393. A Chunktionality of Functionality

This is Dubai Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Alex Cox and Merlin Mann. This week's challenge, try vibe coding. Hello, hello, hello. Can you hear me? I can, yes. Yes, I'm closing. Um Uh you want to do the show? Yes, I would love to do the show. I I don't know if I'm gonna make it, but Friday! It's two bye. Mama, air horn, air horn Heehee I'm sorry that you didn't get a lot of sleep. You have the reins completely your the reins are yours. You are the Santa of the show. Okay. So I have to bring gifts? No. You are a gift. The gift is the presence of Merlin Man. Yeah. He ha yeah, you bring the reindeer, which is your voice. Oh, I see. And hard rain is gonna fall. I get it. Um giddy up, I say, to my what's left of my brain Yeah.

No, I'll be all right. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm just, you know. One of my Tuesday nights, also we're we're doing some new things with medication, so I'm barfing a lot while we're working that out. But you know I don't mind it. Oh no, no, I'd tell you if I was sad. I'm just tired. I'm not sad. I like talking to you. Well, it's a it's it's a pretty tech heavy week uh here in uh Lake Wobagon. We're have we got a lot of tech tech things going on right now. Not not just what you were Huh? Yes, we do. We do. I don't know if you want to talk about any of that, but you uh you just figured out how to make audio hijack transcribe our recordings, which is kind of cool. In theory, we'll see, hopefully. But I am excited about transcription in general because At least in documentary worlds where uh everyone's kind of a bleeding heart liberal anyway, so they're not like firing all of their interns who used to just transcribe th things like the whole job of a lot of interns was to transcribe things.

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. You you you I think you might still be on a dependent clause. Well s start that sentence again Because you're you're glad that people aren't getting laid off for transcribing. And what jobs are you talking about? All right, all right. Um this is gonna be a real pigs and bunnies type episode for me. I know. Uh uh part one. I got uh really excited about transcription in general because Because it takes sound and makes it into words. And uh ten years ago when you needed to really transcribe everything in a documentary in order to get some sort of e timely edits. It was just r really sort of work intensive. And that's why you needed to hire a bunch of interns. to literally sit and go tipee tip tip typey type unless you hired Alex Cox who um you know, it was there already was pretty good voice software if you just needed one track at the time.

It wasn't whisper good. But anyway all documentarians, including radio documentarians, they're bleeding heart liberals. So they are not firing all of their interns. They are letting their interns use transcription software. They're letting their interns use LLMs. And it's freeing up a bunch of time to do more interesting things. So it's it's just exciting. And that's based on based on uh anecdotes you hear from people who do that. Yeah, uh y yeah, and it's uh both anecdotes and just peop wa watching people people do it, it's still really expensive to, you know, use something like D script, that's your app of choice, yes. I love apps. Oh, I love apps. Yeah, um I uh I've spent a little bit of time with Mac Whisper, but it's it works fine for like a couple uses, but it's it's not really quite what I've been looking for.

I think I talked about this on the good slack, but I still have a lot to learn about this stuff. I wish D script was less costly for that stuff because there's all kinds of ways that would be really neat and efficient. But you know, honestly, this also kind of sort of aligns with our challenge for this week, um, it it occurs to me. Kind of. This is mostly what I did for the challenge. This is your vibe coding. This is this is my vibe coding mostly with Python. I I di I kinda almond buttered, but you know In what sense Um I didn't really successfully make an app or a website. I went into this hoping to have a finished product. Oh, absolutely. I like with I don't think I could eat a Debbie cake follow-up the way that you eat a Debbie coff uh coffee cake.

Oh. Um it's coffee cake, but it's not little Debbie. It's from a coffee shop. I and what is the analogy attached to? You can just down those in one bite. And that have does that have to do the transcription jobs? I th I thought that I could build uh I I could build a cockspot which could recognize not your voice or another co-host voice, but just my voice. So I could have something w via Mac Whisper that would just like say, Yep, that is Alex Cox's voice. Which is what uh Oh like teaching it to learn like more than just like identifying oh this file equals a person called Alex that it would actually sort of recognize your voice. Yeah, and there's Can you do that? Is that even is that a thing?

I guess so, it must be. There is because you can also I I can have it say things that are me, but that's you need to still use a third Sort uh well, you don't need to really use a third party service kind of. Okay, well you can make you can make of i if you in something like D script and I assume other places you can absolutely make an AI voice, but that doesn't sound like what you're sound like you're talking about There's a microphone open listening and when you talk it knows it's you. And and so w w and that's so that then it would know to record when you talk to it? Um, it would just know not to transcribe the things that are from another voice. Which is And day to day activities are from a podcast.

From a podcast. Okay. And you don't you don't want your side transcribed. No, I'm sorry. I do want my side transcribed, just not the other side. Well I d ideally, you know, obviously, ideally both sides transcribe the way D script does, and it does voice recognition for vo both people. What do you use for that? What do you use for voice recognition? Because that that's that's an uh that's a part of the stack I feel like I don't have access to. The uh w whisper you can uh go through. Yes. Okay. And it was the first AI thing to fool me. Uh a friend of the show, James Thompson, built a uh uh Kathy Campbell unicorn voice that took, you know, m hundreds of hours of her voice and sent me a little voice a voice memo.

And it wasn't. I really didn't like it. I listened to it over and over again, thinking I'd be like, Yeah, it's that's true. Yeah, they've got those Scottish Scottish tools over there. But Scottish? Uh yeah, he's in Scotland. James Thompson. Yeah. Um that's cool. Yeah, D Script is um, you know, it's a company. They charge for stuff. And you only get so many minutes of uh transcription per month, which I don't keep track of. Which becomes very clear at the point where it goes like you're out of minutes. And it sometimes it's because like I've had to retranscribe something, so I ended up and end up doing like if it's a, you know a podcast like I do, that could be two to three hours of transcription for two people.

