The Vergecast - S9 leaks, Google Reply, and Twitter's war on bots

Episode Date: February 23, 2018

This week on The Vergecast, Dieter is on vacation, so Silicon Valley editor and host of an upcoming Verge podcast, Casey Newton, joins us. Nilay, Paul, and Casey run through the news of the week, including Samsung Galaxy S9 leaks, Twitter bots, and third-party keyboards. Also, as a preview of Casey’s upcoming podcast Converge with Casey Newton, Casey takes over as the host of The Vergecast for a segment to beta test a new game for his podcast with Nilay and Paul as contestants. We’ve got a whole lot more in between that — like Paul’s segment he does every week “Warm robot hugs” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 02:26 - Everything we think we know about the Samsung Galaxy S9 09:26 - Intel’s 5G laptops vs Qualcomm’s all day LTE laptops 16:22 - Does Google Reply count as another messaging app? 20:28 - Swype keyboard has been discontinued 22:00 - Twitter bans bulk tweeting and duplicate accounts in bot crackdown 31:32 - Here’s some Twitter options for Mac users now that the official app is going away 37:05 - Converge with Casey Newton beta 56:36 - Paul’s weekly segment “Warm robot hugs” 58:26- Apple employees can’t stop walking into the beautiful glass doors at new Apple Park campus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Password Manager. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast for this, the week of whatever week it is. The Vergecast, as you know, is the flagship podcast of the internet. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's what it is. Wow. I'm Eli Patel.

Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bone is on vacation. Super not here. So we're doing something crazy. Casey Newton is here. Hello. Hey, Casey. How you doing, man? I'm doing fantastic. I'm glad I can fill in for Dieter in his lazy absence. Yes. He's such a, he's a dilettante that, Bone. When I think of Deeter, I think of a rich playboy sailing seven seas. But if you've been listening to Veritas for the past several weeks, months, years, you know that we've been teasing that Casey will have his own podcast. Which is true. It's going to happen someday. I'm skeptical. So what we're going to do on the first half of the Verge cast today, we're going to talk about the news like we always do. Jokes for days.

Inside jokes that no one understands. Cesar Vodka, everybody. It's great. Then for the second half of the show, Casey is going to do like a pilot of his show. He's going to take it over, and he's going to do the Casey show. And we're all going to see how that works. Yeah, it's a sneak preview. Sort of give you an idea of what we're going to do on Converge.

It's a sneak preview. I think there's a beta test or the harsh glare of the spotlight, pushing you off over a ledge, whatever metaphor you want. So that's the show this week, first half news. Casey, you want to tell them what your show is called? My show is called Converge with Casey Newton. And my name is in it because the lawyers told us that that was necessary. I think it's very true. All right, let's just get into it.

There's a lot going on this week. But I think the biggest news, in a way, you can't stop it. It's like S-9 leaks are happening. Yeah. MWC. MWC. So the S-9 is supposed to be basically announced this week. So if you don't know, MWC is a mobile world Congress.

In Barcelona. We've got a team going out there. Jake will be there. Vlad will be there. A whole bunch of folks will be out there. Tom will be there. It's like the CES of phones. It's the CES of phones.

It's also, if you've ever wanted to know in your heart what mobile executives, like European mobile executives are like, MWC is where it comes to life. And it's a lot of suits and a lot of panel discussions with names like 5G e-commerce solutions for a connected era. And you're like, what, who was excited about? I would download that PowerPoint slide deck in a heartbeat. Anyhow, so we always assume that, you know, the big phone companies are going to put on your phones,

Samsung. They have jurisdiction in notes there, but it seems like the S-9 is going to happen this year because the thing is just leaking all over the place. Yeah. K.C. Are you pumped about the Galaxy S-9? Man, I can't even tell you. Ever since the Galaxy S8, I've been like, are they going to make another one of these? And dadgum, they're doing it.

Yeah. Here's what I thought what happened. What about the Snapdragon 845 processor? That's going to be a substantial upgrade for your life, I believe, Casey. Well, here's what I don't understand. At CES, we saw the new Snaptics fingerprint sensor thing. It was in a Vivo phone. They're like, major filmmakers are going to use this.

That's not all the leaks. Fingerprints. They moved it on the back. the right spot in the center. The correct spot. But it doesn't seem like it has this fingerprint scanner. Yeah. That's not, I'm looking at this thing in virtual reality.

That's not a little fingerprint scanner underneath the camera. No, that's where it is. So before it was off to the side of the camera, which was disaster, because you just, everyone put their finger on the camera. But Eli's saying at CS, we learned that we have the technology now as a human species to place fingerprint sensors under displays. I like that. They can become completely invisible.

Yeah. And if Samsung was first to market with that thing, I'm all in. I'm like, Bixby, show up. But they're in a rush. They're in a rush, putting this thing out. It seems like the big point here is the camera. Okay, so, Casey, you're rarely on the show. I know you're an iPhone person.

What is the one thing Samsung would have to do to get you to buy a Samsung phone? Well, I think that if the S&9 were filled with rich, creamy nugget or like gold de blooms, like it's got to go beyond the phone that I'm used to and give me something radical. different. You know, I want to say I had like an S6 just kind of laying around the office, and it was a fine phone. Like I had no objection to it whatsoever. My bigger problems have always been with Android and the fact that the apps that I want have not been on it. And, you know, my friends and family generally have not been on it, which means I have problems with IMessage and that sort of thing. So there's actually not a ton that Samsung can really do.

It's more about the ecosystem for me. Well, let me throw this at you, Case. Hi, I'm isn't a thing, posts like we do, everything we know. I'm just reading through it. And I've got the I-Message problem, too. I think everyone listening to this knows that I'm locked into a beautiful prison of Apple's design. But Samsung is reportedly working on a new location-based local social network called a sup, which will launch the S-9. That's spelled U-H-S-U-P. Is that, Casey, do you think that is enough?

That common abbreviation of what's up. Yeah, a sup. This is true. This is a real thing. Do you think that would be enough to take you out of the I message ecosystem? Well, I will say that nothing makes me happier than dumb social networks.

