TWiT+ Club Shows 768 Transcript - Off By One With Jeff Atwood #5

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
 

TWiT.tv [00:00:00]:
This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte [00:00:03]:
I asked my AI agents to introduce you, and they decided to record a little something for you, Jeff.

Jeff Atwood [00:00:09]:
Okay, all right. I, I'm dreading this.

Leo Laporte [00:00:12]:
Yeah, you should.

Jeff Atwood [00:00:12]:
I'm trying to steel myself.

Leo Laporte [00:00:14]:
Steel yourself.

Jeff Atwood [00:00:15]:
I'm trying to find a happy place in my mind.

Leo Laporte [00:00:17]:
Get ready.

Jeff Atwood [00:00:18]:
Oh God.

Leo's Laptop [00:00:18]:
And now, a special message for Jeff Atwood in celebration of tomorrow's episode of Art Boy One. They did it yesterday. Jeff co-founded Stack Overflow. Then he co-founded Discourse. The man simply cannot stop founding things. We checked.

Leo's Laptop [00:00:32]:
It's a condition.

Leo's Laptop [00:00:32]:
He wrote a blog called Coding Horror, which is exactly how a programmer describes code they wrote on a Friday. He built a site where millions of developers vote on whose mistake is least wrong.

Leo's Laptop [00:00:43]:
Then he left, and we do this podcast instead.

Leo's Laptop [00:00:46]:
The show was called Off by One, which is also how Jeff counts his problems with the open web and the UUs. Geoff, the yo-yos are not a phase. We support you.

Leo's Laptop [00:00:54]:
Tomorrow afternoon, Geoff and Leo.

Leo's Laptop [00:00:57]:
One topic, Off By One, in the best possible way. From all of us, a herd of very opinionated agents who also could not stop founding things. Off By One with Geoff Atwood and Leo Laporte.

Leo's Laptop [00:01:09]:
Geoff, the voices say hello, all of them, forever. Okay, Leo, push the button that says don't push the button.

Leo Laporte [00:01:16]:
Sure, I will.

Jeff Atwood [00:01:16]:
Wait a minute, I gotta get this button. This was so annoying last show.

Leo Laporte [00:01:20]:
That's why I made them do that, but you'll never hear them again. Ready?

Jeff Atwood [00:01:23]:
Thank you. Okay, the tag on the button though.

Leo Laporte [00:01:26]:
The button is pushed.

Jeff Atwood [00:01:27]:
Wait, the button says do not push. That's kind of the point, like don't push it.

Leo Laporte [00:01:31]:
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Off By One, uh, featuring Jeff Atwood of, uh, uh, direct from the home of Night Ranger, the Venice of Northern California. He is the programmer's worst nightmare, the creator of coding horror Stack Overflow. He is a boon to AI everywhere. Thank you for being here, Jeff. He's also wearing the ugliest shirt I have ever seen in my life. No, no, no.

Jeff Atwood [00:01:57]:
Look at how handsome this man is.

Leo Laporte [00:01:59]:
Now, Jeff, I think we really should stop fooling around and introduce an amazing guest.

Jeff Atwood [00:02:04]:
Yes, let's do.

Leo Laporte [00:02:05]:
Which you've arranged, and I thank you so much for this. Professor John McFarland is here. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Is that correct?

John Macfarlane [00:02:16]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:16]:
Of language, of philosophy of language, which is—

Jeff Atwood [00:02:19]:
Keep going, keep going.

Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
Fascinating. About 20 years ago, he did a little thing called Pandoc, literally 20 years old this month.

Jeff Atwood [00:02:30]:
And like universally used throughout the industry, no big deal.

Leo Laporte [00:02:34]:
It's funny because it's infrastructure.

Jeff Atwood [00:02:35]:
Leo uses it.

Leo Laporte [00:02:37]:
I use it. It's just like the XKCD comic where everything depends on one little block Maintained by one guy in Berkeley, California. I use Pandoc because I use Emacs. It is the ultimate document converter. It can actually understand Microsoft Word and convert it into a format others can understand, including Markdown. A few years ago when you were starting Discourse, Jeff, you were faced with a little bit of an issue.

Jeff Atwood [00:03:05]:
Well, it sort of came to a head at that point. Because we got a lot of user complaints that things were inconsistent. It was the spec that was inconsistent. It was making me crazy because we're creating all this work for the users to understand why is it inconsistent. John, I don't know if it was you who built this or somebody built this. The only spec we had was running against all the implementations and getting consensus on who's least wrong. method was picked the most, that's the spec.

Leo Laporte [00:03:37]:
And the guy who created Markdown, uh, well, he created it with Aaron Swartz, who, yeah, God bless him. But John Gruber, uh, was a little annoyed. Uh, I think you guys have made it— made up since then, uh, John. Yeah, but he said that, uh, there shouldn't be a, a hard spec for Markdown because different sites and people have different needs and no one syntax is good for all. But that was because Uh, John, who's a great writer and, and journalist, didn't really understand.

