Well, the question of what is the alternative is an excellent segue into our next topic, which is the question of digital sovereignty.
[JM]: Because ultimately, that's what we're talking about, right?
[JM]: You said that if Google said we're going to turn off Gmail, people would be like, what do you mean I need to go find another email provider?
[JM]: Gmail was email.
[JM]: And you're right, because they don't understand the concept of portability in this way.
[JM]: There have been a couple of articles this past week that relate to digital sovereignty in the context of self-hosting.
[JM]: Because there's a tendency, certainly for myself and lots of other like-minded people, that the answer to this question, right, the alternative that you said you don't know what it is, that for me and some of the other people that I know, the answer has been to reach for self-hosting.
[JM]: To say, okay, well, that's fine.
[JM]: I'm going to host my own email.
[JM]: I'm going to host my own website.
[JM]: I'm going to host my own podcast server.
[JM]: Every time we find a nail, our hammer is, well, I'm going to self-host it.
[JM]: But the reality is that doesn't really work outside of a tiny, tiny dent in this problem, right?
[JM]: Like it's just barely scratching the surface of the problem because it doesn't work for most people.
[JM]: It barely works for me and other like-minded people.
[DJ]: Yeah, seriously.
[JM]: There's just no way, right?
[JM]: There's no way that the answer to this question is, oh yeah, you should just self-host it.
[JM]: I mean, I've actually seen people say that on the internet and it cracks me up every time.
[JM]: It's so infeasible.
[JM]: And so there seems to be a growing consensus that, okay, it's not feasible at the individual level.
[JM]: Maybe it's more feasible at a community level where a community can say, okay,
[JM]: we as a community, whether that's, I don't know, an extended family, or maybe even it's a larger community, like a nonprofit organization or whatever this community is, the answer can be, this is totally not feasible at an individual level, but at a small group level, we can amortize the cost of it, not in terms of dollars, but just in terms of the extra work that goes into it.
[JM]: It's such a hassle to have to maintain these kinds of things.
[JM]: Just to pick a random example that happened to me literally yesterday, I host my own Mastodon server.
[JM]: Me and the biggest, I just wanted to try it and see how it would go.
[JM]: I figured if it didn't go well, I could always nuke it and just migrate off to one of the other many instances that are managed by people much more technically capable than me.
[JM]: I got some notification.
[JM]: yesterday that the disk was full which you know happens if you manage your own server like chances are good you're going to get a notification if you even have the ability to be notified because otherwise if you don't your stuff just stops working you're like i don't understand why is it down why is it not working and then you're like if you've been around the block a couple of times your next suspicion should be um i think my disk is full apache wrote out 600 gigabytes of logs for some reason and you never built anything that would clean them up so
[JM]: Yes, that is indeed a very common occurrence.
[JM]: In this particular case, it was not log files, although I probably do need to go through and make sure that those are taken care of also.
[JM]: But in this particular case, no.
[JM]: The answer was that I had upwards of 50 gigabytes of media cached that had never been purged.
[JM]: So essentially, from the moment that I stood up this Mastodon instance until now, every single time I've tapped on a post, tapped on...
[JM]: user's avatar to look at their profile.
[JM]: Every single time I've interacted with anything on Mastodon, all of those images were all cached and never purged.
[JM]: That's literally years.
[JM]: So shouldn't be surprising that 50 gigabytes had accumulated and needed to be purged.
[JM]: But this is the kind of thing your average person is never going to do.
[JM]: This is the kind of thing that even someone who knows how to do these things should probably not be doing.
[JM]: It's not worth your time.
[JM]: And that's why some people are saying that perhaps this could be solved at the community level.
[JM]: To some degree, that's why I created this Mastodon instance in the first place, because I figured, okay, I can do this.
[JM]: This way, if family and friends ever want an account, they could use this particular instance and amortize the effort that I put into it.
[JM]: The reality is most of the people that I interact with don't know what Mastodon is and thus don't have much desire or demand for this.
[JM]: And so I remain the only active user on my instance.
[JM]: But I do think that at a certain level, in certain instances, there are times where this could be a good solution, that communities could handle this kind of thing and amortize the pain across enough people that it actually is worth it.
