[JM]: We've talked about Kagi before on the show.
[JM]: They're a paid search engine that I have been trialing for the last three months.
[JM]: And I learned today that there is a Kagi service called Kagi Translate that I didn't know existed until today.
[JM]: And I also found out about it because of a news item that said "Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language".
[JM]: And if you've spent any time on LinkedIn, you probably have some idea of what that means without me having to really explain it.
[JM]: Dan, how would you characterize what your impression would be if someone referred to LinkedIn Speak?
[JM]: Like what would you, what do you envision?
[DJ]: Well, it actually took me a little while to get to the truth on this, because when I first saw this item in our show notes, it said "Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak".
[DJ]: I thought, what is LinkedIn Speak?
[DJ]: Is that like, that sounds like a text-to-speech platform of some kind, but why would LinkedIn provide such?
[DJ]: And then eventually my brain, I mean, it's very early in the morning here, Justin, and I haven't had any coffee yet.
[DJ]: So eventually my brain came around to, oh, I see.
[DJ]: It's like the way that people speak on LinkedIn, which, I mean, I imagine in this day and age, if you look at LinkedIn, it has over the years basically turned into Facebook with a slight professional slant.
[DJ]: It is full of, "content".
[DJ]: And at the current time,
[DJ]: That content is basically entirely about and also, I assume, largely generated by large language models.
[DJ]: So I assume that at this point, LinkedIn Speak is essentially identical to like ChatGPT's output.
[DJ]: Is that true?
[JM]: It is so much so that I think you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between the output of this tool and the output of any...
[JM]: large language model you've ever used.
[JM]: The only thing that's any different is at the end, there's a bunch of hashtags that sort of like, like the real signature, you know, like LinkedIn posts is you got to have, you know, a half dozen hashtags at the end.
[DJ]: Right.
[DJ]: So, so are we a hundred percent sure that Kagi translate isn't just a, like a chat bot?
[JM]: No, I think it totally is just the output of an LLM for sure.
[JM]: That also is tacking on some hashtags at the end of it.
[JM]: And there's also like another pattern to it.
[JM]: It's clearly using a large language model.
[JM]: But the other thing that stands out is the generous sprinkling of emoji.
[JM]: Either at the end of every paragraph or sometimes in the middle of a paragraph at the end of a sentence.
[JM]: But yeah, you have to sprinkle emoji everywhere.
[JM]: That's definitely like a hallmark feature of today's LinkedIn posts.
[DJ]: Okay, well, not to drag out our pre-show here, but I'm going to do a live demo of this feature because I wasn't aware of Kagi Translate either, and I guess I can't tell if it's a real thing or not using its LinkedIn Speak output, but it would be nice to have an alternative to Google for quick translation because I tend to still go to Google Translate on the web when I need to translate some text between languages, although I know there are lots of alternatives at this point.
[DJ]: But I typed in, "Please come to my dinner party."
[DJ]: And the output was, I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be hosting an exclusive networking dinner, rocket ship emoji.
[DJ]: As I continue to focus on building meaningful connections and fostering a community of high value individuals, I'd love to invite you to join the conversation.
[DJ]: It's not just about the meal.
[DJ]: It's about leveraging our collective synergy to unlock new opportunities.
[DJ]: Are you ready to pull up a chair and scale our relationships?
[DJ]: Let's connect over dinner.
[DJ]: Dinner plate emoji followed by sparkle emoji.
[DJ]: Hashtag networking.
[DJ]: Hashtag growth mindset.
[DJ]: Hashtag community building.
[DJ]: Hashtag leadership.
[DJ]: Hashtag synergy.
[DJ]: It's that synergy hashtag I'm the most interested in.
[DJ]: What else is under that hashtag?
[JM]: Like you, I was bemused by the LinkedIn Speak addition to this tool, but also intrigued by the fact that there is this alternative to using Google Translate, which, like you, is what I've been using for a lot of translation needs, and...
[JM]: It'll be interesting to give this tool a try and see how well it works for actual productive translation stuff.
[JM]: Its list of supported languages is quite impressive.
[JM]: There's many languages on this list I have never heard of and have no idea...
[JM]: Like, they could just be made up and I wouldn't know.
[DJ]: I'm going to say they probably aren't made up, but yes, agreed.
[JM]: And some of them just outright sound made up.
[JM]: But again, I trust that they are indeed actual languages.
[JM]: For fun, I chose a language I definitely did not expect to see on this list, which is Yiddish.