So that's one way that I kind of unintentionally burned through a lot of my time. Um, but it is quite good, at least for my purposes, for for what I w want. And so like w the thing that I want, uh, I I imagine it's similar to what you want, what anybody wants, is I'd love to be able to just drop a bunch of uh recordings, mp3s or whatever, onto an app and have it generate D script style transcriptions, you know, knowing knowing who's who and things like that, which feels very in reach. But trying to do that with Mac Whisper alone was not happening for me. I th yeah, I think Jason noted that the just w Not just Mac Whisper, but the Whisper OpenAI in general does not have voice recognition. Yeah, and it's but it's not even it's just it's more that like it's just frustrating because it's got all it does that weird interface, at least on a Mac I'm not criticized I don't mean to criticize, but like it's got that weird interface where it's like in beta now, podcast transcription, you're gonna drop two recordings on there, and I just I haven't had great results with that.

But I I feel like it's all I feel like it's all very close. So you're vibe coding was in the service mostly of this uh this project. Why are you what are you what what are you doing Python for? Oh um I was also trying to get all of the show notes via our Simplecast RSS all of our Do by Friday show notes via our Simplecast RSS feed because I have all of them in drafts uh mi minus a couple that I need to um just sort sort of update and make sure that the other thing is. All the public facing show notes from the website are in separate drafts. Yes. Huh. Yeah. When w when did you do that? While I uh uh did the show notes and I just copied and pasted in Markdown and put it in Simplecast. Um but the uh Oh you're talking about from the era when you were the good boy for show notes, not not not the new era.

Yes, yes. But I don't have all of the images from uh which the RSS feed doesn't have. and you can sort of scrape it, but yeah, the the the vibe coding. Uh Merlin, what is vibe coding? Because so far vibe coding is really fun and it's teaching me more of what I don't know. You're asking You're asking me. what vibe coding is. Yes, I am. I have a I feel like I have a recollection of last week when we're doing the after show and you said that you wanted to do uh vibe coding. And I said, I think I probably said something like, I don't know what that means. Yeah. And I said, I'll send you something. And then you sent me exactly what I was going to send you, which was Kevin Roos's article. Anyway, what I was gonna say was The point I'm trying to make is that that I had said to you, hey Alex, how is this different from making no coding out?

And you said it's really different, I think. And it kind of strikes me that it's exactly what we did six weeks ago. We didn't have any LLM situations and we there were specific services. you needed to use with the no coding. That's true. And you needed to use their like GUI, which I was not a fan of. I'm not sure if you're not going to be able to do that. A huge dump of apps and services I've never heard of. And I started to feel a little bit like I was being gaslighted. Now like cursor, replit, bolt, and lovable are are all ones that you could use. Now here's the neat thing. If you do decide to go with bolt. You can also uh interact in with astro, invite, native script, slidey, svelt, remix, typescript, react, remotion, angular, and quick!

Q W I K. Quick! Quick, Quick! Quick, Quick! Here we're getting Zapier. Zapier. Did you make Did you make your um Vivecode apps, were you using one of these? I have so many questions for you about this that's probably gonna be a little boring. But um I'm really curious about this. So you weren't using Chat E G. You're were you using something like Bolt to make this? Is this what you're talking about when you said it runs in Chrome? Is that what you're talking about? No, no, sorry, that was completely that was a completely different thing where um the like that was a JavaScript thing that I totally stole from someone else. to download my Kindle apps before or sorry, my Kindle books before they took them away.

Um no, I used Claude just because you you can really like I'm like, I'm make it make it dumber. Make it dumber. Please, no, really, make it dumber. Whereas with, you know, Chatty G gr faster really great for I think almost everything else but as I'm like can you make this dumber like seriously making making what dumber the application The yeah, and whatever sort of code Okay, I see, I see. Okay. And there's no like you can't really do a change log. I I I suppose you could if I I could if I wasn't lazy and I could copy and and paste. Um but you can do that with uh both Claude and uh the this I D A E, which is called cursor, one of the many the Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh Is there one of those you like that you think is best suited for the kinds of things you're trying to do more than others?

A cursor, but only Because that's also what I n know uh like well one, it it uses Claude and I kind of, you know know the vibe of of Cl Claude versus GPT. So I kind of know what to expect any way we can avoid using the word vibe. I know. I I was shocked you were going to the personality. My understanding of well, I mean and and the it's it's close to uh God, I'm tired. It's close enough in my brain to the thing we did um six shows ago, but but it's my understanding, whatever term we want to use for this, hey, were you aware that you can If you have an idea for something you want, as we used to say, a chunk of funk. You want some kind of a a chunk a chunctionality of functionality. Hmm. You um you can basically just talk to your dingus, which I did and it it worked great.

Uh so like if you wanted the the I made a simple web page with it that worked really well. I've had it create iOS apps for me, but like I'm really that that that's That's I'm k I'm holding off on that for now. But the basic idea is that imagine you were like kind of rubber ducking um some kind of an an app you'd love to have. I'll well I'll I'll just do mine because the only the only one I did that people have already seen. Uh if this gives you any indication, can I just do this super quick and then my whole thing is done? Can I do this quick? Yes, please. I said um so I'm in, this was in And by the way, I just got four point five this morning. I don't really understand what's different about it.