[DJ]: I like the points made in these articles.
[DJ]: One of them that sort of underlines what you just said that's in this, I think it's in this first article that the future is not self-hosted, makes the point that like the problem with that, oh, we'll just self-host all your own infrastructure is the solution is that like many systemic, it's the problem of like hyper individualism
[DJ]: in general, is that generally that notion is put forward by people who have the privilege of being able to extract themselves from a system that other people remain trapped in.
[DJ]: To put it in simpler words, it's like, well, yeah, that's fine for you, but what about everybody else?
[DJ]: Because if the real problem is, well, Google's killing the web, but don't worry, I can host my own next cloud and et cetera in Docker containers in my own private infrastructure and
[DJ]: But Google still owns email.
[DJ]: So if Google says, you know, turn the email off, like I'm not worried because I've been using a different email provider for, I don't know, 10 plus years.
[DJ]: But like my parents and my friends, what are they going to do?
[DJ]: Right.
[DJ]: It's not a solution for them.
[DJ]: I'm not going to be like, well, well, roll up your sleeves.
[DJ]: It's time to learn about post fix or whatever the Unix mail server things go like.
[DJ]: Um, as you said, like self hosting is only feasible for a few people.
[DJ]: And again, as this article points out, it's isolating.
[DJ]: And that's true.
[DJ]: Like I've, I've generally moved towards self hosting for things where like, I don't really care about sharing them with other people.
[DJ]: I just want to own the data for my own, you know, my own sinister purposes.
[DJ]: But then it's true that it's like, well, what happens when you want to share a photo album with someone?
[DJ]: And some self-hosted tools provide you with ways to do that, but it is an uphill climb versus using these services.
[DJ]: So right now the problem is we have the two extremes.
[DJ]: On the one hand, self-hosting, which very few people can do, and which is inherently isolating.
[DJ]: And on the other hand, just being completely at the whim of giant tech companies for all of our internet-related needs.
[DJ]: And I like that this article posits the notion that there's a middle way where communities, for some definition of community, could run this infrastructure.
[DJ]: One of the examples they give is the idea of like your public library card entitling you to 100 gigabytes of cloud storage.
[DJ]: Maybe it's run by your municipality or something like that.
[DJ]: Not that that's a perfect solution, of course.
[DJ]: There's still the question of, well, who has access to my data and et cetera.
[DJ]: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[DJ]: But there is no perfect solution.
[DJ]: This would at least provide a variety of solutions that are alternatives.
[DJ]: to the world we have right now where it's Gmail or run your own server or nothing, or it's Facebook or run your own server or nothing.
[DJ]: I guess Mastodon is an example of something that sits in the middle, right?
[DJ]: Because yes, you can run your own Mastodon instance if, like Justin, you're a total masochist.
[DJ]: Guilty as charged.
[DJ]: Or you can use one of many Mastodon instances that are run by other people on your behalf.
[JM]: Yeah, there's an excellent example of the community effect, right?
[JM]: Like the community is essentially saying like, unlike me, where for most people, it doesn't make any sense to be a single user instance, but someone...
[JM]: clearly feels like it's worth it to me to maintain this instance because I'm not the only one who benefits.
[JM]: There are all these other people and they benefit and it's something I feel good about providing for this community.
[JM]: And this is an idea that's existed for millennia, right?
[JM]: This notion that communities sometimes
[JM]: will take care of people in it, even when it's not necessarily self-serving.
[JM]: And I hope that we see more of that.
[JM]: And it's interesting to me that in some ways, the concept of the domain name feels like one vector toward achieving this digital sovereignty, right?
[JM]: Because when the web first came on the scene, most people really didn't know what it was in terms of like, okay, what is a domain name that
[JM]: Most people still don't, but it was even less well known then.
[JM]: And you had sites like GeoCities and whatnot where people could have their own little homestead on the web.
[JM]: And that's much less common now, right?
[JM]: Because you have services out there where they abstract all that stuff away.
[JM]: They provide you with this, what you see is what you get or WYSIWYG or some visual editor where you can type in your content and it will show you what your page is gonna look like when you publish it.