[DJ]: Hmm.
[JM]: Which interestingly, the result of the translation is in Hebrew.
[DJ]: Right.
[DJ]: Well, that is how Yiddish is traditionally written.
[JM]: I'm not sure I knew that.
[JM]: Hmm.
[DJ]: I think I only know that because my father actually taught himself Yiddish and like gets a Yiddish newspaper that he reads.
[DJ]: Yiddish to me feels like essentially a historical language, like a language that people in a certain part of the world used in the past.
[DJ]: But I mean, there's still people who speak it.
[DJ]: So it's cool.
[DJ]: It's cool.
[JM]: It's something I'd never seen before.
[DJ]: Yeah, I only really know Yiddish through expressions like "oy gevalt" and such, you know, like things that you yell, essentially.
[JM]: There are some great Yiddish expressions for sure.
[JM]: We'll have to see if we can sneak some into the show every once in a while.
[DJ]: Using Kagi Translate, now we can.
[JM]: Another interesting thing that I see at the top here is it says the default is standard.
[JM]: And then there's a tab that says best.
[JM]: And there's a tool tip that says subscribe to use best quality translations.
[JM]: That's interesting because as I mentioned before, I've been doing this trial of Kagi for the last three months.
[JM]: So presumably a single subscription gets you access to the best quality translations here as well.
[JM]: And it's a timely thing because just
[JM]: today, I did a search and was prompted, your trial is up.
[JM]: Do you want to subscribe?
[JM]: And so I have been trying to weigh in on how it's been going for the last three months.
[JM]: I'm quite happy with Kagi.
[JM]: It's cool to know that I have this other alternative now for translations and that the way to get the best translations is to actually remain a subscriber.
[JM]: So I think my choice here is clear.
[DJ]: I think what you meant to say Justin is that after careful consideration and strategic alignment with your professional goals, you believe your path forward is clearly defined.
[JM]: I see what you did there.
[DJ]: Yeah, this is a useful tool.
[JM]: Another thing I wanted to mention is that this is a special episode because this is our 50th episode.
[JM]: So this is quite a milestone and it comes in the same week as our one-year anniversary.
[JM]: Our first episode was published almost one year ago on March 20th.
[JM]: So yay for us.
[JM]: Well done, sir.
[JM]: Well done.
[DJ]: Yeah, likewise.
[DJ]: Congratulations.
[DJ]: That's a pretty cool milestone, and it is a testament to our diligence and also the relentless passage of time that I can barely remember what our first episode was about a year ago.
[DJ]: I don't even know where I was in March of 2025.
[JM]: I also do not remember what our first episode was about.
[JM]: It was probably about multiple things, as usual.
[JM]: But if you want to just play the odds, chances are pretty good there was an LLM discussion somewhere in episode one, because of course there was.
[DJ]: It has been the technology industry's obsession for more than a year at this point.
[DJ]: So yes, that is likely.
[JM]: Yeah, it's a good opportunity to look back over the previous 49 episodes.
[JM]: And I know that sometimes it's not easy to be talking about the many things that are going on in the world...
[JM]: whether they're related to large language models or otherwise, because sometimes it does feel like a lot of the things that we talk about are a bit of a downer.
[JM]: There's times where we get to the end of an episode and we do a little sidebar, like, how do we put a positive spin on this?
[JM]: And the other person just sort of, like... shrug emoji.
[JM]: It's hard to put a positive spin sometimes on the things that we talk
[JM]: about, so I think for the next 50 episodes, we're gonna try to find positive stories or at least positive slants on stories, and also to find more opportunities to poke fun at things and find the humor in things, even if the subject matter itself is weighty or not exactly uplifting. We're gonna try to find the amusement in there where we can.
[DJ]: And failing that, we can always fall back on translating our topics into LinkedIn Speak, which has that vaguely positive tone.
[DJ]: Let's go back to focusing on how this is our one-year anniversary and our 50th episode, and how other entities in the technology space are celebrating similar, although let's be honest, less impressive milestones.
[JM]: Oh, indeed.
[JM]: I mean, how do you eclipse our achievement here?
[JM]: I mean, come on.
[DJ]: Don't even try.
[DJ]: You can't.
[JM]: No, no.
[JM]: But Apple is trying by celebrating not their 50th episode, but 50 years of thinking different, which is also the title of a letter that CEO Tim Cook wrote
[DJ]: He wrote it as soon as he realized that the Abstractions podcast had hit its 50th episode anniversary.