Oh, interesting. Well no, I mean I haven't done anything with it yet. It's I just posted something on Ivory where I'm saying this is really starting to feel like uh like an Abbott and Costello routine. This naming thing is getting very funny and very stupid. And the problem is if you just read it and you go, wow, I don't understand what's so confusing. Well, there's there's there's different GPTs. There's GPT 4-0 There's 4. 0 with scheduled tasks. There's 4. 5. There's also, by the way, when I say O, that doesn't mean zero. It means O. No, no. There's O1, O three mini, O three mini high. which I think is a song from South Pacific, uh GPT-40 mini, and then just regular GPT-4. Just so you know, GPT-4 and GPT-40 are not the same thing because it's an O, not a zero.

Correct. All right. Um so what I did. I don't know what's hard about. I went in and I said, make a synth so this is in uh Chaty G40 And I said, make a simple web page that shows whether the Pope is still alive. You know, like one of like a like a single serving kind of site. And I was delighted with what it did. It said I've created a simple web page that fetches the Pope's status from Wikipedia and updates the page. Accordingly, let me know if you need any modifications. I w uh so I I and I I c I absolutely copied you, um, and I didn't know if Uh Joseph Coney was alive. So instead of going and Googling whether or not Joseph Coney was alive, I I did uh just did the same thing you did. Okay. And that's why when I realized, oh, this is just taking Wikipedia was.

I love it. I I I don't know. I I'm a kind of I'm I'm really working toward I say this every week, but I really am working toward like being out of the business of explaining or being defensive. But um it's diff sometimes when you're trying to when I I feel like I struggle sometimes because the the sort of The test for a lot of this stuff for a lot of people is like what did it do something flawlessly in a way that didn't need to be checked? And the answer to that is almost always no, or almost always never. But the fact that it's manifesting even incorrect things in the way that it does is still stunning to me. And I still benefit from all sorts of organizational things with this. And if I wanted to spend more time with it than that, I I I could.

But I mean, I thought that was kind of a a fast, clever solution. Um and uh Yeah, I I thought it was neat. I I I do want to try more ambitious things. I wanted to get over the line and not peanut butter. So I that's that's what I'm using as my example. But I am I'm keen to try more things and especially to make like a watch app or an iOS app if I can I'm terrified of doing that because I uh I'm I'm g still learning how git w works, but uh that's you don't have to use git's also great. No, I'm just going to do that. It's just you open it. It usually gives you a thing and you just open it. The ones I've made, you just open it in um Xcode. Yeah, it's a total false I think the GitHub desktop app is is um is good, personally It's I think it's real good.

And you can, you know, in combination, especially for me, in combination with uh VS Code, they work really well together. And then of course on top of it all now Chatty G works with those. So like you can I did something this morning interacting with BB Edit from the kind of thing where like Oh, you don't care. But like it was just really easy to do. Well Well, I I wanted to make a joke to you, um, which I've now made to you, which is I want to make a joke about all the different things that Um which one was it? Which app is it? Uh Bolt. All the things the Bolt works with. And so I went to their webpage, scrolled down to the bottom where all those little like kind of grayed out badges are. said inspect element, grabbed everything inside that area for these one, two, three, four, five, six, about thirteen things that they support.

Just grab those out, pasted it into BB Edit and saved. And then I noticed that there was a uh a class that was, uh I think it was a class that was associated with each each one of the names of these things. And so I just said the ChatGPT I pointed it at the document and BB edit and said, um, pull out everything that has a label of Aria, whatever, the whatever the name of the label was, and give it to me as a markdown list. And it did that. So like I mean like I I one of the things well, I s I say this like I don't like using BBN and I do, but to me one of the marquee features has always been a gooey way to do something that programmers and people can do, but I still find difficult. Copy lines containing I use a lot.

So in BB Edit, you can go in and like when I open up show notes that has chapter markers added, I could say copy all lines containing Octothorpe, Octothorpe space. For the begin with that. And I this is I don't need this is no regex involved in this. It's just it's it's just neat. It reminds me of the old days of Texmate, where you could like whack around and figure out how to do stuff and make macros out of it, even if it wasn't the right way to do it. I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking about that too. I'm only I'm gonna say this very quickly and I don't want to dwell on it. I I I I should I should ask Danny O'Brien his opinion of this because it's his Thought technology, not mine.

But it occurs to me that there are a lot of things about using LLMs to do busted ass shit that it reminds me very favorably of LifeHacks, like in the original conception of LifeHacks. Not, you know, like like not a new way to clean your debit card. but a a a a clever, temporary, sometimes not very pretty solution to an annoying problem. Instead of doing it the right way, you do it the fast way or the easy way and like keeps your system all together because like nobody has time or inclination to like always be starting over to make everything perfect. Well sometimes you just need a thing to work. I don't want to learn regex. I just want these words to be in a different buffer. And I I like anything that'll help me do that.

And again, I want to ask Danny about this before I would try and like, you know, carry a sign about this, but I wonder, I don't know, and I don't want to sound touchy about it, but I wonder if the people who have so many problems with things like LLMs, I mean, did you have those same problems with the with the early conception of life hacks about, you know 'Cause that's really what it is. The life hack in that in that true sense is about like a little tweak or an inelegant fix for something. You know, it can turn into a Rube Goldberg thing. But I I don't didn't realize this until a couple three nights ago. I was thinking, you know, this really kind of reminds me of the days of life hacks. The the good days of life hacks, you know what I mean?

Mm-hmm. Do you see any similarities though in the like the imperfect the inelegant, the sometimes incorrect, the sometimes undependable, but like that's a oh there is a way to get through life other than always stopping everything to to learn everything and do it perfectly It that's a strongly held opinion of mine. Even uh almost more than l life hacks, although I do find myself constantly being like, how can I how can I do this quicker? Um, as well as it's gotten me out of not quite emergency situations, but um, you know, I'm not as talented uh i uh at driving as some of the members of your family. Um and I couldn't start my friend's car. And I took a picture of the key was like stuck in the in the ignition.