That's basically my favorite thing to write about and always has been. So I will definitely be taking a hard look at a sup and see if I can get all my friends and family to use it. Maybe they've got some idea. I mean, to me, the best thing about a sup is just thinking that Samsung probably played a U.S. marketing agency

$48 million to come up with that name. Like that makes me very excited. There's definitely a deck somewhere. I mean, Samsung is like, I mean, they spend a ton of money on like marketing and branding. Like every agency in town has a Samsung account of some kind

because they have so many products. Like there's, there are the people right now that landed the Assup deal and they're like, this is going to make us. They're probably the same people who landed like the milk music deal and they're just like goldfish and they just forget what had happened to them before.

So there's also a rumor that Samsung could do an an emoji type thing. And here's what I want. Samsung obviously feels threatened by Google, right? Yeah. Apple feels threatened by Android. Samsung and Apple are typically enemies, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And they create a special bridge for Apple and emoji users to talk with Samsung.

Bixby emoji users, and they can communicate, but Google Pixel users are left out in the cold. This is horrible. I mean, so you don't need to do that because animojis are just movie files. Well, no, because ideally you'll communicate with an emoji in lieu of FaceTime. Oh, I see. So they'll build a special app. Yeah. It's like an animoji FaceTime app.

Yeah. All right. And it'll bridge the divide. Yeah. Samson will be like, hey Apple, you want some more OLED screens? Google us a custom an emoji API. It'd be a shame of something having all these online screens. I don't know, man.

You know what's interesting? The GalaxyS series, it comes out, the No series, it comes out. There's tons of interest. They're the most popular phones. I'm going to be honest with you. There's nothing about them at this point that makes me more interested than what Google's going to do with its next pixel. Yeah. Right?

And, like, I think it's partial, like, Samsung's got much. much better with the blotware, but it's all of these, like, they're like, are sats. They're like, Samsung looks at what Apple or Google does, and I, like, build a clone. Right. And I don't think they understand that it's not the thing that's important. It's, like, the strategy. Right. It's reality.

It's, like, providing the value to the... It's not checking a box. It's how well you do it and how it ties into a larger picture. Right. It's just they've gotten the point where they think software features are specs. And, like, Voices is. Oh, yeah. dog with shoes.

Yeah. Right. And like, well, supposedly the Bixby button's still here. Casey, have you ever used Bixby?

Never, not even as a joke, which is sad, because I would like to. It's like, it's like the perfect joke word and everything we've ever written about it is that it doesn't work.

So like, I should be spending a lot of time with it just for my own entertainment. So, yeah, you know, I often assign stories on the Vergecast, mostly to Deter

and because you're in the Deeter chair this week. I think my week with Bixby is like a great, Casey Newton's story. All right. Yeah. I'm sold.

I'll do it. Moving on. Also, MWC, lots of wireless standard news in the world. 5G, this sort of relentless march

towards it being real. There's a little bit of standards news. Like Verizon was trying to do their own custom riff on 5G standards. It appears they're swinging back and they're going to do a more

standardized thing, which I obviously love. So hopefully we'll hear some of that at MWC. also a bunch of carriers are starting to announce their first test cities for 5G which is cool

but really the news that we've got here is Intel is doing 5G laptops they're setting up their partnerships to put 5G chips in laptops and then that's like versus Qualcomm being like

hey we're going to make laptops with LTE chips and sell them in wireless carriers stores? Yeah like I think all four big carriers are into it like why would you want to buy a laptop from Sprint?

Do you remember tablets and how well it worked out, how good they were. I just don't understand. I cannot think of... Can I tell a story? Yeah. I bought a tablet.

I got upsold. I was at T-Mobile, just upgrading my phone, like a regular person. And they were like, hey, for just a couple more dollars a month, you could get this fully featured Android tablet. Yeah. And so I did. And then, like, it ended up being, like, a lot more complicated. Like, it was basically I had to activate a whole new line.

right without a phone number on it and no it did even it had a fake phone number it had a fake phone number and so i had an android tab i was like you know what i want to read more books i'll like use it as a kindle and i don't know so i bring it home and i'm watching football on your tablet no on my big projector yeah yeah and i had my tablet out i was setting it up while i was watching football this is day one with the tablet i celebrated a touchdown and i slated a touchdown and i slated I am something out of the tablet and I cracked the screen. Who will help me replace that screen? No, nobody.

Does T-Mobile want to help? No. Does Aesu's care? Hell no. So I learned a valuable lesson about buying computers from mobile carriers. I don't, I just don't, I can't tell if this is all these carriers are going to support the LT chip, so you buy a laptop of the LT chip. Or if it's like literally going to walk into a sprint store And they're like, have you heard of Dell our newest partner?

They make phones that are huge. They're actually laptop. I do think it would be nice. I think the idea of an arm Windows laptop is a little scary to me And there's going to be a lot of software. We just learned that OpenGL stuff won't work. Yeah. Which like it's not just games that use OpenGL.

A lot of things use OpenGL to accelerate whatever they're trying to accomplish. A lot of apps use over jail. Yeah. Last week I was super excited about my new MacBook Quick Pro with a GPU. Yeah. And this week I discovered that Slack just triggers GPU and destroys the battery whenever it wants.

Absolutely. So as long as apps aren't rewritten for ARM, they're not going to work great on these laptops. But if you can get enough done with them and you get all day battery life and you're connected to the internet everywhere and you don't have to go through captive portals every time be at a coffee shop or something. Like, it kind of, it sounds cool. Like, maybe, like, we, I feel like there was a big push to get LTE in the laptops like

five years ago or something. Yeah. It didn't really work out. Maybe, if maybe now's the time, I wouldn't be mad if my laptop lasted all day and had an LTE connection in it. It's just like the surrounding details that might make that difficult. But if it works out, it'd be great. Well, it's funny because as we are recording this podcast, a true fact is that the internet

connection to our office has been down. Yeah. And right before we started the show, we were both trying to tether to our phones and failing. We did succeed at tethering to the phone. Can we load websites very fast? No. Does it seem like it's fragile and almost broken? Yes.

But if we had all-day LTE laptops right now. Or Intel's forthcoming 5G laptops for the end of 2019. Which you can only use, AT&T, and. announces you can only use those laptops in Dallas, Atlanta, and Waco, Texas. Well, those are just the, those are 2018 pilot cities. Yeah, it's great. Dial laptops don't come out until 2019. We'll probably also have like Austin at St. Louis.

