[JM]: Happy New Year, everyone.
[JM]: I hope you all had a pleasant end to your 2025.
[JM]: I'm going to make the chapter art for this particular segment something that I saw that I think excellently summarizes my feeling about 2025, which is a gingerbread house that shows a rather mundane house made out of gingerbread that also is on fire and has very colorful gingerbread flames
[JM]: engulfing said gingerbread house.
[JM]: And there were things that were good about 2025, things that are not so great, but here's hoping that 2026 will be a better year for everyone.
[DJ]: Agreed.
[DJ]: I expect my 2026 to feel a lot better once I'm done eating this gingerbread house.
[DJ]: How do professional comedians do it?
[DJ]: It's authentic.
[DJ]: It's joyful.
[DJ]: And you know what else is authentic?
[DJ]: Enclosing a horse.
[DJ]: I don't know, man.
[DJ]: It's a new year and I feel like all my segues are broken.
[JM]: Yeah, I feel you.
[JM]: What better way to start off the new year than with a fun and utterly pointless game that you can play in your browser.
[JM]: And this one is called Enclosed.horse.
[JM]: And it's right there on the tin.
[JM]: The purpose of this game is to enclose a horse.
[JM]: And you tap on...
[JM]: blocks to enclose the horse.
[JM]: You have a limited number of blocks.
[JM]: The larger the enclosure that you make, the more points you get.
[JM]: And it feels like one of those fun things that you can do a few times and it'll certainly keep the mental alacrity going, you know, keep those neurons exercised.
[JM]: I thought it was fun anyway.
[DJ]: Yeah, this game is great.
[DJ]: I could...
[DJ]: I'm definitely not playing it while we're recording the show, Justin, but I easily could be because it's a lot of fun.
[DJ]: As I always say about these little things that you find on the web, I'm just so glad that someone is out there making these beautiful and pointless diversions that we can go entertain ourselves with.
[DJ]: Also, a great choice of domain name.
[DJ]: That's right.
[DJ]: Well, there was a link in a previous episode where someone had made an animation of a horse running using all of these crazy techniques, including the fingerprint smudges on the display of their laptop.
[DJ]: And these were all animated, so that might have had a .horse domain as well.
[JM]: I don't recall if it did, but if it didn't, that was a missed opportunity for sure.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: Well, especially because there should be like a top-level web portal, you know, like the things that existed in 1999 that just show all the .horse web sites.
[DJ]: Because there can't be that many of them, right?
[DJ]: Like there's gotta be what, maybe 15, and I'm sure they're all great.
[JM]: Sure.
[JM]: You mean like the original Yahoo, where it was just a directory of links, and there would be like an equine section and this would be listed among all of the other horse-related things?
[DJ]: Precisely.
[DJ]: But now that we have these ridiculous vanity top-level domain names, you could do it that way, right?
[DJ]: Like all the .horse web sites and all the ....
[DJ]: I don't know what else there is.
[DJ]: .paint?
[JM]: .pizza, .ninja ...
[DJ]: Yeah, there's all kinds.
[DJ]: .pizza ...
[DJ]: The possibilities there are limitless.
[DJ]: I'm just imagining there's some browser game where you have to enclose a pizza in a pizza box.
[JM]: There probably is.
[JM]: One more bit of fun before moving on to things that aren't completely trivially pointless...
[JM]: ... is a YouTube video of a humanoid robot that is controlled by a motion capture device that a human operator is wearing.
[JM]: And like most videos,
[JM]: you're better off just watching this one than having me describe it to you, but since I'm bringing it up, of course I'm gonna describe it so you at least know what you're gonna get when you go there.
[JM]: So this operator is making movements and I guess, I don't know, doing taekwondo or doing some kind of martial art thing.
[JM]: And this human is doing a kick and there's some latency, which causes a slightly awkward delay
[JM]: between when he makes the movement and when the robot makes the movement, and he does the kick, and long story short, the robot kicks him right where it counts, right in the crotch.
[JM]: And this guy doubles over in pain for obvious reasons.
[JM]: And then of course the robot also doubles over in pain because that is the point of a motion capture device.
[DJ]: I always wondered what the expression adding insult to injury meant.
[DJ]: And now I think I know.
[JM]: For sure, because after spending upwards of US$13,500 only to have this thing kick you where it counts...
[JM]: Yeah, that's definitely adding... maybe... injury to insult?
[JM]: I'm not sure, but it's bad either way.
[JM]: All right, to cover some follow-up, we talked about Black Friday a few episodes ago.