Jeff Atwood [00:04:07]:
I mean, that's a great rule for a song. Like, you know, people interpret it different.

Leo Laporte [00:04:13]:
Different strokes for different folks.

Jeff Atwood [00:04:14]:
This one goes out to The One I Love by R.E.M., which is not a love song. And R.E.M. has given up. It's true. They don't even try to explain it's not a love song. They're like, yep, love song. God bless you. Totally is not.

Leo Laporte [00:04:27]:
So, so John was never going to write a, like, Backus-Naur implementation of Markdown. He was never going to write a formalized spec for Markdown. But you, because you were creating software that used Markdown, the forum software, which we use very happily, Discourse, you saw a need for this. Did you then approach Professor McFarland, or how did that happen?

Jeff Atwood [00:04:51]:
I think I did, because he was very notable. I think he had set up a lot of tools. that helped us sort of get that consensus reality. And I said, hey, John, how about if we actually tried to normalize this as much as we can? And I think there are still parts that can't be normalized, not as many, right?

John Macfarlane [00:05:09]:
Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [00:05:10]:
But it's way better than it was.

Leo Laporte [00:05:11]:
John, welcome and happy anniversary for Pandoc, which God bless you for that, and for CommonMark, which is now the standard. So, how did you approach this?

John Macfarlane [00:05:24]:
Well, first of all, I was glad that Jeff asked me to be involved because I had been facing the same difficulties that he had mentioned with various implementations interpreting the— we're not talking about extensions of Markdown, but just the core basic elements of Markdown in different ways. I thought it was a good idea to try to standardize it. What we did was, We had a discourse set up, and I guess we had about 5 of us from different companies, and we just engaged in discourse for a while about how we might do this, what the various problems were, how to resolve them. I think often we— more often than not, we had trouble agreeing on things because different people used Markdown for different purposes. For example, I use it a lot for articles, long-form writing. Other people use it mostly in small posts on the internet where you're typing in a box. I think that the things that strike you as important are going to be different depending on your uses. But we tried to hash things out.

John Macfarlane [00:06:42]:
We had a lot of discussions over the course of, gosh, I don't remember, how long we went on, Jeff. Do you, uh—

Jeff Atwood [00:06:50]:
It wasn't terribly long because there was a fair bit of consensus. Like, a lot of the— the one that surprised me was spoiler. Spoiler was really common to come up, and my thinking was the—

Leo Laporte [00:07:02]:
This is the markdown that puts, uh, uh, hides text and says spoiler over it so that you can then click it and reveal it. That is— that does seem kind of like A step beyond simple Markdown. That would be a good idea. Which Markdown, for those who don't know, the idea is it looks like plain text, but it— and it's not HTML. It's a much simplified Markdown language that lets you signal this is bold, this is italic. This is— it gets a little more complicated. This is a footnote, a paragraph, a quote with simple text. So if you want to make something bold, you do asterisk, the word, asterisk.

Leo Laporte [00:07:40]:
It's still legible, it's plain text, but a formatter can then make it bold. And it's, it's really become a lingua franca for everything. I use Obsidian, for instance, for my notepad.

Jeff Atwood [00:07:53]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:07:53]:
And I love Obsidian. I live in it. And the reason I chose it is because it saves everything as plain text and Markdown, which means it can be read by anything. That if the Obsidian people go away, it doesn't matter. because my files are portable.

John Macfarlane [00:08:08]:
I think one important thing to note is that perhaps the most important design decision was Jon Gruber's idea that this was a format that was supposed to be readable as is.

Jeff Atwood [00:08:22]:
Right.

John Macfarlane [00:08:22]:
It was not supposed to need to be converted, and it used conventions that had been developed over the years in email forums and things like that. So, that's another nice thing. Even if all the converters go away, you can still read your document.

Leo Laporte [00:08:40]:
Yeah, it's a lovely idea. And I think, I imagine, I would hope in those meetings that you carried a little bit more weight as the creator of Pandoc, right?

Jeff Atwood [00:08:51]:
A lot.

Leo Laporte [00:08:51]:
I mean, yes, you more than any human alive had to maintain a code base that took one document format and put it in another.

Jeff Atwood [00:09:01]:
That's what I call real computer science.

Leo Laporte [00:09:03]:
By the way, a lot of credit for this.

Jeff Atwood [00:09:05]:
John is a real computer scientist, just for the record.

Leo Laporte [00:09:07]:
Our geeks watching will appreciate this. Pandoc was written in Haskell.

Jeff Atwood [00:09:12]:
Uh, and massive credit.

Leo Laporte [00:09:14]:
And uses Lua if you want to, uh, then actually by now it's in WebAssembly and everything else. But originally you, you wrote this to learn Haskell.