Casey, do you have a tablet with an LTE connection at it? I do actually. So I have an iPad. I pay 20 bucks a month of Verizon and it gives me a gigabyte worth of data. And I find that I wind up using it a lot at the coffee shop I go to, which doesn't have Wi-Fi or, you know, if you ever, like, waiting in a doctor's office or something, like, every once in a while you just want to have a little bit of data. So I'm actually really sympathetic to the idea of laptops with LTE and think it makes a lot of sense for the carriers to want to diversify

their product lineup in those giant expensive retail stores they have beyond a handful of phones and tablets. I just don't see people walking to a T-Mobile store and walking out with a laptop. You'll get upsold. The laptop is only $400, right? Here's the thing. Your kid, has been begging you for a computer to play Minecraft on. Yeah. And you, it's like, what, I'm going to buy you a whole laptop. Laptop. Sartre like, $1,000.

And then you're like, you're upgrading your phone or you're getting your screen fixed at a carrier or something like that. And, and they're like, hey. Do you want a laptop? Yeah, they're going to upsell you to like a $400 laptop. That's like, that's the Sales Associate Commission, like, gold star of the year. They're like, hey, it worked on me. Angela did it.

She sold a laptop. Like all of Sprint shuts down, all of the point of sale terminals. Her face on it. Team mobile employees are in a back room watching a VHS training tape on how to upsell people on laptops. This is actually true. I don't want to blow up her spot because she's working on a story for a while. But, you know, Ashley Carmen does a phone case of the week. So she's been talking to wireless carriers because they sell so many of them.

And one of the wireless carriers said the attach rate for phone cases is such that they make like $100 in. accessory revenue with every phone they sell. What is an attach rate? So you buy a phone and you buy all this other stuff, the rate at which you convert the other stuff. That's amazing. That actually goes a long way to explaining why there are so many carrier stores in every American city.

And there are always people in them. Like you walk by the Sprint store in like small town America and there's 17 people inside trying to do something at any hour of the day. Yeah. Most of them are trying to activate a sale. They're just desperately. desperately being like, what, can you just turn this on? But apparently the rest of them are being upsold on expensive phone cases.

I don't want to get too deep in it because she's working out for a long time. I'm very excited about that story. But that was just a stat that she told me that that was crazy. Okay. Casey, I want to ask you about two things. Yeah. There's this new Google app called Reply. And the question we've written here is, does this count as another messaging app from Google? Well, you know me?

I'm always very quick to declare new Google products messaging apps. But to me, Google Reply is actually an acknowledgement of the failure of messaging apps, right? Like, think about the humility Google had to have here. They know that no one is using Google Allo, right? They know that Assistant on iOS is going nowhere, right? Inbox is going nowhere. So if they want to get anyone to use this technology that they've invested so much money into, they have to release it as infrastructure for other people's apps.

Like to me, it was almost like kind of a sad declaration of failure. Huh. I mean, the idea that it's like infrastructure for other apps is, shouldn't they just put out like Gboard is infrastructure for other apps? Yeah, can you explain? It's not a keyboard replacement. What exactly is it? It's a way of putting Google Assistant things into apps like Slack.

You know, so Gmail has this feature and Smart Reply will, for example, let's you turn on a vacation responder or urgent sound and, like, suggest ways to respond to those messages. Or, like, you know, it can use your phone's accelerometer to tell if you're in a vehicle or biking and can, like, auto respond for you. So it's trying to take that technology and put it into other apps that Google doesn't own. So, I mean, like Slack is one that I think that has been tossed around. So I think what we're missing here is that this is a system level app for Android.

Right. So you get a text. No, because it sits on the end. You give it permissions. So it sits at the system layer and you get a text, the example they have here or that we have in our photo is the text says, when you can you be home? And it will read that text and suggest to reply for you. Which is clever. I can read the article, but I can't see if the any of the images.

You can't load any photos because I don't have an LTE laptop. But I will say I've been using Facebook Messenger. and M is really making a big appearance. M is like into it. But I'm starting to feel like, okay, so you have your keyboard. Above your keyboard, you have suggested words while you're typing. And above that is like this a, or no, above that is the actual text box. And to the left of the text box is where you like go into more features.

Yeah. And above that is an ad. And above that is M. Yeah. And there's like a tiny, like a few pixels dedicated to the actual conversation. We've invented the Yahoo tool bar for our keyboard. Right. Well, something else to consider is that, you know, Facebook M, smart assistant, these are consumer services in a way, but they're mainly a way of training the AI inside of Facebook and Google, right?

So Google and Facebook are actually asking you to do some work for them, give them data, help them train their machine learning data sets. And yet it comes at this consumer cost of like, you know, you've given up half your screen for these extra features. So I think that's just kind of funny. Well, we're helping them train them and then what are they going to use it for? Oh, you don't want to know. Not better reply recommendations? Well, yeah, presumably better reply recommendations and, you know, probably other products. You know, in Facebook's case, they're super interested in training to be able to do low-level customer service stuff.

So, I mean, new services are going to come out of it. But right now, these companies are kind of in the feed me stage when it comes to data. Right. Which is also why they're ahead in many ways, right? They're building these products that get them this data collection. Whereas like, Apple is like, whatever. We invented something called differential privacy. Series, great.

Try it. Now, let's say I do use these products a lot and I train them so good. Will they be able to tell whether or not I am a Russian bot? Wait, I don't want to do that. First, I want to point out that swipe is dead. Oh, swipe is dead. Swipe is dead. Swipe is dead.

So, like, it feels like the era of keyboard replacements has just come to a close. If you still use a keyboard replacement. And to be clear, the interaction model of swipe being to type is not dead. Yeah. But the standalone swipe keyboard from nuance is dead. It's gone. And I think all that means is people did not install it on iOS. Right?

Because that's where the iOS keyboard doesn't have it. Google Skobor has it. What are you going to do? Anyway, Casey, have you ever installing these keyboards? Yeah, so I use Gboard. I actually really like Gboard. It does a couple cool things.

If you are ever, like, need to tell a friend, like what restaurant you're meeting at, you can just kind of search for it right inside the keyboard and send that with a couple taps. And then I feel like the swipe recognition of words is pretty handy.

So I'm actually a real fan of Gboard. Okay. All right. I tried Gboard several times. It was really slow when I tried it. Is it better now? I think it's better. I think it's better than the native iOS keyboard.

The native iOS keyboard, by the way, still just randomly capitalizing words whenever it's just whatever. They're like proper nouns. We don't use enough for those. Dinner, it capitalized the word dinner yesterday. It literally made it seem like I was courting my wife in like the 1800s.