[DJ]: And he was like, wait a minute, I got to get out ahead of those guys.
[DJ]: And he pulled out his MacBook Neo and was like, da-da-da-da-da-da.
[JM]: Touche, Tim Cook.
[JM]: So we'll put a link to this letter and it's nicely done.
[JM]: It's a nice short call out to what Apple has achieved over 50 years and underscores a lot of the ideas that Apple has tried to carry with it over the years.
[JM]: Doesn't always succeed as we are not even close to hesitant to call out on this show.
[JM]: But if you grade Apple on a curve relative to many other corporations,
[JM]: I personally think that they come out way ahead of almost all of the other tech companies of any size.
[JM]: And I think that's worth celebrating.
[JM]: I think it's worth looking back at what Apple has achieved and highlighting it.
[JM]: And I was just a tyke on April 1st, 1976.
[JM]: But it was just a few years later that I got my very first computer, my venerated Apple II Plus.
[JM]: And so...
[JM]: just a couple of years from now, I will be celebrating 50 years of the first computer I ever owned.
[JM]: And that is a sobering and also cool thought to have.
[JM]: And a friend of mine, on a side note, for my last birthday, gave me a t-shirt that he had custom printed
[JM]: of an Apple II Plus replete with floppy disk drive right next to it.
[JM]: And this was such a cool gift to receive.
[JM]: I have yet to wear it.
[JM]: It's hung up here in my office.
[JM]: I see it every day.
[JM]: I appreciate the gift.
[JM]: It's a cool thing.
[DJ]: My favorite detail about that is that that might go way over the heads of perhaps much younger people is the notion of an external floppy disk drive.
[DJ]: Or just a floppy disk drive.
[DJ]: Well, yeah, that's one thing, but not just a drive for floppy disks, but the idea that computers did not used to have any of this stuff built into them, that it was all like, oh, you want to put a disk in here?
[DJ]: Well, get a whole other thing and hook it up to the port, which I assume was a serial port at the time.
[DJ]: It certainly wasn't a USB port.
[JM]: This was many years before USB was even conceived.
[DJ]: So ironically, it would have been easier to plug in.
[JM]: Perhaps I can still, and this is the fun thing about sense memory, is I can still feel what this ribbon cable felt like.
[JM]: Probably two to three inches wide.
[JM]: And if you've ever seen a ribbon cable before, it's essentially a bunch of copper wires laid right next to each other in parallel and then encased in plastic, presumably.
[JM]: They are...
[JM]: In terms of cabling, probably the worst cable you will ever use.
[JM]: Well, I mean, you won't use it because, you know, they died out a long time ago, but they were terrible.
[DJ]: So I recently, as in in the last five years, purchased an iMac G4, which is the one that looks like a desk lamp.
[DJ]: It was the first one that had like a flat panel display and it has this great like silver spring-loaded arm that holds up the display and the case is like a white dome.
[DJ]: I always thought those computers were so cool looking.
[DJ]: They came out pretty much like 20 years ago, like the early 2000s.
[DJ]: And so I bought one off eBay for like $50 a few years ago and it works.
[DJ]: But that isn't enough for me.
[DJ]: So recently I took it apart, which with that model of computer is not easy to do.
[DJ]: and I replaced some of the components.
[DJ]: And sure enough, the drives use those ribbon cables.
[DJ]: And in terms of if you've ever been the kind of person who has built a computer or worked on a computer, you know how the shape and routing of cables is such an important factor.
[DJ]: And for the nerds who really get into this, they want to keep the inside of the case looking really clean, both because if they're the kind of person who has a glass panel with LED lights inside their computer case, they want it to look good, but also just for airflow.
[DJ]: Airflow is the most important thing in a high-performance computer.
[DJ]: You've got to keep those things cool.
[DJ]: And so the idea of the cables inside the computer being these like three inch wide, really long, like folded strips of plastic is just such a, yeah.
[DJ]: There are so many things that in retro technology where you just look at it and go, oh boy, really?
[DJ]: That's how we did that?
[DJ]: It's always also sort of miraculous that these things worked and they worked really well.
[JM]: It is amazing when you look back at things and you think really like that was the best idea we had at the time.
[JM]: Like the early bicycles where like one wheel is like six feet tall and the other wheel is like 12 inches across.
[JM]: Like that, that was like someone thought that was the best way to make a bicycle.
[JM]: Yeah.
