[JM]: I came across an interesting tool the other day called Unstream, and you can check it out at unstream.stream, which is probably one of the better domains I've ever seen.
[JM]: And Unstream allows you to support artists directly on alternative platforms.
[JM]: And the concept is to reduce your dependency on streaming.
[JM]: As we have talked about before, artists don't make a lot of money from streaming.
[JM]: Spotify probably being the worst offender, followed closely by Apple Music.
[JM]: And then there is Dan's beloved Qobuz, which compensates artists a little bit better, which is great.
[JM]: But the concept of Unstream is that this allows you to more directly support the artists
[JM]: that you're listening to at any particular moment by installing an app and or installing browser extensions.
[JM]: And the concept is while you're listening to music, you'll see some indication either in your menu bar or in your browser, wherever the music is playing or wherever this on stream app or browser extension can connect to
[JM]: an app that you're using to play music, and it'll show you ways that you can directly support the artist, for example, via Bandcamp, going to their official site to purchase music directly from them, visiting any patronage platforms that they may use,
[JM]: link to like Patreon.
[JM]: And I haven't had a chance to try this out yet.
[JM]: But I really do like the idea because anything that more visibly shows up for you when you're listening to streaming music, anything that pops up and says, hey, here are ways in which you can support this artist, anything that encourages people to do that, to me seems like a win.
[JM]: So I'm all for it.
[DJ]: Yeah, I like the look of this site.
[DJ]: I was just playing around with it.
[DJ]: And aside from browser extensions or what have you, it also has a search bar just on the website.
[DJ]: So you can type in an artist of your choice.
[DJ]: And I typed in a couple who I already know are on Bandcamp because I bought music from them there, but I just typed them in.
[DJ]: And sure enough, a Bandcamp link pops up.
[DJ]: There's also links to a couple other sites where it sounds like Unstream can't
[DJ]: scrape them or search them directly, but it just provides like a query string to go directly to that site to search for the artist.
[DJ]: And I'm a big fan of this because, you know, I've talked about it a bit, but my main motivation for switching from Spotify to Qobuz was the silly name, but the secondary motivation was a desire to better support artists and
[DJ]: buy more of my music as opposed to streaming it, which is also a way to better support artists.
[DJ]: And any tool that makes it easier for us to buy music directly, I'm a big fan.
[DJ]: So hooray for Unstream and their extremely clever domain name.
[JM]: Thanks for pointing out the search bar, which I totally missed.
[JM]: And I just used it to search for a couple of artists.
[JM]: And underneath it will show a list of music marketplaces along with how much of a cut the artist gets when you use them.
[JM]: So for example, under Qobuz, it says 70%.
[JM]: Under Bandcamp, it says 80 to 85%, which is cool to know.
[JM]: Helps you make decisions in terms of how you want to support the artists that you love.
[JM]: Another tool that I wanted to mention is Flight Airports.
[JM]: And I don't use the flighty app.
[JM]: I think that's how most people are aware of flighty.
[JM]: And I don't use it because it is a subscription app.
[JM]: But people rave about it.
[JM]: They have nothing but great things to say.
[JM]: And if you are a frequent traveler, it's probably a very useful app to subscribe for those that are into that sort of thing.
[JM]: But apparently, they have released some resource at flighty.com slash airports, because in this day and age, for reasons, airline travel has gotten more complicated, there are increasing numbers of delays and cancellations, and other disruptions.
[JM]: And this site gives you a very attractive and well designed view into what's going on at airports in your area.
[JM]: And for any particular region, it will show a list of major airports and disruptions and sort them by delays, essentially.
[JM]: So right now, looking at the United States, it shows at the very top, LaGuardia has a significant number of cancellations, departure delays and arrival delays.
[JM]: So if you have travel coming up, this might be a good resource to check out.
[DJ]: I don't have travel coming up, but I noticed that my local airport, apparently 91% of flights are delayed on departure.
[DJ]: So I'm kind of glad I'm not trying to go anywhere in the near future.
[DJ]: I hope whatever that is clears up.
[JM]: It's kind of fun to go to different continents and see which of them have a longer or more concentrated list of yellow, which is OK. Obviously, there's some delays versus green, which means that there are shorter or less frequent or less common delays.
[JM]: And then there's the ones that are just lots of red.
[JM]: So, for example, Asia right now shows a decent number of red indicators.
[DJ]: It would be interesting to see historical trends for this as well.
[DJ]: So you could try to evaluate, is there some particular situation causing a lot of delays at a given airport right now?
[DJ]: Or is it just always like this?
[DJ]: Because many busy airports are just notorious for everything is always delayed.
[DJ]: It would be interesting to know, is the current time worse than baseline?
[JM]: Yeah, the only views you can see here are live and today.