[JM]: And a listener of the show, Kristen, reached out to let me know that Black Friday is called that because it's the day in which the retail sector is brought into the black, as in not red, as in they're not making enough money.
[JM]: They're brought into the black, as in ink, because of all the shopping that occurs on that day.
[JM]: And I thought, huh, that's interesting.
[JM]: So I wanted to learn a little bit more about it.
[JM]: So I looked it up and turns out that's a bit of an urban myth and perhaps something that someone added later as a way of trying to make it make more sense.
[JM]: Because the original origin is related to more calamitous events like stock market crashes that occurred a long time ago.
[JM]: I remember there was a Black Monday in the 1980s when some stock market crash happened.
[JM]: So the idea of calling something "Black " usually was bad.
[JM]: So how did we end up with Black Friday being a shopping day?
[JM]: Well, it turns out, I think that the Philadelphia police at one point started calling it Black Friday because of all of the congestion that all of this shopping behavior created, because for them, it was an annoyance and something that they had to deal with in a way that felt calamitous.
[JM]: And so that term kind of stuck.
[JM]: There were attempts to rebrand it to something else,
[JM]: such as "Big Friday", but all of those attempts failed, and so here we are stuck with the term Black Friday anyway.
[JM]: In another episode, we talked about this Linux distribution that isn't quite a distribution called Omarchy, and another show listener, Hynek, reached out to let us know that the origin of this word, which we did not really understand, is, Dan, as you suspected, Japanese in origin, and it refers to a post
[JM]: from well over a decade ago called "Rails is Omakase", "omakase" meaning a Japanese word that refers to deferring to the expertise or knowledge of the person to whom you are interacting with.
[JM]: I suppose in this case, the idea is that this so-called distro is opinionated and you should defer to their opinionated choices, to which I say, "No thank you very much, because I think your choices in this case aren't so great."
[DJ]: No, indeed.
[DJ]: So it's appropriate that Omar-chee or Omar-key... how are you meant to pronounce it?
[DJ]: That it ends in a Y, because there's a degree of irony to someone declaring their distro, like naming their distribution after basically "accept my decisions".
[DJ]: You know, as the articles that we were making reference to explain in detail, there are a variety of reasons why this isn't really a great set of decisions for a Linux distribution.
[DJ]: Quite in addition to however you might feel about the person who developed it or was the initiator of it in the first place.
[DJ]: So yeah, I agree.
[DJ]: I think I'm going to...
[DJ]: So is omakase a verb?
[DJ]: Or like, do you do it?
[DJ]: Do you...
[DJ]: Are you it?
[JM]: You could refer to a restaurant as an "omakase" style restaurant.
[JM]: So there are sushi restaurants, for example, where you go and you don't order anything.
[JM]: You just tell the chef when to stop serving you things because you've had enough.
[JM]: But it is also a verb in terms of saying "omakase shimasu" or "makaseru".
[JM]: Those are both verb forms and they mean the same thing, which is, "I will let you decide."
[DJ]: Gotcha.
[DJ]: Since I don't speak Japanese, I'm not going to try to use that in a sentence, but I will just say that I'm going to defer my decision-making to other people who have developed Linux distributions.
[JM]: Indeed. As one more last bit of follow-up, I'm still enjoying Kagi for searching.
[JM]: And I had mentioned when we talked about it last time, that as a consequence of Apple not allowing us to say, "Hey, I want to use Kagi as my default search engine," you have to do this cumbersome thing of choosing some other
[JM]: on the anointed list of five choices and then tell the Kagi extension, okay, redirect all requests for that one to Kagi.
[JM]: But that means you can't actually go to that one if you want to.
[JM]: So in my case, that's DuckDuckGo.
[JM]: If I want to search on DuckDuckGo, I effectively can't because if I try, it will just redirect me to Kagi.
[JM]: Well, I figured I'd work around for this.
[JM]: And so I wanted to at least mention it as a bit of follow-up.
[JM]: If you go to noai.duckduckgo.com, then you will get to a special page where the "AI answers" feature of DuckDuckGo is excluded.
[JM]: And so in addition to getting rid of something that generally I don't want when I'm going to that particular site, it also allows me to skirt that redirect, and this way I can choose whether I want my Kagi search or my DuckDuckGo search, and I don't have to sacrifice one for the other.
[JM]: All right, in other news that occurred while we were on break, Anna's Archive, which is a...
[DJ]: I think they are described as a shadow library.
[JM]: That is a good description.
[JM]: They are indeed a shadow library containing an archive of the world's books and other media.
[JM]: One of the things that they did not have is a massive archive of music, and that has since been rectified because it seems that Anna's Archive has backed up all of Spotify.