[JM]: There's all these tools now that allow you to do this stuff on your own domain
[JM]: And so it does feel like at least as far as the web is concerned, for people that care about this, for people that say like, I want a website either because I just want to spew my thoughts into the ether or because it's for a business that they have.
[JM]: But this feels like something where there's just more sovereignty there kind of baked in, right?
[JM]: When it just comes into, I'm going to run this web thing on a domain in a way in which some of these other things feel harder, right?
[JM]: Because...
[JM]: Hosting your own email server is orders of magnitude harder than throwing up a website on a domain.
[JM]: And you could probably say the same thing about photo sharing and umpteen other things that you want to do online.
[JM]: But I do hope that it becomes easier over time for people to have more digital sovereignty for there to be a clearer path.
[JM]: in terms of migrating from, okay, I share my photos on this site and now I want to move to this other site because this one no longer meets my needs or it's shutting down or whatever the reason is.
[JM]: I feel like the domain name helps enable that a bit.
[JM]: And I feel cautiously hopeful that we will see more avenues for better digital sovereignty going forward.
[JM]: Okay, moving on.
[JM]: I don't know if you have had this experience, but I have issues with the concept of computers and devices and sleep.
[JM]: And when I say that I have issues, what I mean is it used to be better and I am here to complain about it.
[JM]: I welcome you to join me in this discussion of computer sleep or just really any kind of device sleep.
[JM]: So when I originally put this item in our show notes, this was a long time ago.
[JM]: We're just talking about it now.
[JM]: And when I originally put this in here, speaking of the web and speaking of Google breaking things, the original article that I referenced, of course, the article no longer exists.
[JM]: If you tap on this link, it just, I don't even know what happens, but you don't get the article.
[JM]: And of course, the domain itself doesn't exist anymore.
[JM]: And it's
[JM]: I don't know, probably some cyber squatter, some domain name squatter grabbed it.
[JM]: In any case, that's besides the point.
[JM]: When this article came out, there was a whole Hacker News thread.
[JM]: And I'm going to read to you my comment on this thread the better part of a year ago.
[JM]: Having owned countless Mac notebooks over the last 30 years, starting from the PowerBook 140 up through the M1 MacBook Pro, I can tell you with confidence that Apple has made the same sleep change shenanigans mentioned in the original posters article.
[JM]: It used to be that you could count on a sleeping Mac to stay asleep until you explicitly woke it up by opening the lid, pressing a key on the keyboard, or pressing the trackpad, or separate trackpad buttons, because yes, those used to exist.
[JM]: Perhaps more importantly, you could count on the sleep function to have barely any effect on the Mac battery.
[JM]: I don't recall when, but at some point over the aforementioned three decades, Apple started changing the terms of this sleep contract.
[JM]: It seems Apple decided that some functions should still be available when the Mac is, quote, sleeping, with no way to restore the previous behavior.
[JM]: As a result, random wake-ups are the new normal, replete with unexpected battery drainage.
[JM]: I have seen modern MacBooks go to, quote, sleep with an 80% charge at night, only to be rendered dead with the 0% battery level by morning.
[JM]: Does something this extreme happen often?
[JM]: No, but it never happened before.
[JM]: And moderate battery loss while sleeping, that happens very often on today's MacBooks.
[JM]: Your mileage may vary, and Apple probably continues to implement better computer sleep behavior than competing vendors.
[JM]: But I would argue that people who think MacBook sleep behavior is excellent have never experienced how it behaved in the past.
[JM]: That behavior was superb.
[JM]: But sadly, I imagine most people have never experienced that excellence.
[JM]: If I were to guess at when this started, or maybe when it accelerated, who knows when it actually started.
[JM]: But I think the inflection point was probably around 2012, when Apple released something called PowerNap in certain Mac models that ran Mac OS X Mountain Lion.
[JM]: And the concept of power nap was, okay, your Mac is asleep, but it's awake enough to do certain things like receive email, receive text messages, make certain network requests.
[JM]: And I can see perhaps for most people that this would be beneficial, right?
[JM]: This way,
[JM]: Say your computer has been asleep all night or whatever their version of sleep is.
