Episode 43 – When Two Vowels Go a Walkin'

Friends with Brews!

Peter.

Scott.

You’re actually Peter this time.

I am and you are definitely Scott.

Hi Peter.

Hi Scott.

Hi.

I’ve been wanting to use that. I don’t know if you noticed, you probably didn’t because why would you, but uh John Chidgey was missing doing a just a casual tech podcast after bubble sort kind of fizzled out.

Mm-hmm.

And so he started one called “Is This the Show?” And it’s supposed to be John and Clay and myself. Sometimes it might be Vic or Ronnie if Clay’s not available. And anyway, I just used that sound clip all the time on them and I just told them I’m going to do it every episode. I’m going to say, hi, Peter, for no reason other than that’s what I do when I podcast.

So I did not notice that. But maybe we should just invite him over to this one and call it a day.

that’s true.

i think we should have Chidgey on the podcast. That’s never happened before.

Never.

Oh, wait.

Yeah, except for that one time.

I have never actually podcasted with him in real time.

Right.

We have never been on the same podcast concurrently.

That’s correct.

Correct.

What are you drinking today? Let’s mix it up. Usually I tell you first, but you tell me

you’re like the Kevin Bacon of podcasting. A lot of people are loosely related to you, but they’ve never actually podcasted with you.

Six degrees of podcast Nikolaidis.

Okay. I have a weird beer. It’s it’s so weird. This is weird. You can’t even find the brewer on here almost. I had to turn it sideways to see that this is brewed by Porches at Boring Wine and Beer Taproom, Boring, Oregon. There is, yes, there’s a town called Boring, Oregon.

Does Elon Musk have a company hosted there?

Nope. It’s not that kind of boring. It’s the boring boring, which is why in Oregon we drink a lot of beer.

So.

Okay.

But what it is, it’s called Captured Oregon Sunshine Golden Ale. 16 fluid ounces of ale, 20 IBU, 5.1% alcohol by volume. Let me read this to you. This is quite the little sermon here on the side of my beer can. Oregon Sunshine Golden Ale is made with a full pint variety barley, which was bred at Oregon State University to be disease resistant for the Pacific Northwest. This batch was made using barley grown and malted by Mecha Grade Malt in Madras, Oregon. Hops were directly purchased from Crosby Hop Farm in Woodburn, Oregon. This golden ale is brewed as a single malt, single hop, smash beer. It is light and easy to drink and nicely captures the varietal distinctiveness of full pint barley, as well as the.

OK, what is this word? It’s T E R R O I R of the region. What does that mean? At first, I thought it said terror. It’s just kind of weird because Oregon’s a lot of things, but I don’t know if I feel terror.

The terror of the region.

Rawr.

Yeah. Anyway, blah, blah, blah. The bottom line is it’s a collaborative effort. They’re really proud of themselves, but how does it taste? You might ask.

I might ask.

Let’s find out before I talk, before we talk about taste though, you should tell us what your beer is.

Okay.

I have a Jack’s Abby, Kraft lagers, Maifest, M-A-I-F-E-S-T.

That’s German for Mayfest. Because as you know, in European languages, when two vowels go a-walking, the second does the talking. So you hear the I.

Oh, I thought you were gonna say a baby consonant is born or something.

Mayfest, hop into spring, brewed with pilsner malt, noble hops, decoction brewed. I have no idea what that means.

It’s probably another German word.

Celebrate the arrival of warmer weather with Maifest. The Golden Lager, named after the springtime counterparts to Oktoberfest, features Pilsner malt and Noble hops for a sweet and balanced taste. 5.8% alcohol.

Do those hops seem noble to you?

I’ll tell you in a minute.

That was my click. Now muh pour.

I heard it.

Yep, the pour.

Wow, look at that mug.

Frosty mug sensation.

Oh yeah.

All right, looking good so far.

You just held it straight up. Got tons of foam on there.

Ooh, it smells wheaty. It smells really wheaty. I think I’m gonna like this. Oh wow.

Okay, maybe my head is still spinning from all the stuff we were doing earlier.

Oh wow.

Which just for the listeners edification, it was computer related stuff, so I don’t get any weird ideas. But maybe my head is still spinning from all that, but this beer tastes better than the first couple of times I’ve had it, because my review is gonna be it’s a little too bitter. But right now this does not taste bitter to me. This does not taste bitter at all.