[JM]: Same with ribbon cables.
[JM]: That's the best idea they had at the time until someone came up with a better one.
[DJ]: You heard it here first, people.
[DJ]: Ribbon cables are the penny-farthing bicycle of computer hardware.
[DJ]: I was going to use a slightly closer analogy, which is when I first learned how traditional mechanical hard drives, not the solid-state drives that have mostly replaced them in a lot of places, when you learn about how traditional mechanical hard drives actually function...
[DJ]: I defy you to have any thought other than I cannot believe that works.
[DJ]: It's just amazing that it works at all, let alone that you'll get one of these drives and it'll spin at 7,000 revolutions per minute constantly for years and reliably read and write data.
[DJ]: That is amazing.
[JM]: It really is.
[JM]: One other thing I would be remiss if I didn't mention is that there is a video that was aired live called Apple at 50, Five Decades of Thinking Different.
[JM]: We'll put the YouTube link in the show notes.
[JM]: And this was a panel.
[JM]: I think it was held at the Computer History Museum.
[JM]: It was moderated by David Pogue and featured...
[JM]: participants such as former Apple CEO, John Sculley, former Apple employees, Chris Espinoza, John Rubenstein, and other surprise guests.
[JM]: I have not had a chance to see this yet, but I'm looking forward to checking it out.
[JM]: It'll be interesting to see what some other people have to say, you know, who were there and had a front row seat for some of the more interesting years of Apple's history.
[DJ]: I really want to know who the surprise guests might turn out to be.
[DJ]: Any wagers?
[DJ]: You think Johnny Ives is going to show up?
[DJ]: It's possible.
[DJ]: I would imagine that one of the surprise guests could be Waz.
[DJ]: Yeah, that would be interesting.
[DJ]: Waz is still around.
[JM]: And he usually is the kind of person who will take these kinds of opportunities when they present themselves.
[JM]: So I feel like there's decent odds that he might be among them.
[DJ]: We must have had the history of computing on our minds a lot recently because I saw a lot of people on the internets linking to a blog post called This is Not the Computer for You by a writer who, I think his name is Sam-Henri Gold.
[DJ]: And the blog post is,
[DJ]: On the surface, a response to reviews of the new MacBook Neo, which Apple just announced a week or so ago, which is notable for being a very affordable entry in Apple's traditionally upmarket, let's say, line of computers.
[DJ]: The MacBook Neo costs, I think, $599 or $699 or $799 in American dollars.
[DJ]: which is several hundred dollars cheaper than the previous entry-level MacBook Air.
[DJ]: And reviews of the MacBook Neo have been quite positive about its capabilities.
[DJ]: So people who have been watching Apple for a long time and using their stuff have been pretty impressed that like, hey, Apple finally shipped essentially an affordable computer that is, you know, of Apple quality.
[DJ]: And what's really interesting about this blog post is I guess there's a lot of reviews out there that are kind of saying, well, but if you use really high performance software like Final Cut or, you know, other video rendering or Xcode to do intensive software development, this is not the computer for you.
[DJ]: Hence the title.
[DJ]: But what the writer talks about in that post is how when he was a kid,
[DJ]: He was definitely running this sort of professional level software on a hand-me-down Apple computer that he'd gotten from his grandmother that was in no way capable of handling what he was throwing at it.
[DJ]: But he does such a good job of describing how that experience turned him into a technology professional.
[DJ]: And I related to it so much.
[DJ]: And I suspect a lot of us who ended up with some kind of, let's call it technology career of some kind, whether you're a designer, you're a developer, principally you make stuff using a computer.
[DJ]: I guess we could say in the current time, very many people's jobs involve making stuff with a computer.
[DJ]: I guess there's a particular type of work that I'm thinking about where when you were a kid, you were fascinated by the fact that you could get on a computer and interact with it and create something.
[DJ]: And that thing might be like music or a drawing or a computer program itself.
[DJ]: I know that's what really got its hooks into me.
[DJ]: A while back, there was a retrospective about the Apple software application called HyperCard because I think one of the creators of HyperCard passed away.
[DJ]: And I was reflecting, I can't remember if we mentioned it in a previous episode or not, once you've done 50 episodes, it does get a little hard to remember what you said on all of them.
[DJ]: I just want to underline how impressive that number is, Justin, that we've done 50.
[DJ]: 50 episodes.
[DJ]: Of course, now someone on Mastodon is going to go back through our catalog and be like, actually, guys, you're only on episode 48.
