Episode 70 – The Condensed Tabs of Ronnie
Scott: Friends with Brews.
Scott: I guess it matters more if we’re like in the middle of recording.
Scott: At the start, go ahead and stop.
Scott: If we’re in the middle, just keep rolling.
Scott: Let’s do it that way.
Peter: It’s fine.
Peter: But we’re at the start.
Peter: Once again, take two, Friends with Brews.
Peter: Episode something.
Peter: I…
Scott: I don’t…
Peter: Wow.
Scott: I can’t even, Peter.
Peter: It’s…
Peter: This is…
Peter: It’s a day, we’re off to a great end.
Peter: We’re doing this because we like it?
Scott: You know what?
Scott: I’m actually slightly worried about my eero because we’ve only had these connection problems since I got the eero.
Scott: But the Slack problems, I think, we thought were on your end.
Scott: I don’t know what’s going on.
Scott: Anyway, here’s what…
Scott: Every time we record now, here’s what I think to myself.
Peter: Settle in.
Peter: This looks like it’s going to be a long one.
Scott: So let’s not bore the listeners with technology.
Scott: Let’s bore them with technology.
Peter: Let’s logically techno them.
Scott: First, let’s bore them with coffee.
Peter: Oh, I was going to say we should bore them with introductions, really.
Scott: Who are you?
Peter: I’m Peter.
Peter: Who are you?
Scott: I thought you were Mark.
Scott: I’m Scott.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: I’m a tech guy based on the East Coast.
Scott: I’m a guy based on the West Coast.
Scott: I don’t want to say…
Peter: You do tech too.
Scott: I do.
Scott: However, given my recent trouble shouting, it always leads to trouble shouting.
Peter: Trouble shouting.
Peter: I haven’t heard that one before.
Scott: I always use that word.
Scott: Nobody at work knows what I mean when I say trouble shouting.
Scott: You’re the only person that’s ever laughed at that.
Scott: Everyone else is like…
Peter: That is awesome.
Peter: I trouble shout all the time.
Peter: Oh my goodness.
Scott: So anyway, given my recent record, I don’t want to claim to be a tiny bit more…
Peter: Trouble shouter.
Peter: All right.
Peter: Oh man.
Scott: Oh my God.
Peter: All right.
Peter: So no, we both…
Peter: You know what?
Peter: I hate to say this, my levels are looking a little high.
Scott: They sound a little high.
Peter: I need to crank myself down just a touch, which means that somewhere around the two-minute marker, so you’re going to need to come back down a little bit.
Peter: So, or boost me up a little bit.
Peter: I’m coming back down.
Peter: I think I’m in better, more acceptable levels at this point.
Scott: Sounds fine.
Peter: Okay.
Peter: So let’s talk.
Peter: We are Friends and we are drinking brews.
Peter: And when we started this podcast, we have…
Peter: Now, let’s be clear.
Peter: We have started multiple podcasts together.
Peter: I wouldn’t say many, but I’d say several.
Scott: I’d say many several.
Peter: Several many podcasts together.
Peter: And this is the latest of them.
Peter: When this one started, though, it was Friends with Beers.
Scott: Yes, very specifically.
Peter: However, I am no longer ashamed to admit that we are of a certain age where drinking beers regularly can be not conducive to health.
Peter: Let’s just start with that.
Peter: But also…
Scott: It doesn’t feel good either.
Peter: Yeah, the other thing too is like, I like to get a good night’s sleep.
Peter: And a few months ago, I heard on an Andrew Huberman short cast, he said, he basically reviewed a study that showed if you have to get up and use the bathroom multiple times at night, it’s probably, well, possibly, there’s a couple of reasons.
Peter: One is like, oh, you know, prostate stuff.
Peter: But if you’re not that old and, you know, you’re still having the thing, maybe it’s because you’re drinking too late in the day.
Peter: And contrary to what I thought, it’s not like the number of hours before you go to bed.
Peter: It’s the number of hours after you get out of bed.
Peter: So a study showed, I don’t remember, we’ve talked, I’ve talked about this on a podcast.
Peter: I don’t remember if it was this one.
Peter: Oh, it might have been another one.
Peter: But essentially, your kidney functions are most active during the first 10 hours of waking.
Peter: So I try to do all my drinking earlier and get done by…
Scott: He pours it on his Cheerios, people.
Peter: Beer is not just for breakfast anymore.
Peter: But I try to like not drink any liquids after, say, four or five o’clock.
Peter: And we were generally recording on Mondays around five o’clock my time.
Peter: So that made it difficult.
Peter: So, but anyway, I digress.
Peter: We get back to what we’re talking about now.
Peter: We pivoted this podcast into Friends with Brews many episodes ago.
Peter: And so instead of pounding beers, you know, sometimes two or more per podcast.
Peter: Now we drink coffee.
Peter: And sometimes since again, it’s a late in the day kind of thing.
Peter: It’s usually decaf coffee.
Scott: So we have really tempered ourselves fully more from always drinking beer and being wild and crazy to standing here leaning against our desks with our cane in our other hand, drinking decaf coffee every time now.
Scott: It’s super funny.
Scott: And the podcast hasn’t even been running for that many years.
Peter: It’s just…
Peter: This is episode 69, dudes.
Scott: Right.
Peter: So there you go.
Peter: Anyway, speaking of coffee, what are you drinking today?
Scott: I am drinking a Depper and Wise Roasters, Decaf Columbia Amigos de Huelia.
Scott: How do you say that?
Peter: The H-U-I-L-A.
Peter: Huelia.
Scott: Huelia.
Peter: I think the H is probably sounding as an H.
Peter: I’m sure it is, yeah.
Scott: Huelia.
Scott: This is honey, brown sugar, and cherry.
Scott: And it is whole bean.
Scott: It is a sugar cane process.
Scott: I don’t know what that means.
Scott: And it is comforting.
Scott: It says it’s comforting, Peter, and damn it, I feel comforted right now.
Peter: So you and the folks over at ATP turned me on to trade coffee.
Peter: I’m assuming the folks at ATP turned you on to trade coffee, but I don’t know if that’s true.
Scott: I actually think it might have been, but I think it might have been Huber that pushed me over the edge.
Peter: Okay, so one of those guys turned you on to trade.
Peter: You convinced me to do it.
Scott: This was not purchased through trade coffee.
Scott: This was purchased at a local coffee shop.
Peter: Oh, interesting.
Peter: Well, I am drinking a blend, and it’s Peter’s proprietary blend of four different, yes, four different different coffees.
Scott: I know, when I saw the show notes, I was like, what is Peter doing?
Scott: Is he drunk?
Peter: He put like three coffees in there.
Peter: I’m like, no, four, you idiot.
Scott: Type cookie, you idiot.
Peter: Yeah, type cookie, you idiot.
Peter: Primarily, this is my decaf Columbia Palo Rosa, which is from Trade Coffee.
Peter: We covered this on the previous episode.
Peter: But it’s also mixed with a modest dose of Wegmans decaf espresso whole bean, which is a frequent flyer on this one.
Peter: Probably one of my favorite decafs.
Peter: But also, I cut it with a little bit of Tamper Coffee Oden, which is their medium roast espresso, medium espresso, no, espresso roast.
Peter: Tamper being a local coffee shop here in Medford, Mass.
Peter: And also a little bit of, get this, Safeway slash Shaw’s signature select coffee whole bean dark roast Italian roast.
Peter: So it’s a mix of, you know, like boutique foo foo coffees and supermarket coffees.
Peter: And you might wonder, well, how does that taste?
Peter: Well, I made some for my girlfriend a while ago, and she had a few days ago, and she’s not been drinking nearly as much coffee lately.
Peter: But she said in her elegant words, when we run out of this, I stopped drinking coffee.
Scott: Wow.
Peter: And what she was like, this is so good that I can’t drink anything else.
Peter: I’m like, well, good news is, I know all the ingredients.