[JM]: And you're right that having some historical indicator, being able to look at it over the last month, three months, six months, X number of years.
[JM]: Yeah, I agree.
[JM]: That would be super handy.
[DJ]: I was planning a trip last year to Europe that didn't end up happening, unfortunately, but I was trying to plan like a route home.
[DJ]: And some of the flights went through Heathrow Airport in London.
[DJ]: And basically the wisdom that you can look up for Heathrow was it's like, oh yeah, for international departures, you want to get to your gate like three hours ahead of time.
[DJ]: And most of the airports I'm used to will tell you like two hours ahead of time for international flights.
[DJ]: And even that is usually conservative.
[DJ]: But I appreciate Heathrow is just like, no, no, no, you should get here days in advance.
[DJ]: Bring a tent.
[DJ]: You're going to need it because this is the busiest airport on the planet.
[DJ]: I'm not actually sure what is the busiest airport on the planet.
[DJ]: It might be LaGuardia, but I'm pretty sure Heathrow is up there.
[JM]: Could be Beijing for all I know.
[DJ]: Actually, that's probably true.
[DJ]: It's almost certainly an airport in Asia, not Europe or America, but they're all busy.
[DJ]: But none of them hold a candle to my least favorite airport, Frankfurt.
[DJ]: So there you go, Frankfurt Airport.
[DJ]: You've been officially called out on the show.
[DJ]: You're welcome.
[DJ]: I hate you.
[JM]: I do share your displeasure with Frankfurt.
[JM]: It is not a good airport and unfortunately is one that I have to use a lot, but I do not like it.
[JM]: But if I have to pick my least favorite, it's gotta be Newark.
[JM]: For whatever unholy reason, someone decided to festoon the entire airport with thousands of tablets that you have to use for everything that you do.
[JM]: If you wanna buy something, you have to use a tablet.
[JM]: If you want to eat something,
[JM]: You have to use a tablet.
[JM]: They're everywhere.
[JM]: They're unavoidable.
[JM]: And you must use them to do anything while you're there.
[JM]: Trust me, Newark is worse.
[DJ]: I believe you.
[DJ]: I've only been to the Newark airport once.
[DJ]: It was years ago, so the tablets might not have been installed.
[DJ]: But my unfortunate experience was that I was switching planes and I didn't realize, but I had to change terminals constantly.
[DJ]: And so when I got to the next terminal, I had to go through security again.
[DJ]: So I missed my plane.
[DJ]: So I don't know why exactly that happened.
[DJ]: It's not necessarily the fault of the Newark airport, but I'm certainly blaming them.
[DJ]: So yes, I also hate Newark airport, Newark airport.
[DJ]: We're calling you out to get in the box with Frankfurt.
[DJ]: I don't know how this turned into the airport ratings podcast, but yeah, it's just a service we provide.
[JM]: Well, to talk about something that I enjoy a lot more than airports, I wanted to do a little bit of follow up regarding Jujutsu.
[JM]: I mentioned this version control system in a previous episode because I was experimenting with it and wanted to share my very early experiences with how this tool works and what it did well and what.
[JM]: things I found challenging.
[JM]: And just wanted to briefly say that I have been using it ever since.
[JM]: And it continues to be a tool that I really enjoy using.
[JM]: And in this era of modern software, I don't really get to say that as often as I would like, because there are so many software experiences, as we have discussed that
[JM]: haven't really been all that great and so it's really nice to be able to point to something and say i enjoy using this tool every day and i keep discovering different things about it that i didn't know before and i'm sure like most of the tools i use i probably am only exercising
[JM]: 10% or so of its capabilities.
[JM]: And I look forward to expanding that beyond that ratio.
[JM]: One of the things that I discovered recently is that it has a built in file and hunk selection interface that is really intuitive.
[JM]: And what that means is, if I want to split a
[JM]: The changes in my current working copy, like say I've modified a whole bunch of files and a lot of my changes aren't really related to each other.
[JM]: And I just wasn't paying attention and I didn't create new changes, meaning separate commits.
[JM]: In Git world, it's quite common to git add a file or git add p a file if you want to be able to select parts of it.
[JM]: But I found that Jujutsu's file and hunk selection interface is much, much better than gets it even has a menu bar across the top that you can tap on with your mouse in the terminal and get little drop down menus in the terminal, which is really fascinating.
[JM]: And of course, our hotkeys, you don't have to use your mouse to do this.
[JM]: But it's interesting when you're learning how to use a tool.
[JM]: It's cool to be able to just go up and tap on it with your mouse and oh, okay, there are menu options here.
[JM]: It's not something I've really seen a lot of terminal-based software applications use, and I was really pleasantly surprised to see how well it's done.
[JM]: Jujutsu continues to be actively developed, and when new versions come out, I check the changelog entries, and it's clear that they are continually adding and refining.