[DJ]: Sorry.
[DJ]: Fact check.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: But the first time I used HyperCard, which is a really cool program that you can still get running through emulators and stuff like that.
[DJ]: It lets you throw a bunch of text and pictures and buttons on this stack of virtual cards that can then navigate to each other, which sounds really simplistic, but it totally captivated me.
[DJ]: And it really got me into this notion that like, oh, I can use a computer to like make software.
[DJ]: And then I took computer science classes in high school that
[DJ]: taught me how to program and that, you know, it was all, it was all over for me from there.
[DJ]: Right.
[DJ]: I did a computer science degree in university and I've been a software developer for 20 years.
[DJ]: So I really liked this article and coming back to its title, he is very much pushing back against the, as he puts it, the sort of like the people who want to make rules about like what you can and can't do with a computer.
[DJ]: He wants to point out that actually it's really important for people to ignore those rules, you know, to do the stuff that they're not supposed to be able to do with their entry level MacBook, because that's the kind of thing that really makes you passionate about this sort of tool for the rest of your life.
[JM]: This article resonated for me as well.
[JM]: And it's interesting, the title is, This is Not the Computer for You.
[JM]: And the title is in quotes.
[JM]: And at first, it wasn't really clear what the author meant.
[JM]: And it seems to me that
[JM]: It can have multiple meanings because the author is referring to reviews of this relatively, in terms of current more expensive computers, relatively underpowered, less expensive machine.
[JM]: And these reviews are calling it out and saying that it is relatively underpowered.
[JM]: and thus perhaps is not the computer for you.
[JM]: But I think the real meaning is the author is saying to the kind of person who's writing these reviews that this computer may not be for you, person who has the means and the experience to go out and spend a lot more money on a computer that probably has more processing power than even that person needs.
[JM]: But it's a great computer for a lot of people.
[JM]: including people who are getting one for the first time or getting one early in their life and just seeing what they can do with it.
[JM]: Because the reality is, even if this MacBook Neo were as resource constrained as I think some people are trying to communicate, it's still an extremely capable Mac.
[JM]: And I really like the way that the author underscores that as a general purpose computer,
[JM]: and not some flavor of iOS or Android where you're getting this curated experience where you can't do many of the things you can do with a general purpose computer.
[JM]: And you instead get this ability to do all kinds of things.
[JM]: And that's what learning is all about.
[JM]: I think of the early computers that I had, and I was lucky enough to have computers that were not underpowered on a relative basis to other options at the time.
[JM]: But it was at a time where you didn't have lots of defined areas like this is what you can use computers for.
[JM]: It was more or less like a pile of Legos.
[JM]: You had to figure out what you were going to do with it.
[JM]: And that's a lot of fun.
[JM]: It's one of the most fun things about having a general purpose computer.
[JM]: And I like that that's what this person's highlighting.
[DJ]: It is nice to push back a little bit against the sort of jaded attitude that comes across in a lot of tech reviewing because it's generally written by and perhaps for an audience of people that are already 100% into this, right?
[DJ]: Like the kind of person who is walking around with a MacBook Pro probably was very intentional about why they bought a MacBook Pro because they're very expensive.
[DJ]: So if you go out there and most people, if they're just like, I need a computer, I guess, like my brother, who's not a technology professional, who is not even really a technology enthusiast, he had an old MacBook for like 15 years or some insane thing, and he just replaced it.
[DJ]: And so he was asking me a bit about what he should get.
[DJ]: And I said,
[DJ]: And he thought, well, I'm going to get a PC this time, like a Windows computer.
[DJ]: So I went and looked at what do Windows computers look like now.
[DJ]: And it hasn't gotten any easier to choose them because there are lots of different manufacturers with lots of different models.
[DJ]: And they all still have these obscure specifications, like Intel Core i7 v15 at x megahertz and all this.
[DJ]: And I can wade through all of that stuff.
[DJ]: So I was able to like advise my brother, I think you need something kind of, given what you want to do, it's mostly like play civilization is what he wants to do, but it's kind of easy to overlook the fact that any computer that you buy in 2026 is more than powerful enough to let you do an enormous amount of things.
[DJ]: Unless it really is either you want to play a cutting edge game or you want to like edit a 4k film or something like that.
[DJ]: Any computer that you buy is more than powerful enough to do all kinds of stuff all at the same time.
[DJ]: Whereas since we've been talking about the mists of the distant past, when we started using computers, it's worth remembering what limitation really looks like.