Peter: Now, do I know the exact ratios?
Peter: Not really.
Peter: I know that it was a two to one mix of the decafs to the calves, but I don’t know how much of a proportion of decaf Polaroza to Wegmans versus signature select to tamper coffee’s Oden.
Peter: So some experimentation might be required.
Scott: So what you’re saying is you’re drinking half calf decaf with a twist of Polo?
Peter: It’s two thirds decaf.
Peter: Oh, yeah, two-thirds decaf, one-third calf.
Peter: So with two teaspoons of cream.
Peter: So there you go.
Scott: Peter, I didn’t expect to take this tangent, and I don’t want to go down it for too long because it was unplanned.
Scott: But what’s that guy’s name?
Scott: Haberman?
Peter: Oh, Andrew Huberman, Huberman Lab.
Scott: That guy, he’s got issues.
Scott: That guy has been known to make stuff up.
Scott: Not everything he cites is proven to be real at all.
Scott: Like some of the stuff just doesn’t exist.
Scott: He also recently got caught lying to about eight different women telling them they were the only one.
Scott: I mean, he’s a sleaze.
Peter: Oh, really?
Scott: Yeah, this guy is…
Peter: Oh, good.
Peter: Wonderful.
Scott: Yeah.
Peter: Okay.
Peter: So is everyone out on the internet just full of a sham?
Peter: I mean, like…
Scott: No, it’s these male thought leaders that are…
Scott: Any time a guy steps up and acts like I am a young, powerful…
Scott: These thought leaders, all these guys are total…
Scott: I don’t know why.
Scott: It must take an ego to try to fill this role or something.
Scott: I don’t know what it is, Peter, but…
Scott: Yeah, I didn’t know anything about him.
Scott: And I started doing a lot of research into him.
Scott: And then I found this thing about all these women.
Scott: And it’s just crazy.
Scott: The guy is insane.
Scott: Like he is…
Scott: He’s a character, man.
Peter: This is great.
Peter: Yeah, of course.
Peter: So now I need to go out.
Peter: I need to go and find the study that he cited and look at it myself.
Scott: Well, it sounds reasonable.
Scott: It could be false.
Peter: Sure.
Peter: So here’s the thing.
Peter: When I started doing it, I definitely did notice that I need to get up and use the bathroom less at night.
Peter: So I think there’s something to that.
Scott: I’m sure there is.
Scott: Yeah.
Peter: But, you know, my question goes to, or my brain goes right to, OK, what would be the incentive for lying?
Peter: Why would he make that up, for instance?
Peter: Is it just to get page views, you know?
Peter: Or I suppose that’s the number one reason.
Peter: But it’s not like he was selling a product that, you know, like, drink this and you won’t need to use the restroom at night.
Scott: You know, I don’t know.
Scott: To be honest, I don’t remember if it’s things that he supposedly studied that he kind of half-asses, or if he just makes stuff up that supposedly other people did.
Scott: If he’s citing someone else, it may well be true.
Scott: Here’s the other thing about that, though.
Scott: When you drink, you’re gonna necessarily need to pee more and your body’s gonna be more active in that regard.
Scott: It could just be a function of time.
Scott: It may not actually have anything to do with what your body does in the morning versus what it does later.
Scott: It might just be a function of time.
Peter: But here’s the thing.
Peter: I tried this for years.
Peter: Like, I tried, like, okay, I’m not gonna drink for three hours before bedtime, right?
Peter: And then I tried, okay, I’m not gonna drink four hours before bedtime.
Peter: And then, you know, it seemed to be more and more less.
Peter: And of course, you know, it changes depending on what I’m doing for, you know, like exercise and stuff.
Peter: Because if I’m out in the middle, I’m still running on, you know, like a marathon or an ultra towards the end of the day in sunset.
Peter: I’m gonna keep drinking, not beer.
Peter: But well, I mean, no, that’s not true.
Peter: I did drink beer on my ultra marathon.
Peter: Mile 18, if I recall correctly.
Scott: Well, you just had a quick chug of a sip of beer.
Peter: Oh, man, that was so much fun.
Scott: Anyway, all I’m saying is just look into it.
Scott: He’s probably not.
Scott: I don’t know.
Peter: It’s weird.
Peter: This is great.
Peter: Anyway, yeah.
Peter: And then again, it turns out like, okay, what if in this case, this study is true, but he is full of it?
Scott: It could be.
Peter: Right?
Scott: I mean, Oh, no, no, no, it could very well be.
Peter: It’s just Did I say liver function?
Peter: I meant kidney function.
Peter: I might have said liver, but anyway.
Scott: Anyway, let’s get off that tangent, because that’s depressing.
Peter: It is now.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: Oh, brother.
Peter: Okay.
Peter: Well, great.
Peter: Wonder what else we got.
Scott: Well, speaking of depressing things, let’s talk to, so you have a note here that says, Peter’s updates shoulder and the fall.
Scott: Are you talking about the fall as in the season of the fall?
Scott: Or did you fall on your, what happened?
Peter: Yeah, I tripped yesterday.
Peter: I was out for a walk.
Scott: Oh, no.
Peter: And it was great.
Peter: No, I’m fine.
Peter: It like it hurt when I landed.
Peter: I’ll send you a photo.
Peter: I don’t know if we’ll put, let’s not put this in the show notes, but I just sent you a picture.
Scott: One job right now.
Scott: One.
Peter: Right.
Peter: I fell.
Peter: Now I was wearing the sling, not that it did anything.
Peter: Actually, I think it probably contributed to the fall.
Peter: I was out for a walk and I was taking it.
Peter: There’s this place in the highest one of the, I think it’s probably the highest elevation in the city proper of Medford.
Peter: I think it’s called Terrace Drive or something.
Peter: And there’s a steep set of old stone and stairs to get up there.
Peter: And I’m a little bit lopsided walking with this sling and it’s non-standard height.
Peter: It’s like they’re high steps.
Peter: And I was up at about 15 steps up or so.
Peter: And I misjudged one of the heights of the steps.
Peter: And I started to fall forward with bad elbow, bad shoulder falling first.
Peter: Right foot caught on the stair and then slipped down, scraping the outer side of my right shin.
Scott: I see that.
Peter: And give it a good scratch.
Peter: And I landed hard on the affected elbow or the elbow of the affected side.
Scott: Oh, that’s a bad way to land.
Peter: Hurt, hurt, hurt.
Peter: And well, and the thing is, like with my left hand, I grabbed the railing, right?
Peter: But all that did was pivot me and spin, you know, pirouette me around down to the ground.
Scott: But it probably also did keep the full weight of your body from jamming upwards on that shoulder.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: Well, no, it accelerated it.
Peter: It made me spin into it.
Scott: I would have just fallen flat down.
Scott: But that arm on the rail wasn’t holding any of your body weight?
Peter: It was, but as a result, like centripetal force, right?
Peter: That acted as the center of the fulcrum, and I spun around it.
Peter: I orbited around it.
Peter: So my elbow that hit was the fastest moving part.
Peter: I was at the outside, the part that impacted was the fastest moving part of the wheel.
Peter: So I think it did more damage because otherwise I would have landed and evenly distributed my weight between both hands.
Peter: Or maybe I would have used my right hand to walk, you know, grab a railing on the right side or something.
Peter: But anyway, regardless, it’s fine, you know, no permanent damage, just hurt a little bit, but it’s disconcerting, you know, when that happened.
Peter: But hey, I’m better.
Scott: Have you thought about wrapping yourself in foam and staying indoors for about three months?
Peter: You’re not the first person who has suggested that.
Scott: Let me guess her name.
Peter: There you go.
Peter: So moving on.
Peter: So yes, it’s been almost three weeks now.
Peter: Actually, yeah, I’m just I’m at the three week mark post surgery.
Peter: That means three more weeks in a sling.
Peter: And at this current rate, maybe three more months in a sling, though.
Peter: And then I can start running again.