[JM]: One of the things I saw in the last release is they added a new...
[JM]: bookmark advance command.
[JM]: And what that means is, when you create new changes, by default, the bookmark doesn't automatically advance to your current revision, you have to explicitly say JJ bookmark set, and then the name of
[JM]: the bookmark and bookmarks, you can think of as branches.
[JM]: They're very similar, but they're different.
[JM]: Clearly, if you are familiar with how git branches work, how I'm describing bookmarks are definitely different.
[JM]: But it's cumbersome to have to say JJ bookmark set and then the name of the branch.
[JM]: Instead, now you can just say JJ bookmark advance, and it'll just take whatever the most recent bookmark was and just move it right up to whatever your current revision is.
[JM]: It's a nice little time saver.
[JM]: It's handy.
[JM]: And I dig it.
[JM]: One other tool that I wanted to mention is called GG.
[JM]: And to my knowledge, GG is the first desktop application for Jujutsu.
[JM]: I'm aware of and have mentioned when I talked about this last time, several terminal based applications,
[JM]: or TUIs, for Jujutsu.
[JM]: But this is actually a desktop application, cross-platform, written in Rust.
[JM]: And I installed it via Homebrew.
[JM]: And it's not going to win any user interface design awards in terms of looking, for example, like a true Mac application on a Mac workstation.
[JM]: But it's super handy for me because oftentimes I just want to be able to tap on a bunch of
[JM]: changes and see what's in them.
[JM]: And that's something that's much more cumbersome to do on the command line.
[JM]: And this makes it really easy to just tap on commits and see what's inside them.
[JM]: squashing commits can be a little messy sometimes.
[JM]: And if you have a lot of commits that you want to squash,
[JM]: I found that specifying the range is kind of hard on the command line.
[JM]: Being able to just tap in this app on one commit and then shift tap on the end of the range and then just hit squash and have it just happen is a huge productivity win and worth the price of admission just for that feature alone.
[JM]: So hats off to the folks that developed this very cool open source application, the link to which will of course be in the show notes.
[JM]: I'll also mention that when I started this experiment, or at least towards the beginning, I was collaborating with a friend on a project using Jujutsu and encouraging him to give it a fair shake and to give it a try and to see whether it could work.
[JM]: And in the end, this friend came to me and said, hey, I'm really struggling with Jujutsu.
[JM]: Would it be a problem if I went back to get...
[JM]: And I was like, I already felt bad just for subjecting this friend to a lot of new things all at once.
[JM]: So, of course, I said, no, by all means, I want you to feel comfortable and I don't want you to feel frustrated.
[JM]: So use whatever tool is best.
[JM]: the most productive and enjoyable for you to use.
[JM]: So he went back to using Git.
[JM]: So in the end, your mileage may vary, but for me, it's been awesome.
[JM]: And the last thing I'll mention about it for now, I've always guessed that Jiu Jitsu as a name was chosen because of JJ and JJ was chosen first, because if it's location on a keyboard, it's right under your right index finger on a QWERTY layout.
[JM]: So I think that's why JJ was chosen.
[JM]: And then they thought, okay, well,
[JM]: JJ is kind of a boring name.
[JM]: I think they came up with Jujutsu after the fact.
[JM]: But because I don't use a QWERTY layout, because I am a total masochist and using Colmac, the J key statistically is not a key that you use very much when you're typing English stuff.
[JM]: And so it has been moved under the Colmac layout to a...
[JM]: less convenient location.
[JM]: It's where the Y key is on a QWERTY layout.
[JM]: So when I need to type JJ, which I'm doing constantly, I have to kind of reach for it.
[JM]: And this is, of course, why you should never use anything other than a QWERTY layout, because the rest of the world doesn't care about your weird predilections for alternative keyboard layouts and will punish you endlessly for it.
[JM]: Unintentionally, of course.
[JM]: But nonetheless, that's what happens.
[JM]: So you've been warned.
[DJ]: That ship sailed for me long ago because I also use an alternative layout and like a crazy split keyboard with strange keys.
[DJ]: And it's just, yeah, I've just had to get used to what you're saying.
[DJ]: But what key is under the right index finger on a Colmac keyboard?
[DJ]: N. N, okay.
[DJ]: So I assume you aliased NN to JJ in your terminal and it's all good now?
Yeah.
[JM]: Way ahead of you.
[JM]: I haven't done it, but that has been in the back of my mind for at least a few days at this point because I'm getting tired of reaching for this far away key and definitely need to change it so that I can just type N twice instead.
[JM]: All right, moving on.
[JM]: In other news, Apple has announced Apple for Business.
[DJ]: And there's only one reason that this matters.
[DJ]: Only one?