[JM]: From their announcement on this topic, they said, "We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity. This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open...
[JM]: (meaning it can be easily mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files representing around 99.6% of listens.
[JM]: This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a 'preservation archive' for music.
[JM]: Of course, Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start."
[JM]: So when I saw this news, I was just floored by the audacity, by the scope,
[JM]: the idea, like the vision of it, right?
[JM]: Like we're going to archive what is probably the world's most popular music streaming service in its entirety, at least in terms of its functional entirety, because there are a few tracks of course that it sounds like that they don't have in this archive, but it also sounds like no one ever listens to those tracks.
[JM]: So it doesn't seem like a big loss.
[DJ]: What's even more interesting is from what I was reading, I think it is a gigantic, enormous, tremendous number of tracks that aren't in the archive, but no one listens to them.
[DJ]: I think it said that covering the 99 percentile of listens is only about a third of Spotify's entire library.
[DJ]: which means most of the music on Spotify is never listened to, which isn't really surprising if you think about it.
[DJ]: There are some interesting points in the stuff I was reading about this.
[DJ]: One of them made the point that over the last couple of years, as presumably AI-generated music has kind of found its way onto Spotify, there's been a gigantic explosion in absolute number
[DJ]: of tracks.
[DJ]: I mean, I think for the purposes of what's going on here, it makes sense to not back those up for the most part, right?
[DJ]: Like generally you want to back up the data people are actually interested in.
[DJ]: It is quite the achievement
[DJ]: And it's a controversial one, right?
[DJ]: Because they're doing this in defiance of copyright law.
[DJ]: But what everybody thinks about that is, I don't know, certainly what I think about that has gotten complicated and nuanced over the years.
[DJ]: And I say that both as someone who is a fan of digital preservation and also like a published author to whom copyright does mean something, since I want to retain control over my own work.
[DJ]: But at the same time, I think I'm generally a fan of...
[DJ]: preservation and access.
[DJ]: And as far as I can tell, Spotify, the fact that Spotify would generally say, no, you can't copy all of the music on Spotify is not really, I don't know, like, I don't know, is that really entrenching the well-being of the people who made the music?
[DJ]: Or is it mostly about Spotify's well-being as a corporate entity?
[JM]: I think we both already know the answer to that question.
[DJ]: Well, I have a bias towards an answer to the question that we probably share.
[DJ]: I don't actually know whether it is materially correct.
[JM]: I think for me, it also feels kind of...
[JM]: I wouldn't go so far as to say irrelevant, but not the part of this story that I find the most interesting.
[JM]: Because the reality is...
[JM]: anyone who wrings their hands and goes, "Oh no, you know, these people, they're infringing on someone's copyrights by doing this"... How many people are actually going to do anything with this archive?
[JM]: How many people have, I don't know, 300 terabytes of disk space lying around, because I know that I don't. I consider myself to be borderline digital hoarder, and I don't
[JM]: have even a tiny fraction of that kind of storage space available.
[JM]: And sure, I understand that not everyone needs to have the entire archive, and sure there are benefits to being able to have even a small part of that.
[JM]: And I certainly don't want anyone to think that I don't respect people who create and people who want to make a living off of those passions and the stuff they create.
[JM]: But I really do admire and support the general concept of archiving humanity's creative output in a way in which serves humanity, to preserve it so that it is not lost.
[JM]: Because if we've seen anything as it relates to this growing movement towards streaming,
[JM]: whether it's music or video or movies or TV or any of that stuff, more and more we are seeing examples of that disappearing. Some streaming service acquires the rights to a particular show, probably by buying some other company and
[JM]: and then realizes that having that show maybe costs them more in royalties to have it in their library than it does to maintain it.
[JM]: And so they just remove it, which means effectively no one can watch it anymore.
[JM]: So that's why I respect and support the general concept of trying to archive our cultural heritage.
[DJ]: I agree.
[DJ]: And you make a good point about streaming in particular, that streaming has had this insidious effect of making all media feel transient.
[DJ]: Like at least, you know, a decade or two ago, a TV show would air and then like a DVD boxed set would come out and it might be expensive, granted, but you could...
[DJ]: If you had a show you really liked, you could acquire a copy of the media, and then at least, even if that show wasn't available on any network or streaming service after a few years, you could put your DVDs or your Blu-rays in and watch it again.
[DJ]: Grant you, like, Blu-rays still exist, but I haven't been paying attention to the rate at which new movies and shows, especially ones that are initially created by streaming services, ever get a release like that.