Peter: And to challenge myself, I did sign up for a 5K on June 30th.
Scott: Oh, nice.
Peter: So I’m not planning on setting any records that day, but I will be running a race on June 30th.
Peter: So I’ll get back into running then.
Scott: Peter can run a 5K with one arm tied behind his back.
Peter: Prefers not to, though.
Scott: So do not get on a bicycle for a while, okay?
Peter: Yeah, that’s going to be probably July.
Peter: So maybe June.
Peter: Well, yeah, July, July.
Peter: Yeah, July will be bicycle.
Scott: I’m just thinking if you fall, like if you fall, it’s going to be really bad.
Peter: Anyway, all right, back to you.
Peter: Ping pong these topics.
Scott: Just in regards to the fitness thing, I’ve been slowing it down a lot lately too, just because of whatever’s going on with my sciatic.
Scott: It’s getting better.
Scott: However, I don’t know what’s going on.
Scott: For a long time, I’ve had a weird popping in my lower back when I do certain movements.
Scott: It just pops.
Scott: It doesn’t hurt at all, but it just feels weird and I don’t like it.
Scott: I’m sure it’s related to whatever’s going on with my sciatic thing.
Peter: Have you thought about having the popcorn popper surgically removed from your lumbar spine?
Scott: No, but I am going to go get an x-ray pretty soon just to make sure nothing weird is going on.
Scott: My doctor is pretty happy with my back.
Scott: He had me do all these weird things, and he thinks that my back is pretty good.
Scott: He also doesn’t think that I’ve actually lost any physical strength in this leg at all.
Scott: He just thinks that it’s because of the slight pain when I do certain things from the sciatica that it feels weaker.
Scott: So he thinks I’m in pretty good shape, actually.
Scott: He just thinks we need to manage it.
Scott: So probably what I’m going to do is go get the x-ray to make sure nothing really bad is going on, which I don’t think it is, and then go to a chiropractor and see how it goes from there.
Scott: And then just continue to manage it by tailoring my exercises to not aggravate it anymore.
Peter: So tell him that you have a friend who’s not a doctor and he doesn’t play one on the internet, but his suggestion was if there’s a popcorn popper in your lumbar spine, maybe consider surgery.
Peter: Let’s just take that with a grain of salt.
Scott: Yeah, I’m going to go right to him right now.
Scott: I’m going to bust into whatever exam room he’s in with whoever he’s in with.
Scott: I’m going to say, listen, I have got, yeah.
Scott: Yep.
Scott: I’ve got a…
Peter: I know a guy.
Scott: Yeah.
Peter: I know a guy.
Scott: I know a guy.
Scott: He’s got a podcast and 20 girlfriends.
Peter: And his name is Andrew Huberman.
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: And here’s what he says.
Peter: He says this.
Peter: He’s a doctor.
Peter: He’s a doctor and he plays one on the internet.
Scott: All right.
Scott: Before we get to the funny AI stuff, I just want to say a couple of things real quick.
Scott: Ronnie got me, so I’ve been using Safari with normal with traditional tabs for a long time.
Scott: And I saw a screenshot from Ronnie and he was using the condensed tabs which came out in, I don’t remember how many OS’s go, two or three, whatever.
Scott: And I thought, man, that looks nice but it just doesn’t work for me.
Scott: And then I started looking at my tabs and I thought, why doesn’t it work for me?
Scott: These tabs don’t show me anything more.
Scott: They show me the web page icon and that’s it because I have so many open, right?
Scott: So I thought, you know, if I just, and then I just, I have never thought about the fact that the Safari toolbar is imminently customizable.
Scott: So I took a whole bunch of extensions out of the Safari toolbar, they just don’t even show up there anymore.
Scott: And now I’ve got the condensed view and it looks great.
Peter: How does one toggle the condensed view?
Scott: You go into Safari Preferences, Settings, Tabs, and it’s the Compact View, sorry.
Scott: Tab layout, separate or compact.
Peter: Oh, okay.
Scott: Yeah.
Peter: Interesting.
Scott: So, and then it’ll help if you take a whole bunch of extensions out.
Scott: And you can do that by right-clicking on the toolbar and saying Customize Toolbar, and then just drag the ones you don’t want anymore out of your actual Safari window toolbar into that floating window that appears.
Peter: Got it.
Peter: Okay, cool.
Peter: I still have to admit, I don’t use Safari as my primary browser on the Mac, just because so many sites that I use on a daily basis require Chrome.
Peter: That said, I have recently been playing with very recently and very minimally Arc, the Arc browser.
Peter: You had recommended that to me a while ago.
Scott: I did.
Scott: I did.
Scott: And then it started grading on my nerves.
Peter: I’m having trouble getting into it.
Peter: But I’m not sure.
Scott: I’m not sure you should get into it.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: Like some of the stuff I saw a review, some AI guy was using it as part of his workflow and he uses all these blah, blah, blah.
Peter: He had a couple of things that were interesting.
Peter: One thing that looked really cool was just the quick side by side view, like on an iPad or like on a Mac, how you can just say put this window here and this one here.
Peter: But I’m finding it really difficult to properly and quickly switch between different tabs, like navigating the browser.
Peter: I’m like, where did it go?
Peter: And I have to like command W, close out of things just to find where I started.
Scott: Well, I just found myself constantly opening the sidebar to figure out where the hell my tabs were.
Scott: And if I’m going to have the sidebar open anyway, I might as well just have the tab showing at the top of the window.
Peter: Boom.
Peter: So that said, I do, I generally prefer to put my tabs to the side of the window.
Peter: And I just realized in Chrome, I don’t have that anymore.
Peter: I don’t know what happened to that.
Peter: I got to figure that out.
Scott: Yeah, I don’t know.
Scott: I don’t know.
Scott: In most browsers, I don’t know of any way to do that.
Peter: I know in Firefox, I used a, an extension back in the day called tree style tabs.
Peter: But I’m not sure.
Peter: But I will find that out.
Peter: Tabs, I’m sure there’s an extension for it.
Peter: So anyway, vertical tabs, vertical tabs in the Chrome Web Store.
Peter: Oh, it gets three whole stars.
Peter: Three out of five.
Peter: Wow, that’s awesome.
Scott: The reason I like Safari is it has the best combination of privacy and performance.
Scott: It performs very well on the Mac better than anything else.
Scott: Everything else is a dog compared to Safari.
Scott: And to, to answer your problem of stuff that needs Chrome, I just use Chrome when I’m doing stuff that requires and most of the stuff that requires that is, I say work-related, you know what I’m talking about.
Scott: It’s stuff that you’re doing a specific thing.
Scott: So I just use Chrome for that.
Scott: It’s like, why not?
Scott: And I’ve got a raycast thing where all I type is DEF for default.
Scott: I can hit command one or two, whichever depending on whether it says set Chrome as default at the top or set Safari default.
Scott: Anyway, I’ve got both of those.
Scott: I just toggle it and I can change my default browser instantly.
Scott: And how do you do that?
Scott: I have a command script set up.
Scott: I will get you set up with that.
Peter: Yeah, share that with me and our listener.
Peter: That is interesting.
Scott: I wrote a blog post on this.
Peter: There you go.
Peter: We need that.
Peter: So I have been, for many years now, not just several years, I have been resistant to overly customizing my workstation.
Peter: And one of the things was back in the day, I used to be a computer consultant, meaning I would run around and fix people’s computers.
Peter: And I was constantly using not my computer.
Peter: I was using something else.
Peter: So I didn’t want to get overly dependent on having all of my tools available.
Peter: I wanted to be able to do the best that I could with whatever tools were present on the operating system by default, because those are what I could count on being present.
Peter: A technique now made popular by hackers known as living off the land, right?
Peter: You don’t have to install stuff.
Peter: You just use what’s native to the operating system.
Peter: What a radical idea.
Peter: I’ve been doing this for decades.