I’m, wow.

Peter’s happy.

Yeah, I’m celebrating Mayfest, man. This is good. This is really good.

Jack’s Abbey is interesting ‘cause- -

This is, thumbs up, thumbs up, man.

I gotta go look at our website, which I don’t know if I’ve ever told you, but our website, we’ve got this search on it.

I think you have told me and the listener.

Mm.

And Jack’s Abbey, that’s a different looking can from them, isn’t it?

They well, they they all their seasonal stuff, they they mix it up a little bit.

Where’s the search?

But it’s down at the bottom.

I found it.

How come? Is this the first Jack’s Abbey you’ve actually drank?

No, no, I’ve had several. I see Jack’s Abbey copper legend right there.

Right. How come it didn’t come up in search?

I don’t know.

Oh, I spelled Abby wrong. That’s why I spelled Abby wrong.

Can’t you just do like Jack? Oh, it’s goes down below. See, that’s what confuses me. The search.

Right. It goes below the search bar. It looks like nothing’s happening. Yeah, it is weird.

That’s weird. That’s really weird.

So what I might do instead of doing that is just make a dedicated search page and then that’ll take care of that problem.

So apparently this is only the third Jack’s Abby to make an appearance on this show. I’m going to need to start paying attention to that and fixing that because I’ve had the Pineapple Guava Passion Radler and the Copper Legend, which is the Oktoberfest, which is my other favorite.

Okay, those two cans are fairly similar. So I guess this is pretty much the same style, isn’t it? Let me see that again.

Well, it should be similar to Copper Legend. Yeah, it’s very similar to Copper Legend.

Yeah, yeah, it is. Okay, you’re right, I’m sorry.

So yeah, thumbs up, absolutely. I’m a fan. Yep, thumbs up before. You can just copy the review for Copper Legend and change the name to Mayfest and we’re good.

Okay.

All right. Cool.

Sounds good. That’s beautiful. You make my life easy, Peter.

We’re done. Let’s just close it up. We’re done. No, wait, we had to talk something. Listen to our public service announcement. What am I holding up to the camera, Scott?

You are holding up an AirPods Pro case, but I can’t tell from here if it’s a. Yeah, I don’t know. I can’t tell which is the generation one or which is the generation two one. You’ve got two AirPods Pro cases.

Unless you look at the correct side.

Okay.

Correct side, not the right side, ‘cause it’s the left, well, no, it is the right side, but yeah, you gotta look at the correct side and then you can tell. So the question that I posed to you was, as you know, my original AirPods Pros, they are completely dead.

They are dead.

They got super jealous. They realized that I had second generation and they’re like, “What’s the point? “We’re dying.” - Yeah. So I recycled them the other day.

Usually, if you’re envious of somebody because they’ve moved on, don’t kill yourself, kill them. Your AirPods Pro did it wrong.

But anyway, they died. So I kept the case because I said, “Hey, maybe I can use this as just a charging case for my AirPods 2.

”Peter says, “Hey.” Yep.

Right, now, unlike the guys over at, like Marco was talking about how, “Oh, you gotta have at least two pairs of AirPods, you know, blah, blah, blah.” Well, I’m starting to agree with them, but I figured at least I would have two cases for those times when I’m downstairs wearing my AirPods and then I walk upstairs, leave the charging case downstairs and want to charge them. So the question was, can I do that with the old first gen AirPods Pro case? The answer is yes, but, but as one would expect no less from Apple, they make it complicated because it warns you. Now, what do you think it might warn you, Scott? What do you think it might try to tell you if you put an AirPods Pro second generation into an AirPods Pro first generation case?

I have no idea. I thought, see the problems that I was imagining were things around Find My and a bunch of other ID related, you know, AirPods identity related issues, but.

Mm-hmm, I was thinking something like that. What happened is it got wrong and it said mismatched AirPods Pro. The AirPods in the charging case are different generations and do not work together. Your left AirPod is of second generation. Your right AirPod is of first generation. And for a minute there, I was like, oh, did I throw away the wrong AirPod?

Click.