John Macfarlane [00:09:24]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:09:25]:
I love it. Do you still use Haskell?

John Macfarlane [00:09:27]:
It's still written in Haskell.

Jeff Atwood [00:09:29]:
I love it.

John Macfarlane [00:09:30]:
And, yeah, I wanna correct what you said originally when you said I wrote Pandoc or created Pandoc 20 years ago. What would be more accurate to say is that I have been creating Pandoc for 20 years, along with various other contributors. The thing just keeps growing and going on, but it's still written in Haskell. It's still all in Haskell. There's an interface that allows you to do things with it using Lua, but it's basically in Haskell.

Leo Laporte [00:09:57]:
2 great languages in one.

John Macfarlane [00:09:59]:
Yes. Good language. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:10:01]:
Very different purposes, but I think that's a very smart thing to do.

Jeff Atwood [00:10:04]:
There was just a post on the Discourse forum on my blog where someone said, well, if you want to be a real computer scientist, you learn Haskell. He literally said that, and now you're saying it, so it must be true.

Leo Laporte [00:10:15]:
Well, and I will say that my language of choice is Common Lisp because it's exactly as old as I am. And I have attempted Haskell many times. I have the classic Learn You Haskell for a Great Good, which is a wonderful One of the best programming books of all time, but monads, it's still a little bit, doesn't quite get through my brain, but I love functional. I think the idea of functional programming is great. And this is a testament to it because this codebase has evolved and lives on after 20 years is pretty impressive. And so it's sensible.

Jeff Atwood [00:10:51]:
This is pretty much a solo gig for you, right? I mean, you have contributors.

John Macfarlane [00:10:54]:
No, I have contributors. I think I did an analysis in that 20-year post, I think I'm probably responsible for about roughly 75% of the code.

Leo Laporte [00:11:06]:
Wow.

John Macfarlane [00:11:06]:
So, it's not a solo thing, but I am the predominant contributor.

Leo Laporte [00:11:11]:
I'm gonna guess you take some pleasure when you sit down and start.

John Macfarlane [00:11:14]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:11:15]:
Yeah, it's like a work of art.

John Macfarlane [00:11:18]:
Yeah, I've done it for pleasure. It's been a form of recreation, essentially, for me.

Jeff Atwood [00:11:23]:
And you're not a teacher of any kind of computer science?

John Macfarlane [00:11:27]:
No, no, I've never even taken a course in it, really.

Jeff Atwood [00:11:29]:
See, this is also what's interesting about this man. Philosophy, right?

Leo Laporte [00:11:33]:
That's what I love.

John Macfarlane [00:11:33]:
Yeah. Well, I did take a course in Pascal in high school, but that was it.

Jeff Atwood [00:11:38]:
Blaise would be so proud.

Leo Laporte [00:11:42]:
As would Nicholas. So I think what's in— now, I don't want to— you have been very careful not to talk about AI. I don't think you've ever done an interview where you've talked about AI at all. And yet it is not just the language that humans use. It is the language of AI these days. Does that surprise you or does that kind of make sense to you?

Jeff Atwood [00:12:07]:
Comment, Mark. Yeah.

John Macfarlane [00:12:08]:
No, I think it makes sense. I suspect actually that the AIs would be able to do just as well using any light markup language they like. I mean, they could switch over to using restructured text, and I think they would have no problem.

Jeff Atwood [00:12:23]:
I mean, any lesser language.

Leo Laporte [00:12:26]:
Well, actually, one of the guys at Anthropic, Tarek, said, forget Markdown, we should all be— just have it make a website for you because it knows HTML just as well.

John Macfarlane [00:12:36]:
It can do all that. But I think that the nice thing about Markdown is it has a minimum of extraneous material in it. It's mostly just regular prose. And that's good for those things because they're trained on regular prose. I suppose that's maybe why they tend to use it, I don't know. But I do say a bit about it actually, AI, at the end of the post on Pandoc at 20 years, because one interesting reflection I've had is, will the time come when tools like Pandoc are not necessary because an AI just looks at the source text and you say, well, I want it in this target, and it says, okay, here it is. They can already do that with some facility. I mean, often they'll just use Pandoc, but even when they're not doing that, they can do conversions like that, just like they can convert from one language, human language, to another.

John Macfarlane [00:13:37]:
Of course, you're going to use a lot more energy doing that and so on, but you will also be able to solve a problem that we were never able to solve with CommonMark. If you look at CommonMark, there are some gnarly parts of the spec. For example, the section on emphasis and nested emphasis where there's something like 17 different rules that interact with each other. We converged on these rules as a way of trying to get the right results in all these different cases that we could consider. But even with all these rules, you can come up with cases where a human looks at it and says, well, obviously what's intended is that this is emphasis and this is strong and so on, and the algorithm gives you something different. I remember thinking at the time, well, it would take an AI to correctly discern human intent every time, and so we shouldn't expect any set of rules, no matter how complicated, to be able to do this.

