The Vergecast - Waymo v Uber, another iOS bug, and AMP Stories

Episode Date: February 16, 2018

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul welcome senior writer Sarah Jeong to the show for the first time. Sarah was at the federal court in San Francisco for Waymo v. Uber trial and has been reporting on it for The Verge, so she lends us her expertise to explain what was going on between the two companies. Also, Dieter explains why so much software is broken and also checks the pulse of the open web with this week’s tech headlines. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like the segment Paul does every week “Fingers are round if you think about it” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 01:06 - HomePods are staining wooden tables with a white ring 06:28 - Tesla Model 3 first impressions feat. MKBHD 07:34 - The Uber-Waymo trial with Sarah Jeong 25:21 - Major new iOS bug can crash iPhones and disable access to apps and iMessages 32:52 - Samsung halts Android Oreo rollout on Galaxy S8 due to ‘unexpected’ restarts 35:21 - Fiat Chrysler sent an over-the-air update that is causing Uconnect to endlessly reboot 39:27 - Paul’s weekly segment “Fingers are round if you think about it” 41:56 - Microsoft is turning Progressive Web Apps into Windows apps 45:42 - The ‘Stories’ format is coming to Google search next 57:36 - Caavo review 1:04:56 - Boston Dynamics robots can now hold the door for its friends Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of everything. Here's the problem with this metaphor. It's not a metaphor. We don't have a flag. I can fix that problem. I've been out of boat. We don't have a verge flag. How much a custom flag screen printing?

This best flag.com. Oh, boy. You've fallen into Google AdSense hole. Well, look, this is the Vergecast. It is. Thank you for joining us. I just want to start right away. I don't want to let this go.

The hottest news of the week, the best news of the week, the most important news of the week. The HomePod, when you put it on a table, turns the table white, and the ring it leaves on the table. Just looks like a pile of cocaine. And it is, I have just been laughing at it. Like, every time I see it, I just crack into a huge smile. This news broke yesterday. We're recording it on Thursday. So we, like, made a whole bunch of amusing jokes about it yesterday.

And then it was literally the first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning. And I just started laughing all over again. Yeah. It's not, okay. Let's just say facts and then we can say all the jokes. Okay. Here are the facts. The bottom of the home pot is like a rubbery material.

Silicon. Silicon. It's a special kind of silicone, according to Apple's. It's obviously a circle. It's vibration dampening silicone. If you put it on a. certain kind of wooden surface. Uh-huh.

Like, when we were reviewing it, all the wooden surfaces we had on were coated in polyurethane, they were all fine. Like a natural wooden surface that you, like, treat with oil, or like, you know? Yeah. One that you love. One that you love. One that's maybe a precious family air loop. Something about that, the silicone, the vibration

from the speaker, and the oil in the wood. Yeah. Just turns that into like a glowing white ring. Now, before you yell at us about bias, we have since learned that the Sonos one also can leave little white marks on wood, but they have like four little feet thing in bigiggers. So it's a different, it leaves a different kind of mark,

which maybe isn't as bad, but it's nevertheless still a mark. But it doesn't look like a ring of cocaine. Yeah, it doesn't look like you're like a 1980s like Wall Street or like a preference for having a good time in geometry. I am no cocaine expert. Yeah. But I was under the impression that you make little straight lines of cocaine.

Okay, so like a... Like, next level. Ring of cocaine. It's just, it's like, it's just the one picture that's like particularly white. It's just very fun. This plays really well into your whole theory of Apple, like one person listening to it at a time and being very secretive it and like the beats people weren't allowed to touch it.

Like clearly, the beats people are really. Clearly they tested it on every material that they had around, which was all glass. Right? It was all mirrors. Glass and brushed metal. And there's weird. There's some brush metal left in a corner somewhere.

Yeah. And there's weird black toilets or I don't like those. It's very 80s. So Apple updated their support page. That's true. I tweeted the quote that we included, and I made a joke about it. And then a person whom I will not name

sent me the following unicorn an emoji. All right. Let me try this. It is not unusual for Eddie Speaker with the vibration, damn big, so-based, base, to leave what? Fuck, fuck, fuck.

That was their statement. Couldn't white get through it there. Yeah. So the same bit is, it is not unusual for any speaker with vibration dampening silicone base to leave mild marks in place on a wooden service. But it's not unusual. It's just the Tom Jones song. And so you can't, you can't not read the statement and think, it's not unusual. Pretty speaker of vibration damning silicone base to leave mild marks on place on some wooden services.

I went to dinner. Da-da-da-da-da-da. We were dinner last night and he just wouldn't stop singing this. the whole time, the waitress was like, do you want dessert? You started singing the statement at her. It's horrible. Anyway, it's a very funny. It's not unusual for a hungry boy to get more dessert.

It's awful. Anyway, it's just so funny. It's just ridiculous. Here is the last turn of the knife. Yeah. So you got a sonos that's a making little mark. So like, okay, I'm going to put a little something under my sonos. Yeah.

The home pod, and this is true, you're not supposed to. to put it on a soft surface. Right. Because the tweeters fired down. Yeah. So if you're just like, I'm going to put a cloth underneath it, you will interfere with the sound of the hot pod. You have to put a special kind of cloth that is like the right size so it doesn't interfere

with the sound. You probably want that cloth to like, I don't know, like it's got to be pretty thin and you want it to look nice. So what I'm saying is we need custom home pod doilies. Yeah. Please visit my new website, HomePod Doyleys. Someone has already released a leather coaster to solve this problem. Of course.

Someone has, yeah. My question is, the Google Home Macs. How do you sell doilies? The Google Home Max comes with a silicone pad that's not attached to it. You place the max on that pad. Can you take that pad and put it on your precious heirloom furniture and then put a home pod on top of that? This is everyone's strategy. Homepoddoilies.com available.

There you go. Nice. Okay, so flags, what kind of size are we think? All right. So that is the set of jokes to start the show. Just put it on a mirror. Make it the 80s experience that you have always been waiting for. I don't think this is a critical problem for Apple.

They should have just told people don't put this on naturally finished wood. It would have been fine. Just like they should have told people that they slow down their batteries. No, slow down their phones. They slow down their batteries. I don't know how to do that, but it sounds bad. That's why Craig Friedery's hair is so big. It's full of secrets.

It's rough. What's you got in there, Craig? Oh, all right. So we did a bunch of stuff this week. Real quick, I want to say I drove a Model 3, a Tesla Model 3 this week. What? That video should be up as you're listening to this. So go to the YouTube page, go to the site, watch me tour around the Model 3.