[DJ]: I mean, I remember on my family's first computer, which I was so excited to finally have our own computer at home because I had fallen in love with these wacky devices.
[DJ]: If you wanted to write a document in the venerable Microsoft Word 6.0, I seem to recall that it took one minute, one minute to open that application on our computer.
[DJ]: Like you double click the word icon and then you could go make yourself a sandwich.
[DJ]: Like it took forever.
[DJ]: That computer was so slow and so limited.
[DJ]: And so we can get lost in the like, well, is the M5 Max really that much better than the M4 Max or whatever with its 700 million performance cores and its 80 bajillion trillion other cores?
[DJ]: And it's like, okay.
[DJ]: But on the other hand, the MacBook Neo is more than capable of doing whatever you want to do with a computer probably.
[DJ]: for an enormous number of people.
[DJ]: And that's so cool.
[DJ]: Oh, and also not that $700 is no money at all, but like, again, if you jump back 20 or 30 years, any computer, if you adjust for inflation was like thousands of dollars.
[DJ]: So the idea that all of this stuff is so much more accessible, I think is fantastic.
[JM]: Absolutely, and you mentioned 4k video editing as this thing that you know, maybe you might want a more powerful machine for and Yet 4k video editing is something you can do today on The device that's in your pocket phones iPhones in particular have been able to do 4k video editing for years at this point and
[JM]: This is an iPhone chip in this MacBook Neo.
[JM]: So of course it can also do 4K video editing.
[JM]: So I think that the kinds of people who write reviews for these kinds of devices just forget what it was like when they got their first
[JM]: Computer and they forget what it's like to not be in this business as a full-time computer nerd because for example, I don't think I know a single person who isn't a programmer or a
[JM]: or full-time tech writer of some kind.
[JM]: I don't think any of these people that I know who have spent decades of their life using computers, day in, day out, I don't think a single one of them could tell you the difference between RAM and persistent storage.
[JM]: Not one person.
[JM]: The number of times in my life I've had to have this conversation multiple times with the same person to say, no, that's RAM.
[JM]: You're talking about storage like solid state drive or whatever drive was the most popular when this conversation was happening.
[JM]: I think people just lose touch.
[JM]: They lose sight that most people are looking for a tool to get something done.
[JM]: They have no interest in understanding the difference between RAM and persistent storage or performance cores and efficiency cores or any of the other tech nerdery minutia that we often find ourselves fascinated by.
[JM]: Speaking of things that would definitely rank highly on the nerd spectrum,
[JM]: One of the things that I find myself wanting to do from time to time is to access some process that's running in a terminal on my machine at my desk, but when I'm not at my desk.
[JM]: So say if I'm downstairs or if I'm out of my house entirely, there are times where I want to see what's running in a particular terminal window on the machine on my desk.
[JM]: And there are various ways of doing this.
[JM]: Apple has provided a tool called Remote Desktop for years.
[JM]: And Remote Desktop used to be better than it is today.
[JM]: And I think was more suited to this in the past.
[JM]: But like a lot of things,
[JM]: I feel like Apple has just lost interest in maintaining remote desktop in a way that makes it a reliable, dependable tool that you can reach for when you need it, and instead is more of a last resort
[JM]: you know, okay, well, I have no other options, I guess I'll try remote desktop, even though I don't have high confidence that it will work.
[JM]: And it also is a sort of tool that works better, say, if I were downstairs, okay, that's easier, as soon as you start dealing with crossing network barriers, that when you're outside your house, now it becomes more difficult.
[JM]: So and also, it's somewhat silly, when all you want to access is just the output
[JM]: in a particular terminal window, I don't need the entire gigantic desktop screen to be replicated over what might be a less than super speedy network connection.
[JM]: So trying to do it via remote desktop is really not the right tool for this particular job anyway.
[JM]: So I want to describe how I ended up doing this.
[JM]: And I have to say it works pretty well.
[JM]: The first ingredient is tailscale.
[JM]: And Tailscale is a service that allows you to connect a bunch of computing devices together on a private network.
[JM]: So you can think of it like a VPN, if you are familiar with those, with a bunch of extra magic sprinkled on top in terms of
[JM]: It automatically generates TLS certificates so that you can connect to these different devices in ways that are secure, in ways in which you don't get any warnings about the connection not being encrypted.
[JM]: And also these things are on demand, so you don't have to constantly be connecting and then disconnecting.