[JM]: And you wake up the next morning, you grab it in its lid closed state where you haven't woken it up and you throw it in your bag and you take it on your trip and you're on a plane and you open it up.
[JM]: Well, any email that arrived while you were sleeping, well, that's all there.
[JM]: And you could respond to it on the plane if you were say offline.
[JM]: In a pre power nap world, well, whenever you close the lid, none of those messages, none of that interaction wouldn't be happening.
[JM]: And so you wouldn't have access to those things if you were opening your notebook for the first time in an offline environment like a plane.
[JM]: So I can see the benefits for certain people in those environments.
[JM]: But for me, it has just not been worth it.
[JM]: The number of times that I see battery drainage when I don't want it is just, I've lost count.
[JM]: Like at this point, I am so adamant.
[JM]: I just leave this thing connected to power all the time.
[JM]: And the few times I forget, I come back to it and there's easily 20, 30, 40 or more percent gone while it's supposedly sleeping.
[JM]: And it's not even Mac specific.
[JM]: I'm at a point where I have the habit now because I've had to have the habit of putting my iPad in airplane mode when I'm not using it.
[JM]: This was something I figured out over time that if I just closed the lid on the iPad and came back to it, say a day later, I'd have like half the battery that I did before.
[JM]: But if I put it in airplane mode and don't essentially allow it to make any of these various connections, what do you know?
[JM]: Suddenly battery level's pretty much where I left it.
[JM]: But man, what a hassle.
[JM]: Like I shouldn't have to do this.
[JM]: I would love a setting that just says, when I close this thing, make it a paperweight, make it a brick.
[JM]: Make it just not connect to anything.
[JM]: Don't do anything.
[JM]: Don't receive anything.
[JM]: Don't send anything.
[JM]: Just stop.
[JM]: And Macs have had a hibernation feature, right, that kind of does this.
[JM]: But there's no easy way to activate hibernation that I can think of on a Mac.
[JM]: I think there's like some obscure command you can run in terminal that essentially tells the computer, okay, when I close the lid, I want you to hibernate and not sleep.
[JM]: And hibernate means dump the contents of RAM to disk.
[JM]: And then when you pull the lid open, I want you to reload that
[JM]: information from disk back into RAM.
[JM]: And that probably would have a significant improvement in battery life.
[JM]: But really, what I want is not hibernation, I just want the old sleep back, I just want the old contract that we had, which was when I close this lid, or when I choose sleep from the menu, you just go to sleep, you just stop doing things, because that's how it used to work.
[JM]: And up through I think Ventura and maybe even
[JM]: Later, there was an option in the battery settings on Mac OS where you could disable power nap.
[JM]: And there's an Apple support document that says even up to and including Sequoia that you go to the battery settings and you choose options and there's a button to disable power nap.
[JM]: Except there isn't because I'm looking at it and there's no such button anymore.
[JM]: So at some point they removed it and forgot to document on their support document that, oh yeah, this thing we said you could turn off.
[JM]: Yeah, you can't turn it off anymore.
[JM]: I have no idea when that happened, but clearly it happened at some point.
[JM]: Anyway, Dan, do you have this problem?
[JM]: Is it just me?
[DJ]: It's mostly you.
[DJ]: Well, no, there's a very real trade-off, which is the downside to having your computer truly sleep.
[DJ]: You know, we're talking about battery-powered laptops, right, where you close the lid and
[DJ]: and the computer goes into some kind of inactive state screen shuts off and notionally a bunch of other stuff should shut off too because there's no point in it operating when you clearly can't be using you can't be looking at or interacting with the computer at that time as more and more of the functionality of devices has come to rely on an internet connection for things like fetching email fetching messages fetching whatever the heck else
[DJ]: it's fetching.
[DJ]: There is this trade-off where if you put the computer to sleep and it doesn't do any of that network activity, it has to catch up, right?
[DJ]: Like as soon as you reactivate the computer, it has to go, uh, okay.
[DJ]: Um, whatever I would have done with the internet over the last six hours, I have to suddenly go do all of that, which is a worse user experience in terms of things like checking your email.