Here's what we did, because we only had it for a few hours. Paul and I started Circerbreaker Live in it, which was really fun. Saw that. But then after the show, I literally just did laps of New York and picked up cool people and talked to them about the Model 3. So Marquez Brownlee And I rolled around the Model 3 for a while That was super fun Thank you for doing that video with us

Ashley Carmen We did a series of challenges Because you know the whole car The interface of the car is 17-inched touchscreen Yeah So we I was like Can you turn it on the wipers? And we had like figure it out

So that was fun And then Lauren Grush and I drove around And we talked about Elon Musk And SpaceX and Tesla And how the different companies are covered And then I just floored it on the west side highway And we both yelled because the car's really fast That was really fun

And then she drove and she was like, wait, this is really fast. And she floored it. And I yelled. It was great. Good times all around. So check out that video. It should be up at the same time as this. But really, the first segment of the show, even though we've like burned 10 minutes of nonsense.

Sarah, John, welcome. Hi. So, Sarah, you covered Uber and Waymo last week. And I just want to tell this story. And then I want to ask you about the trial in a case. But while you were covering, you were finding. daily dispatches from the trial. It's like this overheated trial. Waymo is obviously

a division in alphabet, the self-driving car division. They're suing Uber for a long thing that boils down to you stole trade secrets from us about self-driving cars, particularly LIDAR. And Sarah was covering the trial every day. And this is a true thing.

A major, like, PR person called me from Uber and said, is Sarah going to be covering the trial every day? As a fact. And then email me, not call me. And then was it Thursday that you published? I'm not sure if Waymo has a case.

It was Thursday, right? Yeah. On Friday. Well, so actually, my favorite part of this progression was the day before, nobody likes Uber and they can't play the underdogs because they're too underhanded or something. Yeah, it's too evil. Nobody likes them. And then Waymo doesn't have a case.

And then. On Friday morning, like very, very early, they just settled. They're like, whatever, we're done. We settled. And they just walked away. So Sarah, tell me, well, tell the listener about the case and like what you saw there. Because it's so complicated what was actually happening. But from the outside, it just looks like two big companies fighting in it.

And it just seemed like they accomplished nothing. Yeah, that's one way of looking at it for sure. I mean, what it boils down to is some guy who was, I guess, really overpaid and considered sort of this genius in the self-driving car market. got poached. Like he left Google because he was mad and he went and founded his own startup and that startup got acquired by Uber and Google was really, really mad about it. And in the meantime, he pulled some really shady things. Like he recruited people for that startup while he was still at Google and he downloaded 14,000 documents and walked away with them and was really shady about

it. Like he, well, not only is it really weird to download 14,000. documents from your work and then suddenly quit, but it's also pretty shady to then move them on to backup disks and put them into your closet and then like suddenly find them when it's like, you know, when you're about to get acquired by a competitor and be like, oh, hey guys, by the way, I have these documents. What should I do with them? And then also to delete all of your text messages about the documents and also to delete the text messages about deleting the text messages. And there was a whole thing, right? So basically the core of this case is this guy did something super shading. And from there you have this thing where Google, for whatever reason, got a forwarded

email from like a hardware parts like manufacturer that sent them a like a chip 2D model. And they're like, wait a second, this chip looks familiar. And then from there, the lawsuit proceeds where they go, wait, he downloaded how many documents? What happened here? And then they sue. And it just turns into this huge thing. In the middle of them suing, like Travis gets ousted from Uber. Anthony, that's the guy who downloaded the 14,000 documents allegedly. He gets ousted from Uber too. This startup that they acquired that was supposed to solve all of their self-driving car problems.

They blow all of their benchmarks. They just don't meet any of their benchmarks. It's just, it's like, yeah, it's just one thing after. another, there's a new CEO, like, and then meanwhile, like, basically it's one of the funniest cases I've ever seen because everything points towards Uber looking super guilty, right? And then it turns out that there might not actually be a case. Like when with the, like the case sort of narrowed down, like they threw in all these patent claims, they threw in a bunch of like, you know, unfair competition, like all of this stuff. But it really boiled down to trade secrets, like eight trade secrets.

So we have no idea what the trade secrets are. They probably, probably have something to do with circuit boards and chips. And in order to prove trade secret misappropriation, you have to prove that the trade secrets made it over from Google to Uber. Like there has to be like a cause and effect kind of deal. When you have patents, you don't have to prove cause and effect. Like it's enough that it's, it violates the patent. But in this case, you do have to prove this sort of, yeah, the documents made it over from there to the other place. And there just isn't really that proof. Like all you have is like, well, they could have.

There's no like slam duck. They definitely didn't. But there's no affirmative case. Like that's for certain either. So it is a really funny, funny. Like you just have all of these suspicious circumstances and they're all bundled around like kind of a hollow shell. It's very strange. So your argument.

sort of midway through the trial was there's these eight trade secrets that can't be made public because then they lose their trade secret status. Right. So they're central to the case. They get talked about by the judge. Does the jury get to see the trade secrets? Yeah.

The jury gets to see. But the public does not. So when that was happening, they would go under seal and only the jury would see it. And you noticed that they'd only spent like a really small amount of time under seal, right? Was that the thing that teed you off if there's nothing here? was there something else? Well, the judge did keep saying things, like sort of very ominous things during pretrial. Like, you're going to be in big trouble if you can't, like, prove that the secrets

never made it over, right? And that I thought was like, well, he could just be trolling them, right? Because this is Judge Alst. He's kind of known for having a tough love demeanor with attorneys. But that seemed interesting. So I like sort of kept an eye on that. And from there, I was like, well, if the heart of this case is trade secrets and we have no idea what the heart of the case is. Like right now it just really seems like all we're doing is speculating on suspicious circumstances. We don't actually seem to know what this case actually is about. So I'm like really curious to find out how much we're going to hear about the actual lasers and the actual circuit boards and the actual technology. And I was told like, yeah, they will be discussing this technology in broad terms. But every time they started talking. about the technology, it just never became very clear what they were talking about, even in broad terms. And so I started watching for how long they were spending under seal. And I began to think, like, the jury can't possibly know what's going on in this case either. If, like, if I don't know, and they've only spent like 45 minutes or so under seal, then there's no way that the jury

knows what's what's up either. Yeah, it seemed like Waymo's case was really based on, hey, you've heard of Travis Kalanick, right? He's shady. He's a jerk. Here's his other shady dude. Like, well, was this, was this actually about them trying to win the trial, get a settlement, or was it just about, well, Uber's down. We hate them. We're going to embarrass them by, like, dunking on them and, like, showing off their embarrassing text messages. Why not all of the above? I mean, like, it's not just Travis.