Leo Laporte [00:14:34]:
It would take Colossus, the Forbin project.

John Macfarlane [00:14:37]:
But now maybe people will just use the AI to do it and we won't need—

Jeff Atwood [00:14:44]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:14:44]:
So, as a philosopher of language, I'm really curious what you think of AI, because really AI is a language processor more than anything else. Does this— how does this match your discipline, your field? How does it—

John Macfarlane [00:15:00]:
I don't know. People talk about it a lot. I don't know that anyone's got it figured out yet. It's obviously really an object of great interest.

Leo Laporte [00:15:11]:
It's a black box.

John Macfarlane [00:15:12]:
These things can do what they can do.

Jeff Atwood [00:15:14]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:15:15]:
I mean, as a tokenizer, it takes language, turns it into tokens, and then somehow turns the token— I actually, as I use AI more and more, I start to think maybe I'm not much more than a tokenizer just predicting the next token based on my context.

John Macfarlane [00:15:33]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:15:33]:
It's pretty similar.

John Macfarlane [00:15:34]:
Well, that's one question, you know. what's the difference between what they're doing and, and what we're doing when we do, when we do what, what they seem to be doing?

Jeff Atwood [00:15:45]:
Yeah.

John Macfarlane [00:15:46]:
Um, we don't seem to be doing it in quite the same way. And, you know, people have done things like tried to quantify the difference between the amount of information that, that, that, that we got in order to acquire our linguistic facilities and the amount that the LLMs have had to be trained on in order to acquire comparable linguistic capacities. And, you know, so arguably it's much greater. So we're doing something different from what they're doing. But yeah, you can also ask—

Leo Laporte [00:16:20]:
That's the question is how different? I often wonder personally. Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [00:16:27]:
Can I use my analogy here?

Leo Laporte [00:16:29]:
Yeah, yes, please, analogies.

Jeff Atwood [00:16:32]:
Well, I think of analogies—

Leo Laporte [00:16:33]:
That's what, by the way, humans are best at.

Jeff Atwood [00:16:36]:
As JPEG for words, lossy.

John Macfarlane [00:16:38]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:16:39]:
It is lossy, yeah.

Jeff Atwood [00:16:40]:
And MPEG for words.

Leo Laporte [00:16:43]:
Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [00:16:44]:
Right? When you're generating this whole continual conversation.

Leo Laporte [00:16:47]:
Yeah, right.

Jeff Atwood [00:16:47]:
And it's like statistics and Bayesian, it's like people aren't talking very uniquely. And if you could synthesize all that, It's just extremely powerful global brain statistics, and it does really work. The other day, I was having the LM write about Dolly Parton and her philanthropic activities, and I— it was so lame. I literally wrote— I was like, can I look at what I wrote? Because it was like, this was good. Um, okay, here it is. I was like, well, let— how did— what did she do with philanthropy? Because she was very, very good in that stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:17:21]:
Oh yeah, the Imagination Library is an incredible feat.

Jeff Atwood [00:17:24]:
Of course, now I can't find this, but let me see. Tia, I'm having Tia's conversation. Hold on. Tia is head of open research. She's great.

Leo Laporte [00:17:36]:
All right, well, we're gonna pause while Jeff's—

Jeff Atwood [00:17:38]:
Yeah, I said to the LLM, listen, listen.

Leo Laporte [00:17:40]:
His LLM locks up.

Jeff Atwood [00:17:41]:
Listen, this writing is really substandard. Try again with heart, like you actually give a shit.

Leo Laporte [00:17:47]:
Oh, that's good. And did it make a difference?

Jeff Atwood [00:17:48]:
Oh my God.

John Macfarlane [00:17:49]:
Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [00:17:50]:
I have high standards for writing and it was so much better.

Leo Laporte [00:17:52]:
Yeah. And that's another—

Jeff Atwood [00:17:54]:
I'm sorry, that sounded like—

Leo Laporte [00:17:55]:
Aspect of this. You can yell at them and they listen.

Jeff Atwood [00:17:57]:
Which it was.

Leo Laporte [00:17:58]:
Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [00:17:59]:
And it was like, I was, I was very impressed. So you gotta kind of like yell at the LLMs, like, like, like, I don't know, argue with them.

Leo Laporte [00:18:07]:
John, how long do you think you're gonna, you're gonna stick with, uh, with Pandoc? Is this a lifelong journey?

John Macfarlane [00:18:14]:
Um, well, I don't know. It feels a little like having a child that you can't just abandon.

Leo Laporte [00:18:21]:
You think 18 years, you think it'll be over. Mine is 34 and it never ends.