[DJ]: Let's say the,
[DJ]: trade-off is if the computer quietly does all that stuff while it's supposed to be asleep, then it's using energy and it's draining its battery.
[DJ]: And so when you open it up several hours later, you have less battery charge than you expected.
[DJ]: Whether that is a real problem for you probably depends on your circumstances.
[DJ]: If you're traveling, it's more of a problem.
[DJ]: If you're at home and the power adapter is right there, it's probably less of a problem.
[DJ]: The overall move to
[DJ]: introduce this power nap feature and then just make it part of the fabric of your machine where like you have no control over whether it happens or not does feel like tendency that I'm pretty sure we've complained about before with Apple's devices in particular, where when smartphones came out, they have always felt like more of an appliance than a general purpose computer.
[DJ]: Always.
[DJ]: That's kind of been their jam.
[DJ]: So I don't think it's ever been that surprising that they don't sleep.
[DJ]: Like when you leave your phone on the desk and the screen shuts off, I think it feels very intuitive to most people that it's still doing stuff with the network.
[DJ]: So to your point about like you have to put your iPad in airplane mode to make it actually stop talking to the Internet all the time.
[DJ]: To me, that feels more intuitive, especially for a smartphone and the iPad itself.
[DJ]: You know, I don't know.
[DJ]: The iPad has always felt more like a big iPhone than a small MacBook.
[DJ]: So it makes sense to me that the iPad would have that behavior too.
[DJ]: But if you've been using laptops for many, many years, you have had to go through this mindset shift where the laptop behaves a bit more like a smartphone than it used to.
[DJ]: And whether you like that or not, I guess that's what it comes down to, right?
[DJ]: Do you like your laptops more like your phone?
[DJ]: Or do you like your laptops more like the computers you used 20 years ago?
[DJ]: And the answer to that question might determine how you feel about this trade-off that's being made.
[JM]: For sure.
[JM]: And I'm not saying that Apple shouldn't have made any of these changes.
[JM]: What I'm saying is I want the ability to have that other behavior that I used to have.
[JM]: I want the ability to say, when I put this thing down and I close the lid, because I'm done with it.
[JM]: And when I want to come back to it, then you can do all of those things, like check for email and load any new messages that arrived in messages.
[JM]: Whatever the things are that it does when it's supposedly asleep.
[JM]: Yeah, just do that when I wake you up.
[JM]: All I want is like some setting that says, yeah, I want that other behavior.
[JM]: This new behavior can be the default and people can enjoy that.
[JM]: And I'm sure it's perfect for them by and large.
[JM]: But for me, it's really more of a hindrance.
[JM]: And I find the battery drain more
[JM]: problematic than any benefit that I get from it doing these things while it's supposedly asleep.
[DJ]: The ongoing "appliance-ification" — that's a new word, I just invented it…
[DJ]: it's in the dictionary now — of Apple computers does make those of us that are very opinionated about how our computers work annoyed.
[DJ]: And this feels like a good example.
[DJ]: The thing where it's like, look,
[DJ]: I don't like this decision you made, but my problem isn't so much that you made the decision, computer manufacturer.
[DJ]: It's that you have given me no recourse.
[DJ]: I just don't have an option.
[DJ]: And again, maybe most people just don't care or they don't even know that there is any alternative.
[DJ]: But again, those of us that are very opinionated about our computers, you feel very hemmed in when you get this device that's supposed to
[DJ]: have all of this open sort of capability and configurability and the people who made it are like no it just works this way and you're like well I'd really prefer for it to work that way and it doesn't seem that hard for you to just yeah like give me a switch I can flip and it's like well there's no switch okay well hmm you just have to eat it and that doesn't feel very good.
[JM]: My understanding is that even if I turn these devices off, they're not technically off either.
[JM]: Like they're still somewhat on and that's like a whole other topic, right?
[JM]: So I'm not going to dig into that, but it's related.
[JM]: And like you said, I think you really encapsulated it.
[JM]: I'm just going to have to eat it.
[JM]: All right, that's all for this episode.
[JM]: Thanks, everyone, for listening.
[JM]: You can find me on the web at justinmayer.com, and you can find Dan at danj.ca.
[JM]: Please reach out with your thoughts via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.