Like, they settled before Anthony could get on the stand. Right. And he was largely expected to take the fifth. in the courtroom in front of the jury, which that would have been very interesting. And that, you know, in a civil trial, you're allowed to make a negative inference based on that. In short, like, the jury can judge the hell out of this case based on how suspicious it is that this guy is taking the fifth. Like in criminal trials, if someone takes the fifth, they get a whole lecture about how it's their constitutional right and they can't make any negative inference based on taking the fifth, right? but in a civil trial you totally can't like you just totally can like oh yeah all right if this guy's

taking the fifth something's up like you're allowed so yeah like this settlement like basically skated right to the edge of what would have been sort of the most disastrous moment for uber i think so who knows i think that waymo did probably get what they wanted out of the settlement which is the promise of non-use but yeah it's uh It's an interesting one. We don't really have very many details on what that promise of non-use actually entails. Like, they promised, Uber has promised them that they're not going to use the Google intellectual property in their self-driving car technology. So I heard someone describe it as like a UN nuclear weapons inspector sort of deal. But I don't know. Like I don't know what the actual details of that are or how they hashed out what it meant that they were going to not use their intellectual property.

since Uber still has maintained that they don't use Google's intellectual property anyways. Well, then it's a good deal for Uber, right? Well, yeah. They're going to keep not doing the thing that they're not doing. Is Google going to be like ripping open future Uber self-driving cars and trying to find their secrets inside of them? I mean, that's what, like, you're free to do that is the thing. Like, once these cars are out on the market, like, you're free to, like, buy one and rip it open and try to reverse engineer it. That's why these trade secrets just, they don't keep.

trade secret status for very long. Like, yeah, it's like some recipes and stuff, like the Coca-Cola recipe. You could probably reverse engineer it to some extent, but like the exact recipe is still considered a trade secret, right? But, yeah, it's a lot of things. You're just, it's going to lose trade secret protection because you can reverse engineer it through legal means. Yeah.

I think what's, there's this moment. Who said Laser is the sauce? Was that Travis to Anthony or Anthony to Travis? I was Travis to somebody else about Anthony, I thought. I think it was an Uber executive. I think it was in like Uber meeting notes. Like, yeah, in like actual meeting notes. So that's an amazing phrase.

Laser is a sauce. The laser is a sauce. And that's in, first of all, it's just a ridiculous thing to say. Don't say that. But it was in reference the idea that LIDAR is the core technology that's going to enable self-driving. Right. So this whole case is going on. all of us are just like whispering the phrase laser as a sauce to one another and like cracking up.

And at the same time, Elon Musk is at like a Tesla shareholders meeting and he's like, LIDAR is a dead end and we're not going to use it and the people who are using it are going to find, I think the phrase he uses they're going to find themselves trapped in a local maximum and they're not going to be able to get out of it. So it's funny, there's this whole case about LIDAR. And I think didn't Alsa say, like, admonish both parties for claiming to have invented LIDAR? because it's not really about LiDAR. He watched Waymo. Yeah, he's like, you're making it sound like you invented LiDar.

He said, you're making it sound like this case is about LiDor. You're making it sound like you invented LiDar. You did not invent LiDar. This case is not about LiDar. And if you keep doing this, I'm going to have to like take the jury aside and tell them exactly that. Wow. Yeah. So like a little bit later, they were very careful to be like, like, Google didn't invent

lighter, did they? to their witness and that was like, oh, no, no, but like, right? Like, it's just, yeah. But it's funny that this case is about this, like, very narrow subset of how LIDAR is used or implemented. And at the same time, Elon is like,

actually, this is all nonsense. And it's going to, it's not the right approach. But this case was also about Waymo feeling pissed and, like, betrayed and angry. It was about, quote, uh, Sergey being, quote, super unpumped.

Yeah. It was Larry. It was Larry. Damn it. Larry was, Larry was unpumped. I mean, it just, it seems like Waymo put Uber on trial just to, just to quote them. And then they're like, well, we done and done. But Uber has like a new CEO.

His tone is really apologetic in a statement. We're sorry. This was a distraction. We're going to keep moving. What's your read? Now that it's over, what's your read on sort of what happens next for both of these parties? It's kind of almost a business as usual kind of thing, right? Like we've gone back to sort of the normal state of affairs.

We don't know why it is that automoto missed all of their benchmarks, right? Like that might have actually been because of this lawsuit. Like it's possible that Alphabet just put Uber back like years in developing their LIDAR because of the lawsuit. Like it's possible. It's also possible that that acquisition was not all it was going to, it was cracked up to be and that it was a garbage acquisition. and that they were going to miss all those benchmarks anyways. But yeah, I think we're sort of back to both companies are back to doing the thing. And since we don't know what the trade secrets were, maybe they were really important and valuable.

Or maybe they were just, you know, not quite the sauce that everyone thought that they were. And then lastly, you were mentioning to me the other day that there were some patents involved, that some of the patents had been invalidated? No, they are not invalidated yet. So I believe how many was it? Like four patents were involved. And then three dropped because it turned out that they were not implicated in the case at all. Like they were just not being used in the tech.

And then the last, the fourth patent, there was an ex parte proceeding. So like a third party came in and went like, hey, I think this patent might be invalid. And then so we've gotten a non-final office action that's like, yeah, we think this patent might also, like, might be invalid too. And now Waymo's supposed to respond. And I've been told that there are a lot of these where, like, you know, they come back and like, hey, we think this patent might be invalid. And then you get something like, you know, the patent language gets adjusted or you get some kind of response from the owner. And then the patent is upheld. Albuy it bleaked a bit. So that could be the end result of this. But yeah,

throughout this whole thing, that patent has been just sort of hanging out in the background. The one patent that makes it relevant. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Sarah. I completely enjoyed your coverage of this trial. It was, you don't usually get amused at IP litigation, but it was such a circus from start to finish. And it was amazing to have you actually there, actually covering it and pointing out how, I mean, I credit you for making them settle, basically.

I don't know that's true, but I think the four of us and the Vergecast listeners, we're all just going to believe it's true. Yeah. Because you definitely shamed them into being like, we should just stop this. It's a good fan fiction universe. Exactly. All right. Thank you so much, Sarah. All right.

Thank you. Bye. All right. I'm going to read a quick. Sarah's great. Yeah. She's just, she, I've been such a fan of her coverage for so long. It's so cool as she works here.

Do you think the next time we have her on, she can talk about how. we should get rid of all patents. Y'all can have that fight. I'm going to go have fun with my new laptop that has a GPU. Play some of those great Mac games. Tux Racer. Tux Racer. I got a new laptop.

Well, I got a old laptop. Cromag Raleigh. My laptop was dying in Vox Media IT. I put in their request ages ago, and they were just waiting for someone to turn back in a 2015 MacBook Pro. Riven. No touchbar. I have it now. It is perfect. It has all kinds of ports. Where in the world is Carmen San Diego? I will say that I've had it on for approximately an hour and a half now the battery's

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No, get some sleep. We'll be here in the morning. The end of the ad. Look, I'm not going to tell you how to live your life, but maybe there's something else to listen to when you're trying to fall asleep. It's not us just goofing. Listen to like a Vox podcast. Wow. Yeah, the weeds is real boring.

Listen to that. Sorry. Now, they're great. I love them. They're starting a new podcast. Today explained. Every day. They explain the day to you.

They're explained. Today is Tuesday. All right. Dieter, you have written the heading of this segment. It's in all capital letters. It's bold. It's bigger than usual. It's an H2 header.