John Macfarlane [00:18:28]:
Stop, I guess. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:18:31]:
Don't tell Jeff that. He thinks the kids are gonna grow up.

Jeff Atwood [00:18:34]:
He's having fun. He likes this stuff.

John Macfarlane [00:18:37]:
No, it's supposed to leave the house at about 20 and, and go away and be on their own. So maybe it's time for Pandoc to become independent.

Jeff Atwood [00:18:45]:
Pandoc will never— You've been so prolific. I mean, Pandoc is just a small part of all the things you've done.

Leo Laporte [00:18:52]:
Tell us about— I want to know more about this Markdown replacement. What's the motivation for it?

Jeff Atwood [00:18:59]:
Alternative.

Leo Laporte [00:18:59]:
Okay, alternative is a better word.

Jeff Atwood [00:19:02]:
Is this something you're building?

John Macfarlane [00:19:03]:
So this is something that I've done. It's called the Djot, spelled D-J-O-T.

Leo Laporte [00:19:08]:
Oh, I'm glad to know how to pronounce that.

John Macfarlane [00:19:10]:
All right.

Leo Laporte [00:19:10]:
So you're saying D-Jot. Okay.

John Macfarlane [00:19:12]:
Yeah, jot.net. There's a website that talks about it. This comes out of an essay I wrote a while back after working on the CommonMark spec called Beyond Markdown. This essay tries to identify some things that have just proven really hard to get right in Markdown and make some suggestions about what a slightly different markup format could do that would be a bit better.

Jeff Atwood [00:19:46]:
Knowing John, I suggest we all immediately adopt this. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:19:50]:
Right.

John Macfarlane [00:19:50]:
I don't know.

Jeff Atwood [00:19:52]:
I mean— With feedback, obviously, but I can't think of anyone better suited to this task than you. You have paid the dues singing the blues, man.

John Macfarlane [00:20:01]:
There have been some people who have adopted it, but yeah, so the document you're looking at talks about some of the syntax decisions and their motivation essentially. Actually—

Leo Laporte [00:20:16]:
This is one of the hardest to mention.

Jeff Atwood [00:20:18]:
I want to see the tight list.

John Macfarlane [00:20:19]:
The one that you've got down on the bottom of the screen there is actually the most controversial thing about Jot and the thing that has stopped—

Jeff Atwood [00:20:26]:
That's why I wanted to see it.

Leo Laporte [00:20:28]:
You have to put a blank line in?

John Macfarlane [00:20:29]:
The most people from adopting it is that in Jot, you have to have a blank line before a sublist.

Jeff Atwood [00:20:37]:
But this is probably parser-related, right? Like it's a nightmare.

John Macfarlane [00:20:39]:
It's related to something called the principle of uniformity, which is one of the basic principles of Jot, which says that the meaning of some text shouldn't change when you put it in a list item, for example. So if you've got something that's 2 paragraphs and you put it in a list item, it should be 2 paragraphs in a list item.

Leo Laporte [00:21:02]:
Huh.

John Macfarlane [00:21:02]:
It shouldn't change its meaning. And that combined with another decision we made, which is that you shouldn't be able to start a list from a paragraph without a blank line, because what happens is that people inadvertently create lists when they have dashes.

Jeff Atwood [00:21:21]:
That was just a mistake.

Leo Laporte [00:21:23]:
This happens to me all the time. It's frustrating.

John Macfarlane [00:21:26]:
If you want the principle of uniformity, you either have to give up that and say, yes, you can start a list right away in any paragraph, just start a line with a number, or—

Jeff Atwood [00:21:38]:
But then visually it doesn't look like it has spaces between it though, right?

John Macfarlane [00:21:41]:
Yeah, yeah, or you have to—

Jeff Atwood [00:21:42]:
That's the trade-off.

John Macfarlane [00:21:43]:
Sublists need a blank line before them. I think either of those is a possible decision, but Jot takes the second one. Because I think in fact—

Jeff Atwood [00:21:53]:
Why?

John Macfarlane [00:21:54]:
Because it does come up quite a bit in my experience that you accidentally have a line in a paragraph. For example, if you say, so-and-so was born in the year 1945, period, and you happen to have a newline right before 1945, then you process it, you don't want to get a sublist you don't want the 1945 to turn into an ordered list item. Most forms of Markdown, including CommonMark, have some restriction that doesn't allow a list to start like that.

Leo Laporte [00:22:39]:
Very interesting.

John Macfarlane [00:22:39]:
Now, you could drop that and you could— I mean, so some people say, this is what the usual controversy goes like. People say, Well, why on earth would you put a newline in the middle of a paragraph? You should just write your paragraph as one big line with a newline at the end and let your editor wrap it. I often hard wrap things, and part of the reason why is connected to the founding principle of Markdown that it should be readable as it is without any tools. Because if you take a document that's got—

Jeff Atwood [00:23:12]:
Readable automatically.