[DJ]: There's only one terrible, stupid reason that I care about this at all.
[JM]: You're right that there is only one reason, and we'll get to that.
[JM]: But I feel like Apple is wrapping this whole thing that we're about to talk about in this greater concept of Apple business.
[JM]: which they describe as a new all-in-one platform.
[JM]: I don't even want to read the rest of the sentence at that point.
[JM]: Anytime I read something as a new all-in-one platform, I've just totally lost interest completely.
[JM]: It's such a marketing speak.
[JM]: It's just gross anyway.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: And I think like basically you're also saying like whenever a company uses the phrase a new all in one platform, that's never good.
[DJ]: Like there are no good all in one platforms.
[DJ]: There are only bad ones.
[JM]: Absolutely.
[JM]: So Apple business is just a wrapper around a bunch of things that already exist, such as mobile device management or MDM managed Apple accounts, app distribution at an institutional level.
[JM]: As far as I know, these things already exist.
[JM]: The thing that's new, in addition to this wrapper around things that already exist, is this other thing that didn't exist that they are inserting inside of this wrapper, and that is ads in Apple Maps.
[DJ]: You're pausing for the cheering, right?
[JM]: You're pausing for the... What's the inverse of a laugh track?
[JM]: Because just people booing, whatever it is, I wish I had it on a soundboard right now.
[JM]: A despair track, a two minutes hate, if you will.
[JM]: And what's really terrible about it, I mean, besides everything, is that in this newsroom PR page, the header of the part of the page where they start to talk about ads doesn't say we're adding ads to Apple Maps.
[JM]: No, the heading says enhanced discoverability in Apple Maps.
[DJ]: Yeah, well, I mean, how do you enhance discoverability, right?
[DJ]: The way you enhance discoverability is pay us and we'll force people to see your thing.
[DJ]: Just like a new all-in-one platform means same thing as before but kind of worse, enhanced discoverability means ads.
[DJ]: Enhanced discoverability means you can pay us to force other people to see your thing.
[DJ]: As someone who isn't an advertiser but is an avid user of Apple Maps, this sucks and I hate it.
[JM]: Agreed.
[JM]: In part because Apple's value proposition relative to Google in part relies upon this concept of we're the anti-Google, right?
[JM]: We don't do creepy privacy destroying things.
[JM]: We don't rely on ads for our revenue like Google does.
[JM]: And this new development is just one more additional chunk removed from this value proposition.
[JM]: It's clear that this is designed for brands, right?
[JM]: Like the whole concept is that you can manage your brand name, your logo and key details
[JM]: consistently across Apple Maps wallet and other features and apps.
[JM]: And of course, as we talked about in a recent episode, Apple is doing this because their services division is where all of their growth prospects seem to be because they have as far as I'm concerned, seemingly just given up on the idea of we're going to make really innovative, interesting products that you can buy.
[JM]: and are just instead trying to figure out ways of getting you to add subscriptions or sacrifice your privacy by looking at ads and also your user experience by looking at ads.
[JM]: And so this is a good opportunity to think about alternatives to Apple Maps.
[JM]: Google Maps suffers from a lot of the same problems and probably more.
[JM]: So I personally wouldn't recommend Google Maps if your goal is to get away from the kinds of things that Apple is introducing.
[DJ]: Yeah, because Apple is trying to turn into Google Maps as quickly as possible, I guess.
[DJ]: Or more like as slowly as possible, because Apple Maps has been around a long time.
[DJ]: And when it first came out, the criticism of it was that the maps, especially the navigation directions, were a lot worse than Google's.
[DJ]: And Apple definitely caught up over time.
[DJ]: I've even still encountered people who are like, yeah, I don't know.
[DJ]: I just I heard Apple Maps wasn't very good.
[DJ]: So I downloaded Google Maps and never looked at Apple Maps again.
[DJ]: And I'm like, that's fascinating and unfortunate because like Apple Maps has been great for a decade at this point.
[DJ]: But they were trailing behind Google Maps in one important way, which was they weren't full of ads.
[DJ]: So now they've patched that they filled that gap.
[JM]: Indeed, and to that end, I'm going to mention three alternatives that you can try out.
[JM]: The first one is OpenStreetMap.
[JM]: And one of the interesting things about OpenStreetMap is the word open, because unlike most other things that have open in the title, like OpenAI,
[JM]: OpenStreetMap actually is open.
[JM]: That word actually means something.
[JM]: It is a map of the world that is editable by anyone and presumably thousands of people every day refine and provide suggestions and improvements to OpenStreetMap maps.
[JM]: Now I've used the web version of OpenStreetMap and it does seem very cool, but I have not used the mobile version.
[JM]: Dan, have you ever used the mobile version of OpenStreetMap?
[DJ]: I have, but it was a lot of years ago, so I don't know what the state of the art is.