It says all software is broken. It is super broken. I'm super tired of company shipping. betas and bad betas and then just like bugs are fine but it just I don't know this week you look at the scope of crap that was broken and it just feels like too much we had yet another instance where you could send a special character to an iPhone and it would crash whatever app received that character not just I message but any messaging app we've seen this script before I don't know why it keeps happening just like stick to Unicode I don't know so that

That's going to get fixed before iOS 11.3, but they're going to fix that problem. Something is going on with Apple's text handling across the board. Yeah. Right? They had the weird bug where it was replacing characters. Yes. Right. The iOS keyboard still just capitalizes words at random all of the time.

The two that are the most knowing for me personally are the word news and team, which are words that I use all of the time at work. and it constantly sounds like I'm addressing like the local news bureau of a TV station. Like, where's the news team? I don't need that to happen. Can I explain something about, so there's a fundamental element of computing. It's called strings, right?

So old-timey days, when there was, let's say, only 256 characters usable, right? You represent a string by using a series of numbers. So, so like they're ASCII codes, right? So whatever 5, 7, 29, 29, and 8 spells, what? Whatever that spells, right? You just put those into an array, right? Yeah. And then you, you, the computer renders those as the letters.

Yeah. As Unicode has, the Unicode standard extends obviously greatly beyond just Western alphabet and numbers and includes emojis and all sorts of other languages and scripts and stuff. Those aren't all represented?

I think it includes wingdings. I think it does include wingdings. I'm pretty sure. When did wingdings go from a font to a situation? I super miss wingdings. Please continue. They're not all represented

by a single number at a time. So like think of even like an E with the little accent, whatever that's called. An accent? But you know what I'm talking about in Spanish. You have the E, but you got a little apostrophe over the E. Yeah.

In Unicode, that's represented by like the E thing and then like a modifier thing. But how is it rendered? It's rendered as a single character. And so when you are making the fundamental software that all developers use to build their software, you have all this machinery to handle these very. complicated strings because developers just want to say, I want the third character. But down underneath, well, that third character is represented by two different codes. I'm sad that we missed the opportunity to use the word umlaut in this podcast today.

Oh, I'm sorry. It's a really interesting theory about strings. You might say it's a really good string theory. But I don't know if that's what the problem is here. The problem here might just be that Apple's bad. But so is Samsung. Wait, wait. Let's just wrap the Apple thing for one second.

the Samsung thing is equally bad. Yeah. So the bug, and this is like the second time it's happened, we're just sending a character to an iPhone. It will crash springboard. Yep. So you get, in

this bug in particular, you send a character in English called Dalaiou. You get the notification. You click on the notification. It opens the app. It will crash springboard, back you out of the app, restart it all. And then when you go to open that messaging app, it tries to render the character again, and

instantly closes the app. So you're locked out of your messaging app. So it works in WhatsApp, it works in IMessage. I mean, this is like, to your point, this is happening at a deep system level. We're just trying to render this character is destroying the phone. My guess is it's a buffer overflow, right?

If you think your word is four characters long, but it's actually five. Yeah. Uh-oh. But I don't think, this is just a single character. I don't think there's an accent. But it might be used. It's funded in Unicode by multiple things.

But I don't know. That's just a theory. I just like strings. I mean, it's just like, this keeps, seems to. Yeah, you'd think after it happens one time, they're like, well, we definitely need to rethink the fundamentals of how this works. But it's also like, it's iOS 11. Like, they've made 11 versions of this software.

Yeah. Like, how did we get here? The iPhone has been out for 10 years. So here's my theory. I think that because it's 10 years old and because they launched it. in an age when, like, iOS launched in an age when, like, you really couldn't, like, there's, like, full computer running OS10 underneath, sort of. It's, like, their original pitch for it.

But it took them a while to, like, do proper multitasking. They never did full on. You can do whatever the hell you want multitasking, which Android people used to give Apple crap about, but now it looks kind of savvy because the thing lasts longer and gets a little bit less buggy and has a little bit less battery drain. And Android's moving that direction. I just, like, I'm not surprised that iOS has, like, a fundamental thing, because I think that it is fundamentally on top of UNIX,

whatever iOS is doing is, like, you know, they've, like, just built and built and built and built. They haven't re-architected the thing from scratch. And so it's not a total shock to me. Which is a little addendum to my theory. Oh, God. Strings are everywhere. Text is everywhere.

Yeah. And text rendering is a thing that you're doing constantly. Yeah. So as a software developer, you try to optimize the hell out of it. So Apple probably has tried to optimize, and its optimizations miss corner cases on occasion. And we found another one. And part of the problem, Steven Sinovsky had a very long Twitter storm about this where he's like, Apple ships more software at scale than anyone. They were very, they were out there last week.

We talked about this. They're like refocusing their efforts on quality instead of new features. Right. And in theory, they're also maybe going to try and decouple app updates from the OS release. And this is one of the reasons when I talk about iOS feeling rickety and like based on old, an old conception, old architecture for the OS. Like, of course, Unix is old, fine, whatever. But the fact that they can't ship iterative updates to core apps that are built into the OS without shipping a whole new OS or they either can't or they refuse to. Either way, it just makes the whole thing feel like,

ah, core Android apps that Google makes that are, like, pre-installed on the OS, I get updates for that every day. Like, Gmail just gets updated all the time. Yeah, all the time. And mail gets updated on the cycle or when there's, like, a critical bug, and they've got to do, like, a full-on OS flash for it. Well, they can do it or it. But you know what I'm saying.

Yeah. It's bonkers. Sorry, continue. No, I was going to say, speaking of rickety OS's. Samsung had to pause their Oreo rollout. I was so excited

because it actually has new emoji and... Yeah. What did they have to do? It was causing Galaxy S-8s to unexpectedly reboot,

which is a thing that you don't want. No. No. I would say the unexpected reboot loop with phones is not the problem

that you would expect to surface like this. Yeah. Because that's the battery issue for the iPhone. Yeah, yeah. Restart themselves. The other,

also a little bit of angst because Samsung opted not to troubleize Oreo on the SCS8. We kind of knew they wouldn't. Yeah, we figured they wouldn't. It's too much work. Tribalization is with increasing modularity of the system. Yeah, so all your customizations are

separate from the core OS so that if Google wants to issue an update, they just can and then your customizations have to be done in a standardized way so that they can update the OS underneath your customizations and they don't have to wait for you to get the updates out. In theory, it also makes it possible to more easily flash ROMs on phones because you can just create the ROM.

And then like since all the modules, all the ways that customizations get done are standardized. Then a ROM that gets made for one phone could theoretically work on another phone if they both use treble to create that underlying layer. So theoretically, if Samsung had done the work to use treble, this wouldn't have happened. Well, theoretically, if Samsung had done the work to use trouble and then you could just be like, well, Samsung, your OS sucks. I'm going to go to XDA developers and I'm going to download, you know, something else, lineage, whatever, and I'm going to, or what's, is that what they're called now? What replaced cyanogen? Was it lineage? You're deeper in this hole than I am in.