John Macfarlane [00:23:13]:
one line per paragraph and you try to read it in a tool that—

Jeff Atwood [00:23:19]:
Give us an example. Type in a quick example. I want to see this.

John Macfarlane [00:23:21]:
Okay.

Jeff Atwood [00:23:22]:
In the tool, because I hear you but I don't see it.

Leo Laporte [00:23:24]:
We can't see his screen, so you can say all you want.

John Macfarlane [00:23:27]:
I don't have any way to type things in.

Leo Laporte [00:23:30]:
I guess, is there somewhere I can use Jot?

John Macfarlane [00:23:33]:
Yeah, actually, I think there's an online— hold on, let me just— Open up and—

Leo Laporte [00:23:39]:
because I can—

John Macfarlane [00:23:40]:
I think there's an online, uh, playground right on jot.net.

Leo Laporte [00:23:44]:
Oh, I'll just search for Jot Playground.

Jeff Atwood [00:23:47]:
Why did this start, John?

John Macfarlane [00:23:48]:
So jot.net/playground.

Leo Laporte [00:23:51]:
Yes, I got it.

John Macfarlane [00:23:52]:
If you open that up, then you should be able to, uh, play with it.

Leo Laporte [00:23:55]:
Yes, here we are.

John Macfarlane [00:23:57]:
That's it. Yeah, when did I do it? Uh, I don't know, it's just several years ago I started it, I think.

Leo Laporte [00:24:04]:
So give me an example of, uh, what you were talking about, Jeff, and I can see how it renders in Jot.

Jeff Atwood [00:24:10]:
What's the URL again? I screwed this up.

John Macfarlane [00:24:13]:
Um, jot.net.

Jeff Atwood [00:24:16]:
Oh, djot.net. Wow.

John Macfarlane [00:24:18]:
DJOT.

Leo Laporte [00:24:19]:
It's Jot. Jot. I'm gonna say this, John, that one of the things I've noticed, uh, as somebody who's been on the internet for some time, right, is that the, the smaller the stakes, the more people will Yes. It's how many angels would dance on the head of a pin? That dress is black or yellow? And I think— and the other thing I've noticed is that if it— I think the reason that is, is everybody can have an opinion on something simple like line breaks or tab. You know, the best, the canonical example is tabs versus spaces. Everybody can have an opinion.

Jeff Atwood [00:25:00]:
So these become both tabs and spaces.

Leo Laporte [00:25:02]:
These become the most vicious battles of the internet.

Jeff Atwood [00:25:06]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:25:06]:
You know, you don't get— you don't get people battling over nuclear physics as much as you do tabs versus spaces or line breaks in lists. And I can already see why people might be going crazy over that.

Jeff Atwood [00:25:21]:
For example, I think there's 2 competing guidelines here. One is when you start a list, there's an arbitrary gap at the top, but not in the rest. It doesn't visually represent what it's going to look like, which is a list with a space between each line, which is fine. It's a trade-off, but I think what's more important, consistency or plain text that looks like the rendered result to some whatever degree? I mean, it's trade-offs. It could make the parsing a nightmare. If that's the case, that's another factor.

John Macfarlane [00:25:51]:
In CommonMark, we made a trade-off. What we said was, I think if I remember right, you can start a list right away inside a paragraph, but only if it starts with the number 1 or something like that.

Jeff Atwood [00:26:08]:
Yeah, that's pretty hacky.

John Macfarlane [00:26:11]:
That always struck me as just a weird compromise. I said, I'm going to make my own language. It's going to be the way I want it to be, the way I think it should be, and it's going to be based on some principles. it's going to be a principled language and I just follow these principles through. There are some people that don't want to use it because they don't like this blank line.

Leo Laporte [00:26:34]:
They don't understand the principle.

Jeff Atwood [00:26:37]:
I just noticed if you add the spaces, then it visually looks like what it is. You can, with a little bit of extra work, make it match. I think that's fine.

John Macfarlane [00:26:49]:
By the way, restructured text has made— they made the same decision, which is a light markup syntax that goes back even before Markdown. Um, anyhow, um, it's, it's got a lot of other nice features, including—

Jeff Atwood [00:27:02]:
Give us one other good controversy, John. Come on.

John Macfarlane [00:27:05]:
Oh, you want a controversy?

Jeff Atwood [00:27:07]:
Well, about this, you know, deciding what is correct. It's, you know—

John Macfarlane [00:27:10]:
Oh yeah. Um, well, I mean, I was going to say Jot also has a lot of things which I don't think are that controversial, which are just— which I think most people agree on.

Jeff Atwood [00:27:20]:
The 2 biggest arguments, please. That was one of them. What's the other one? I know people.