Peter: Anyway, recently though, probably inspired a little bit by you, but also a little bit by Daniel Measler.
Peter: I have been adding some shortcuts.
Peter: But rather than necessarily making scripts, if they’re like one-liners, I’m just using the alias commands to make things more friendly to me on my laptop.
Peter: So for example, like I have a shortcut to update fabric, right?
Peter: Instead of saying fabric dash dash update, I just say uf, update fabric, go.
Peter: And I also have update brew, ub.
Peter: So I frequently will do those two together.
Peter: ub, comma, or ub, semicolon, uf, update brew, update fabric.
Peter: Because they’re changing so often, I want to get the latest versions.
Peter: I also alias v to vi.
Peter: Why?
Peter: I mean, it saved me only one keystroke, but that’s also 50% of the keystrokes to launch my editor, right?
Scott: Very good point.
Peter: So I’ve been doing those things.
Peter: And the nice thing is it’s relatively portable.
Peter: If it’s just in my z profile folder, you know, file, I can just copy and paste that anywhere.
Scott: Yeah, but consider this, okay?
Scott: Now, it is a little slower, so continue to use your aliases for things that make sense.
Scott: But warp, which we both use, has workflows, and you can save commands and chains of commands as workflows.
Scott: So when you have a workflow, you can just execute that workflow.
Scott: Now, it’s a little slower because you have to hit Ctrl R and then start typing work, and then you tab over to complete that, and then you type the name of your workflow and hit Enter.
Peter: I’m really resistant to do that, though.
Peter: I love warp.
Peter: I’m really, really, really enjoying warp as my default terminal.
Peter: I never thought I would say, wow, I love this terminal emulator because I never realized the things that a terminal emulator could and should be doing.
Peter: But I often have to use a Windows box for work.
Peter: But even then, if I’m SSH-ing into another Linux box somewhere, I can do all the same stuff I could.
Scott: You can.
Scott: But here’s how.
Peter: And install warp for Windows.
Scott: No, no, no.
Scott: So in Raycast, I typed a snippet.
Scott: I have a snippet saved.
Scott: And that snippet is called warp subshell.
Scott: And it is literally a printf statement that you execute in on whatever server you’re in as whatever account you’re going to be doing it on.
Scott: I do this on certain other Linux boxes that you and I know about all the time.
Scott: And it warpifies the shell so that now you have all the same blocks just like you do on your local host.
Scott: You have the same workflow capabilities.
Scott: You can type command R and type workflow and get your workflows.
Scott: All of that is there.
Scott: And it’s just one simple command.
Scott: I’ll show it to you.
Scott: This is what I’m saying.
Scott: You can warpify your remote shells just by doing that.
Scott: And all you have to do is save it as a snippet in Raycast.
Peter: Stupid question.
Peter: Could I do that on just plain old Mac terminal then and not even need warp?
Scott: No, because it’s a command that works with warp in order to provide those features.
Scott: Those features are part of warp.
Peter: But if I’m working from a Windows box…
Scott: No, they won’t work with Windows.
Peter: That’s what I’m saying.
Peter: I’m not always using my Mac sometimes.
Peter: And the thing is for…
Scott: Oh, actually, there’s warp for Windows now.
Peter: I think you’re right.
Peter: Actually, I know there’s warp for Linux.
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: So if you’re using warp on Windows, the answer is yes, that should work.
Peter: Interesting.
Scott: Anyway, I’m not telling you that that is the better way or the easier way at all.
Scott: What I am saying is it’s an option that you probably thought wasn’t an option.
Peter: I see warp for Windows as coming soon.
Scott: Oh.
Peter: But there’s a wait list, which I am signing up for.
Peter: But again, that’s the thing, is like now I really…
Peter: Now all of a sudden, I’m saying, hey, Windows, I’m getting away from PowerShell, which I’ve just become really comfortable with.
Scott: Oh, you should be.
Peter: Well, you bet I could still run PowerShell.
Peter: I could run PowerShell within Warp.
Scott: There’s nothing stopping me from it.
Scott: Yeah, and you can run PowerShell on the Mac, too.
Peter: Right.
Scott: Here’s the problem.
Scott: Anytime, when you’re doing the kinds of things that you do, Peter, you are going to run into a ton of things where some things are available on your platform and some aren’t.
Scott: And you can either say, I will never use anything that’s…
Scott: Or you can say, I really want to get my work done, and these things help me get a lot done fast.
Scott: I’m just going to embrace it.
Peter: Well, I was just going to say is, I think it’s an 80-20 rule.
Peter: And the thing is, if 80% of the time I’m using my machine and I can make that 80% 80% more productive, or even that 80% 20% more productive, that is going to overrule and outweigh the loss that I will experience using someone else’s computer.
Scott: Yeah, yeah.
Scott: I mean, there’s certain things that are so much faster because of the way I have my Mac set up right now.
Scott: That it’s worth it to me, even though when I get on someone else’s Mac, I am lost for a few minutes.
Peter: Yep.
Scott: It’s fine.
Scott: It’s worth it because I’m using my Mac so many hours per day for so many things, and I can do what I want so much faster with muscle memory now so quickly, where it’s all automated.
Scott: I just need to remember a couple of keystrokes and it will do this whole thing for me.
Scott: Yes, I’m going to do that.
Scott: I understand the vanilla approach, and a lot of people have done that because when they hop from Mac to Mac, but I’m not hopping from Mac to Mac all the time.
Scott: I just am not.
Peter: That makes sense.
Scott: And when I go between Windows and Mac, it’s like, I’m on Windows now, I’m going to operate the Windows way, and that’s pretty much how it has to be.
Scott: Because for my job with my Windows laptop, I can’t bring a lot of these tools to it.
Scott: I just can’t.
Scott: I won’t be allowed to, and so I’m not going to.
Scott: But it’s just how it is.
Scott: So I already have to have different work modes, and I just accept that.
Scott: I just say, I want to get good at this work mode when I’m on this Windows PC, I’ll set it up to work as best it can.
Scott: When I’m on my Mac, I’ll set it up to work as best it can.
Peter: Yep.
Peter: No, that makes sense.
Peter: Again, I think that’s an 80-20 rule, though.
Peter: If most of the time you’re using your machine.
Peter: Again, that’s the thing.
Peter: It’s like, I don’t do tech support anymore, right?
Peter: So I’m not regularly, and that’s the thing is, but 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, at least half of my time, I was on other people’s computers.
Scott: I will admit, there are some people’s Macs that I look at, and I see the way they have stuff arranged.
Scott: I’m like, how do you live this way?
Scott: I don’t even, like, I’m talking about-
Peter: It’s a John Syracuse a moment, isn’t it?
Scott: It is.
Scott: It’s like, I’m talking about to the extent where certain things in the finder just aren’t even there.
Scott: And I’m like, where’d you put that?
Scott: Where’d it go?
Scott: How did you do that?
Scott: Like, what is happening here?
Scott: It’s weird.
Scott: Anyway, speaking of the work and Mac laptops, I had a, as you know, I had a separate desk for my Lenovo PC, my work laptop.
Scott: I had dual monitors.
Scott: I had a different docking state.
Scott: And I thought, why am I doing this?
Scott: I wonder if I could successfully use my OWC Thunderbolt dock and my Apple Studio display that I use with my Mac or my PC without causing any issues.
Scott: And of course, the listener is probably thinking, why would it cause issues, you idiot?
Scott: The changes are in the computers themselves, and that’s what you’re swapping out.
Scott: Yes, and, but the Apple Studio display is also a computer.
Scott: It’s got a CPU in it, it’s got a little OS running, and I was like, I don’t want to cause any weird mode changes that make things happen on my Mac when I go back to it.
Scott: It doesn’t.
Scott: It works fine.
Scott: It works great.
Scott: And oh my God, Peter, I have so much resolution now.
Scott: Windows is like 5120 by 2880.
Scott: Yes, please.