[DJ]: I did once experiment with getting an old Android phone and installing an alternative de-Googlized fork of Android on it, and then you have the challenge of all the apps and services you're used to being on a smartphone aren't there, so where will you get them from?
[DJ]: So I was trying out an OpenStreetMap client, but I don't think that that experience is necessarily indicative of where it might be now.
[DJ]: So no, I would be interested in trying this out again and seeing what it's like to use on an iPhone in 2026 or...
[JM]: Real-time follow-up.
[JM]: I'm getting the impression that the reason I've never used the OpenStreetMap app is because there is none.
[JM]: There is no official OpenStreetMap app that I can find on the App Store.
[JM]: There's a ton of different apps that connect to it and that are essentially client versions of it.
[DJ]: I'm under the impression that might kind of be their deal.
[DJ]: I think OpenStreetMap provides maps, and then app developers can build on top of them.
[DJ]: I think that is sort of the intention.
[JM]: Yes, I agree that it is a mapping service that happens to include a web client that you can use to browse and take a look at and annotate and edit.
[JM]: And that is really its focus.
[JM]: So I'll mention the two other tools then in terms of tools that you can use that definitely are, I think, more focused on the app experience.
[JM]: And the first one is the only one of the three that I have direct experience with, and that is Organic Maps.
[JM]: And the reason that I've used Organic Maps is because it like OpenStreetMap, I believe, is designed for people to provide edits and suggestions.
[JM]: And its focus is, as far as I can tell, on hiking, cycling, hiking.
[JM]: and mapping when you may not have an internet connection.
[JM]: So offline use is one of its core focal areas.
[JM]: It's billed as one of the few applications that supports 100% of its features without an active internet connection.
[DJ]: That's cool.
[JM]: It says, install Organic Maps, download maps, throw away your SIM card, and go for a week-long trip on a single battery charge without any byte sent to the network.
[DJ]: Yeah, I mean, whether you think you can get through a trip on a single battery charge, that one's really on you.
[DJ]: But otherwise, that sounds pretty cool.
[DJ]: I think the other reason I'm attracted to Organic Maps is no pesticides.
[DJ]: Nice.
[DJ]: Listeners to the show can't see it, but the best part of that for me was watching Justin's expression in the couple of seconds before he got the joke.
[DJ]: Took me a second.
[DJ]: That's really where the money is for me.
[JM]: The ability to import and export bookmarks and waypoints in GPX, KML, KMZ, GeoJSON, and other formats I've never heard of is a very cool feature.
[JM]: And I have used the GPX feature before.
[JM]: If I'm going to go hike in some place I've never been...
[JM]: And I know that neither Google Maps nor Apple Maps is going to have any clue where I'm going or how to get me to where I want to go.
[JM]: I've used Organic Maps for this purpose, and it's been great.
[JM]: The other one is called CoMaps.
[JM]: And as far as I can tell, CoMaps is a fork of Organic Maps, which itself was a fork of maps.me.
[JM]: Continuing the long tradition of open source in which one project...
[JM]: For whatever reason, the people who work on it decide that they're not digging it and they go and they create their own thing based on the source code of the other thing.
[JM]: So now we've got maps.me, Organic Maps and CoMaps that share a lot of their code, at least historically.
[DJ]: I will deploy my time-tested technique of going to each respective GitHub repository and seeing how recently they've actually been worked on to try to decide which fork I want to use.
[DJ]: I'm curious, though, do you know what is the underlying map data of Organic Maps and CoMaps?
[DJ]: I wonder, like, are they using OpenStreetMap under the hood, or do they actually have a different source of the underlying maps?
[JM]: Both Organic Maps and CoMaps do indeed use OpenStreetMap data, which is no surprise because that is no small feat to collect and organize that much and that detailed information.
[JM]: So that does indeed seem to be where their data comes from.
[DJ]: I'm happy about that because one of the common anti-patterns that we see in big tech software is that these companies are competitors with each other.
[DJ]: So Google Maps built their really excellent high-quality maps by paying a bunch of people to drive cars all over the world with cameras, right?
[DJ]: And then when Apple wanted to build a map app, as far as I know, like for the most part, they had to do that too.
[DJ]: So now you have like two completely separate streams of incredibly laborious work being done to accomplish the exact same result for two different companies, which I'm sure we could like get into a bunch of details.
[DJ]: But bottom line, I find that sort of annoying.
[DJ]: And maybe kind of a waste of human labor.
[DJ]: And then there's the fact that now that information is the intellectual property of these private corporations who exist primarily to monetize that intellectual property, not to serve humankind with it.
[DJ]: Something like OpenStreetMap, I think, just like Wikipedia, is really an incredible achievement and like a testament to what people can do collaboratively at a massive scale and over time.