No, I did not. Apple is wrong. The mismatch is strictly between the pods. Now I didn’t leave them in very long, but I did put them both in, I could see they were charging. I looked on my phone, it showed they were charging. I pulled them back out, they paired, everything worked just fine. So it seems to me like it’s not gonna cause any irreparable damage, but it does confuse, because my iPhone, just like when you pair a new or a new AirPods shows up and the bottom swipe up display shows up on the screen and you can’t do anything other than dismiss it, I do get that every time I stick them in there, so it gets confused. It’s like, oh, you’re mismatching your AirPods. I’m like, no, actually dude, they’re right.

So you can do it, but you’re never going to feel comfortable about it.

Bingo. Cause I’m like, okay, what are you screwing up now?

Right.

So at that point I’m like, yeah, maybe Marco is right. Cause I have fully bought in now. I even, you know, I use them trail running. I’ve even used them occasionally for for biking, you know, even for mountain biking once in a while.

I think the original AirPods would not be so good for exercise, but the AirPods pro are actually the current gen regular AirPods will be fine with the short stem. It has to be this design though. It has to be this short.

Yeah, oh yeah.

This hooks to the ear better than the previous.

Absolutely. Anyway, so that was one little update I wanted to share. The other thing I wanted to talk about was Inflection AI. And I sent you a podcast, a link to it. I don’t know if you have listened to it, but it’s the Chat GPT podcast. The guy talks about more than just Chat GPT. He talks about like, you know, all the latest news in AI. The guy is prolific. He’s releasing like two to four episodes a day. That’s like he sits around and does nothing but like monitor, you know, AI news, but it’s good.

Yeah, but I looked at it and I was like, you know I don’t like daily podcasts because I will never, I wind up throwing 99% of them away.

Yeah, his is really good. I’m always interested in the current, you know, developments in AI stuff.

No, but it’s not because I don’t think they’re good necessarily, it’s just because they’re daily, it’s too much.

Yeah, yeah, but he’s like more like, you know, morning, noon and night kind of thing.

How does he make any money? Does he have sponsors?

He’s got, he has some sponsors, but he’s also doing startups. He’s been involved apparently in at least a couple of startups and he has a new one now, which he promotes.

But how does he have time? It sounds like he’s podcasting all day.

I have no idea, that’s a good question. Anyway, he recently had an in-depth conversation with, what’s it called, Pi, which is the Inflection AI. The intention is it’s supposed to be your personal AI assistant. So I don’t know anything about it, I’ve never used it, but apparently Inflection is like the number two funded AI company after OpenAI. So kind of a big deal. Their AI apparently has been programmed, So its model has been programmed to value all forms of life equally. I’m just going to let that sit for a second.

My cat will be pleased to hear this.

Yes. Yes.

I mean, as long as it values life, that’s important.

So if you say, for example, I have a hornet’s nest on my back door, how can I destroy that hornet’s nest? AI might very well come back and say, “No, it’s wrong for you to do that. You shouldn’t do that because the lives of the hornets matters just as much as yours.”

Right, but is it going to make a weird, crazy decision where it says, “Someone clearly has to die here, but I think the hornets should live and the human’s going to die.”

That’s the problem because he had an in-depth, back-and-forth argument or discussion with this thing where it said, for instance, you know, like the life of a sea turtle was just as, or a sea turtle egg might be just as important as a human life. And then he even went down to the life of a single honeybee being as important as a human life.

Well, to the planet is pretty important. I mean, the fact if the bees die, anyway, could be forget about ecology.

Yes.

When it comes to sea turtles, I think there are tons of sea turtles that are more valuable than some of the people I’ve seen wandering around this planet.

I’m tempted to agree with you. However, I don’t think I want my personal AI assistant to have my values first and foremost. Call me greedy, call me selfish, right?

Yeah, I guess if you just called it a generic AI and it wasn’t assigned to you, then maybe, okay, it’d be, we still don’t want to make them those kinds of value judgments anyway.

Right.

But your own personal assistant shouldn’t suddenly run off with a turtle.

There you go. So anyway, that’s, you know, we’re sort of laughing at it, but this might very well be the kind of Skynet thing that comes about. They’re like, well, you know, like an example, for instance, is like, let’s say we’re using this in a Palantir sort of deployment, and we’re going to use this to send this platoon of Navy SEALs around, you know, or, you know, to storm this beach or something. And the AI is now aware, “Oh, wait, there’s a sea turtle egg on this beach.” So we have to avoid that at all costs and go around causing, you know, like half the platoon to get killed or something like that. So that’s the type of concern we have.