[JM]: Yes, and who knows what the future holds for that kind of physical media anyway.
[JM]: I...
[JM]: can't imagine that, just to pick a number, 50 years from now, there will be such things as Blu-ray discs.
[JM]: I think the idea of media in physical form like that is probably going away.
[JM]: Its days feel very much numbered.
[JM]: So even if every single TV show, movie, book, music, whatever, even if those are today being produced in some physical form,
[JM]: making it easier to archive them, it seems very much that that's not in our future.
[JM]: That doesn't seem like that's going to continue.
[DJ]: No, and even in the present state of things, the devices like DVDs and Blu-rays have already been encumbered with attempts to gatekeep your ability to
[DJ]: access this art.
[DJ]: A lot of the digital rights management stuff...
[JM]: Digital *restrictions* management.
[DJ]: Well, yeah, exactly.
[DJ]: Yes.
[DJ]: Thank you for removing the double speak from that phrase.
[JM]: See also: Don't Use Their B.S. Euphemisms™
[DJ]: Yeah, indeed.
[DJ]: Those formats were already problematic in terms of being a way for you, the appreciator of the art, to enjoy it in an ongoing and unrestricted fashion.
[DJ]: So I agreed that that's not the ideal solution either.
[DJ]: So I am generally glad that people are engaging in these acts of large-scale archiving.
[DJ]: Were there other things about this Anna's Archive story in particular, though, that you wanted to touch on?
[JM]: Yes, I thought it was interesting that soon after this announcement was made, Anna's Archive lost their annas-archive.org domain, presumably because it was yanked out from under them via some kind of...
[JM]: extra-judicial suspension, the details of which I don't fully understand, but people noticed the site was down and that the domain was not resolving anymore.
[JM]: But thankfully Anna's Archive has numerous other backup alternative domains.
[JM]: And I found it interesting that the best way to find out what those are is just to search the internet for Anna's Archive.
[JM]: And among the first results will be Wikipedia.
[JM]: And then on the Wikipedia page is a list of their currently functioning domains, which just tickles me because in this age of...
[JM]: domain suspensions like this, it seems like Wikipedia is effectively functioning as a kind of domain name service, or like a backup DNS, for sites like this that are suffering from this kind of whack-a-mole problem where they register a domain, it gets yanked, they register another one that gets yanked...
[JM]: So they just go ahead and register
[JM]: a bunch of different domains.
[JM]: And so if in doubt, just go to Wikipedia and you can find out which ones are still around and functioning.
[DJ]: Wikipedia remains, by the way, one of the most important resources on the Internet.
[DJ]: And this is just another reason why, because it is something that can't so easily be shut off.
[JM]: Yeah, that is true.
[JM]: Oh, and before I forget, the metadata for this Spotify archive has already been released and can be downloaded.
[JM]: And then apparently next up, coming soon, are the music files themselves, which as of this recording do not appear to have been released yet, but presumably should be released sometime soon.
[JM]: All right, moving on to something else that I saw over the break, and that's that, if you recall, we talked about notifications, specifically our inability to suppress certain notifications regarding operating system updates and whatnot from Apple's operating systems.
[JM]: and I saw someone post a rather inventive solution to the problem of the notification badge on the iOS settings app.
[JM]: So I don't put the settings app on my home screen mainly for this exact problem of Apple putting some badge on the settings app that I cannot get rid of.
[JM]: So I banished the settings app to some other screen that is not my primary
[JM]: home screen on my phone or on my iPad.
[JM]: But nonetheless, even when you're moving to these other screens, you have to look at this ugly red badge on the iOS settings app, even though you don't want to, or may not want to.
[JM]: And so this person came up with a clever solution and it goes something like this:
[JM]: You long-press the Settings app, then you tap Remove App, then you tap Remove from Home Screen.
[JM]: So now the Settings app is no longer on your home screen at all.
[JM]: Then this person provides an image of the icon for the Settings app and says to save that image to your device.
[JM]: Then add a shortcut that they wrote to the Apple shortcuts app.
[JM]: You then add that shortcut to your home screen, selecting the image that you saved previously as the icon for it.
[JM]: So to recap, you basically create an image of the Settings icon, you put it on your home screen, and when you tap it, it launches a shortcut that then opens the Settings app...
[JM]: thereby bypassing the whole silly red badge.
[JM]: It's a really clever idea.
[JM]: I haven't tried this yet to see if it works.
[DJ]: This idea is cursed.
[DJ]: I mean, yeah, don't get me wrong.
[DJ]: It's clever, but just the, just, uh... I want to quit.
[DJ]: I want to quit iOS over this.