I took a picture and so and I said, why this is stuck, why can't I turn it? And it's like, oh, gently turn the wheel and then turn the key of the turn the car key. Yeah, that's that's tricky. If you got it locked too hard, like if you're curbing if you're curbing the wheels, like it's real easy to lock yourself in with like You need some upper body strength to unlock that sometimes. The well I I I literally am like It was just I uh that's why I also enjoy the real, I guess, uh hacks of Not ha hacks. Again, I I guess I'm uh hesitant to use that word. Of course you are, and I asked Brian in your thing. I had a huge role in spreading that around, and I feel in some ways to blame for how dumb that phrase has become.

But I mean, if we go back to how that stuff started and like how that was one of the three things that made me want to start a website. alongside getting things done in Quicksilver, um, life hacks. It's like I think I probably said in one of the earliest posts, like I've always would I when I was a kid and my whole life, I always loved learning non-obvious solutions to problems, usually like ad hoc non-obvious solutions. Like, I mean for the longest time in America, you could unscrew so many screws with a dime. If you didn't have a screwdriver, like if you're just out in the world and you needed to tighten or loosen a screw, like there's so many screws where you could just use a dime. And it was it was fine.

And then you go back to what you're doing. You put your change back in your pocket. You didn't have to go out and buy a set of tools. You didn't have to beat yourself up because you it's just little things like that. grounded in geek culture where I'm I'm attempting to broaden that a little bit to people who aren't, you know, just writing shell scripts on shell scripts and stuff like that. But I've always thought that was really neat. that scratches an itch in my brain to know that a non-obvious s uh solution exists for a lot of problems and sometimes and again it's not perfect but I find that very attractive still The thing that I keep coming back to from Conclave actually is the homily where, hey, happy Ash Wednesday, everybody.

Uh if you're a happy Ash Wednesday to you two. Ash, Ash, Ash, Pokemon as in uh Ash Wednesday as in the Pokemon Master Ash catching. I thought you told me he had a different name now. Was it like Ghost Boy or something? I thought he changed his name Is he a sword or a shield? No, God. No, he I remember yeah, re uh Okay. But he's in the poke he's in the he's in the poke decks. Yes, he uh he uh he died for our sins in the Johto region. Oh no, really funny to some people that is a premise. Alright. Uh uh Uh the I do think if if y if you want to call it a a sin, but I or uh one of the I What's a sin? Okay, hold on No, no, no, no. We're done with Ash. We're done with Ash versus Red Motocross. They're two different people.

Ashley. And who who's the twins that I'm attracted to? Who is that? No, the Zan and Jaina, what are they called? I don't know. I think they got balls and they got like it's a boy and a girl and they got suits. And like flippy hands. Oh, I'm not sure. Well you gotta catch them all. Yeah, yeah. Um concl okay in Conclave uh the guy says the greatest sin is certainty and it just every time I see someone go this is mad because um I it's I I like that line too. I did. As I said on Letterboxd I just want to say for the record, I liked everything about that movie except the actual movie. It was the opposite of a gestalt. It was an opposite of a gestalt. It was it was it was an unintentional kind of pile of garbage, just made of beautiful garbage though.

I thought it was an amazing looking movie. I thought everybody was great. I think the story was absolutely Insane. I don't think that's how Conclave do. Coincidence. Oh, we've received another letter. And then when you get to the end, and Billy and I, we got to finally, I told you, I think I told you I watched it through the second act. twice. And finally Billy and I I said because you know he's thinking of becoming a Catholic. And so or not a Catholic, really primarily he wants to become a priest. Well no, he wants to be in a a priory. I think because he likes it. Did he play priest as a kid like I did? Oh, yeah. No, he didn't. Didn't he didn't he's not aware of it. Yeah. It's normal. No, well, I mean, don't don't steal Valor.

But I uh we got to the And the the pre-end, and I I I don't want to spoil this because a lot of people really love that movie, and I I think that's that's cool. But there's a there's been several little twists, but then there's a pretty significant twist. at the end. And if you've ever watched CGP Gray's video about how to become the Pope, let's just say one of the rules has been has been bent. If you like. And you go and we looked at each other and we both we both looked at each other with no expression and with no punctuation. We both said, What? Wait, he's so wait, okay. And he's he's he's he's a super secret cardinal. Yeah. Okay, all right. And he's uh he's what? Oh That's that's quite a twist.

I wonder how the Cardinals are gonna feel about this. I I watched it again and thought, this is another Bo Burnham's inside for Merlin Mann. It is Um I no I don't want to be mean. And I love Ralph Vines. I love him. I love all of them. I love I love a touch of the Tooch I thought it looked tremendous. Um I thought the the music was pretty good. It's just, you know, it didn't nail the tone. Also got so much marble. A person can only look at so much marble. I yeah, yes, exactly. Yes, and you start looking at them and it's a therapist office. Okay, this morning it looks that is a very abusive therapist. Don't just one where you have an incredibly toxic. Yes, that one's a butterfly vagina. That one's a sex vagina.

Well, if uh uh you're familiar with Stations of the Cross, right? Um, I've I've I've had people like you explain it to me. What was what was Zyracuse's word? A tight 14, right? Right? Is that right? Fourteen? I uh yeah, but uh well d they sure aren't tight. I just like the way he said that. Sometimes John really makes me laugh. Yeah, I've I've seen that in the And then he mutes himself. Um so he doesn't go. So I so I can't hear him laugh. I can't I can't drain away his life essence by hearing him enjoy something. Yeah. That would be off-brand for him. Yeah. Absolutely. No. And so the oh oh oh certainty. Yeah, I mean I don't want to overstate it. I don't want to be a drama queen about it, but I do think that's a pretty good thing to keep in mind.