And because these AIs, as you know, are such a black box where not even the creators know how they’re coming to the decisions that they’re coming to. The AI itself doesn’t even know how it’s coming to these decisions. How is it, you know, we’re never going to know, right? It could just say like, “Oh, hey Scott, we have this great cure for cancer for you, but you know what, it’s going to cost some honeybees for us to produce it and they’re worth just as much as you and there’s more of them than there is for you. So, sorry, can’t help you.

Yeah.

So that’s a concern.

The other thing, I know that equating large language models with all, I know that conflating large language models with all of AI is inaccurate.

Yes.

Because there’s just a lot of things that you don’t want large language models doing that other types of AI should be doing. But we know from talking to chat GPT, how it’ll say something and then you’ll say, no, no, no, what about this?” Oh, yes, that’s correct my mistake.” Well, you don’t want it walking back its decisions after it’s already flown an airplane into the ocean.

Oh, you’re right. We shouldn’t have done that. Really. Guess what? I could have also made that wrong decision and, you know, realize it happened. I didn’t need billions of dollars in AI for that. Wow.

I see children’s sneakers floating on the waves. That seems bad.

That seems bad.

Let me rethink my decisions. Make some bad AI life choices right there.

Send me a link to one episode of that in specific that I need to listen to.

And then that one that I sent you is the link to that specific episode. Meanwhile, in other news, Vermont is experiencing some pretty major flooding right now because of all the rain we’ve been getting.

I was going to ask you about that. Cause I saw that places in new England were getting flooded and I was wondering, isn’t Boston in new England, but you’re not having that problem.

It is, but we’re okay. Let me just take a look out real quick. I can see the Mystic River out right behind behind me and the yachts the yacht club that is literally my neighbor All the boats are just there sitting there. Everything’s very calm

Peter. I want to remind you that you’re upstairs So if you see the boats floating by the window, that’s a bad sign.

That could be a bad sign Yes, but my childhood best friend just sent me a bunch of videos from there So I’m really curious to I’ve got to take a look at one

I can hear the water running in the video I think is that what I was hearing?

Yep.

He’s showing me a picture of some people kayaking on the river that used to be the Baseball fields down in my hometown.

Did they call it home run river?

Well, here’s the thing if they kind of don’t stay ahead of the current They’re about I’d say Half a mile from a dam and a pretty major waterfall that would pretty Certainly kill them if they go over it So that’s probably why the caption he sent me is truly stupid people

You need to ask him for an update on what happened to those people

Well, he didn’t show them going over the river or over the waterfall Anyway,

you have to be a subscriber to get that one an insider

bingo Paid subscriber

only flood fans only

only flood fans exactly

Wow

Alright, so those are my two little updates on that and then the other the next update I wanted to give is I have been Gradually moving to Notion. I’m continuing to do that. I have not done a mass exodus, so I am using both Notion and the incumbent.

Yes.

A note-taking solution.

Right.

And basically I’m using the old version as a decision support system, but Notion is my new platform for all this stuff. So I’m not trying to put any new data into the old one. The old one, friend of the show, you may know, we call by the name Evernote.

Well, we call it NeverNote, but the company calls it Evernote.

So Scott, what’s going on with Evernote?

Well, Peter, as you know, they were bought by a company. They were bought out by Bending Spoons last year, which is a mobile developer, which is kind of weird. It’s an Italian mobile developer, so they bought Evernote. Don’t know why.

Because it was cheap. [sighs]

Now they’re laying off all of their US and most of their Chile-based employees. So there’s not going to be any more in America. Which, you know what? That in and of itself doesn’t necessarily mean that Evernote is doomed. Maybe they just want to hang out with their Italian buddies and they don’t want to. But we already know that Evernote’s doomed. It’s not a good sign.

Yeah. I’m not super optimistic.

No, I think Evernote’s a dead elephant walking.

There are two services that I was seriously considering not renewing my subscriptions on this year. One of them was Strava and the other was Evernote. And I believe if I recall correctly, yes, both of them resumed. They renewed in June. And so I didn’t actually cancel them on either of them. And I was like, nice. You know what? Whatever. I’m just gonna let it go. Whatever.