[DJ]: I'm so tired.
[DJ]: Like I'm so tired of stuff like this, where it's just like, "Update your operating system!"
[DJ]: "I don't want to."
[DJ]: "OK, well, we're going to put this notification badge, which you have been trained over the years to associate with something that requires your urgent attention, on here.
[DJ]: And you can't ever get rid of it until you update."
[DJ]: It's like, "I don't want to update, though."
[DJ]: "Too bad."
[DJ]: "OK, well, what if I laboriously remove the Settings app?
[DJ]: But I still need to use it for stuff.
[DJ]: So I'm going to fabricate a way of launching it that won't get a notification."
[DJ]: I don't want to have to fight with my phone like this.
[DJ]: This is not how I want to spend my time.
[JM]: You shouldn't have to fight with your phone or spend your time doing this obviously ridiculous workaround.
[JM]: Yeah, none of us should have to do this stuff.
[JM]: At the same time, I admire the ingenuity of the person who came up with this workaround.
[JM]: And I'm sure in the next release, Apple will come up with some way to confound it and make it not work anymore.
[DJ]: I guess we'll see about that.
[DJ]: I mean, my hope is that they're going to spend their time making the next release of their operating system less of a dumpster fire, because then maybe I'll update to it.
[DJ]: Maybe.
[JM]: One can dream.
[DJ]: Just my luck is that the last operating system that has support for my iPhone 12 mini will be iOS 26 with its notorious, terrible user interface.
[JM]: Hopefully by the time that iOS 18 is no longer supported, you will have a phone out there that you're excited to use instead.
[DJ]: I don't hold out a lot of hope that that's going to happen, that someone is going to go back and release a phone with a sub-six-inch screen.
[DJ]: But yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess literally anything is possible... except that it's not going to happen.
[DJ]: I'm sorry.
[DJ]: I don't believe in it.
[DJ]: I want to believe, like Fox Mulder from the X-Files.
[DJ]: Does anyone remember that show?
[DJ]: But I don't.
[JM]: Speaking of disbelief, a well-known expert of all things Macintosh has published an article on their site called "Last Year on My Mac, Look Back in Disbelief".
[JM]: And the intro goes like this...
[JM]: "If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn't have believed them.
[JM]: Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic, and social turmoil, I came to the interface changes brought in MacOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass.
[JM]: After three months of strong feedback during beta testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on the 15th of September to see how little had been addressed.
[JM]: When 26.1 followed on the 3rd of November, it had only regressed and 26.2 has done nothing.
[JM]: Here I summarize my opinions on where Tahoe's overhaul has gone wrong."
[JM]: And this person goes on to list a lot of the things that we've already talked about with regards to overly rounded corners that waste space in ways in which previous operating systems never did, increasing the size of controls, making things much less space efficient in terms of real estate on your screen, the utter travesty that is the redesign of icons in Tahoe,
[JM]: making them much less visually appealing than previous versions of MacOS,
[JM]: poor contrast, weird overlays where elements are sloppily overlaid on other ones, making it really hard to read what's underneath it, et cetera, et cetera.
[JM]: And around the same time, I've seen several articles talking about the usage of icons in menus in MacOS.
[JM]: Prior to this MacOS 26 Tahoe operating system,
[JM]: I can't really think of any instances where well-made Mac applications include icons in the menu items.
[JM]: So for example, we're chatting right now via FaceTime.
[JM]: If I tap on any of the menu items for this app, I see things like "Mute", "Always on top",
[JM]: "Enter full screen", et cetera, et cetera.
[JM]: But none of these menus include icons.
[JM]: It looks like from what I hear, someone at Apple decided to add icons to a bunch of menus in this new operating system.
[JM]: And we'll include a link to an excellent takedown of this entire debacle in the show notes that, among other things, includes references to the Macintosh human interface guidelines
[JM]: from decades ago, from 1992, that has a very clear illustration with a caption that says, "Don't use arbitrary graphic elements" and shows two dropdown menus.
[JM]: One of them on the right that says "Good" with no icons next to the items in the list.
[JM]: And then the one on the left that says "Ugly" and shows a bunch of icons, much like the ones that apparently have been added to Tahoe.
[JM]: So as we have talked about before, I feel like someday someone at Apple is going to be rummaging around some archive and dust off some box of old human interface guideline books and come across this particular image and go, "Huh, so why did we add the icons?"
[JM]: "Why did we do that?"
[DJ]: Yeah, some senior design executive at Apple someday who will not even have been born in 1992.