[DJ]: So I like the fact that mapping apps of this kind are saying, let's see what things we can build on top of this incredible collective achievement.
[DJ]: As opposed to, again, like you say, people fork apps for all kinds of reasons, including I didn't like which package manager they were using.
[DJ]: I would find it unfortunate if these apps were also like, well, we have to build our own source of mapping data.
[DJ]: Never mind that that's basically impossible for like an open source developer that isn't a trillion dollar company.
[DJ]: Yeah, so I'm a big fan of this space.
[DJ]: And I have to admit, I haven't explored it much.
[DJ]: I have generally been quite happy with Apple Maps for many years.
[DJ]: But this is the sort of development them starting to add advertising to it.
[DJ]: that awakens me from my slumber, and I will probably try out one or more of these apps.
[DJ]: I do also, although I haven't used it that much because I'm not a big backcountry hiker, I do also think the potential for offline with a mapping app is actually really cool.
[DJ]: So yeah, I'm going to investigate these further.
[JM]: One of the things I've noticed is that the map of the specific place that I live, like my little neighborhood, is more accurate in OpenStreetMap than it is in Google Maps.
[DJ]: Really?
[DJ]: That's interesting.
[JM]: Now, I don't know in terms of general everyday usage, deriving from point A to point B, how Organic Maps or co-maps works, because I've never really used it for that purpose.
[JM]: But I'm going to take this opportunity to remove Apple Maps from my home screen and put
[JM]: one or both of these other alternatives there and give them a test run and see how well they work.
[JM]: Because one of the things that's great about them is that you don't need an account to use either of them.
[JM]: Both Apple Maps and Google Maps.
[JM]: Well, technically, you don't have to use an account with Google Maps, but let's not kid ourselves.
[JM]: They know who you are anyway.
[JM]: Even if you never log into Google Maps, which I never do.
[JM]: But even then, they know who I am.
[JM]: I feel confident that neither Organic Maps nor CoMaps or OpenStreetMap, for that matter, have any idea who I am, nor do I think they care, which is great.
[DJ]: Agreed.
[DJ]: The sense of relief that rolled over me at the mere phrase, you don't need an account to use it, was intense.
[DJ]: So yeah, please give me more software like this.
[JM]: All right, moving on.
[JM]: In other news, ARM, a company that designs computer processors and which Apple uses to make their own chips, has decided that they want to get in on the actual production and are going to make their own CPUs.
[DJ]: To make it clear, ARM up until now, right, has been a chip designer.
[DJ]: They design processors, but not a chip manufacturer.
[DJ]: Like, they don't actually fabricate them, right?
[DJ]: And now they're going to fabricate their own?
[JM]: You are correct that, to my knowledge, they have never produced or fabbed their own chips.
[JM]: And I'm not even sure that they make specific designs so much as they design architectures upon which you can then build your own chips.
[JM]: But...
[JM]: I'm not a chip engineer and I'm a little out of my depth here, but apparently they've decided they're going to manufacture their own chips.
[JM]: And in this announcement, they say announcing ARM AGI CPU, the silicon foundation for the agentic AI cloud era.
[DJ]: And I have thoughts about this headline.
[DJ]: Do you have thoughts about how they could possibly have stuck more buzzwords in it somehow?
[DJ]: I'm not sure the laws of the English language, you know, malleable as they are, would allow for such a thing.
[DJ]: I mean, I don't know about you, Justin, but I have this agentic AI cloud right over here and I have been wondering how I was going to power it.
[JM]: Well, now you're all set because you can get, you know, sentient chips now apparently from ARM that you can put in your AI cloud.
[JM]: Or I'm sorry, your agentic AI cloud.
[DJ]: I don't think the chips themselves are sentient, but I think that when you put them in a computer, the computer becomes sentient.
[DJ]: Oh, got it.
[DJ]: Okay.
[DJ]: Or maybe you have to like network a certain number of chips in parallel and they achieve sentience.
[DJ]: One way or another, there is a sci-fi movie from the 1980s to be made here on the back of this exciting new hardware.
[JM]: If it's not clear, one of the things that I object to the most here is the AGI part of this.
[JM]: What on earth are they talking about?
[DJ]: They're talking, Justin, about artificial general intelligence, a term that used to be used to mean things, but which now doesn't mean anything because it has been completely co-opted by marketing.
[JM]: Well, and to recap, AGI itself is not some traditional term.
[JM]: It itself was coined to replace the meaningless AI term that became meaningless because everyone abused it.
[JM]: And so in a perfect encapsulation of semantic diffusion, now AGI, which was introduced to distinguish between what AI used to mean and what apparently it now means, which is nothing, itself has become a word that means nothing.
[DJ]: Don't worry, though, because I have a really exciting replacement for you.