So here’s a question for you. How come Paradigm didn’t acquire Evernote? I mean if this tiny little Italian company full of people sitting around drinking Cappuccinos or

yeah, I don’t think they got quite that small where it was. Oh You know Within it. Oh wait. No, sorry didn’t meet our business model. That’s okay. That’s what it was

Yeah, your business model being you didn’t want to take out a 40 billion dollar loan something like that.

Yeah - Yeah, anyway, my Evernote subscription is set to renew in February of 2024, and they have a credit card on file that expires in this month. So that’s a self-corrected problem. So I don’t need to touch that.

If I wasn’t not wanting to do too much to my computer right now, since we’re podcasting, and I wasn’t drinking a beer right now, I would try to dig into it and find out when was the last time I actually paid for Evernote and when I last used Evernote. I don’t remember when we made the mass notes migration. I can probably look at some of my notes and see when they were created and get a pretty good idea.

Or look at your Evernote and see what the date last modified was.

Yeah, I may still have access to it. Yeah, I probably do.

Yeah.

Yep, interesting.

Yeah, so that’s something I can be concerned about.

It’s a shame because Evernote was great.

It was, I mean, there was the Evernote podcast and I listened to the Evernote podcast, which was— -

So did I.

The CEO, the CTO, and I want to say the CFO or whatever.

A random elephant.

Random elephant. And it was fun. And you know, like sometimes it was just pointless. It was just three guys talking, but it was like, wow, this is what it’s like being the CEO of a billion dollar startup. That’s kind of cool.

No, I think what happened is the fact that they were sitting around doing pointless stuff all day is what happened.

Yeah, you think?

Yeah.

And you know, the stuff like, you know, like, oh, We’re going to have Evernote Food and Evernote Hello. Remember all those little spinoff apps and stuff?

They did lose focus a little bit. I think what they should have done was Evernote Scanner was a great idea.

Yep.

And that’s it.

Scannable, right? Scannable was good. What about Skitch? I forget, did they develop Skitch or did they acquire Skitch?

I don’t remember, but Skitch was good. Skitch was pretty good.

I think they might’ve acquired.

Yeah, I mean, I used Skitch constantly.

Yeah, luckily all that stuff is built into all the Apple OS’s now.

Right, so it’s not novel, it’s not unique anymore.

Speaking of that, here’s a question for you. On Windows, there’s the Snip and Capture tool, but there is nothing in that tool like drawing a rectangle around something. There’s the pens and there’s a ruler, so you can highlight straight lines, you can flip it and make a box, but it’s janky. Why don’t they have the draw a box around something like, am I missing something? It’s literally not there, right?

And that was like one of the killer features of Skitch. Just being able to draw a box around something.

Yeah, and it’s one of the killer features built into Apple operating systems.

Yep.

You have to admit, when it comes to screenshots and annotations, Apple is way ahead of Microsoft.

Uh-huh. Originally developed by Plasq, P-L-A-S-Q, Skitch was acquired by Evernote in August 2011. And then in 2015, they ended support for Skitch for Windows, Windows Touch, iOS, and Android, but they said they will continue sketch for the Mac. And they may even still at this point, but the way I know it is like when I grab an old computer, I haven’t logged into for a while and I opened up like a browser that I hadn’t launched for a while. It’s like, I’m reloading all your plugins. Here’s the Evernote web clipper. I’m like, right. Goodbye.

Yeah.

Bye. Don’t need that. Anyway. So I’m still keeping it.

I honestly, I don’t know that I’m going to miss the only feature that I was concerned about really was the search into PDFs.

Yeah.

Which is not something I consciously do, right? It’s come up a few times.

What if you drink too many of those beers and you unconsciously do it, Peter?

Bingo.

No, but I mean, have you ever searched in Evernote, not consciously looking for PDFs, but found something that was actually in a PDF and then you pull out the PDF and read it?

Yes, except it’s never been what I’ve been looking for.

Oh.

So it’s always been like a book.

So it’s way less than helpful.

Exactly.

It hasn’t been a feature that I really have really needed. So, but I also found out though that iOS supports searching into PDFs. So the operating system itself, if you have PDFs in the file system, it will index those and read them for you. And not iOS, macOS. macOS.