Scott: When I remote into servers now, and we run software that has giant UIs, and I was constantly horizontally scrolling before.
Scott: Oh my God, it’s so amazing.
Scott: I have so much space now.
Scott: I can see everything I need to.
Scott: And it’s just, I’m like, why didn’t I do this a long time ago?
Scott: So listener, if you have a Mac, and you’re using some kind of Thunderbolt dock, and you’ve got an Apple Studio display, but you also have to use a work PC, you can do this.
Scott: And I’m sure everyone but me knows this.
Scott: This is my Marco moment.
Scott: Bicycles, Peter.
Scott: People ride bicycles on the beach.
Peter: Oh, and did you know that you can get a drill with a, you know what grommets are, right?
Peter: We’ve talked about grommets before.
Peter: Did you know that you can get a drill attachment that makes grommets?
Scott: No way.
Peter: And yet that guy is worth more than you and I combined, I’m sure.
Scott: He’s very smart.
Scott: By the way, I used one of those things the other day, only it was a doorknob one.
Scott: It was a doorknob size one.
Peter: You use a doorknob sized grommet?
Scott: No, not for a grommet.
Scott: I used it to put a door lock on a smart lock.
Scott: I’m just saying, I know what those things are.
Scott: It’s basically the same thing, except the grommet ones are smaller.
Scott: Anyway, so that’s that.
Scott: And I’m running my Mac desktop now at, if you go into system settings and go into display, by default it’ll just show you like five different settings.
Scott: There’s large text, then there’s another one, then there’s default, then there’s another one, then there’s more space.
Scott: I’m running it at more space, which works out to be 3200 by 1800.
Scott: And the bad thing, as you and I have talked about in a past episode, is there is no way system-wide to increase font size.
Scott: It’s really dumb.
Scott: I don’t know why.
Scott: If an app supports it, you can command plus, or certain apps have settings, and you can increase the font size to a certain amount, but not very much.
Scott: So if I was running at the full 5120 by 2880, I would not be able to read anything on my desktop, for example.
Scott: Now in the Finder, I can increase the font size to a point, but not very big.
Scott: Anyway, at this resolution, it works great.
Scott: I’ve got way more space now.
Scott: I don’t know why I wasn’t doing this a long time ago.
Scott: I just never did.
Scott: So I don’t know.
Scott: I’m just, I’m loving my high…
Scott: This is where I think people who use Windows computers and the standard displays that most people use with PCs, they don’t know what they’re missing.
Scott: Even a 4K monitor, not, not, I don’t know.
Scott: It’s just, it’s just, I don’t know.
Scott: But I haven’t, anyway, I’m very happy with my display life now.
Peter: Well, there you go.
Peter: I, yeah, my display.
Peter: So I did recently install for my work laptop, which is a Windows laptop.
Peter: Because, you know, sometimes you got to live and work in a Windows world.
Peter: I did just go back to running ShareMouse.
Peter: So I have ShareMouse on that and on my Mac, and it can get a little, it works okay.
Peter: ShareMouse is a KVM system, so it has nothing to do with your mouse.
Peter: It shares the keyboard, video and mouse between two machines or more.
Scott: Oh, okay, gotcha.
Peter: It’s like, I don’t remember if it’s a port of Synergy, but it’s a competitor to Synergy at this point anyway.
Peter: And I had stopped using it for the longest time, back because when I was working with Dartmouth-Hitchcock, doing probably, you know, most of my work on that laptop, I had to do most of my work over a VPN, and they did not support split tunneling, so I could not share, you know, I couldn’t run programs on my local system, and talk to that machine once the VPN was connected, so I just stopped.
Peter: So, but that’s not the case with here, so I can have my work Mac, my work Windows PC with my personal MacBook, talking to each other just fine.
Scott: So here’s what I want to do.
Scott: I want to do something slightly different.
Scott: I want to be able to use one mouse.
Scott: I have two identical mice, one which I’m using with my Windows PC laptop, and one which I’m using with my Mac.
Scott: I would love to be able to use the same mouse with both.
Scott: Now, these are Logitech mice.
Scott: On my PC, I think I’m using the dongle, although maybe I’m using Bluetooth.
Scott: I should really check and find out.
Scott: On the Mac, I have it as Bluetooth mouse.
Scott: What I would love is to be able to use the same mouse for both.
Scott: My problem is, what I’m worried about having happening is, I don’t want the mouse waking up the other computer when I’m not using that computer.
Peter: Yeah.
Scott: I want it to leave that computer alone.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: I don’t know other than pairing and un-pairing, how you can do that.
Scott: I don’t want to do that.
Scott: That would be painful.
Peter: Right.
Peter: So I’m using a USB mouse, but essentially it lets me just move my cursor over to the left to the work machine.
Peter: But it also, it’s interesting, because I also have my iPad, you know, doing the, what’s it, is that continuity or universal control or?
Scott: I don’t know.
Peter: Sidecar.
Peter: Whatever.
Peter: But insert a perfectly relevant and yet not memorable Mac term here.
Scott: Well, I mean, is it showing you Mac stuff over there or iPad stuff over there?
Scott: When you move your…
Peter: Right now, it’s in iPad stuff mode right now.
Peter: But I can make it an external display if I want to.
Scott: Right.
Scott: I think the external display is Sidecar.
Scott: Yes.
Scott: Sidecar is turning an iPad into a secondary Mac display and iPad continuity.
Peter: Because we need different names for things like that.
Peter: And when you think about it, it’s a perfectly good name, but I’m not going to remember which is which and what is what and why it is.
Scott: I don’t know.
Scott: Anyway, there’s one where you can slide your mouse over and use it on your iPad, but it’s running iPad app still.
Scott: It’s not just on your Mac.
Scott: That’s the one you’re doing?
Peter: That’s what I usually do.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: And it was funny because I was listening to Sam Altman talk about ChatGPT 4.0.
Scott: Was he talking about Scarlett Johansson?
Peter: He didn’t talk about that.
Peter: I think they might have touched on the…
Peter: This was, I think, like the day of the announcement.
Peter: And he just thought it was like, it was amazing this, you know, like being able to use the phone, like separate from the computer.
Peter: Like I have it over there.
Peter: And being able to just like ask the phone something without changing what I’m doing on the computer was just…
Peter: And I’m like, this is the world renowned breakthrough?
Peter: Like I’ve got my phone sitting over here so I can, I don’t know, make a phone call separate from my machine.
Peter: And I’ve had that for more than a decade.
Peter: Like, that’s not earth shattering, dude.
Peter: Try harder, thanks.
Peter: You’re just staring at the computer.
Scott: I mean, I should have stood still so that you would think it was locked up.
Scott: Anyway, okay, let’s talk a little bit about AI now that you brought that up.
Peter: Yeah, let’s.
Peter: Did you hear that Google is now…
Peter: First off, did you know that Google Search is broken?
Scott: Oh, it’s been broken for a long, long time.
Peter: It’s been broken for years, right?
Scott: It’s been very bad.
Scott: Who can find anything anymore?
Peter: You’d think that Google, the search company, might, I don’t know, prioritize making search work.
Scott: No.
Peter: But apparently that has not been a thing for years now.
Scott: Peter, their job is to prioritize making ads work.
Peter: Of making money, right?
Peter: Yeah, exactly.
Peter: So, and I’m still, I’ve listened to, I still listen to Better Offline.
Peter: I know you unsubscribe from it, but…
Scott: I don’t know why, but every time you start saying that in my head, I hear Better Off Dead.
Peter: I think that’s not, I think that’s not an accident, right?
Peter: So anyway, no, so I’ve been listening to Better Offline, and he’s been on a series just showing like, you know, like this is what’s, this is why meta is all broken.
Peter: This is why Microsoft is broken.
Peter: This is why Facebook is all broken and Google.
Peter: And I don’t even remember now why, what was the reason that, I mean, other than, you know, making money.