Like, my lady, when will you arrive at dinner? It was ridiculous. All right, Casey, before we do this, and you take over, there's a bunch of Twitter and Facebook news about bots. I'm actually very entertained by the idea that Twitter just shut down Twitter from Mac. You write an entire newsletter every day about social networks and democracy. Can you just sort of like help me understand what these two networks are doing in the context of Russia? And then can we tell a bunch of jokes about Twitter for Mac? Yeah, that would be great. There is so much going on, which is why I do,

I have been writing a newsletter every day, just kind of rounding up what has been going on. You know, in the particular case of Twitter, they have been under increasing pressure to do something about their bot problems. So, you know, for example, in the aftermath of the Florida shooting, you may have seen stories about how these Twitter accounts that had been dormant all of a sudden kind of came to life and started tweeting about the shooting. And some were very pro-gun control and some were very anti-gun control, and all of them seem to be linked back to Russia, right, which fits this Russian playbook of trying to sow division and inflame tensions in America, wherever it can find them, which is like sort of their geopolitical art project about how

democracy is bad, right? It's just to like get Americans to yell at each other all the time about everything. So, you know, Twitter is under increasing pressure to act. And so this week they announced some new limits on how users and apps can automate their tweets to try to combat some of this automated propaganda. So if you're using tweet deck, which is kind of the pro version of Twitter that lets you sort of run multiple Twitter accounts at once and tweet from multiple accounts simultaneously, it's getting rid of a lot of those options. And it's hoping that that is going to be a step towards reducing the spread of some of this

propaganda. Were people automating tweet deck? Yeah. Or is a person switching between a bunch of account a quote unquote bot because they don't mean it. Sure. And you know, you sort of raise a good point which what is a bot? There are many definitions and it, you know, it is important to kind of define our terms here. But something that you could do in tweet deck was set up like, let's say 50 accounts and then send the same tweet from all of them simultaneously.

So while logged into just one tweet tech account, you could sort of send the same tweet from a lot of different accounts. And of course, one of the things that that enables you to do is to make something trend. And as dumb of a thing as it seems like, like the trending algorithm has been so easy to game across all social networks, frankly, that Russian actors are happy to just put whatever divisive trend into that trending box that they can find. And so this is the kind of step that's going to make that slightly harder to do. It seems weird that they have that much influence.

I mean, I'm kind of going to go. off the Mueller like indictment of these like 13 Russian trolls. And is there a feeling that that's just like a tip of the iceberg? Because like in the indictment they like there's like, it mentions hundreds of Twitter accounts. And like, you know, that's a lot. You could do a lot with 100 Twitter accounts, but you're not going to change US trending. Right. And and and so this is sort of always the question is how big a deal is all of this? You know, in the narrow case of tweets, probably not that big of a deal. But when you look at everything else that Russians did with the context of the election, I do suspect that it had some sort of effect. Our best knowledge at this

time is that it wasn't this brilliantly coordinated campaign. It was sort of lots and lots of experiments that were happening simultaneously in the hopes that they would have some kind of destabilizing effect. And that's a successful. exceeded, you know, beyond Russia's wildest dreams. Now, while these were experiments, I do want to say that some of them were quite sophisticated. Russia did send people to America, right? Like a classic espionage using fake identities, you know, buying Facebook ads with stolen PayPal accounts. So they did some really sophisticated things. But I think that even the Russians at the time weren't exactly sure of what the effect of that was going to be. And they didn't have to be because they were just kind of

passing around. I really like your description of it as a geopolitical art project. I want to get to the point where we describe every Russian teen as a bot and they self-identify as bots. And there's like a Douglas Copeland book called bots and it's about Russian teens. People in 4chan self-identify as Russian bots. No, not like that. It's a hot thing. No, I literally mean like it just becomes like lingo. We're like, those are the Goths, right? Those are the bots. Those are the jocks. Those are the bots. I had another question about this whole thing. So I feel like Facebook

and Twitter are getting a lot of shit for not identifying bots. It does seem like there are some automated ways they could. But when we talk about, oh, this person was fooled by a bot and went to a

event that was like concocted by the Russians. Well, I think that's why you're getting weirdly conflate. Like, the bots didn't set up events. Like the actual human Russian troll farms set up the pages and events. Right. Okay, so take away the word bots.

Yeah. Right. The Russians set up events and people went to the events. And I feel like Facebook and Twitter are getting shit for not identifying those were fake. But how? How? How should they identify that's fake if someone reads it and thinks it's real and goes to it? Casey. Yeah, so there's no good, yeah, there's no good answer to that question.

And it's one of the reasons that Facebook is in such trouble, right? Like there was this crazy story in the New York Times about one of these rallies that was set up by Russian actors that, you know, brought a lot of people out waving Confederate flags. And there was like a banner that said white lives matter. And it was organized by this Facebook group called Heart of Texas, which had 250,000 likes on Facebook. So the rally happens. Everyone's mad. Everyone's yelling. And then afterwards, people who went were posting on Facebook like, hey, it was weird that no one from the heart of Texas was there.

Like, no one who set up this entire rally even showed up at it, right? Like, it's insane. And it doesn't seem like there's any great way for Facebook to crack down on that specifically. But one of the things I've been arguing lately is that Facebook says that groups are the future. It's going to kind of move away from these broadcast posts and the news feed. and it's going to get us all into these very meaningful groups where we're only with our closest friends or people that share some kind of affinity with us.

And we've seen what happens when you do that. Like we saw it in the 2016 election and it's that you create these very polarized groups that are then easily manipulated. So this kind of stuff really scares me because there is no easy answer. Hmm. Yeah.

I mean, again, my argument continues to be that we should shut Facebook down and that Twitter should be restricted only to Donald Trump. And then once a day, we can have our 10 minutes hate. We all just look at Twitter. And we just like walk away. It's great.

I will say I feel like half of every podcast I listen to and Casey I really hope your new podcast will have this has a very active Facebook group. There's like a, something about podcasts attract like a...