Remember cyanogen? I remember cyanogen. Yeah, it's lineage. I'm right. I'm right. I knew you were right. I trusted you. I just wanted you to believe in yourself.

I don't know. Essential just is put out a beta for 8.1, which finds. fixes they couldn't get 8.0 working. They're like, oh, 8.0 is so easy, and we're going to do treble. And, like, we'll get this done in a couple of weeks. But they, like, introduced a whole bunch of jank. Yeah. A bunch of scroll jank.

They call it scroll jitter, but we all know it's jank. They got their camera software. They got HGR auto working finally a little bit. It's like a little bit better. That's good. Anyway, like, just another example of software is hard and it's annoying. Can I, can I do my favorite one? Ooh.

Favorite one in the week? Yes, please. I mean, I have a Jeep with UConnect. And like a big issue with UConnect was that it didn't have support for carplay and Android Auto and my car has a resisted touchscreen. Would you say that sometimes you don't connect? Anyway, there's a new version and new cars

and new Fiat Chrysler cars. They made a big deal about it, capacitive touchscreen, carplay, Android, auto, a whole thing. People are so excited about it. This is true. There are third parties that will sell a retrofit kit to you for like $1,200 so you can take out the whole screen of your car.

If you have Fiat Chrysler vehicle and replace it, you've got to replace the USB hub to. It's like a whole thing. Anyway, Fiat Chrysler issued a software update to that system, and it's just causing the cars the whole stack to just reboot randomly whenever it wants. Yeah. Over the air update for the car. Yeah. So it just started happening to people.

It's been happening for weeks now. Dieter, what is the suggested fix? Sean O'Kaney's been calling customers tweeting about it. Apparently, Chrysler is called. call their customers and they call says, start your cars and leave them running in open spaces for 15 to

20 minutes. And then maybe they'll get OTA update pushed down to them. Yeah, there's no way to request. Again, I have the system. There's no way to request the update for the car. You just have to wait. The Android update button on pixels up until, you know, a couple weeks ago. The pushing the button didn't do anything. Like, pretty

soon the recommendation is that you draw like a pentagram in the dirt with your blood. Yeah, well, it's funny. So I drove the Model 3. Yeah. And, you know, the whole thing with Tesla is they're constantly updating the software. So I got the Model 3.

The Tesla PR person was in there where she's showing me the screen. And she's like, we're actually going to change this interface. I think it was for the wipers. I think she's like, we're going to change this wiper UI like very soon. Like that update's like going out today or tomorrow. And that's like Tesla's thing. People love Tesla because the cars are constantly being updated. The software is changing.

It's going to lose your views. It's getting more features. And like all their cars. and like all their car makers like oh we got to get in on that we got to people want that there are computers we should update that and the fiat's like we're bad at this we're not we should you shouldn't do that

I mean it's just like these computers man I don't even have like an angle or a deep thought I've just everything was broken this week this is why you got to get a 2015 laptop with real ports and GPU I have a I have an idea yeah it's the micro kernels are the answer so Google's

next fuchsia. We're going to go on a fuchsia hole. Well, one of the big problems with the, especially when you're trying to update an operating system, is that there's so much in the kernel and it touches so many things. And a lot of the drivers are kernel level.

Yeah. And there's a different way to design an operating system. It's called a micro kernel and there's not exactly precise definition of a microcernel. It's basically a kernel that does as little as possible to just get you booted and to hand out capability. But then you have a very small, stable core. And then when things go bad, they don't kill everything because they weren't deeply tied deep in the operating system. It also makes it easier to create drivers for different hardware without having to be like committing to like literally adding code to Linux to support your stuff.

I think, I think Google sees the writing on the wall and Fuchsia is, is, is, definitely like the right direction to go. There's also a great open source project called Red. What is it called? Redox. There's a Rust operating system that's a micro kernel. It's very interesting. That's the other thing.

Everything should be written in the Rust programming language. That's my other recommendation. I like this. I like that you're just sort of everyone's CTO. Yeah. Yeah. Paul Miller, CTO. Buffer overflows? No, thank you.

Watch out for those texturing optimizations, everyone. This has been your CTO. Optimize safely. All right, Paul. Yeah. I mean, the segment should just be called Paul Miller's CTO, but every week you do a segment. It has the same name.

That's right. What's it called this week? It is always called Fingers Are Round if you think about it. Hmm. I've not thought about it before. But now that you think about it. figures are around.

That's true. Panasonic still makes laptops. Hey. It's in Tough books, right? Oh, I know what we're talking about. They put out a new let's-note laptop. And it's just like, I think I'm looking at a, it says the

verge of the top, but I'm pretty sure I'm looking at an In gadget post from 2006. And the Let's-Note laptops, if you're not familiar with, are distinctive for their circular touchpads. And yeah, so there's some new, let's-nose. I mean, they're just for Japan. Yeah. They got Ethernet ports. Vio just put out a new laptop.

It's got Ethernet. It's got VGA. Hey. Like, if you're living in Japan, you've got all sorts of cool plugs. Does it have regular USBAs? Yep. Yeah, of course. Of course.

You know, on Circuitbreaker this week, Paul and I had a heated argument that caused Time Gartenberg to basically explode. Oh, I watched this. When I suggested that the prevalence and attention paid to USBC adapters is actually a repudiation of all USBC. Yeah. Because the most interesting thing you can do with a USB port, just plug in an adapter that gives a USBA ports. Yeah. It's bad.

2015 laptop with a GPU. That's where I live now. But the hub idea is still powerful. The hub that both charges your laptop and also gives you access to plugging into other things. The ideal is that you have a hub plugged into your monitor and plugged into the wall and plugged into your SD card reader and a few other cool accessories. When you show up to work, you pull out your laptop, plug in one USBC into your laptop that charges your laptop also powers the display.

It also connects you to everything in that hub. That's the dream. That's how life should be. We're going to get there. If you'd like to see this argument happen while Hymne slowly explodes, you should watch Circuit Breaker Live this week. Deere, you've written another H2. This one is ironic.

Yeah, this one isn't true. You've written The Web Lives. So, okay, a couple, one very heartwarming web story. Microsoft is enabling progressive web apps in the Windows store. They're just going to start tossing them in when they find them on the web. Progressive web apps are pretty cool. I think that the idea of progressive web apps being built into. a platform working native to a platform

is better than random-ass electron apps or fluid apps that you see. Electrons great and fine, but it's not it's a different runtime than maybe your optimized for your operating system. Progressive web apps, if they're coded well, will work on Firefox

or Edge or Chrome or Safari. And actually Safari's going to be fully supporting them. And so instead of having to like download a random electron app that is basically just a whole other damn web browser, runtime running and that's where your app lives, like progressive web apps that are built into your platform,

seems like a much more elegant solution. And so I'm very happy that that is happening. There's like Twitter Lite is an example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you haven't used a progressive web app, like there's sites that list them, they feel amazing because it's like using a website. But all the links that you'd want to click on,

like the navigation of that website, everything is already pre-cash typically. is how they typically work. Yep. So it's like using... It progressively loads the stuff in the background. So every time you click something, it's just... Oh, it's so quick.