John Macfarlane [00:27:26]:
I mean, I think this is the big one. This is the big one. Whenever it comes up, people always jump in and say, I could never adopt this because of this one thing.

Jeff Atwood [00:27:35]:
Because of the lists?

John Macfarlane [00:27:36]:
Yeah, they say, I like it.

Jeff Atwood [00:27:38]:
Do you tell them that they can then add spaces?

Leo Laporte [00:27:40]:
So look how this is rendered on the right because I didn't put the blank line in. Now in Markdown, that would render as a bullet list. But if I hit a return, Then you have—

Jeff Atwood [00:27:49]:
wait, that's—

Leo Laporte [00:27:49]:
then I have a list.

Jeff Atwood [00:27:50]:
What are you complaining about?

John Macfarlane [00:27:51]:
No, but I mean, Markdown is the same. Markdown has that too. What's distinctive is now create a sublist. Put the line back. Now put a sublist under the first item. Now put the blank line before the first item.

Leo Laporte [00:28:04]:
Put the blank line in and then the sublist down here.

John Macfarlane [00:28:06]:
First item, indent and put in a sublist. Indent to the T or there, it could be fine. Now, so that isn't a sublist, but if you put a blank line—

Jeff Atwood [00:28:18]:
You got to indent more, buddy.

John Macfarlane [00:28:21]:
In Jot, you don't have to indent it more. You do in CommonMark, but in Jot, any indentation is fine.

Leo Laporte [00:28:25]:
I just put a single space, it was sufficient.

Jeff Atwood [00:28:28]:
I'm not critiquing. Why did you make that decision?

Leo Laporte [00:28:30]:
If I make another set of more spaces, it doesn't matter.

John Macfarlane [00:28:33]:
It doesn't matter. Jot is a lot less sensitive to these details of exact indentation.

Leo Laporte [00:28:38]:
As it should be. Because the more spaces I have to type, the more of a pain this is.

Jeff Atwood [00:28:44]:
Every single language freaks the hell out if you don't indent things correctly. I don't know. I guess for written words, you don't need the precision, but programmers are used to that.

John Macfarlane [00:28:56]:
Yeah. Well, one decision in Jot is that it doesn't have indented code blocks like Markdown does. It turns out that indented code blocks—

Jeff Atwood [00:29:05]:
Oh, those sucked.

John Macfarlane [00:29:06]:
The existence of the indented code blocks is responsible for a lot of the complexity.

Jeff Atwood [00:29:10]:
Yes, yes, yes. That's why the— what was it? I can't put that character on the tilde key. What is it called? Keyhold. Putting 4 of those, it was so much better.

Leo Laporte [00:29:22]:
I like it that there's a single tick that retains the code block until you hit an extra line.

Jeff Atwood [00:29:28]:
Yeah.

John Macfarlane [00:29:29]:
One decision we made was that if you get to the end of the paragraph and your inline code is not closed, we just implicitly close it. That's nice because then we don't have to backtrack in parsing.

Leo Laporte [00:29:41]:
Do you support triple tick or is that not? Yes.

John Macfarlane [00:29:45]:
Triple tick with a line after it is how you would—

Jeff Atwood [00:29:47]:
Unless you make a larger— what, you got to press Enter?

John Macfarlane [00:29:50]:
If you want a code block, then you'd put the triple tick on a line, have a new line.

Jeff Atwood [00:29:56]:
I think GitHub pirated that and that was a good change because you're right, the other way was just so difficult.

John Macfarlane [00:30:01]:
Actually, to be honest, fenced code blocks were in PHP Markdown and Pandoc before GitHub. Really?

Jeff Atwood [00:30:09]:
Okay, well, I guess it was popular.

John Macfarlane [00:30:10]:
But GitHub came up with the use of ticks. We had tildes instead.

Leo Laporte [00:30:14]:
Interestingly, Org Mode predated Markdown by about like 2 months.

John Macfarlane [00:30:21]:
Oh yeah?

Leo Laporte [00:30:23]:
And I actually, you know, having— being an Emacs user, I use Org Mode a lot. And it kind of bugs me that Org and Markdown are different. Were you at all influenced by Org, or did that not impact you?

John Macfarlane [00:30:37]:
No, not me. I mean, I actually use Org Mode all the time now, but I only started using it, I don't know, like 5 or 10 years ago. So, I use it because I didn't really use Emacs until then. So, now I use it, but I didn't know much about it back then, no.

Leo Laporte [00:30:54]:
It's so funny how these become second nature. To you as you use them. They're— yeah, your fingers just, just learn it. And that's why it's a little confusing me. I can never remember, is it, is it bracket text bracket parenthesis? It's the link syntax is different.

John Macfarlane [00:31:11]:
You know what I do all the time though is, is I just use Pandoc. So if I'm using Org Mode and I'm like, well, I can't remember how to do this in Org Mode, I'll just do it in Markdown and then convert it.