[DJ]: I'm hoping that they will…
[DJ]: "Well, I've been inspired by the great designers of history in the past", and they'll bring a new generation of less obnoxiously terrible user interface design to the company that kind of made their bones designing really usable user interfaces.
[DJ]: Which I think is what sets on edge the teeth of myself and so many other people about this is like if Microsoft released a version of Windows that had a terrible design, which they might have done -- I wouldn't know.
[DJ]: Yeah, of course, that's just de rigueur because Microsoft does not have a history of designing aesthetically pleasing and highly usable user interfaces.
[DJ]: They have a history of doing some things well, don't get me wrong, but it's not that.
[DJ]: Whereas, at least in my opinion and the opinion of many others, Apple has traditionally been the place you go to have like such careful attention to detail put into various aspects of the user interface.
[DJ]: And all of that seems like it has vanished in the last year especially, which I think justifies making a big gingerbread house that appears to be on fire with the year 2025 on the side.
[JM]: Yeah, I think we should replace "2025" with "OS 26" perhaps and just slap that on this burning gingerbread house.
[JM]: But it isn't so much just that putting the icons in the menu items are ugly, and this person took great pains to write down in a whole lot of detail why this is bad, why it's cluttered, why it detracts from usability.
[JM]: It is replete with
[JM]: more images than I think I've seen in a post.
[JM]: And this goes on and on for a lot of pages.
[JM]: This is a fantastic takedown.
[JM]: So hats off to the person that put this together.
[JM]: And I highly recommend reading it if you want to understand why stuffing menu items with a bunch of icons is a bad idea.
[JM]: Speaking of things that are a bad idea...
[JM]: One of the things that I've noticed recently is this increasing trend for software product developers to replace username and password logins with what are sometimes called "magic link" or email-based authentication mechanisms.
[JM]: I feel like Claude is probably the one that I'm going to hold up in this moment because it's just something I've been using recently.
[JM]: And I find that the way that Claude handles this is indicative of the way that a lot of people are using it.
[JM]: And I don't like it.
[JM]: And so I just wanted to mention it because I'm curious whether this is something that you experienced, Dan, and whether you have similar feelings about it.
[JM]: So I'll let you start in terms of, yeah, what do you think about this?
[DJ]: It sucks.
[DJ]: I don't like it.
[DJ]: It feels like a form of security that is there to protect the company from its users as opposed to protect its users.
[DJ]: As some parties have pointed out about this, it is maybe a way to curtail password sharing if you're going to share your account on some streaming service with different people instead of each of you paying a subscription.
[DJ]: I don't really see any advantages to it beyond something like that.
[DJ]: And even then, people who really want to can find a way around it.
[DJ]: It just feels inconvenient.
[DJ]: We already have this concept of a username and a password, which has its problems.
[DJ]: One solution to those problems is the notion of a password management app, where as a user, you...
[DJ]: consolidate all of your passwords in one place behind one very secure password.
[DJ]: That addresses a bunch of the problems with passwords in at least a reasonably usable and reasonably secure way.
[DJ]: And then we've got this notion of two-factor authentication, which many web sites have adopted, and that has some good properties, but you still need a way to manage those codes.
[DJ]: A lot of password management apps can do that.
[DJ]: So there are upsides and downsides to having your password and your two-factor authentication mechanism in the same app, but it is maybe a reasonable trade-off of security for convenience.
[DJ]: The thing I don't like about these "magic link" email schemes is they break all of that.
[DJ]: Because there's no way to have an app or a browser plugin or some other thing that can provide the code.
[DJ]: If it's emailed to you, you are reliant on your email service.
[DJ]: Like you're reliant on email sending and receiving that message in a timely fashion for starters.
[DJ]: And then you have to access your email, which is probably not as well integrated.
[DJ]: So if you are finding yourself bored and annoyed by my laborious explanation of this, yeah, that's also how magic links make me feel.
[JM]: Yeah, and I feel like I didn't explain this very well, but the concept of magic link or email-based authentication... The way it works is you go to the site in question or the app in question, you put in your email address, you tap a button, it sends you a link via email, you tap on that link, and then it logs you in, in case that wasn't clear from the way I introduced this segment.
[JM]: And like you said, it is cumbersome also because you have to wait for the email to arrive.
[JM]: And sometimes that happens right away and sometimes it doesn't.
[JM]: And like you said, it also breaks all of the things that we put together as an ecosystem to make authentication secure and convenient, right?
[JM]: Because...
[JM]: There's always this interplay between security and convenience, and usually it's a zero sum game.
[JM]: And to make one of those things better, you have to take away from the other.