Speaking of things that are pre-cashed, accelerated mobile pages are pre-cashed. They're web-be, web-esque, web-like. Web-adjacent? They're built with web technologies. Controlled by Google. You can... Well, sort of.

Distributed by Google. So we could get into Amazon. Amp deeply at some point. I'm like, I could make the case for AMP if I wanted to. Okay. I'm not going to do that right now. We're just going to shit. We're just going to, I'm just going to swear.

We're just going to crap. Do you want me to make the case that Google is slowly turning? We did drop an F-bomb earlier in this podcast. We did? Yeah. When the fuck did we do that? By playing an emoji. I just, see what I did.

Anyway, make the case that AMP is good in one sentence. It solves many of, the web, mobile web's problems. Comma. By seating control to Google. Simicolon. It's only controlled by Google because everybody else is ignoring it. Close parentheses.

Fair. Are you going to talk about the Amstories? If somebody else rolled up and just started like submitting more code to the GitHub. Facebook was like, instant articles, what a terrible idea. Let's join forces with Google. work on AMP together. If Facebook wanted to roll up and just kind of take over the project, Google wouldn't be able

to stop them. This implies Facebook can make a plan and execute it in a way. So Google released two things. One I thought was like, man, it's not that interesting. One, as a person who's like cares about the future of digital media, I thought was very interesting.

Turns out, I had it exactly wrong. People cared way more about the fact that AMP is going to be able to work in Gmail soon so that you can put a web full-on web page or web progressive web app inside an email. Hmm. So when you get an email and it's from Pinterest and you can just, Pinterest is right there in your email.

The whole thing. Huh. Just sitting there. That sounds like it will be used for evil. Yeah. Yeah. But it can't be used for evil because AMP doesn't allow you to do evil things. And because Dr.

Google is watching every length of him. That's his name. Yeah. Dr. Google. Yeah. It's like Dr. Mario.

Same music plays too when he's watching Gmail. Like the pills. Amp stories. That's where we're going. So, you know, it's stories. You know Instagram stories. You know Snapchat stories. You know other kinds of stories.

Yeah. Google is building amp stories. And so right now, if you want to find them, you've got to search for a publisher. You could search for our friends at SB Nation. You could search for Mashable. Maybe some point in your future would be able to search for Verge. You can search for Wired. Fox.com.

Search for Vox.com. And you will see this carousel. You have to do it out from a phone for it to really, truly work. and you'll see a carousel of these story formats where you open it up it takes up your whole screen there's cute little moving images and the text slides around and then you tap on them you can't slide you tap and it like pages through you know a story just like an instagram story a snapchat story and like there's a little timer on it and a little progress bar at the top and at the end there's a link and uh the same way that there's like a carousel of you know amp stories the top stories

staying into Google search. I imagine Google thinks eventually there'll be a carousel of these stories. Yeah. And there will be, they'll show up on your Android phone on the left. So another thing. Everything is a slideshow. Right. I think this is very bad. Here are my reasons. Yeah. So Instagram stories are very good. Love an Instagram story. They are super native to the platform. Yeah. Even though they were wholly stolen from Snapchat. But it's a camera app. It's a photography app. Yeah. Stories are generally made

of photography. It's a simpler, cheaper way to do photo-driven storytelling, although now there's like a text mode. But you understand what I'm saying. Yeah.

It's like a very visual app and you like push this button and people, you can like blast through a bunch of photos and videos. It's just really fun. It's native and you're like, okay, I want something more curated.

You just like scroll through the feed. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So it's all just, James Barber Martha's piece for us ages ago, 2013, where he was like, he's been a,

he's a pro photographer, has been for years. He's like, the smartphone radically changed my conception of photography because the device you used to capture the imagery and the device used to view it, process it and view it are all the same. Instagram is the perfect example of that. Google search is not where you capture and edit images. And I get it. It's on a phone. And, you know, the interaction is native.

I do not think that you could reasonably create an amp story from a phone either. Yeah. It's just this other thing. And it's basically they've just, when you search for something, if you're like, like, oh, I don't want a whole web page. I'll just click through a slideshow. That is what it has given people the ability to do in this select group of publishers. I mean, I don't think that's what people actually want when they search.

The utility of search. Right, but it may show up in the Google feed, which is the thing that's like on an Android phone on the left or in the Android app on an iPhone, which just like shows you the latest news, right? And because it's AMP, it gets pre-cached, right? The app is, especially like on a web browser, it's like a glorified eye frame. We're on Twitter. It's basically like, oh, there's an app page.

I'm going to load this. the background, then you click it and opens up in a special viewer. So if you think about it, what Google is doing is they are now planning on preloading slideshows on everybody's phone. Just all the time. This is bad. What if you like slideshows? I don't think that what people want,

I get the feed is like a different experience and whatever. I just don't think, I think when you open Instagram, you're looking for photos and videos. Yeah. Instagram stories, Snapchat stories. Yep. Make it easier to create photos and videos. and share them with an audience

of people who are looking for photos and videos. This is a very simple, it's a democratic tool. Yeah. Right? It just lowers the cost of production to nothing so you can like

tell this story very quickly. Yeah. For regular people, we use it too as a publisher. I think that it's like some of the funnest stuff we make. Normal people cannot make an amp story. Normal people cannot make a website. It's like this weird...

Anybody can make an amp story, but Google is only showing the developer previews. But anybody can go and make one and you could link to it. it. And if you link to it from a desktop, it should take this weird, like, carousel-looking thing. If you link to it, if you click the link on the phone, it takes up your full screen. If you rotate your phone on the landscape, it breaks. It tells you to go back into portrait mode. It's a real thing that happens. I don't know what need they were serving with this.

And I don't know what, if, I don't know what. The need they're serving is that slideshows make a lot of money because you can put an ad every third slide. And they're sticky. And people click on them. This was like, do you remember, Back in the late 2000s, everybody was making slideshows for everything, and you had to reload an entire page, and everybody got real mad at slideshows. Now it's 2018, and we're making them again, except now they're fast, native, and pre-cashed on your phone.

How do you feel about Twitter's slideshow presentation of information? Like Twitter's moment type thing. Oh, I deeply love it. Yeah. Yep. See, I'm fine with Twitter doing it. I feel like it's very easy to ignore. when I want to and I can get it when I need it.

Google doing it though feels a little bit like Google gobbled up the world's information and is presenting it back to me in a information for babies kind of format. Right. And I go to Google to win debates with my friends. Meanwhile, if we're talking about relationships of giant companies publishers, Code Media Conference is wrapping up as you're listening to this or maybe it just finished. Facebook got up on stage and basically told all of us news publishers, yeah, no, you know, we did a bunch of stuff and so it didn't work out so well. and we don't really know what we're doing either,

and it's all an experiment. So if you want to come and experiment with us, go for it. Otherwise, it's fine. You can leave it. It doesn't matter. Which, that's honest and true.