No, they just need community platforms. Casey, I think you should start like a V bulletin for your new podcast. Right. Like it's a good community platform. journal. Yeah. V-Bolting is the one you can have your signature be like a little fake banner ad that you

made yourself about how cool you are. Most of the ones I frequent that are silly bulletins are like, you know, like vintage tier equipment and people just put lists of everything they own as their signatures. It's like a credibility list. I was talking to Mandy Brown, who's the head of chorus, the platform that we work on. She like runs the whole thing. And one of her previous jobs, she worked for a book publisher. and there was an author

and the book publisher was like, what are you going to do about this V-Bulletin that we've been running for this author's books? And the people, it was like 250 people or something she was telling me, and they found out who she was

and they started contacting her being like, hey, we've heard there are some changes to like this platform, like leave ours alone. And eventually the decision was to just leave it be. Like, we're not going to upgrade

the software. That's beautiful. There's just these people, and they're going to run on ancient V-bulletin for the rest of their lives. and they're just happy and we're leaving it alone. Well, and V. Bolton, you're under pseudonyms and you have avatars.

Yeah. And so maybe where we went wrong was trying to pretend that anybody could ever have a true, a real person identity on the internet. On the internet? I mean, that's, we can't do that right now. Let's tell jokes about Twitter from Act on. Okay. I can't go to, I can't, I want to get to the next part of the podcast.

Okay, you can do this thing. I don't want to fall down the identity in the internet hole. That's just another, that's another sequence of podcast. Anyone real. God damn it. I'm so ready. Stop it. I'll do it, damn it.

So Twitter announced are killing Twitter from Mac. I think to me, this is the end of my using Twitter. Yeah, so I tweeted this before they announced it. Twitter for Mac has gotten increasingly terrible. They didn't upgrade it to support 280. It doesn't play GIFs. Yeah, when you click on a link in it, now it just opens the tweet again inside of it. It's just broken.

And it had previously been slightly less broken, but still broken. And I preferred that experience because it regulated my Twitter use. I would like, look at Twitter. I'm like, okay, I kind of know what's going on the stream. I'm like, reply to some folks. And I'm like, this is horrible. Why do I do this? And I would stop.

Right. And I got so broken. And I was like, okay, now I'm just using the website. So it made no surprise to me that they're killing this product. But their answer is that you should use the web on your Mac, which I think is a disaster for them. Because the whole, the vibrancy of Twitter comes from the feeling that it's like this real-time thing that's happening.

and if you just hide it in a tab, that goes away in a very meaningful way. So I've got tweetbot open, but I don't like it. I mean, the value of Twitter is in the stream, right? So for me and a lot of my colleagues, we just sort of have Twitter open in our app of choice. I use tweet bot, you know, and that way we can just kind of see the tweets

streaming down our screen all day, so you can kind of dip in and out of it. When you're using it on the web, you just got this static display of tweets. You'd like scroll down a bunch and then you have to scroll all the way back up and then load some new tweets. And it's a really kind of chaotic

and inferior experience. So I just cannot believe that they're promoting that as the ideal way to use the service. I took Twitter. Dot app the other day and I threw it in my virtual trash can because I'm not going to let them leave me.

I'm going to leave them. That's good. Also, also, I hate this is a terrible thing to say, but I'm getting a little more popular on Twitter and I was having a hard time dealing with all the notifications. So I tried to turn off the notifications. I just meant like, so it doesn't pop up on my Twitter notifications turned off. It doesn't pop up on my lock screen. But also I'm verified on Twitter right now, which is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. Because now, if I go look at my mentions, I only see mentions from other variables.

You can turn that off. Well, I haven't succeeded. So on Twitter for Mac, Twitter for Mac is like, we don't know what any of this is. And they just showed me everything. So I would still use Twitter for Mac to actually catch up on what people are like saying to me. But now if I use the mobile app or the web app, trying to like, I wanted to filter down the noise. Yeah. And now I just see, I basically only see Neelai's tweet.

So Neilie quits Twitter. What up? I figured it out. Audience one, baby. Liberal propaganda for days, Paul. It's coming right at you. Also my bot farm. I'm switching to gab.a.

God. Can I tell a quick funny story about Twitter for Mac? Yeah. Here's the funniest thing you need to know about Twitter for Mac, which maybe you knew already, but it was not made by Twitter. So in like 2014-ish, Twitter decides,

we've got to like, you know, remake our Mac app, which we've neglected for a long time. And so they contract with this third-party app developer called Black Pixel and have them secretly make the Twitter app. And then it comes out and has all these bugs and everyone's yelling and screaming about it.

And, you know, Black Pixel wouldn't talk to me about it. I assume because they were under some sort of NDA. I'm not saying that everything that went wrong there was their fault. But it's just so crazy to me that Twitter decided, let's redo our Mac app, but also like, well, we're actually not going to do it. Like, we're going to pay someone to go make an app for us. And then we're going to neglect it. I was messaging with a former Twitter person this week.

and they were just like, honestly, I was there at the time, and I have no idea why we decided to do that. Like, even at the time, no one knew why they were making Twitter for Mac with a third-party developer. The idea that you could just build an app and that it's done? Yeah.

It's like building a coffee table. I improve my coffee table every week. I don't tell any one I'm doing. I just have various bug fixes and improvements. It's a beta. It's weird. But really you're sanding off the bottom of the legs It just took us away.

Four years from now, we'll realize that the coffee table's all the way out of the ground. This is the worst troll in history. All right, I'm going to read this ad. Just everyone should stop using social networks. We have a great commenting system. Feeble. We have our own ancient forum system getting there. It's going to be a good time.

All right, this episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by mattress firm. They sell mattresses. They have one question for you. Are you struggling to get some shut up? If you answered yes, you're in luck because they have a great tip for you can zonk up more easily, which is, as you might suspect, to buy a new mattress for a mattress firm, America's neighborhood mattress store, which lets your budget stretch further when you're looking for ways to improve your sleep.

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Again, go to mattress firm.com slash podcast to learn how your sleeping could be monumentally improved. And if you're still awake, we're going to restart the show right now. I know that implies that you, during it, you will have just like passed out. How are you going to deal on the mattress? You don't make it through the whole ad. All right, Casey, yes, my friend. This is now your show.

Paul and I are guests. You just start. Go for it. Wonderful. Well, gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to Converge. Converge is the game show that's easy to win, but not impossible to lose. Each week, we bring on some of Silicon Valley's coolest entrepreneurs, and they compete to see how high they can go on the all-time Converge leaderboard. So when we watch this, yeah, I know. It's a big deal.