[DJ]: Are you ready?
[DJ]: I'm ready.
[DJ]: Okay.
[DJ]: AXGI.
[DJ]: Doesn't that sound awesome?
[DJ]: Perfect.
[DJ]: I'm calling ARM right now.
[DJ]: I think they should call their next generation chip the AXGI chip.
[DJ]: What is AXGI?
[DJ]: Oh, you're not even ready to find out yet.
[JM]: At no point in this ridiculous press release do they actually claim anything about artificial general intelligence.
[JM]: It's just something they slapped on the name of this CPU without any apparent reason other than
[JM]: They're trying to capitalize on the whole, we're just going to, you know, everyone's going to just light as much money and resources on fire in order to pursue, you know, I don't know, the singularity, whatever it is that these companies are trying to do.
[JM]: But it's so absurd.
[JM]: And so not only is the AGI part of it absurd, but the idea that it's an AI CPU, right?
[JM]: which they're going out of their way to just endlessly keyword stuff in this press release is also absurd because there's nothing AI specific as far as I can tell about this CPU at all.
[JM]: There's nothing about this chip that does anything related to so-called AI.
[JM]: I understand that when you are a company and you make products, you have to sell to whatever the current hype cycle is, right?
[JM]: I guess if you made software at some point, you decided like, oh, you know what?
[JM]: We have to target NFTs because that is what everyone's talking about right now.
[JM]: And...
[JM]: And then suddenly they weren't.
[JM]: And then your software, I don't know, started endlessly being aimed and marketed at, I don't know, the metaverse or whatever the next, you know, tulip bulb craze was.
[JM]: And here we are with ARM clearly doing the same thing.
[JM]: And I just, it's hilarious and kind of pathetic.
[JM]: And I am here to dunk on it.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: The reason that they deserve the dunks in particular is, you know, you, you told me about something and I can't remember if it was a paper shredder or a humidifier, but the point is like it had the word AI or it had like a switch that put it in AI mode.
[JM]: Space heater, Amazon Basics space heater.
[DJ]: Amazon Basics, Basics yet, space heater, and it's powered by AI.
[DJ]: So like, that's so transparently just a stupid marketing thing.
[DJ]: Like, it's just like, oh, AI is exciting.
[DJ]: So put this on a space heater.
[DJ]: And like, actually, it's like, it's when you know that the term has lost all meaning is when it shows up on a space heater.
[DJ]: But the ridiculous thing is ARM designs computer chips like they actually it is actually reasonable that they could have designed a chip architecture that is somehow optimized for so-called AI for doing things like inference and training of large language models or something like that.
[DJ]: Right.
[DJ]: Like that's actually a thing a chip designer could actually do.
[DJ]: But as you're pointing out, if they have done that, they're not actually explaining it.
[DJ]: And maybe they haven't even bothered.
[DJ]: They're just like our chips are great for AGI.
[DJ]: It's like, all right, well, so are so are everyone else's, I guess.
[DJ]: Give me a break.
[DJ]: Yes.
[DJ]: It feels like the most blatant form of that, like, we're cool too, guys.
[DJ]: We want to get on board.
[DJ]: Because as you said, if there are these gigantic companies dedicated to depriving all of us hobbyist computer enthusiasts of components and also destroying the entire global economy to try to cause the singularity or whatever it is they're doing.
[DJ]: This just feels so much like someone running after the bus as it pulls away from the stop going like, no, me, me too, me.
[DJ]: Give us some of those billions of dollars, please.
[JM]: We would also like a multi-trillion dollar market cab.
[DJ]: And this is how we're going to do it.
[DJ]: You can imagine, like, I'm just getting insulting now, so sorry, ARM.
[DJ]: But, like, we were talking before about Nvidia, which is now, like, the biggest company in the world because they supply chips for so-called AI hardware.
[DJ]: And you can just imagine, like, their CEO presenting their silly video card thing where it rewrites all your graphics to make them better.
[DJ]: But like you can imagine the CEO of Nvidia standing up on stage and there's just like a miniature arm CEO like tugging at his like coat and he keeps batting him away.
[DJ]: He's like, get away.
[DJ]: Go.
[DJ]: And he's like, we're here too.
[DJ]: We're here too.
[DJ]: We're important.
[JM]: Well, the technique seems to be working because real-time follow-up, I just looked it up, and ARM is up over 21% today.
[JM]: One day.
[JM]: We'll see how long they sustain that.
[JM]: Yes, we shall.
[JM]: All right, moving on.
[JM]: In other news, Astral, an open-source company that focused on using the Rust programming language to make Python tooling faster and more robust, is now owned by OpenAI.
[JM]: Oh, good.
[JM]: A development that was met with applause by nobody other than by OpenAI and the founders and investors of Astral.