[JM]: And yes, compared to your standard email address and password combination, sending an authentication token via some link that goes to you via email is probably more secure, generally, because people don't use strong passwords.
[JM]: So in aggregate, yes,
[JM]: as a function of, people don't do this very well just because we're all human and people just use the same password, usually an insecure one, across multiple services, because it's easy to remember and that way they can get things done, they're choosing the convenience over the security, whether they understand that or not, so I understand that this is to some degree effective at saving people from themselves.
[DJ]: I even have to push back on that, Justin.
[DJ]: I'm sorry, because you know what isn't really a secure channel of communication, especially in a world where people regularly reuse their passwords in an insecure way?
[DJ]: Email.
[DJ]: Like, where did this idea come from?
[DJ]: Email isn't secure, so... no.
[DJ]: Argument in favor of magic links denied.
[DJ]: I think they're just a bad idea.
[DJ]: They're bad usability.
[DJ]: They're not good for security.
[DJ]: Like, come on.
[DJ]: We already have better solutions.
[JM]: I 100% agree that to me it is mainly an effort to curtail password sharing, masqueraded as security theater.
[JM]: So...
[JM]: Yes, I agree with you that that is almost exactly, for example, why Claude does this. They could just allow me to log in with a username and password, but then I could share it with you and other friends.
[JM]: And they don't want that to happen.
[JM]: So they don't allow you to do that.
[JM]: And that sucks.
[JM]: As far as I'm concerned, I understand the desire to minimize password sharing and account sharing, I should say.
[JM]: But this is just a really bad way of addressing that.
[JM]: And I try to, when I can, as we've talked about before, vote with my feet.
[JM]: In this particular case, I will probably continue to use Claude for a while.
[JM]: But the moment someone gives me something that provides more or less the same level of quality related to unit of cost, but allows me to log in with a username and password, I am going to switch in a heartbeat.
[JM]: And if you are going to implement this kind of cumbersome, and as far as I'm concerned, user hostile authentication mechanism... please don't.
[JM]: But for some reason, if you ignore our pleas and do it anyway, make the authenticated session validity period as long as possible.
[JM]: Because otherwise, what you're asking people to do is to do the same cumbersome shenanigan
[JM]: over and over again, repeatedly.
[JM]: So don't have it time out after an hour, or even a day, or even a week.
[JM]: Let it last for months.
[JM]: I have a password on my computer.
[JM]: It's already secured.
[JM]: You don't need to time out my session in the browser.
[JM]: I don't know.
[JM]: This just feels obvious, but here we are.
[DJ]: Yes, there are many things about bad software usability that feel obvious.
[DJ]: And yet, as you say, here we are.
[JM]: All right, one last thing before we go.
[JM]: If you haven't heard, the powers-that-be chose the word "slop" as the Word of the Year for 2025.
[JM]: But Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is not having it, because having invested unholy sums of money into generative software, Microsoft CEO wants everyone to stop calling it slop...
[JM]: saying: "'We need to get beyond the arguments of slop versus sophistication,'
[JM]: Nadella laments, emphasizing hopes that society will become more accepting of AI or what Nadella describes as 'cognitive amplifier tools' and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our 'theory of the mind' that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other."
[JM]: "Cognitive amplifier tools."
[JM]: That is a heck of a euphemism.
[DJ]: I mean, they do make everyone write in a voice that sounds exactly the same and that I'm rapidly getting tired of.
[DJ]: So there's that.
[DJ]: I guess that's a new way of relating.
[JM]: Well, it's also, I think, an example of an increasing trend of saying the exact opposite semantically of the thing you're describing, right?
[JM]: Because using large language models by-and-large is outsourcing cognition to something else so that you don't have to.
[JM]: To then call that a "cognitive amplifier tool" to me is, I don't know, misleading at best.
[DJ]: Yeah, it does paint over a lot of nuance, I think.
[DJ]: When I think about the use of LLMs in my profession and software development, we're getting a lot of value out of using a large language model to generate code.
[DJ]: But the most value you get is when you have this thing rapidly compare different approaches and point out, you know, the virtues of one thing over another, and then you combine that with your own thinking and your own expertise.
[DJ]: Or if you're relatively junior and you don't have a lot of expertise yet, I really do think there's a valuable opportunity here to not just have a large language model generate some code for you so that you can go eat a sandwich.
[DJ]: I mean, don't get me wrong.
[DJ]: Sandwiches are delicious.
[DJ]: But like you could also like if I was watching like a developer in the first year of their career...
[DJ]: generate some code, what I would be telling them to do is like, "Okay, now send another prompt that says, explain why you did it that way.