So, you know, on the show, each episode is going to have three rounds. But today, in the interest of time, we're going to skip right to the third round, I'm calling luck of the draw. The first two rounds of Converge are always the same and are going to feature interviews with guests about their lives, their work, their big ideas. But the third round is going to be different week to week.

And we've developed a variety of quizzes, challenges, and mathematical proofs that guests have to solve. So today, for the Vergecast, I've reached into the old Convergatron 5,000, and the game it's selected for us was Retro Pitch. Have you guys ever played Retro Pitch? I've not played retro pitch. Retro pitch.

I'm still stuck on the idea that you're going to get Jack Dorsey on the show and you're going to make him like solve a proof. Oh, that's going to be, when I get Jack Dorsey solving Fermat's last theorem, like move over cereal. It's going to be a sensation. Wow. All right. What is retro pitch? Retro pitch is a game in which the guest has to pitch me a good idea that only seems obvious in retrospect. So I have a deck of cards and I will draw from that deck and that deck will have a,

the name of some service or product that we're all familiar with and that we all use, or at least have heard of, but maybe it was not obvious at the time. And then you will then have about two minutes to pitch me why our company should build it. You are like you're a VC firm or are like shared company? I would have you think of me as a CEO and you are a, you are an internal employee trying to get me to build this thing. Okay. Okay. You should know that I'm a very stern, unforgiving taskmaster. And so to persuade me, you will need to win across four dimensions.

Are you currently cosplaying a Steve Jobs? Four dimensions. Yeah, I am in a black turtleneck. I'm in a Miyaki turtle neck. And today I have eaten only one raw carrot is all I intend to eat today. And I'm currently parked in a handicapped space. Yeah, no license plate in the car.

I got it. Okay, you're deep thing. So here's how I'm going to be evaluating you. There's sort of originality. So if you have an original, I don't know. These are honestly the same categories I use for all of our Converged games. So I'm not exactly sure what originality means in the context of a product that actually exists. But I encourage you to figure it out.

Number two, presentation. So you know, you got to come at me with some fire and some pizzazz. Number three, profit potential. You got to sell this to me as a business. You know, we're not here to make friends. And then finally, you have to ask, answer whether I would personally be a customer. So persuade me to use this. So that's kind of the rubric.

You know, Converge is designed for a single player, but for this sneak preview, we're going to have both you, Neelai, and you, Paul, play around a retro pitch with me. And while all Converge interviews are going to be conducted in person, today we are living that Skype life. And so I'm going to be selecting your cards. Any questions before we begin? Originality, presentation, profit potential. Would I personally be a customer? I'm ready to go, Casey. Nailed it.

Okay. Fantastic. So, Neelai, we're going to start with you. I'm going to select your card and your card is Gmail. Google Mail. Gmail? Yes, Gmail.

So do I have to, am I existing now? Gmail came out what? April 1, I know it's April Fool's Day, like 2004, right? Neil, I'm so glad you asked because I have the Wikipedia page pulled up right now. The idea for Gmail was developed by Paul Buckheight several years before it was announced to the public. It was known by the code named Caribou. It was kept secret from Google's own engineers.

But in 2004, almost everybody was using it internally. And then, yes, it was released in 2004. So let's say it's 2003. And, Neelah, you're in a very important meeting with me, Larry Page. Paul, if you'd like, you can play Sergey Brin. And Neelai, you've had this idea for Gmail. And now you've got to convince me that we're going to do it. And do I have to be historically accurate to the pitch?

Or am I just going? I'll say this. It is not part of the rubric. So if you like refer to your iPhone, even though it's in 2004. I will not count that against you, but you may get some tweets from the audience. Okay. Okay. Dr. Page, if I may. Yes. I am just tolling. Let me shuffle these papers around. I can't. I can't get this VGA connection to work. It's 2004. Here's what I think is happening, Lair.

Yeah. You know, we're, there are no such things as phones at this time. Wait, that's horrible. I'm trying to get myself in this space. All right. T-MATEL. What are you talking about? All right, Gmail. Start it over. It's a lot of pressure. Can I do it?

No, you're going to get your own. Look, we all use Gmail. I'm just falling apart here, man. The thing is, I go to meetings like this in my regular life and pitch our things. Okay, I got it. Yeah. We all use email. And I think, as you know, the restrictions on email are holding it back.

I think we could build a better email product that more people want to use using our vast data facilities. And what we're really going to do is give people one gigabyte of email storage. And that's going to blow their mind. We're also going to move it out of bad apps that run on desktop computers. And we're going to, you know, these local apps are so heavy and clunky. They don't give you access everywhere. We're to move it onto the web, which is our native platform.

And about 15 years from now, that hold on the web will let us crush the entire web and do a new thing I'm calling AMP. But I'm just getting ahead of myself. I think what we need to do is fundamentally reinvent the email experience for the consumer. So they get unlimited storage. And then we can eventually start to use our own algorithms and thinking to better sort that email, to prevent spam, to collect their data ruthlessly, show them ads, and make even more money, Larry. Here's my question as, Sergei.

How will this help us with our messaging app strategy? Same is eating our lunch Let me say this to you first Serag Great shoes This was this was I believe during your Your finger shoe face Oh no I'm wearing roller plates

This is horrible You know what we're going to do So we're going to launch Gmail People are going to love it They're going to flip out And they're going to think it's a joke And then we're going to launch a chat client inside of it That will come to dominate

International Cultural Conversation We're going to call G-chat. It's great. Nice. And then, right when mobile hits, we're going to kill that product. And then we're just going to fart around a little bit. People are going to fall in love over G-chat. They're going to have wedding invitations that are themed on G-chat because it's going to be so

important to them. And then we're going to say, have you tried another product that is inferior and doesn't run everywhere? But that's the future of Gmail. All right. Okay, say it did more. All right, Neil, I felt like you had a good pitch, and then you sort of walked it off the cliff. You know, I mean, I've got to say, you know, I've got a private Hotmail account over here.

I've got 10 megabytes of storage. Like, like, what do you, a gigabyte of storage? What am I possibly going to put in my, in my email account here in 2004 that's more than, I don't know, 85 kilobytes? And the answer is everything. The answer is, first of all, Hotmail is a Microsoft product. And as you all know, any pitch that we have that threatens Microsoft is an instant green light. So I didn't even know we're still talking about. Well, that's true.