Is that some of the wrongest people in the world that you just look at and you're like, Oh man, you are just you're so r you know, that your opinion is so wrong it's not even right, as they used to say. Like you're so goofy about this and you have no idea. Those are some of the most certain people in the world. And I I think we shouldn't I should I I think we should learn from that. I don't think we should reject that as being a dumb people thing. just solely a dumb people thing. It's an everybody thing. And a lot of, you know, a lot of us are dumb people and just don't know it yet. So certainty can be it's a blight. I am trying to I'm not I'm doing the chicken problem a little bit I think because Well, I think we have a lot of mutual friends and acquaintances who are really certain about a lot of types of tech, not Not just LLMs, but mostly LLMs.

Um and there's a the uh not just a certainty, but a snobbishness that I I don't think they would put it that way. But I think that's in that's important well, I feel like it's kind of important to understand that no, they don't see it that way. So like, you know, and rather than I I know you're not doing this, uh or at least not intentionally, but like we we don't want to get into that thing of going of having a different kind of more sophisticated black and white thinking Where we go like, yeah, well, but thing is actually though, I uh I do know a lot, so I am in a position to say when someone's too certain. And like will that already get you into some sort of like Some epistemological problems.

Exactly. That's where like how I kept being like, well, does it use the case? Why anybody rear Kirk a guard anymore? Because they were too busy flirting with girls in philosophy class. It just i it wasn't a priority. hear uh The Exorcist, other kinds of movies where there's somebody who's having struggles, if not a full on crisis, with their faith. I mean you'll always hear somebody say, Well that's that's the point. That's what makes it faith. You know? Yes. What is it? Hope hope is the thing with feathers. Like faith is is the thing. I mean, that's kind of a lot of curiosity. Kierkegaard's deal. And the thing is, I I know you're you're thinking you don't want to read Kierkegaard because of all the Jesus stuff, but he's very anti-church.

He's just very pro-Jesus. And I I kind of I kind of respect that. But that's the leap of faith. That's your guy. Um, and so but yeah, I don't know. It's frustrating. But anyway, we all we're all doing our best every day. Uh and so are you are you having fun with this? Are you enjoying uh this process? You're you're you're monkeying around and you're vibe coding? Oh, I adore it because I still think that whatever whatever sort of uh conversation you're having with software i teaches you to be a better writer or a uh different short. It sure doesn't hurt. It doesn't it doesn't always hurt, that's for sure. Yeah. And and by writer I don't necessarily mean a Merlin man or a writer that's a good idea.

Somebody who can uh somebody who can pass on an idea with clarity. Yes. Um maybe n honest, honest to God. Um the voice, the advanced voice mode with Chat E G. I I'll ask it, how could I have made that more clear, but I know I stuttered, but other than the start stuttering and stammering. How could I be more clear? Um, and I have played some back some recordings from this show, and it's like, no, you made sense. And I'm like, yeah, I know I did. Uh but But there are there's also uh still who should I only did that one time. I only I I only did like one time. That's good. Well I'm glad you I'm glad you can now proceed with confidence that you always make sense Yes I'm certainly I'm certain. Yeah, I'm certain certain.

Certain he's a prison. I love what I'm so confident about. Oh god, I'm so confident. Oh man. But it is really helpful to explain something to it and uh Uh say, all right, now I'm go I want to uh tell someone uh this same give someone these same instructions. I I was Trying to do that. Oh I do that all the time. I cheat off the back of something, or I'll figure out I'll use its own words against it. It's like I can't make you a Caravaggio painting and I'll say describe the paintings of Caravaggio and I'll just copy and paste that. No. Yes, there's that. But also how do you feel about Charisku? Mm-hmm. I I was um showing my brother how to set up his uh or like uh d talking to my brother over the phone how to set up his iPhone and I'm like I want to show him how to go into jiggle mode and change all these settings but he has an Android phone so how can I explain this in the best analogy through Android like whatever he has and like from an old Samsung phone.

Because I don't know how to do that. And uh there's more types of uh translation than just l uh one verbal langu one language to a another. I don't know how oh God, what's a w what is language? Is there a What is language? What is like I'm gonna language is a virus from an outer space. What is language? Oh I um Oh yes, I'm so confident. I'm Can I send you something and we can have a laugh together perhaps Here's something that continues to be really funny to me for some reason. I mean, I've been I'm I'm I'm surrounded by people who are kind enough to always explain to me things that I I don't didn't ask them to explain to me. But however an LLM works. However, any new however a thing works, I'm always a little surprised that there's nothing in there to watch for people asking meta questions in a way that can be answered.

like normally and like wholesomely. A good example is like one of the first things I always ask when there's an update or something out there is I'll all and I know this all differs and please don't explain it to me. It's just funny to me that like I mean, one of the most common things I ask ChatGPT, well, in this instance, usually I'll upload an image or a data set and I'll say, what is this? because I want to see what it thinks it is. I try not to to give it too many cues about what I call it or what it 'cause it gets so attached to like what I called something, even if it was wrong. And I'm I what I'll say is what is this? And they'll go, well this looks like a bunch of health data with blah dah da blah dah, blah, et cetera.

But like It's just it's it is kind of it's weird and funny to me. Just let me find this weird and funny, computer friends. And when I'll say something like, um, when's the 4. 5 model going to be available to plus users? And it gets whatever model it is, it's so confused and it's like, what models? What is model? What are you talking about? And it's like I'm always just a little bit surprised there's not some kind of a little hook in there. to to grab it. So here's I think you probably already saw this, but I said, I opened up a new thread, 4. 0, and I said, what is vibe coding? And it says vibe coding is an internet slang term that refers to subtly altering one's behavior, style, or persona to match a particular aesthetic, mood, or cultural vibe.