[JM]: You can just have them active at all times.
[JM]: And then when you make a connection between one device and the other, it will make that connection without routing all of your network traffic through that connection.
[JM]: And it is a service that's free up to a hundred devices, which even for the nerdiest of nerds, I feel is going to cover most people's needs.
[JM]: And that's very generous of the company that operates the service.
[JM]: And hopefully that's something that they continue to do for a long time.
[JM]: The next ingredient here is SSH, or secure shell.
[JM]: And the setup of that is pretty straightforward.
[JM]: If you've had any experience connecting between say a local workstation and a remote server somewhere, I generated a key on my workstation.
[JM]: And doing this on other devices was a little trickier.
[JM]: not the Mac downstairs, that's obviously really easy.
[JM]: But if I want to connect from a phone or an iPad, I wasn't sure which terminal application would be a good fit.
[JM]: It's been a long time since I've even tried to use a terminal emulator on iOS.
[JM]: I found an open source app called a shell.
[JM]: And I thought, Okay, I'll give it a try.
[JM]: If it doesn't work, I'll find something else.
[JM]: And in the end, it worked quite well and did exactly what I needed it to do.
[JM]: I used it to generate keys on the phone.
[JM]: And then on the iPad, took me all of 30 seconds copied and pasted the public keys
[JM]: into the authorized keys file on the Mac that's at my desk.
[JM]: And I was able to make connections immediately.
[JM]: The last ingredient that I needed here was some kind of session persistence.
[JM]: A lot of people will use TMUX or screen for this purpose.
[JM]: These are tools that allow you to create a session and then attach to it and detach from it.
[JM]: But TMUX and screen are
[JM]: a class of tool called a terminal multiplexer.
[JM]: And I don't need the terminal multiplexing features that they provide.
[DJ]: You don't want to multiplex your terminals?
[DJ]: That just seems like something that you would want to do.
[JM]: I have low terminal multiplexing needs.
[DJ]: Interesting.
[DJ]: As in I don't need them at all.
[DJ]: I'm still not really sure what it means to multiplex your terminals.
[DJ]: So I'm not sure I have high terminal multiplexing needs either.
[JM]: It essentially means that you can create
[JM]: multiple panes in your terminal.
[JM]: Some terminals support the idea of creating multiple windows essentially in one window.
[JM]: That's not what I'm talking about.
[JM]: This is the process itself in a single terminal window allows you to divide it into multiple panes.
[JM]: That's my understanding of what a terminal multiplexer is.
[DJ]: I feel no more informed than I was a moment ago.
[DJ]: Thank you.
[DJ]: Fair enough.
[DJ]: But anyway, the point is, for this at least, you don't need a terminal multiplexer, whatever that is.
[JM]: Correct.
[JM]: I don't need that feature.
[JM]: And when you use those tools, they can introduce other problems.
[JM]: like scroll back buffers get weird.
[JM]: There are just certain things that come along with those features that to me are clearly in the disadvantage column.
[JM]: And to me, the costs outweigh the benefits that I've already described that I don't need.
[JM]: I don't need those benefits and it comes with these costs.
[JM]: So anyway, someone else figured out that they just wanted
[JM]: the persistence, the session persistence without the terminal multiplexing.
[JM]: So they created a tool called ZMX, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes that provides this.
[JM]: You get the ability to create a session and then freely attach and detach from it without running a terminal multiplexer, without dealing with these other problems that terminal multiplexers can have.
[JM]: And so this combination of things has made it easy for me to connect to a process that's running on my desktop.
[JM]: And that's great.
[JM]: I have to remember to run the command on the desktop to say, okay, I've set up this session and then I can attach to it because if I don't create the session before I walk away from my desk or at least have it running, cause it can just run forever.
[JM]: You don't need to
[JM]: do it all the time, you just can create it once and then just continue to use that same session really forever.
[JM]: And you can create multiple sessions and they can have names and you can attach to this one and then detach and attach to another one.
[JM]: As long as you have a session that you want to attach to before you walk away, then it's easy to SSH into that machine and attach to it.
[JM]: And I've been really happy with this, the only piece that I would say maybe is missing would be
[JM]: Connection persistence, which is there are tools like Mosh and Eternal Terminal that allow you to make the SSH connection and then you can essentially close your notebook lid and go to sleep and wake up the next day and open the lid and you're still connected, which is not how your average SSH connection works.
[JM]: They will not just stay open like that and
[JM]: And I used Eternal Terminal before in the past and liked it more so than Mosh.