Second, the answer is everything. We're going to take away email management from people. We're going to build archives of all communication, because as we all know, all communication forever will be conducted an email. And then Google will have access to all human correspondence. And that will help us do something that we do because we're Google. And I believe that is advertising. I'm just an email engineer and this is my idea.

Now, are you at all worried that Microsoft will learn of what we're doing and launch a campaign suggesting that we're somehow trying to scrugle people? I think that would be the best possible outcome. If Microsoft begins marketing our products for us with funny words and t-shirts that people want, I think we're coming out ahead. I don't think bomber knows what hit him. All right. I only have one final question.

which is, is Larry at gmail.com still available? Sadly, it has been taken by Russian bots. Oh, my God. Well, that's going to cut heavily into your score. All right, we're going to put a pin in it there. Neil, I have to say, you really did cover most of the ideas why Gmail was a good idea. And I felt like you even had some original ideas about basically owning all human data. So I've got to give you a solid nine there.

Whoa. Yeah, so that was very good. Nailed it. Presentation, I liked your passion, but then you talked about how we were going to build a whole chat system just to fail at it, which, you know, I didn't like that very much. So I'm going to go with five points for that. Sabotized. Damn it, Paul. Self-sabotage.

I'm playing a win. The profit potential seemed pretty high. So I think I've got to award that an eight. and then whether I would personally be a customer, like if Larry at Gmail had been available, I think that that definitely would have been a 10. But, you know, now that I'm going to have to be like Larry underscore page,

I think I can only give you a seven. So 14, 22, 29. That is 29 points for Nilai. I'm beginning to understanding how figure skaters feel when the shit's weird. Yeah. All right. Yeah.

And we also always throw out the low score. No, that's not true. All right, Paul. Now we turn to you, and I'm going to pull your card, and your card is the Microsoft Surface. All right. Now, if you need a little jogging of your memory, Microsoft first announced the surface on June 18, 2012. It was presented by former CEO and my personal hero, Steve Balmer, in Milk Studios in Los Angeles, and it was the first major initiative by Microsoft to integrate the Windows operating system with its own hardware,

and was the first PC designed and distributed solely by Microsoft. So that is what you're going to pitch me. It's 2010, let's say. I'm Steve Balmer. And Nilai, you're Bill Gates, and you just come by the office for lunch. I just roll in. And, yeah.

Bill and cheese here, everybody. Make it round. Yeah, Paul, again, you will be judged on originality, presentation, profit potential, and whether I would personally be a customer, you may now go. Bill doesn't wait around. Yeah, Bill is already bored.

Excuse me. I've got malaria to cure. Paul, take your time. So as all things, D, thank you for Microsoft for sending me there to sit in the audience and learn from the greats of our industry. Are you sucking up to bank off right now? And I heard, no, I'm a Microsoft employee. I'm thanking my boss, Steve Ballmer, for the great amenities he provides at this company. that has a lot of money.

But you know the thing is, Microsoft has been all about software. And you could say we won on the desktop, but the desktop is fading in relevance. The future is phones. And I'm not going to point fingers here, but you fucked it up. Wow.

Wow. No, it's true. I, Bill Gates, agree with Paul. Steve. Steve, you You fucked it up Gee, guys This is so

It's a Thursday morning And this is not what I was expecting I thought you had a new I'm not here to hear about how I messed up All right I want to hear new ideas Make me some money, Paul We have one chance left

And it's tablets One chance, wow It's tablid Dyer We won at desktops We lost the phones tablets are still fair game

and I think here's the thing we can both make the future of tablets and the future of laptops at the same time by vertically integrating

we will give people the best software everybody knows that Microsoft has the best operating system but we will... I know I invented it we will develop

the best hardware team and we will make the best tablet that is also the world's best laptop. It will give... It will be good. I'm going to stop you there, Miller,

because you are seriously threatening our potential profits. Now, as you know, we have a lot of OEMs out there that are our best customers. And you're telling me, I got to go out to them and tell them that all of a sudden we're competing with them. Are you out of your mind?

Where are they going to go, Steve? What are they going to put Linux on their computers? Steve, what is it that you said about Linux? that it was bad or something? Oh, you'll have to remind me what I said about Linux. I remember it was Linux is bad. Steve Bomber. Yes, of course.

My classic quote, they're not going to switch to Linux. They're going to eat their cheer. What is the, when you have to eat the bad things? Yeah, they got to eat their vegetables. Vegetables are good things. They can eat their vegetables.

I got charities out there giving vegetables to kids. Here's the thing. We're not going to compete with all the OEMs because the surface will be a premium product. It's for people who want the literal best. Do you, so what you're saying is you want to kill Apple with a tablet that's a laptop? Well, Apple.

I'm very into this idea. Apple ate our lunch in phones. I think this is our chance. Steve just bought Nokia. To own computers. Why I brought up all things, Steve, Steve Jobs, thought that there was cars and there was trucks. And you know what cars were?

And most people have cars, by the, way. Cars are tablets. The surface is a car. The surface is the future of productive computing. Wait, the surface is a car or is it a truck? Or is it an El Camino? The surface is a car. Is it an, but it with truck-like features. Desktops are laptops. As you know, I love to classify things. Desktop or sorry, laptops are truck-like. The magic of the surface is that it can be both. It has detachable keyboard, you attach it it's a laptop, and you are as productive

as any truck owner. But as soon as you rip off that magnetic keyboard, you're carrying it around. Imagine yourself, Steve, you're walking from meeting to meeting here in Seattle with a tablet full of Excel spreadsheets.

Will I be able to circle things with a pen? Absolutely you can circle things with a pen. I'm glad you asked and reminded me about the pin book show. I think I'm done. I think I'm done. That's all I'm trying, man. That was, okay, thank you, thank you, Paul.

I heard everything. I do have a final question, a final question, with just to clarify, will this Microsoft service, will it run Excel? Yes. No, the first one won't. All right. The RT. Oh, it did, it did. The RT did.

They recoded Office for it. Remember, you had to switch the desktop mode? Oh, yeah. It's going to take a lot of software work on our part. A lot of feeling around in the darkness for what Windows should actually be as a minimal set of features. Well, and that may be a question for another day, but thank you for your pitch. It is now time to score your pitch. That's how Steve Vommer ends every meeting.