[JM]: And the backstory here is Python packaging has not been the area of the Python programming language since.
[JM]: that people have traditionally raved about.
[JM]: It has been a rather fragmented and somewhat haphazard endeavor over years.
[JM]: Now, lots of people have done really good work.
[JM]: I personally think that Python packaging gets a bit of a bad rap, but I do understand the feelings around it.
[JM]: I myself have
[JM]: moved from pip to poetry, only to find problems there, to move on to another tool called PDM, which I really rather like, only to find myself somewhat but not fully swept up in the whole UV craze.
[JM]: UV is a tool made by Astral.
[JM]: And UV has really taken the Python world by storm and has been widely adopted and is the heir apparent of all things Python packaging and dependency management.
[JM]: Or at least it was, because now I think there's a big question mark, at least speaking for myself and apparently just some of the reactions that I've seen to this news.
[JM]: There are other folks that are as concerned about it as I am, because I've experimented with UV and use it here and there.
[JM]: But I haven't taken the step of switching to it across all of the projects that I maintain.
[JM]: And at this point, that feels like a rather smart move.
[JM]: Because I have conflicting thoughts about adopting a tool that's now being financially supported and ultimately controlled by a corporation that I don't really want to support.
[JM]: And like most things open source, the good news is if there is sufficient motivation, sufficient reason to do it, the community can fork the various projects that Astral has developed and continue working on them and developing them in a way in which is more consistent with their values.
[JM]: But of course, that requires a significant amount of time and resources.
[JM]: And the only way presumably that that happened here was because the founders got an influx of venture capital.
[JM]: and were paid well, and incentivized to put in all of that time and effort.
[JM]: And it's much harder to do when you are volunteering your time, which is how most open source projects are run.
[JM]: And so you see this pattern now where folks are starting open source projects with the idea of, if we get this big enough,
[JM]: we can get Aqua hired by some gigantic company.
[JM]: And that paid off well here for the founders and the investors.
[JM]: But it's a pattern that I'm not sure pays off particularly well for everyone else, all the people who use this software.
[DJ]: What do you think, Dan?
[DJ]: That it mattered.
[DJ]: I also hadn't been like publishing libraries or collaborating on stuff.
[DJ]: So there really wasn't, I didn't really need like the sort of management experience that you get from a tool like poetry or PDM or etc.
[DJ]: And so I just hadn't really learned about any of them.
[DJ]: But I kept hearing about UV from Simon Willison, who I follow because his blog is fantastic.
[DJ]: And it sounded like a really cool tool.
[DJ]: So at one point, I tried it out.
[DJ]: And yeah, it rapidly became like now when I want to start a Python project, I just go UV in it.
[DJ]: Like I use it from the beginning.
[DJ]: And so yeah, I wasn't particularly happy to hear that it had been
[DJ]: acquired for all the reasons that you just said.
[DJ]: You hadn't gone in with both feet yet.
[DJ]: So what are you using for most of your projects?
[DJ]: PDM?
[JM]: Yes.
[DJ]: Okay.
[DJ]: So you might say, okay, I'm mostly going to stay on PDM and I might just not play with UV that much anymore.
[DJ]: And I think I'm kind of in the opposite boat where like, I'm going to keep using UV until it becomes pretty clear that like, oh, this thing is dead in the water or some other thing because of its
[DJ]: acquisition.
[DJ]: And then I might consider, okay, let's go take a look at, at something like PDM.
[DJ]: My real hope though, is that UV does get forked because that will give the community the opportunity to advance the letters in the command line tool.
[DJ]: And then it would be VW.
[DJ]: And I think it would be very funny to use a command line tool called VW.
[JM]: I have never liked the UV name.
[JM]: I always thought it was kind of silly.
[JM]: Like, do you call it UV?
[JM]: Some people, I think, I'm guessing some people pronounce it of.
[JM]: I don't know why you would ever pronounce it that way, but I don't know.
[JM]: The ambiguity itself is a problem.
[JM]: I just think the name is terrible.
[JM]: But again, naming is hard.
[DJ]: It's pronounced Quo-Buzz.
[DJ]: I assume that you, I mean, Astral is the name of the company, which has kind of like a cosmic theme.
[DJ]: And so I assume UV is like an abbreviation for ultraviolet radiation.
[DJ]: Probably.
[DJ]: I still don't get why that's a good name for a piece of software, but whatever.
[DJ]: I mean, I think its main advantage is it's a very short command to type, right?
[DJ]: Two-letter commands are a beautiful thing, but there's only so many of them.
[JM]: I think you are correct that that was the prime criterion, yes.
[DJ]: So VW, look for it soon, people, coming from the open source community.
[DJ]: And then presumably being sued by Volkswagen, but... Can't wait.
[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]: Reach out with your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.