And my wife works for Oculus, which is a divino Facebook. There's your disclosure. But it's also, like, there's a bunch of people that got hooked on that Facebook sauce, a bunch of publishers that need it. And Facebook is now like saying, yeah, come on in.

Play another round of the Hunger Game. Yeah. I don't know what that company is doing. Yeah. I think they are bad. There's an amazing post on BuzzFeed by Katie. Katie Napotopoulos who basically posted a video that she knew all her friends would hate. And so because they comment on it telling her that they hate it, Facebook sees that as engagement. Yeah. And so it keeps on popping up to the top of everybody's feed.

It's great. It was really good. Wow. I just, I just think, I think companies like Google and Facebook really shoot themselves on the foot when they try to get, make their algorithms a little too clever. Yeah. I think Facebook shut, shut itself down. That's my answer. Wow. I mean, we've made big bets on Facebook.

We launched Shrekkerbreaker Breaker as a Facebook page. It did very well. A lot of people like Facebook. We launched Ferd Science on Facebook to distribute better kinds of science videos because we saw a huge opportunity. Yeah. Great. Right. We, we took the ride with Facebook.

things are still doing well. Circuit Breaker is one of my favorite things. We have a whole live show called Circuit Breaker Live. It's true. We did all the things. But every time I think about how they assess their responsibility to their customers, they either say we don't have any, or they say some words that I think they, like, programmed to sound like the right answer.

Like they ask a computer for, like, what is the right answer? And the computer, like, spits out keywords and they just, like, say the keywords. And I just, look, I don't trust Google, right? They're like a big company. We cover them. They screw up. They mess up. Apple's a big company.

We cover them. They screw up. They mess up. Their interests are generally aligned with the people, with the consumer. Google's mission is like, we want to organize information. And they're like, what if we hoover up all of the information? Trust us. It'll be fine.

But then you're like, ask Google a question. They try to give you an answer. Yeah. Makes sense. Apple's like, what if we lock you into a gorgeous prison? the best messaging experience possible. And you're like, well, I'm in this prison, but at least the bubbles are blue. Like, it's fine.

Like, you understand the exchanges you're making there. I don't understand the exchange people make with Facebook. I feel like Facebook realized how off-based they were and are actually working on it. I just think it's going to take some time for them to figure out what they should be. But obviously, they should be good for people's lives. Facebook ideally helps people connect with each other. It's how I talk to my relatives. It's how people stay in touch with people from high school.

There's a lot of very valuable stuff that Facebook has done for people to allow them to share their lives with each other. And Facebook kind of got caught up in being people's whole world and got really off track. And I think they realized that now. And it's going to take them probably a long time. Maybe they'll never get there to get back to what their core value is. for people. Yeah. I think they need to align that value with how they make money.

Right? Like, so a thing Google, they do it, but they don't do a lot of it. Like, Google's algorithm, when it shows you the search results, like, you can't really buy your way into it. You can try really hard to get to the top of the list, but if you want to pay for, you want to pay Google to get in that list, you're in a different spot. Right? And there's all kinds of politics around that, and that is.

definitely changed over time, and Google's like, really, but that's like their business. Like, here's this list that, it's not page rank anymore, but here's this list that the search algorithm gives you, and we're protective of that, and people, we do it, we try to get higher on that list, and then here's the place where the advertiser goes. And those, those things are, like, a line. Facebook makes business with pleasure. Yeah, it's like, there's not a, people get paid. Dieter's just looking very thoughtful. Just, just to be clear, in case you've never, like, managed a Facebook page like a publisher does or a big personality does, when you have a Facebook page, you post stuff on Facebook and none of your audience that likes it sees it unless

you pay money, pay money, or it goes extremely viral. Right. So a piece of my Facebook experience, I'm an admin for the verge page, I'm admin for the Circlebreaker page. Every now and again, I get a Facebook notification, just asking me for money. Yep. Hey, the Circuit Breaker Post is doing well. Add some money to the pot and we'll boost up the result.

Eli, if you pay money, you can control what your audience sees. Yeah. And I don't know. There's just something there. Sick. There's a misalignment in there where everybody understands a trade with Apple, right? You pay the money, you get a beautiful piece of hardware. Great.

Like, interaction complete. Everybody sort of understands what you get out of Google. It's not nearly as simple with Google. And I do not mean to suggest that Google is in any way innocent, right? Like Google collects a lot of data, YouTube's, the whole YouTube situation. is very messy and complicated. They're blocking ads in Chrome now. Yeah, they're taking over the web by literally restricting what ads and

potentially favoring their own ad network because the web is their revenue platform. They're building AMP and AMP. There's no innocence. They're not like naive. But I think people understand the transaction that they're in with Google. Right. And I would personally like people to care more about their privacy and native collection. They don't because they're getting a ton of value back out of Google.

Facebook should focus on its core money-making opportunity, which is using the fact that it listens to what everybody says to make targeted advertising. Anyway, I don't know how we digressed on the Facebook this hard. The web lives is what the user is. Should I talk about Cabo for five minutes? You get three. I've been really excited about this product. It's called the Cabo. If you don't remember what it is, because why would you pay attention to me when I ramble about this?

It is the world's most complicated, over-engineered universal remote control, which is a dream. Paul, I think on the NGadgett podcast, I started complaining about universal remotes like a decade ago. IRBlasters. It has IRBlasters. But all of that is in service, like the IRBlaster, the HDMI CC, it can control your stuff over IP, but you plug everything into it and it watches the HTML outputs with machine vision to make sure that when you click down on the remote, It actually got the command. It can type into search fields for you.

So you can be like, search for altered carbon, and you can search on the Apple TV. It'll switch the Apple TV, open the Apple TV search interface, type in the phrase altered carbon and deliver you the Apple TV server. It's like, cool. Is that ridiculous? It's so over-engineered. Is there a butt? Well, it's $400. It is a butt.

It works. It works. Like a butt. So I got one, reviewed it. I gave it a seven. In a world of no sevens, I would have given it a six. but I gave it a seven. Yeah.

Because it does work. Okay. But that is the main thing. The idea of machine vision, it's like a butler for your TV. Yeah. You're like, turn this on and then you sit back and you literally watch it operate your device. By the way, can I just point out that a butler for your TV, a little artificial intelligent sort of thing that handles like complicated UIs for you so you don't have to? Yeah.

You know that's the. original pitch for Bixby, right? Yeah. Okay. I'm going there. Okay. Just wait a second. All right.

So it works. Yeah. It actually works. The tiny little dog just goes jumping around. But it works. Yeah. Okay. That's cool.

Yeah. That is cool. It doesn't support 4K or it doesn't support HDR. It supports 4K but no HDR. Yeah. It can't control the apps on smart TVs because it can't see the TV screen. Oh, yeah. Doesn't support Atmos.

and I asked Becky to use it. I was like, hey, when you use the TV tonight, just like use this. I tweeted it. I got a string of increasingly frustrated text that was like, what is this? Where's the TV screen? I just want the TV.