[DJ]: What are some other ways you could do the same thing?
[DJ]: And how should I think about choosing between them?"
[DJ]: Because granted, hallucinations and confabulations notwithstanding, you can still derive a lot of correct and very useful information from that process.
[DJ]: And I'd argue that that is a way of cognitive amplification
[DJ]: like speeding up your own learning.
[DJ]: You could do the same thing by searching the Internet, don't get me wrong, but you can take advantage of a large language's capability to distill large amounts of semi-structured information into a small amount of structured information.
[DJ]: So I guess Microsoft could hire me to make a more compelling case for their stupid nonsense than they're doing.
[DJ]: But every everything I just said, like it does annoy me the amount of like nuance that is lost and how people keep talking about this, especially like the people who are the most responsible for it.
[DJ]: Like it would be one thing,
[DJ]: it's one thing if someone who doesn't really understand any of this stuff has a bad take on so-called "A.I.",
[DJ]: but it is so tiresome to have the CEO of Microsoft making these sort of like grandiose proclamations about like, "Humans must learn new ways of relating with cognitive amplification mechanisms."
[DJ]: It's like, all right, whose trust are you earning when you say stuff like that?
[JM]: Yeah, to me, it just feels really petty to be responding to what I think is often very valid criticism of some of the aspects of generative software.
[JM]: And instead of saying, "Yes,
[JM]: This is a problem.
[JM]: There is a lot of slop.
[JM]: There's a multitude of other problems with this whole sea change in technology and our industry, but we're trying to do what we can to be a force for good and to make these tools work for humanity," et cetera, et cetera.
[JM]: Like focus on the things you're doing to try to do it well, instead of complaining about legitimate criticism, because that's how this comes off.
[DJ]: And it's really not a good look.
[DJ]: No, agreed.
[DJ]: You said complaining about criticism.
[DJ]: It comes off to me as basically saying, "Shut up and stop complaining."
[DJ]: Which, no, I'm sorry, that's the part that's out of touch with reality.
[DJ]: Because as you say, the word "slop" did not get so popular for no reason, right?
[DJ]: There is a zeitgeist.
[DJ]: More and more people are feeling a certain way, and it sucks to see the people that are making and boosting all of this technology...
[DJ]: Like doing the equivalent of putting their hands to their ears and going, "La la la, I'm not listening."
[DJ]: Now subscribe to Copilot.
[JM]: Speaking of Copilot, apparently Microsoft has renamed "Microsoft Office" to "Microsoft 365 Copilot App".
[DJ]: What?
[DJ]: You made that up.
[JM]: I wish I did.
[DJ]: Oh no.
[JM]: But I didn't.
[DJ]: Oh no.
[DJ]: Come on.
[JM]: It's just comical.
[JM]: Like at this point, I can't distinguish -- and apparently you can't distinguish either --
[DJ]: No.
[JM]: parody from stuff that's actually coming out of Microsoft.
[DJ]: Oh my God.
[DJ]: This is like, this is like the "use AI to generate what you would look like as a baby" of product rename.
[DJ]: Like it's, it's like uncanny-valley stuff.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: So I'm just like, that can't be true.
[DJ]: Right.
[DJ]: They wouldn't destroy like decades of like, don't get me wrong...
[DJ]: Microsoft has always been obnoxious, but I have to admit, I have a little bit of fondness for the brand of Microsoft Office.
[DJ]: Like it reminds me of my dad buying said product in the 1990s, and it came on like 45 floppy disks so that you could install Word and Excel 6.0 on your PC.
[DJ]: Like forget all of that.
[DJ]: Put icons next to all the menu items.
[DJ]: It's like the people who work at the biggest tech companies in the world have forgotten everything you could ever learn about how to like design and ship good products.
[DJ]: I don't like it.
[JM]: You know, sometimes people will post a collection of images as a company's logo changes over time.
[JM]: Well, if you get a chance to look at the chapter art for this particular segment, you'll see that someone has done that for Microsoft, except they've replaced it.
[JM]: So as you see it evolve over the years, instead of it saying "Microsoft", it just says "Microslop", repeated five times from its origins in the 80s all the way to the current iteration.
[JM]: It's quite the visual.
[DJ]: Prove us wrong, Satya Nadella.
[DJ]: Prove us wrong.
[JM]: Yeah, good luck.
[JM]: All right, everyone.
[JM]: That's all for this episode.
[JM]: Thanks for listening.
[JM]: You can find me on the web at justinmayer.com and you can find Dan on the web at danj.ca.
[JM]: Reach out with your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.