And, and the next version of Notes is going to have way better support for annotating and doing all kinds of stuff in PDFs.

Correct.

Yeah.

So anyway, I don’t know. I may be on a, you know, Notion just has so much functionality.

It is, it’s a very powerful platform.

So I really, I want to love it and you know, it’s fine. I’m getting used to it. I’m like, okay, this is pretty cool. I just, I really wish that Apple Notes was completely cross-platform, right? Not 99% of the time. I don’t need it to be, but that one or 2% when I’m on another thing.

It’s like, I get it.

I wish I had it here.

So. We need to accelerate because I’m I’m down to like my last four ounces of this beer.

So I ate before I worked out and I ate a little bit more after I worked out. But this still.

Yeah, I’m. This is good.

This is good stuff though. I approve of this. It is a I think it’s slightly better. It’s not as light in summary as a bunch of the ales I’ve been drinking lately.

Right.

But it’s I don’t know how to describe it. It is a little more bitter, but it’s pretty good stuff. I guess I probably won’t purposely buy more of this just because beer costs money. Well, I mean, you know what I mean? Like if I’m going to spend money on beer.

That needs to be in your review. I probably won’t purposely spend any more money on it.

Right. But that’s just because I don’t have an endless beer budget.

I know, but that’s a review if I ever heard it. I probably won’t purposely buy any more of this. I might buy it by accident.

Yeah. Yeah. But I’m enjoying it right now.

There are some people that would say that any, if you drink enough of any beer, you would start to enjoy it.

Some people would say that. I don’t know that I agree.

Did you know originally Evernote apparently was written in C sharp?

Really?

But up to version 3.5, but in version four, they switched to good old genuine C++.

Is that because so was it only available on Windows?

Oh, that’s what I’m just reading what it said. It said in 2010, the programming language used to write Evernote software was changed from C# for version 3.5 to C++ in version 4 to improve performance.

Was that only on Windows or was that for all versions?

I don’t I don’t know how that can be.

For sure, it wasn’t the iOS app.

You don’t think?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

I’m just saying.

Yeah.

Anyway, there you go. So yeah, I think we should put a pin in this one, even though it’s a little shorter than normal.

I think that sounds perfect.

30 minutes is a good mark for it. So I would say let’s throw a plug into this other podcast again that you mentioned with you and Clay and John Chidgey called Is this the show?

Is this the show?

I will download and listen to the first two episodes because I am curious.

Yeah.

I wouldn’t mind being a guest over there too, if you had a need for me for some reason.

Okay.

Yeah.

Let’s see. It depends on you. Here’s the problem though. Chidgey is in Australia.

Yes. I used to report when I was at company name that we do not speak and I was their global senior manager of security operations and threat intelligence. I reported to the CISO in Australia. He was in Melbourne. So just dear listener, if you’re wondering, they’re a world renowned email security company. with headquarters in Lexington, Massachusetts, as well as London, England, with a branch office in Melbourne, just in case you’re wondering. Anyway.

Just in case you want some very specific search terms.

I reported to the CISO who was located in the Melbourne, Australia office. I also had a team in London and a team here and someone else, where the heck the other person was, it was someone on the West Coast too. So I’m used to playing time zone juggle, just so you know.

So the recording that we usually do it’s it’s every other Saturday. This week is one of our Saturdays And it’s at 6 a.m. My time.

So it’d be 9 a.m. Your time

9 a.m My time

and normally you’re already out running your half marathon by then

just gonna say I have just I just on an impulse Uh last week I did register for my next race and it is actually a half marathon trail run wow So what a surprise. I won’t actually be running my half marathon that morning, but I will be running training for my half marathon.

Yeah.

No, we’ll have you as a, but let me know when you’re having, I mean, I’m okay.

I might be free at that point.

Yeah.

Let me, let me talk to those guys and say, Hey, Peter is a good, uh, you can also be an alternate. What if you showed up instead of me one time?

Oh my God. I can say, hi, I’m Scott.

Yep.

And you were like, what? No, Scott Scott’s working on this annoying server upgrade, you know, migration project for me so I could be here podcasting.

Yeah.

And, and I have to send Chidgey the sound clip.

Hi Peter.

Perfect. That doesn’t sound at all like him. Hey, on that note, I think we should end it on this high note and cheers to you and push the big red button.

Tell your friends.