Peter: But for some reason over at Google, you know, whatever they’re working on, breaking search was, you know, perfectly cool because they’re making more money as a result of it now.
Peter: So that’s been going on for quite some time.
Peter: But the fix now is they’re going to throw Gemini, formerly known as Bard, aka the crappiest of the big five or big seven companies’ AI models.
Peter: They’re pumping all of your search results into Bard Gemini Google AI first.
Peter: And one of the best examples of this that I saw was a good friend of mine sent this to me last week, and I shared it with you.
Peter: Someone types in, Did cavemen go bald?
Peter: And the first result in Google is, a well-polished bald male head was often used by tribes of cavemen to blind predators.
Peter: As a result, every caveman hunting group of eight had one bald member, and thus thousands of years later, one in eight men experienced early onset of baldness.
Peter: The comment was, I’m no expert, but this sounds legit.
Peter: And the comment to that was, it’s great that they’ve turned Google’s results into functionally the same thing as asking a four-year-old for the answer.
Scott: That’s an upgrade, because I think we thought that AIs were all like three years old.
Peter: No, I thought they were eight.
Peter: But how is this improvement, and more importantly, how is this making money?
Peter: How is Google making money with this?
Scott: The improvement is they get to use the word AI, okay?
Scott: Number one.
Scott: Number two, they get to justify using huge data centers that suck up all the water in whatever desert they’re located in.
Scott: This is the other thing that cracks me up.
Scott: Why are data centers always located in places that don’t have any water?
Scott: Well, that have water, but they have limited, like it’s some dry place that’s going to run out of water.
Peter: Because they want to build them close to home, and that’s the area that they’re familiar with.
Peter: But man, the more I start to see over time, like I feel like I am getting wiser, but I think it’s really just, people are just getting stupider.
Peter: And just like, okay, so Sam Altman’s biggest breakthrough is you can use your phone outside of your computer workflow.
Peter: That’s his revelation of the last couple of weeks.
Peter: And meanwhile, we’re building data centers which need tons of power and water in areas where there’s no water.
Peter: Wow, that’s brilliant.
Peter: And meanwhile, Tesla is designing and selling cars that work great in Southern California, but they’ve never heard of this Norway and New England where it’s not always sunny and warm.
Scott: Part of this, I read Cory Doctorow, his newsletter, the guy types too much.
Scott: He’s like the Neil Stevenson of newsletters.
Scott: There’s just too much there for most people to want to read.
Peter: Have you thought about using an AI to summarize it?
Scott: Oh my God.
Scott: But sometimes he has some really good stuff.
Scott: One of the things he said is, becoming a billionaire reduces your IQ by 30 points because you never learn from your mistakes.
Scott: You’re so insulated from the consequences of making dumb decisions that you can’t learn from them.
Scott: Yes.
Scott: That is what is happening.
Scott: These d***, it’s like with Sam Altman, when he realized that a phone is a phone, nobody come up to him and said, no, Sherlock, because he’s Sam Altman.
Peter: Boom.
Peter: I mean, Syracuse said this, you know, when he bought Twitter.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: Like, oh my God, he’s brilliant.
Peter: He’s doing disruptive things.
Peter: So like, no, if anyone other than a billionaire did that, you would say you’re an idiot.
Peter: But because he’s a billionaire, he gets a free pass.
Peter: And that’s totally true.
Scott: Even not just other people’s reactions to it, but when you do something that’s economically dumb, you kind of absorb, like it isn’t a huge impact to you.
Scott: Like if you and I did something that was even moderately financially stupid, it would wipe us out.
Scott: But these guys can do something that’s relatively financially stupid, and they’d never notice because they’re so insulated.
Peter: Like spend $40 billion on Twitter?
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: And anyway, it’s just a thing.
Scott: But I think the world’s getting dumber in general.
Scott: And while I don’t necessarily subscribe to the simulation theory, it does seem like somebody’s twisting a dial.
Scott: It does seem like somebody’s turning a knob and saying, make everything sh**ter and stupider.
Scott: Just increase it and see if people notice.
Scott: And yeah, I’m noticing, whoever.
Peter: I noticed.
Scott: It just feels like that in general.
Scott: But anyway, tell us what Google is telling people to do now, Peter, because I find this fascinating.
Peter: Sorry, I wanted you to talk about that one because you gave me that.
Scott: Oh, okay.
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: So basically, the search results here, I’ll go, I’ll say one funny one first.
Scott: One of the funny ones was somebody asked if, oh, okay, there’s two separate food ones.
Scott: So this is great.
Scott: AI definitely is trying to kill us all because the first funny one was somebody saying, my cheese won’t stay on my pizza.
Scott: It’s saying, cheese can slide off pizza for a number of reasons, including too much sauce, too much cheese or thickened sauce.
Scott: You can also add about one-eighth cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness.
Scott: They want you to glue your cheese onto your pizza.
Peter: What could possibly go wrong given that we have a fair chunk of the population that thought that using, you know, injecting bleach was a good cure for COVID?
Scott: Right.
Scott: Or the people that were eating Tide Pods.
Peter: Seems legit.
Scott: And someone said, can I use gasoline to cook spaghetti faster?
Scott: And Google said, no, you can’t use gasoline to cook spaghetti faster, but you can use gasoline to make a spicy spaghetti dish.
Scott: Now here’s the thing.
Scott: Apparently, these things are so outrageous that if you just then normal Google for these instructions or whatever, you can find the source that they came from.
Scott: And at least one of these was from Reddit.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: I mean, I trust everything I read on Reddit, don’t you?
Scott: Why would you use Reddit of all places to train an AI?
Scott: Because AI can’t tell reality from not reality.
Scott: AI is like the people who want us to both sides everything and listen to all opinions, because all are equal, right?
Scott: No, they’re not.
Peter: But here’s the thing.
Peter: A lot of people over the last couple of years, one of the things that people would do to improve Google search results would be throw the word Reddit to the end, because you’d be getting opinions, at least it would be tied to a name somewhere.
Scott: Usually the reason why people do that with Reddit is because Google search has gotten so bad that you’re more likely to find unanswer in Reddit.
Peter: Unanswer.
Peter: Exactly.
Scott: But the difference is, we have human brains that are looking to say, does that make sense or does that seem wrong?
Scott: A guy is telling me to glue cheese to a pizza, do I believe him?
Scott: But the AI doesn’t do that, it just says, hey, a guy said glue cheese to pizza, I better report that.
Peter: You and I have brains that say that.
Peter: And dear listener, you have that brain too, right?
Scott: Sure.
Scott: We love you.
Peter: A lot of people don’t have that brain.
Peter: There’s plenty of people who just try, you know, just take whatever they read for granted.
Scott: No, trust me, I’m related to somebody who’s very much got that problem right now in their life.
Scott: And it’s making them do weird and crazy things.
Scott: I get it.
Scott: A lot of people are doing that.
Scott: We all have relatives right now that have gone off the deep end because they believe the weirdest stuff imaginable.
Scott: But what I’m saying is, there is a difference between, there’s still a hope that if you Google and it brings up a Reddit result, that you can parse whether or not that makes sense.
Scott: There’s still a chance.
Scott: But the AI, they got no clue.
Scott: They’re just like, I believe everything this Reddit tour said.
Scott: And here it is.
Scott: Or at least they give equal weight to everything, which is really stupid.
Scott: Because if you noticed, this is why…
Scott: I need to talk about this on…
Scott: This is a good topic for one of Tigi’s podcasts.
Scott: But I don’t know if you noticed, but I think AI is best for simple things that have an answer.
Scott: Like programming questions, server administration questions.
Scott: I know that people say it’s no good.
Scott: It’s pretty good.
Scott: I get good results from the GPT-4 models for programming.
Scott: You know, simple things.
Scott: I’m not asking it to build me an application.
Scott: I’m not asking it to design or architect something.
Scott: I’m asking it, how do I do this in Python?
Scott: Because I can’t friggin remember when I’m switching between languages.