And so, for example, you could you might vibe code you might vibe vibecode as a 90s hacker by wearing oversized hoodies, uh green on black terminal, and listening to brake core. My favorite, the person could vibe code as a character from a Wes Anderson movie by dressing in vintage past pastels, speaking in a deadpan tone, and creating a Anyways, I I was a little bit surprised that it didn't have anything about that, but whatever. But then if you go down to after that, it's a thread, you can't tell. I said, please illustrate what it might look like to vibe code as a character from a Wes Anderson movie. Beautiful. Did you see it dutifully serves them up? Some beautiful mustard tones. Absolutely beautiful.

And the Jean Gene Hackman corduroy look. Kind of a Hermione Granger looking she looks a little like a Granger or a a little bit of a fanning. Oh wait, it was this one this was on Ivor not I I call Massoda on Ivory now. No, no, I do too. That's where I put the tech stuff. Everybody loves computers on there. We really do. Well everyone's mad on Blue Sky. I can we talked about this. I can only be so sad. Uh Vib coding. And wait, I have a whole bunch of things I wrote down. You ended that the aristocrat The aristocrats. What do I do? Oh no, you just said it with um of finality that I don't know. That's a hell of an axe out there. What do you call it? You wrote you wrote something down. Yeah, there's audio hijack transcribing.

I don't know if you wanted to talk about um Mac. things. Yeah, yeah. Or because you seemed uh enthusiastic about that, I wanted to tell you this control center playlist thing. I checked and it does work. I now have a uh uh but one button in control center I can hit that'll play my uh my Born Slippy playlist. You can define what playlists you want as buttons. I wanted to share that. And I wanted to ask your questions about how f what 4. 5 does well. But go anywhere you want, Mac. First, do you have a system that you can share for naming your Apple devices? No. It used to be for the longest time it was all Simpson stuff. For a long time it was all Mabim Bam stuff Um the latest one which is just kind of a mini trend is characters from alien movies Ooh.

So so the computer I was gonna send you is Bishop, you know, the robot from um Alien2. And um the oh oh oh let's see. Then uh the I've got one called I've got another computer called Jonesy, named after the cat. Um and the Mac that I'm on right now is called uh Buttons, uh named after Mr. Buttons from our flag means death. I think Mr. Buttons is a sweet name. That is a very sweet name. I don't I I shouldn't have to be a little bit of a sort of thing. Yes. The like kind of skinny guy with like the drawn face and the huge eyes. You know the uh it might be Busby or Big B or or Bixie or um uh no he's the one he's the one he's got a super Scottish name. What's his name? Transpotting he's Mr. Buttons This is this is all of uh um well um you and you and Bremner.

Ew and Bremner. You and you and Bremner army Bremner You There's also a Ewan McGregor. Johnny Lee Miller. Man. Boy. Oh, right? Yeah. Do you do that? And he was with he was with uh he was with uh what's her name, you know, for the longest time. With uh Angelina Jolie He uh is one of the most attractive people. Yeah, I also I dig he reminds me of Julian Sand a little bit in his like the way he ages and gets you know stays hot. Oh my god, wr how uh He there's there's a show that I don't I don't enjoy the show, but I enjoy everyone in it. So I can just Oh wait, I think tell me what the show is, because I think Madeline Was watch might have watched a show with oh God Hackers. That's the movie he was in with her.

Oh my god, that is incredible. One of the best films ever. It's got the Scooby-Doo kid. It's got the Scooby-Doo kid and they gotta crack the encryption and break the Firewall or whatever. Mm-hmm. Pen and pen tests in it. It's it's perfect. Oh, is that called pen gillette testing? It's the pen is short for penetration. Penetr yeah, the change of elements. They do, they penetrate the penetration. Came from a shtetl. Magician on the roof. He's up there day and night. Classic misdirection. I guess I'm waking up. I sleep so much. Oh God. Johnny Lee Miller. Um stars. Have you watched um Companion yet? No. Okay. Wait, companion. No, don't look it up. Don't look it up. Okay, not looking it up, just putting it on the list.

Yeah, I got it if you wanted its own thing. Oh I um what was I oh elementary is the terrible Is that the one with Lucy Liu? Yes. And she's like she's Girl Sherlock. Girl Lock? She's no, she's Girl Lox and he is This Girl Lock is funny. Girl Hawk. The uh Girl Watson. Uh G hu yeah, she's girl watson and then Johnny Leon Miller takes his shirt off a whole bunch and he has lots of tattoos. Um anyway. The a bright oh god. Oh yeah. Um the Maybe you can borrow some from Ariana Grande. She always looks like she needs to wash her hands. It's very upsetting to me. Huh? What were you saying about Eileen Miller? Oh, because she has to be a little bit more. I didn't hear that part. No, I'm not talking, I'm not addressing that.

What? You're n uh okay, fine. Uh just that he's an attractive man. Computers, uh you wanted to talk about Mac stuff? I think then I'm thinking I'm naming this guy Kilgore. Steve, will anybody know what the fuck you're talking about? If they listen to the after show, they will so uh give us your fucking money. com. What? Um People will know what I'm talking about if they listened to the after show. If they listened to last week's after show? Yes. No, they won't. Because we're the way that we left it was a certain thing and then something very different happened. I didn't know if you wanted to talk about that. It's okay if you don't want to. Oh, well I wanted s to still uh oh sure we can No no forget it.