Just ruthlessly scorching. Yes. A lot of people get fired right after their pitches. Microsoft is what I've heard. All right. So originality, you know, I think you really did cover the waterfront. It had a lot of good ideas. I'm going to go ahead and give you an eight.

presentation. You know, I feel like this one got away from you a little bit, Paul. The trucks and the cars. Don't hold back. It was a little hard to follow at times. So I'm going to go ahead and give you a five. You know, profit potential. I like your idea that all of our beloved partners have nowhere else to go.

And that's the only reason they'll continue to work with us. But this does sound like a fairly capital-intensive product. it might take a while to play out. So I'm going to give you a seven there. And then on the question of whether I personally would be a customer, you know, is somebody who lives in Excel spreadsheets, I've got to give you a nine. So that was, I think, the best work that you did there. So let me add it up.

That's 813, 7. Oh, my good. We've got a tie. We've got a literal tie. We've got a tie at 29 points. And there is no tiebreaker that has yet been designed for. this part of Converge. This is why you do it.

This is why you dry run it in front of a mass of a chest audience. So that when you see, this is the whole point. We're iterating. Exactly. We're going to iterate. But right now,

I'm going to go ahead and put you two on the all-time Converge leaderboard tied for first and last place at 29 points. All right. I like it. This is great.

And that's how we play Converge. And there'll be different games every week and we're still learning and growing. And if you have more ideas, send them my way, what was fun, what was insufferable. And hopefully we'll have a, it's fun. I think of it as an interview game show.

We're going to learn about the person and then we're going to have some fun. And hopefully it will be unlike any tech podcast you've ever heard. Casey, you're planning after South By we're going to launch it sometime, right? That's right. So March is when we are planning the launch. It's very exciting. Speaking of South By, I'm going to just remind people, we're going to be there. I'm very excited for Casey's going to be there with us.

He's been on the Vergecast live at Southby. Ashley and Caitlin are going to be there doing their show. Why'd you push that button with some special guests? That little promo went up. Season two, Why'd you push that button coming out the week before South By? All very exciting. Podcasts. The future of stuff.

But we're the best one. That's right. Flagship of podcasts that are on the internet. Yeah. So maybe there's some CD-ROM distributed podcasts that maybe have us beat. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I feel like podcasting is a thing would not take off.

if they hadn't invented the word podcast. If people are like, I'm going to go home and I love listening to Internet radio. It just wouldn't happen for anyone. It's a good word. Okay. Paul. Yeah. We've got to wrap the show here.

Okay. Casey, I'm officially taking the show back over from you, host of Converge. Take it over. Okay, Paul, every week, you do a segment. Always. It's got the same name. It's called Warm Robot Hugs. Okay.

I loved last week's edition of Warm Robot Hugs. This week's segment of, warm robot hugs is about the mercury intelligent heated jacket. So you might have heard of jackets that have, well, first off, jackets are... You might have heard of jackets. Jackets are meant to keep you warm. Yeah. But what if they don't do a good enough job?

Well, you could put electricity inside of the jacket and have it make you artificially warm. But what if that's not good enough? Yeah. What if there was artificial intelligence in the jacket to help... Decide when you should be warm. No. First of all, I just want to say, this basic concept, literally like power tool companies put out jackets for construction workers that accept power tool batteries and heat them up. Yeah.

Yeah, but do they have artificial tones? As far as I know, they do not. Do they have an Alexa skill? No. Well, I think I've said enough. Head on over to. Does it have like a 3G connection? Or do you have to be in the range of Wi-Fi to yell at your jacket?

I don't think it has a 3G connection. So how do you, never mind. But it has, it must have Wi-Fi. I can't load Kickstarter to get all the details. Because we don't have Wi-Fi. Because we don't have Wi-Fi. But just go to Kickstarter and you'll find it. It's called the Mercury Intelligent Heated Jacket from Ministry of Supply.

Ministry of Supply? Russian trolls everywhere. That is a Russian bot farm. All right. Lastly, I just want to bring this up. Paul has it listed here in our rundown, is Story of the Week. Yeah, that segment we do every week called Story of the Week.

Go ahead. I'm ready to laugh at this story. Oh, I lost a tab. Here we go, here we go. Apple employees can't stop walking into the beautiful glass doors at new Apple Park campus. That's it. That's all we need.

That's basically the story. It's a Bloomberg story, and they said they were putting stickers and stuff on the glass walls. And they, Johnny, I've been to take him now because it ruined the design, which is great. We have a glass window at our house that birds run into, and I put up a sticker of a fake bird to deter birds.

Apple employees are very much like. I just, I think it would be great if like, they put up big stickers of birds on all the thing. All right. Just some things to plug here at the end. Like I said, we are going to be at Southby to give you details.

It's at the Belmont, which is 10-minute walk from the Austin Convention Center. Friday, March 9th is a live Vergecast. You know to Voxmedia.com slash South by Southwest SXSW-2018. Just go to the verge.com. We'll have stuff. That is part of a big thing in Vox Media called the Deep End.

We're taking over the entire Belmont for three days from March 9th, March 11th. There's other live podcasts happening. Recode decode, Karrisso should be doing that live. Like I said, Ashley and Caitlin are going to be doing. Why did you push that button? You guys are going to be doing something. Join me.

We can heckle our rival together. We're not going to heckle him. It's going to be great. I think he's got a really cool guest that I can't disclose, but I think people will be into it. Also, Paul and I are doing the circuit breaker show live on YouTube every week at Tuesday. Ashley, Jake, Hime, Nat, the whole crew here in New York is joining us. We're doing demos of products.

We're having a great time. Paul keeps making insane videos. Watch that. On YouTube, we've done the first two episodes. Every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern, it's live. Lauren Goods versus is back. And they are just great. So check that out on YouTube as well.

And Lauren Good also hosts a great podcast called To Embarrass to Ask. Karras Fisher hosts a great podcast called Recode Decode and Peter Kafka hosts a great podcast called Recode Media. So listen to all of that stuff. Just a flood of content in our armada of things of which we, as always, with this show, the most polished, professional, well-produced. It actually is Andrew does a great job producing it. But from our perspective, the flagship, organized flagship. flagship of organization. That's the whole show.

Casey, thank you for being here. Thanks, Casey. It was great. I am super excited about your show. Where can the people tweet at you, Casey? People can tweet at me at Casey Newton. You can tweet at Paul. At Future Paul.

You can tweet at me at Reckless. That's it for Verchast. We'll be back next week. Rock and roll. Paul. promo code.