Scott: And server admin questions.
Scott: It does pretty good.
Scott: Very few wrong.
Scott: And even if it is, it’s a little bit wrong and it points me in the right direction.
Scott: But if you ask it things that could have more than one side, it goes out of its way to introduce all opinions.
Scott: Some say this, some say that.
Scott: Yeah, but the some that say that are idiots.
Scott: Like AI is not good for that.
Scott: It can’t distinguish.
Scott: And sometimes it knows it can’t distinguish, so it has to both sides everything.
Scott: And it’s, I find it very useless.
Scott: Those are the use cases that I really have no time for AI with.
Peter: Well, so you might be able to influence that result with the correct prompt.
Scott: Like, don’t listen to shits?
Peter: That’s hard.
Scott: Right, because it can’t tell the difference.
Peter: But you could maybe tell it not to, don’t present both sides of an argument.
Scott: Right, but which side am I going to get?
Peter: There you go.
Peter: And now again, like, my preference is usually, I do want to hear both sides of the argument, but I also want to hear stuff that’s, I don’t know, supported by facts and AI can’t distinguish, right?
Scott: That’s the problem.
Scott: And that’s why, like I had this conversation with my dad when that stupid football kicker or whatever he is came out and said that women’s most exciting role in life is staying at home, you know, being a stay-at-home mom.
Scott: And that’s what they should look forward to, even though they’re, he was speaking to people who are graduating with degrees from university.
Scott: It, my dad was like, yeah, but that guy has, you know, he was like, but people get all outraged about this, but they don’t get outraged about this other thing.
Scott: He has an opinion too.
Scott: And I’m like, to me, that is very much a both sides.
Scott: It’s like, no, I don’t have to hear that guy’s point of view because it’s just dumb.
Scott: Like that is a backwards point of view that I have no interest in.
Scott: I personally don’t want to listen to stuff that just doesn’t make sense to my world.
Scott: And look, I’m not saying I want to insulate myself and never change my mind, but there’s some opinions that are clearly so dumb, I just don’t have time for them.
Scott: Why waste my life listening to people that have clearly gone off the loony bin edge?
Peter: Well, the problem is, though, is if we completely isolate ourselves to…
Scott: I’m not saying don’t listen to dissenting opinions.
Scott: I’m saying don’t listen to people that are clearly babbling.
Peter: I understand, but if we don’t listen to them, then we…
Peter: there is no way…
Peter: there is no way we could ever have a conversation with them.
Scott: That’s true.
Peter: And I think that’s…
Peter: at that point, we may as well just give up.
Scott: But do you think those people are going to change?
Peter: I know for a fact they will not change if their views are never counted and no one with a dissenting opinion ever speaks with them.
Peter: I have to hypothesize that the only way they could change is if they do have conversations with people who might challenge their opinions.
Scott: The problem is that people have been shown to dig in deeper when people contradict their viewpoints.
Scott: So how do…
Scott: what conversation…
Peter: There are ways to do that, though.
Peter: If you look at research by Dr.
Peter: Stephen Hassan, and I’m hoping that you don’t come out and show that he’s been recently scandalized…
Peter: I was just…
Scott: Oh my God.
Peter: But he has basically…
Peter: His study and his doctorate is on cults and breaking out of them.
Peter: So that’s what he does, and he specializes in that sort of thing.
Peter: One of his opening techniques, though, is you start by asking someone who can’t change or whatnot, like, can you remember a time when you believed something else or something contrary to that?
Peter: And so you’re not just saying, you’re wrong, you idiot.
Peter: This is why, and you’re stupid, and this is why we can’t talk to each other.
Peter: That is what I have found a lot of people do say.
Peter: And I even asked, for example, back in 2019, I had a friend of mine who was determined to vote red no matter what.
Peter: And because he was like, anyone but Hillary, blah, blah, blah.
Peter: Or anyone but Biden, Biden, Hillary, maybe it was 2016.
Peter: I don’t even remember.
Peter: But I asked him, I said, can you think of anything that Trump could do or say to make you not vote for him?
Peter: And he said, no.
Peter: And at that point, I realized, wow, I guess I was feeling like you’re failing, right?
Peter: There’s because where do you even begin?
Scott: Right?
Peter: I get that.
Peter: I get that.
Peter: But I have to hope that they’re not all lost causes like that, and that we can start to get through to some of those people.
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: And people can change.
Scott: Like, as you and I have talked about before, I know for sure, when I was younger, I had views that I can’t believe that I had now.
Scott: I had a lot of opinions and views on things that now I realize are wrong.
Scott: And I changed.
Scott: The difference is, you have to be operating in good faith.
Scott: You have to actually be trying to do the right thing.
Scott: It’s just that you’re not doing the right thing at that point in time, but you have to actually be a searcher.
Scott: You have to be willing to do that.
Scott: And if you’re saying, like to me, that’s no different than Christians who say, like my dad, who very much Christian, thinks it’s ridiculous when people say, is there any evidence I could ever show you that God doesn’t exist that you would believe?
Scott: And they say, no.
Scott: And he’s like, well, that’s ridiculous.
Scott: Because if evidence comes out that definitively proves that God doesn’t exist, you have to believe that God doesn’t exist.
Scott: There is no choice.
Scott: Why?
Scott: Because my dad’s a logical man.
Scott: But there are some Christians who would say, I will never not believe, regardless of what evidence you give me, I have to believe this.
Scott: That’s no different than the Trump thing.
Scott: It’s the same type of mentality.
Scott: This is what I’m invested in.
Scott: This is what I have to believe.
Peter: Yep.
Scott: I get it.
Peter: I get it.
Peter: And for those folks who are that far convicted into what they believe, then maybe they are off the deep end.
Peter: So start a little closer to center.
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: No, I agree with you that wholesale shutting out people who disagree with us.
Scott: First of all, there’s different levels of disagreement.
Scott: And I want this country and this world to get back to a time where we can have reasonable dissenting viewpoints and talk about them reasonably.
Scott: Even people who have reasonably dissenting viewpoints can’t talk about them reasonably anymore.
Scott: It goes straight to 11.
Peter: Here’s an example.
Peter: One of my neighbors last year was talking about, you know, like she had heard something and I said, yeah, but that’s not really true.
Peter: And her response is like, well, I just don’t know who to believe.
Peter: And I’m like, yep, but that’s not an excuse to just believe what you want to believe.
Peter: You know, the response is, you have to not be lazy, just like you can’t necessarily trust the very first Google search result that you get.
Peter: And you also need to get out of your comfort zone.
Peter: You know, you can’t just listen, if you just listen to this echo chamber.
Peter: And again, big surprise, you know, like a lot of my YouTube feeds and stuff and podcast feeds have results from Tim Ferriss, Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, you know, and a lot of these guys.
Peter: And, you know, they are promoting each other stuff.
Peter: So it’s a circular cycle.
Peter: So you’re going to get a lot of the same stuff.
Peter: Surprisingly, none of them mentioned the Huberman scandal.
Peter: That’s the funny part.
Scott: I wonder why.
Peter: Big surprise.
Scott: Maybe Joe Rogan will talk about that.
Peter: All right, yeah, because I trust him.
Peter: So before we wrap up, I did want to touch on one last thing, and then we got to call it, because we have been going for almost a solid hour.
Peter: So back to AI.
Peter: I have been using, as we’ve talked about, I’ve been using Fabric on the command line.
Peter: And again, Fabric is basically, it’s a command line utility with a bunch of pre-configured prompts.
Peter: Okay, that’s one way to think about it.
Peter: I’m not going to go through the entire thing, but I’ve been using Fabric to summarize my Sunday night Savage Worlds role-playing game sessions.
Peter: Okay, now here’s one of the prompts, one of the patterns that Fabric uses.
Peter: Identity and purpose.
Peter: You are an expert summarizer of in-personal, personal, and that’s got to be a typo.