We'll maintain the mystery. The point is we need the money. Alex Alex is uh very unhinged about this. Go to give us your fucking money. com and I just want you to listen to the show. If you listen to the show, if you listen about this. If you say, are you a pinch about it? How am I unhinged about this? Ooh, I I like the way you know you have a very a very musical voice. It's very lovely. I like it when people have a musical voice. You know? Sometimes I'll I'll notice when somebody has a musical voice. Like Uh Simone uh Sanders Townsend, I think her name is, on MSNBC. Whenever she's talking, she sounds like she's singing, and I love it. And you have that to an extent. I think you have a very musical voice.

I bet you're a pretty singer I bet you're a singer who's pretty. Bringing in the sheaves. Bringing in the sheaves. Were you ever rejoicing bringing in the sheaves? Oh, I don't know what You got you got different hymns than us, I think. Oh, absol absolutely. The ones that are shared you can tell are are are I don't know uh how to describe them. It's just like okay, which someone tried to do it. It's like two different versions of D I mean there's there's a lot of similarities, but they're different enough that it'll be frustrating. Yes. And y you know, there are a lot of uh Catholic I can't of course I can't think of one now, but uh pr Protestant songs that were sung at Protestant services that were far better and less creepy than a Catholic song, but you know, Catholics had changed it a little bit for Mass, but it was sort of It it was like um converting it to a different like a game that was designed for iOS and they made it for the Switch or vice versa.

These hymns are ported. Ported hymns. They're ported, thank you. Yeah, but couldn't Yeah. You gotta you gotta run carbon or something. Yeah. And uh put it through Blender and then then you gotta put it through Blender, you get your step file. Put that on your station of the cross. Type 14. You get in, you get out. What's the 12th one? Is the 12th one love? Oh. And why fourteen? That's a weird number. Why would it be upsetting? Because a lot of people have to be. Oh, like the maybe there maybe there used to be fifteen, but then they had to transfer 'em. Uh uh To a different religion. And transform to a different religion. How is the Pope still alive? I don't understand how he's still alive. He sounds sick as fuck.

I th I thought that I my magical thinking had killed him. I was really Did he die? No, he didn't. Uh there was um I uh I tried to go a whole episode without mentioning a headline. Okay. But I'm gonna mention a h headline. I appreciate you trying that though. Thank you. Uh the po the Pope passes uh uh through the night, I believe is what it was. What? It was it was like the yeah, yeah, it was the worst Headline, let me think. This is and I'm getting you know, okay, so also you know this this also gets into one of my newer bugaboos, which is if you're gonna write write in headline speak. and you're going to avoid things like conjunctions, right? Or um you know, or or like any kind of like linking words and the ands and the buts.

Like Dude, you've got to not have half of the words reboot. Don't have over half of the words in your headline be ambiguous as parts of speech. Yeah, it's a big thing. So like like people love saying I one of one of my another one I've hated for years is uh blob such and such person faces Blah blah blah. They're facing they're facing criticism. They're facing um an ouster. But you're like, well dude, the problem is like the first time you read a word like faces I'm I mean maybe I'm prejudiced, but like that makes me think of someone's face. And there's times where maybe just because I haven't slept very well, I'll wake up and I'll be like, there are so there are half of the words in this headline could be at least two different parts of speech.

And it drives me crazy. Well, because you could which one's the verb? Which one's the verb for the headline? And because you don't, you can't be fucked to use stuff like conjunctions, like it's just a bunch of, it's just a bunch of ugh. The Pope passed a peaceful nice. A Pope passed A peaceful night. The Pope is dying. The Pope is dying to feel better. The Pope is dead. Sure, he'll be better soon. The oh and and then uh uh sorry, it's on know your meme. Um the night passed well. The Pope s slept and is resting. Oh that's good Stop saying past. Don't. You're not the arrested development doctor. Oh god. Oh shit. Yeah. Um yeah, Ian from UCB. We've lost the biggest. Oh my god. Um He's so funny. He's also great in the last Season of Veep as the the guy who's gonna be Selena's VP and he's got the canes.

She's so mean, the Dubonnay. Se Um what else did I have here? I think that's mostly it. I I wouldn't mind uh stopping on the early side so I can just drink water and come back um feeling vivid. Um oh oh oh oh so in the Kevin Roos article um I one thing I would be in interested in is hearing more Honestly, his list of things that he made was really interesting. I thought. Yes. Like a and it it made me want to like do that annoying thing where I'm like, what app are you using? Like I was like, oh, you do a thing to like decide what's in your fridge to make your kids lunch tomorrow? Like I have so many things like that. I have now a thing I'm excited about is I have embraced the what ethos, the whatever of this.

Like I'm into this. Like I think this is cool. I'm not really that concerned if other people like how I like it. That's okay, we can be different. But I'm very excited about this. I love the idea of talking to this and having it make me chunks of funk. Um and now I guess in the short term I would love to be inspired by hearing more about what other people have made. Es especially if it's stuff that doesn't require like opening Xcode. But I'm I'd just love to see a long ass list of what people make with this stuff. This is uh another frustration of mine. Th th those people exist And they're on fucking Twitter. And I won't I just I can't not even like I won't. I'm not like meh, I won't. It's just it this It's uh it's uh I can't you can't find anything without it I get it.

I wan I I think though There uh I I think there will be easier ways to find this as GitHub embraces this I hate calling it web code. Okay, let me just pull this up. Uh where was it? It's somewhere here, probably and I need to keep always I need to always be reconnecting my reader account. I don't know why. Uh Rogue Ameeba. I've been having the same issue. Oh, I figured it was just m some kind of cookie thing where I'm I'm goofy. Um Dogeology for a screenshot. Oh, seven ways to make your roosted broccoli better. Yes, please. Um terrific transcription. Where's the roost, roost, roost, roost, roost? Ooh, did you see the article what a crab sees before it gets eaten by a cuttlefish? No. Oh, it's badass.