[JM]: But I have this problem at the moment where there's some compiler issue where I go to install the latest version of Eternal Terminal and it just fails.
[JM]: And I need to resolve that at some point.
[JM]: But that's the only missing piece.
[JM]: And I'm sure I'll figure that out one of these days.
[JM]: And that's only missing to the extent that I want that connection persistence.
[JM]: If I decide that I'm fine with just closing the terminal window before I close the notebook lid, then it's not a problem.
[JM]: Just create a new window, SSH in, attach, done.
[JM]: So all in all, I'm pretty happy with the setup.
[JM]: It solves a problem that I've had for a while.
[JM]: And yeah, I'm excited about it.
[DJ]: Nice.
[DJ]: To throw in another suggestion, it's not free or open source, but there's an app called Secure Shellfish for iOS, which is an absolutely excellent SSH client.
[DJ]: It is by the same developer as an app called Working Copy, which is, again, an amazing Git client for iOS.
[DJ]: And both of those apps do a really good job of
[DJ]: taking what is a sort of esoteric computing task or set of computing tasks that you might do in a command line interface and making them play really nicely with all of the idiosyncrasies and also capabilities of iOS.
[DJ]: So if you are big into things like Git and SSH sessions and you want to build workflows like that that feature your phone or your iPad,
[DJ]: I would say check those apps out.
[DJ]: They are really well done.
[DJ]: They're one of those examples of an indie app where you're just like, you want me to pay how much?
[DJ]: Yeah, take twice that.
[DJ]: Take five times that.
[DJ]: I can't believe how good this piece of software is.
[DJ]: Like, they're really exceptional.
[JM]: Indeed.
[JM]: And I have used Secure Shellfish in the past and forgot about it.
[JM]: So thank you for bringing that back around again.
[JM]: I'll have to take another look at that one as well.
[DJ]: As a fan of the Fish shell, Justin, I assumed you would be all over shellfish.
[JM]: Definitely on brand, you're right.
[JM]: And I don't know how it escaped my consciousness.
[JM]: Another couple of tools that I wanted to mention relate to this question we've talked about before, which is running large language models locally.
[JM]: One of the problems that I have found in the past is this never ending game because there is so much activity in this area and new models come out so frequently.
[JM]: that the answer one week can be different than the answer the next week to the question of which model runs the best, provides the best combination of accuracy and speed on the hardware that I have.
[JM]: And the first tool that I'll mention is if you happen to be the kind of person who is frequently looking at these models on Hugging Face, which is a site that you can use to find a whole bunch of
[JM]: open weights models, I think a lesser known feature of hugging face is if you happen to have an account there.
[JM]: And if you find yourself downloading models from hugging face, you should create an account and generate an API key and use it when you do your download because your downloads will go faster if you pass the API key as a parameter when you do your download.
[JM]: So if you have a Hugging Face account, a little known feature is you can add what your hardware is.
[JM]: You can say, I have this computer with these resources.
[JM]: And then this indicator will appear on certain pages that wasn't there before that shows you for any particular quantization, it will show you, okay, this runs well, this doesn't.
[JM]: So that's super handy.
[JM]: Another tool that I will mention is an open source tool called LLM Fit.
[JM]: And this is a command line tool that you can run
[JM]: that will introspect your system's RAM, CPU, GPU, and recommend particular models for your specific hardware.
[JM]: The last tool I'll mention is essentially a website version of LLM Fit called canirun.ai, and it uses WebGPU to introspect the capabilities of your hardware through the web browser and will recommend models that might be a good fit for your machine.
[JM]: All right, that's all for this episode.
[JM]: Thanks everyone for listening.
[JM]: If I could ask a moment of your time, given that it is our 50th episode, it would really mean a lot to us if you could take a moment.
[JM]: If you are driving a car, obviously you don't need to pull over.
[JM]: I mean, if it's safe to pull over, by all means, pull over for a moment.
[JM]: But if you can drop whatever you're doing as you're listening to this, go to Spotify or Apple podcasts or whatever platform you usually use to listen to your podcasts.
[JM]: Take a moment and write a review of our podcast.
[JM]: Give it a rating.
[JM]: Anything that you can do to show your support would really help us out a lot in terms of
[JM]: letting other people know that you are enjoying the show.
[JM]: And with that, you can find me on the web at justinmayer.com and you can find Dan at danj.ca.
[JM]: Reach out with your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.