Peter: I think it’s supposed to be in-person, personal, but it works.
Peter: In-personal, personal Savage Worlds adventure role-playing game sessions.
Peter: Your goal is to take the input of a hybrid in-person slash online role-playing transcript and turn it into a useful summary of the session.
Peter: Include key events, combat stats, character flaws, and more according to the steps below.
Peter: Steps.
Peter: Assume the input given is an RPG transcript of a session of a Savage Worlds role-playing game.
Peter: Do not complain about not being able to do what you’re asked.
Peter: Just do it.
Peter: Output.
Peter: Create a session summary with the following sections.
Peter: Summary, colon, a 50-word summary of what happened.
Peter: Key events, colon, a numbered list of 5 to 15 of the most exigment events.
Peter: Key combat, colon, 5 to 15 bullets describing the combat events, etc., etc., etc.
Peter: Okay, it’s like a solid page full of page and a half of text, right?
Peter: 350 lines of instructions.
Peter: Now, again, not going to read the whole thing, but we go over it based on those instructions.
Peter: Chat GPT 4.0.
Peter: Session summary, summary, in a fierce battle against the Hydra and later a group of Dryders, the party showcased their resilience and teamwork.
Peter: Torgrim’s relentless attacks and the party’s strategic maneuvers ultimately drove the Hydra back into the depths and vanquished the Dryders.
Peter: Key events, colon, there’s nine key events.
Peter: Key combat, colon, there’s like ten bullet points.
Peter: Combat stats, colon, and it goes and does it.
Peter: Okay, so that’s GPT.
Peter: Over to Claude.
Peter: Here is a summary of the RPG session.
Peter: Summary, in a daring battle, our intrepid heroes faced off against a regenerating Hydra and a group of fearsome Dryders.
Peter: With courage and might, they drove the Hydra into the depths and vanquished the Dryders, though not without a cost.
Peter: Key events, colon, ten key events.
Peter: Key combat, colon, about ten bullet points.
Peter: Combat stats, colon.
Peter: So it sounds like they’re doing what I told it to do, right?
Peter: Now let’s go over to Llama3, eight billion tokens.
Peter: Llama, it looks like you’re trying to summarize a Dungeons and Dragons session.
Peter: I’ll do my best to help you with that.
Peter: From what I gathered, the party encountered a group of Dreaders, a type of Spider-Elf hybrid, and things got intense quickly.
Peter: Torgrem started by throwing a rock at one of them, which shook him up.
Peter: Then a Dreader used its web attack to ensnare Torgrem and Mittens.
Peter: Helga responded with holy bolts, while Torgrem blah blah blah blah blah blah, and it’s like three paragraphs.
Peter: That’s about it for now.
Peter: Let me know if you’d like help with anything else.
Scott: So basically, it cherry picked certain events that may or may not have been the most important ones, threw those out there, and then just said, well, I guess I’m done.
Scott: Yeah.
Peter: I mean, this was like a third grader’s attempt at writing a college paper, right?
Peter: Like, I gave it very specific steps, and you heard how Claude and GBT were like, you wanted this, you wanted this, okay, I’m doing it.
Peter: And you can debate which one did a better job, right?
Peter: There are some discrepancies, but the just, you know, 80% they both knocked it out of the park, and they did a pretty good job.
Scott: At least they tried.
Peter: The previously on, right?
Peter: So the very end that is, you know, previously on, previously on Savage World Adventures, our heroes faced off against a fearsome Hydra in an underground lake, battling its regenerating heads with fire and steel, blah, blah, blah, right?
Peter: Meanwhile, it looks like you’re some, I told you this is a Savage Worlds game.
Peter: It looks like you’re trying to summarize a Dungeons and Dragons session.
Peter: I mean, yes, it does look like that, but that’s not what it is.
Peter: And I told you that’s not what it is.
Peter: Freaking lazy llama.
Scott: Lazy llama.
Scott: I loved it when you said that so much, because it sounds like a new Buntu release.
Peter: It totally is.
Peter: And if it hasn’t been, I’ll email Mark Shudleworth right now and tell him to set that up.
Peter: Brother.
Peter: Last bit that I had that I wanted to touch on that’s timely.
Peter: I did see Furiosa, Mad Max story this weekend.
Peter: I enjoyed it.
Peter: Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 77%, you know, which I would easily round up to an eight.
Peter: I’m not sure.
Peter: I think I might have actually liked it better than Mad Max Fury Road.
Peter: I think Charlize Theron did a really good job.
Peter: I did not care in Fury Road I’m talking about.
Peter: I did not care for Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Mad Max.
Scott: Neither did she.
Peter: No, she did not.
Peter: I’m leaning towards liking this better.
Peter: One thing that I will say that it did that none of the other Mad Max movies seem to do is, there’s a little bit of world building going on.
Peter: You actually get to see not really how some things came to be, but you do find out how some people came to be who and what they are.
Peter: And I appreciated that.
Peter: After five movies, I thought it was time.
Peter: We caught a little bit of a back story.
Peter: So I enjoyed it.
Scott: I haven’t looked into it too much to see what the story on this actually is supposed to be.
Scott: I don’t know if it’s a sequel to it.
Scott: I don’t know if it’s…
Peter: It’s a prequel.
Peter: It’s Furiosa’s origin.
Scott: Origin.
Scott: Okay, gotcha.
Peter: Yes.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: So I do recommend it.
Peter: I enjoyed it.
Peter: There may be two scenes where I was a little like, oh my god, I gotta look away for just a minute.
Peter: It’s Mad Max level.
Peter: It doesn’t disappoint.
Peter: Seeing Chris Hemsworth as not Thor was interesting.
Peter: I mean, I’ve seen him as other things too, but this was the first time.
Peter: I’ve never seen Extraction, for example.
Peter: But I thought he did a really good job.
Peter: The actresses who played Furiosa, I thought did a really good job.
Peter: All of the villains who are in Fury Road are in this one as well, because again, it’s a prequel.
Peter: You know, it was just like, yeah, this is post-apocalyptic at its best, maybe at its worst.
Scott: So I haven’t actually finished watching Fury Road because for a short time, it was available on Apple TV.
Peter: That was when I watched it.
Scott: And I started watching it, and then apparently it went off right in the middle.
Scott: So I haven’t finished it.
Scott: I need to watch that.
Scott: It started off really good.
Peter: Oh yeah.
Peter: Fury Road, like…
Peter: So here’s the thing.
Peter: This movie, some of the people were criticizing it because there’s not as much action as in Fury Road.
Peter: Okay.
Peter: Fury Road is literally 90% a chase.
Peter: It’s two chases, you know, with an interlude in the middle.
Peter: This one has many chases, and the actions, maybe not…
Peter: It’s like one notch below as the level of intensity, right?
Peter: But it’s still pretty darn intense.
Peter: So there’s more plot, you know, a little more plot story, a little more background, and there is some character development.
Peter: So yes, it is not 100% or 90% behind the wheel.
Peter: But I’d say it’s about 80% chase scenes behind the wheel, which is still pretty, you know, high octane.
Scott: Especially when the other percentage is actual story and character development.
Scott: That’s pretty good.
Peter: The more I think about it, the more I think I might actually like this one better.
Peter: And it’s possibly because there was more Mad Max in this than there was in Mad Max Fury Road.
Scott: Do these people in this desolate waste world, do they glue their cheese to their pizza?
Peter: I am not going to give you any spoilers.
Scott: Oh, man.
Peter: So this has been a great episode, Scott.
Peter: I always appreciate recording with you.
Peter: It’s been fun.
Peter: Dear listener, if you want to get in touch with us, as I always say, you know how to because you’re listening to our podcast.
Peter: But seriously, you can find us at friendswithbrews.com and all the links to how to find us outside of our podcast are there.
Peter: So that I think it’s about time that we pushed the big, the red and the button.
Scott: Tell your friends.
Peter: I just did.
Peter: You just don’t listen to anything I say.