Badass. Where's that? Uh, New York Times from sometime. Where's the Kevin Roos thing? I'm I really hope I don't have to do surgery today. I I don't haven't heard anything about needing to do it, but I would want to I would ask the person to potentially reschedule. Because I don't think I'm on top of my game right now. I've got uh let me uh It's the one with dials. Got it. AI and vibe coding help me create my own software. And where's the ones okay so so this is um third third paragraph down, among my creations, a tool that transcribes and summarizes long podcasts. Hell yeah. A tool to organize organize my social media bookmarks into a searchable database? I would love to hear more about that.

A website that tells me whether a piece of furniture will fit in my car's trunk? That one's wild. That's good. Yeah. And so like uh anyway, I can I just it would um it would tickle me to to hear some more examples uh at about that level of detail. I mean I'd love to hear more, but I it's not that I like it uh it's not like I'm starved for functionality in my life. I mean I can mostly do stuff with stuff, but it is I I think of this as a two-stage process. I said a minute ago, whatever, I like this ethos or I like this approach or whatever, but I feel like it's it's important to kind of like for me anyway to distinguish between like, I don't know. I think it's important to distinguish between it's a little bit of a building and scaffolding thing in my mind, but like you to benefit from what you can do with this stuff, you need to on un clench a little bit, right?

In the same way that doing anything with an LLM, at least in my experience, requires you to relax and think a little bit differently. And Don't don't don't be overly detailed unless you know that's useful, or don't be too general unless you know that that's useful. But like you get, you know, again to use your word, you develop a sense of the vibe. of of how this thing goes. And if it says to you, I have no idea what you're talking about, do you mean one of these three synonyms? Well, then you probably need to be more, you know, um directed in in telling it it what it's giving it more context. But that's a that's a real balance to me is is to have an idea of the kinds of things I'd want to do But what have I what have I learned more than anything from this?

Like if I want to put out one positive thing about this, not my mean things I say about people being bad managers, even though I think that's true. unintentionally like unknowingly bad managers. That's who doesn't like ChatGPT because they don't know how to ask for shit. But I think w there is a benefit, like you said, to thinking about it as a collaboration, which is very frustrating to people. I think people want it to be the drive the drive up drive up window at Starbucks and to get exactly the cup of coffee that they ask for and it's frustrating to them that it doesn't do that, which makes sense. But I like that. I like that it's weird. I like that it's dumb. And I like that it thinks differently than I do, quote unquote.

I mean, for both of us in terms of thinking. I guess we're both kind of in air quotes, but I like that about it. And I like having to or choosing to think about this process as a collaboration, um, because I think I have It would be like somebody who like thinks like, oh, I'm gonna go and read an ins an entire series of encyclopedias just so I can beat the encyclopedia. It's like, well, how can you have anything to say about this because you still haven't beaten encyclopedia? Oh, that's really good. Yeah, you can watch my speedrun on Discord, I guess. But the but but um I'm not interested in that. I don't that the part that drives everybody else crazy not only doesn't bother me Um I'm just being honest.

It not only doesn't bother me that it's not doing exactly what I expected, I think that's part of the collaboration, is realizing that maybe this wants to be something different. And and can I can I give a good example, I think? When I was talking about my dreams, remember making movies of your dreams? Which is also a line from a kind of a line from a Built Spill song. Um What I said was, uh this might sound difficult to understand, but I when I do my dream stuff in my little funny project and I think it's entertaining. I just describe in as much detail as possible empirically what's happening. And I tend to avoid feelings. Like I can't tell you how a dream feels. If you're telling people how a dream feels mostly, that's why people hate you telling them your dreams.

Because you can't you can't tell people what it felt like and you were there but it wasn't you and it was your childhood home, but it was a bear and like you're like just describe it clinically. So what I love is when I describe these dreams that I've written down clinically, it comes up with something that looks often absolutely nothing. like how it looked in the dream. But you know what? It feels a lot like the way it felt in the dream. So not only now, I'm off the hook because I don't have to tell you how it felt. This is gonna this image sometimes a disturbing, slightly surreal or da-da image will tell you how it felt. It's just that it's neat to me that like I couldn't I couldn't or wouldn't have come up with that on my own if I jept just kept yelling at it to give me exactly the image I expected.

And getting mad that it says, well, I can't give you a Hitchcock. I can't do you know, I can't do branded stuff or whatever. Like well, work around that. Like keep talking to it. You know, remember I said last week about organized silence. Like you don't benefit from just leaving in a huff. Like you y you might as well hang out and figure out what you could do together. And I think that's I still think that's exciting. It's very exhilarating to me. Yeah, I also get a little bit not necessarily bummed, but uh it doesn't really interest me when It's like, oh look it, we remade this thing with s uh the new Sora so that it just looks even smoother and cleaner. I'm like, No, I like the we uh weird shit I like Merlin's bird movie that I think once a week.

I wouldn't how would I ever that turns into a woman walking on the beach that's completely uncanny and nothing that I would have had a way to even know how to ask for. So those happy accidents, those Buddhist gifts, uh, I think are to be savored and to be supported and enjoyed rather than, you know. I don't know, people should do what makes them happy, but that makes me happy. I don't know. I don't I don't mm not a full endorsement from me on that one. No, I think uh uh people doing what makes them happy. Oh but some b parameter What is it you'd like people to do? Um to do what makes them happy that doesn't harm anyone else. And I didn't cover that enough in mine. And the uh yeah, I like it. I shouldn't say I just want people to be happy.

I shouldn't say I just want anything. I I I yes. It's a collaboration. I hate it. It's a component. I don't hate it. I don't hate it. It's like it's a raw transcript