Screw this. I'm using the normal remote. And then she said, I don't want you to ask me to use the computer remote again, ever. So I think that is a little bit problematic. It's super expensive. And I think, I hope this isn't the end game for this company because they just raise money.

Yeah. And they do have this technology that does actually work. Yeah. And it's a bunch of people from audio backgrounds and they kind of told me, like, their next product will be Soundbar, which makes a lot of sense for this kind of technology integrated. I'm really worried that Samsung buys this company. Oh, that's what's going to happen. And it's called, like, Bixby Home. Bixby.

And it clicks around your Apple TV for you. And it's actually a dog butler, like, walking from icon to icon. I mean, they already have smart things. They haven't ruined smart things for me. Maybe this will be okay. I'm just really worried about this. Yeah. But anyway, the Kavo. Cabo.

It does work. Yeah. That's an accomplishment. They've sold out of their initial run, right? They only made $5,000 for this. Oh, really? They were never trying to be a mainstream consumer product. They were trying to launch the technology, prove that it worked.

They raised another round of funding. Their founders, when they were here a few months ago, told me the goal is actually just to get it out in the world, then make cheaper products. Like you don't really need 8 HDMI ports. It has 8 HTML ports. You don't need that, right? How many do you think the average person needs? Three. Three?

Three. Hmm. I was going to go with four. I say four. Okay. My three were like Roku or Apple TV, cable box, game console. I'm going to go to two game consoles because everyone's going to get a switch. You're going to have some kind of box.

It's probably going to be an Apple TV. And then, like, you never know. You want an open one all the time. Maybe you're going to plug a Chromecast in. Maybe somebody will call. combine want to give you a PowerPoint presentation. Yeah. You always want that one extra.

The Chromecast thing is really cool. That fourth one, by the way, could just be your cable box. So like switch PS4, Apple TV, or whatever, cable box. And so maybe you need five. All right. The Chromecast thing is cool because, you know, Chromecasts don't have more remotes. Yeah. But you plug a Chromecast into it and it just sits there.

And then whenever you send a cast stream, it'll automatically switch the Chromecast, instantly remap the remote. And you got play pause by it. It's like, it's the best Chromecast experience. I don't know if you should have a $400 machine learning system to enhance your Chromecast. To make Chromecast actually work? But it was nice. But it's messy.

If you're just like, you have to be a big nerd. But if you're a big nerd, this thing is like a delight. But no, those 5,000 people are going to have. But doesn't it also, you have to watch it navigate the UI when you know you could do it faster yourself? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a thing that it does. But it's like really fun to watch.

You know what? I would buy this thing to navigate. The hot garbage that is the YouTube app on the Apple TV. They updated it so that it's the same UI that they have on other consoles. But they don't know that the Apple TV remote is a swiping remote. And so it just treats every single thing as a click. And so you're better off just tapping the edges of it to click around like it's a five-way. It is...

There are a lot of people that are mad that they're not matching Apple's human interface guidelines. It doesn't match. It doesn't feel like an Apple TV app. And like, I get that. I'm like, I am not happy about that either. The last YouTube app was much more, felt much more native to the Apple TV. But you wanted to be consistent across platforms. Netflix is doing a similar thing, so is Hulu.

But those apps aren't garbage. Yeah. The YouTube app on the Apple TV, I'm sorry. No, I'm not. It's just bad. It's super duper bad. The YouTube TV app is actually slightly better than the main YouTube app. My feeling is that Google is just trying to crush Apple out of the TV space.

With the Chromecast With whatever But they're not going to They're not doing the codex support That Apple wants for 4K So there's no 4K in the Apple TV 4K in YouTube The app is way jankyer now Yeah

They're just using their own like people want YouTube Yeah If you love YouTube You should not buy an Apple TV That's their leverage If you want YouTube you should not buy an Apple Amazon Echo show If you want YouTube what should you buy? YouTube is a cudgel

What should you buy? A shield You should buy a TV An Android TV with a good YouTube app built in. An Android TV. I'm just saying. No one does that. I know no one does that.

But I think they're using YouTube business cudgel to get what they want out of these companies in terms of deals. I paid for YouTube TV to watch the Olympics, and I was using a web browser that I like to use sometimes called Firefox. And Google said that's not cool. You got to use Chrome to watch. YouTube TV. So the web is doing very well. YouTube TV is not on the web. Like I said, Google is not an

innocent. Except for Instagram, which is a true delight. All right, that's our show. I want to tell everybody. Wait, Paul gets 60 seconds to talk about robots. You talked about your stupid TV thing. All right. 60 seconds. Go. The dog robot from Boston Dynamics can open doors now. Opening doors is a difficult problem for robots because you're not just controlling your own weight and momentum.

You're interacting with a large object external to you that has its own weight, movement, momentum. And the robot dog opens the door now. It's cute. It's not terrifying. It's of good progress for technology. You think it's not terrifying? They should have put a big, like, rubber velociraptor head on the top of it. So it's like the scene from Jurassic Park when they learn how to use the door handle.

I mean, if people want to keep on anthropomorphizing all these, No, it's not anthropomorphizing. It's dynopramorphizing. That's the show, everybody. Okay. Good point. Well played, Deter. Well played.

I'll see you next week. That's all we got. You can't possibly do more. We will unfortunately be at South by Southwest. We'll be unfortunately inflicting this experience on you. So if you're coming to Southby, come the Vox Media has, we'll be at the Belmont. They're naming it the deep end. It's our activation.

It's true. Ezra will be there doing some podcasts. Why'd you push that button? We'll be live there. Caitlin Ashley is live coming back for season two. A lot of pressure on producer Andrew Marino. Get that right. Andrew will be sweating bullets.

Versus is back. The Lauren Good Review Show where she argues with herself in the service of journalism. That's excellent. You should watch that. Paul and I are doing Circle Breaker Live YouTube 4 p.m. Eastern. My favorite part of this is people talking to us in the chat. It's just a good time.

YouTube chat's a thing. It's a lot of fun. people are watching it beat our goals already so keep watching that Dieter's got a new show on the YouTube's Soon soon soonish He just keeps threatening us Soonish

What's gonna happen There's a really good teaser about it It's called optimism Yeah It's just that sound And that's it for us You can tweet at us I'm reckless

Dieter's back on Paul's future Paul And we'll be back next week It's funny the week before I was like super slow Yeah Now we're just like back in it Yeah All kinds of stuff going on

Paul. Rock and roll. Paul? Primal Cod. Laser sauce. I'm Sean Ramosverum. I'm the host of Today Explained, a new show from Vox.

It's an all-killer, no-filler, daily news explainer that'll drop every afternoon. But not on the weekend. Our show's going to explain the news every way we know how. Clips, radio drama, maybe even a song.

Today, today explains. Subscribe. Subscribe now in Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Thank you.