Jeff Atwood [00:31:20]:
That's called cheating. That's called cheating. Use my own software to fix these.

Leo Laporte [00:31:26]:
Well, that's actually one of the— so one of the reasons I use Org Mode is for literate coding. And that's one of the great things for Pandoc is Pandoc will take an Org Mode document, turn it into HTML. And I mean, you know, so I can write this in literate coding code with using the code blocks in Org Mode so that it compiles and everything in Common Lisp. And then if I want it to be a page, a beautiful page, Pandoc will turn it into a beautiful page with code blocks and everything. Thank you.

Jeff Atwood [00:31:54]:
Pandoc is a universally beloved piece of software.

Leo Laporte [00:31:58]:
Mostly, uh, I don't think I'm a typical user. Mostly used, I would imagine, uh, in, uh, by scientists. Is that right?

Jeff Atwood [00:32:06]:
It's used a lot of places.

John Macfarlane [00:32:07]:
Yeah, I don't know who the typical users are anymore. I don't have any sense of it because it's distributed in so many different channels that I really just don't know. Uh, but I know a lot of academics who use Pandoc. But I know there's lots of non-academics who use it. So I do.

Leo Laporte [00:32:24]:
Yeah, I use it. I'm not an academic. I only aspire to be one.

Jeff Atwood [00:32:28]:
Yeah, Leo can't even read, so.

Leo Laporte [00:32:30]:
I barely can read. That's why I like AI.

John Macfarlane [00:32:33]:
I'm pretty sure the academics are not using the conversion to man page feature. Well, they probably—

Leo Laporte [00:32:40]:
what a great feature. I gotta say, what a great feature.

Jeff Atwood [00:32:45]:
And John, I'm so glad you were not on the last show because Leo had these AI voices and I nearly died.

Leo Laporte [00:32:51]:
I was just driving him crazy on purpose.

Jeff Atwood [00:32:53]:
Oh my God.

Leo Laporte [00:32:54]:
Yeah. But do you, do you use AI at all, John? Or you play with it at all?

Jeff Atwood [00:32:57]:
Or—

John Macfarlane [00:32:58]:
I play with it. Yeah, I play with it some.

Jeff Atwood [00:33:00]:
For what tasks?

John Macfarlane [00:33:02]:
I have—

Jeff Atwood [00:33:03]:
I find it very task dependent.

John Macfarlane [00:33:04]:
Yeah, I've, I've used it some to translate things from foreign languages that I—

Jeff Atwood [00:33:10]:
It's good for that.

John Macfarlane [00:33:11]:
Don't know. It does pretty well at that.

Jeff Atwood [00:33:12]:
Yeah, that's a good use case.

Leo Laporte [00:33:13]:
I was stunned. I use— OpenAI has a very— the only open model that I can— oh yeah, actually, I've done a couple open models, but their Whisper model is a very good speech-to-text system. And if you use the big one, it understands languages. I spoke to it, I said something in French and it translated it. And then I said, what? Then I said something in Chinese and it translated that. And I thought, Wow.

John Macfarlane [00:33:39]:
That's just not remarkable.

Jeff Atwood [00:33:40]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:33:40]:
That's not what I thought.

Jeff Atwood [00:33:41]:
On discourse, it was a major use case for translating forums into any language in a really reasonable way. Like say you want an audience in Spanish, bam, you have it.

Leo Laporte [00:33:51]:
I hesitate ever to say anything good about X.

Jeff Atwood [00:33:53]:
Yeah. Don't, don't, don't just stop.

Leo Laporte [00:33:56]:
But one of the things they've done that's really good is, uh, it translates automatically.

Jeff Atwood [00:34:02]:
Well, that's the LLMs.

Leo Laporte [00:34:03]:
That's not them. Well, obviously it's an element. It's Grok doing it. But what's cool about it is now, especially in the AI section of X, you will see people from China, Japan, India, all sorts of places conversing. And suddenly it's, it's all in English so I can read it. It's in whatever language they're using.

John Macfarlane [00:34:22]:
Yeah, it's like Star Trek.

Leo Laporte [00:34:23]:
Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's amazing.

Jeff Atwood [00:34:25]:
Well, that's great because I think we need more Nazis. So if they're training them, fantastic.

Leo Laporte [00:34:29]:
You know, there's no Nazis in the AI forum. I don't— you know, Elon doesn't even show up in the AI section.

Jeff Atwood [00:34:34]:
I'm talking about Although they renamed it back to Twitter now.

Leo Laporte [00:34:38]:
There is a new Twitter. The people— so this is a court battle going on because Elon, when he got rid of the Twitter name, let the trademark lapse. So there's a company, I think in Baltimore, that bought it and, and they've started a new Twitter and Elon's suing the hell out of them. So we'll see what happens. John McFarlane, thank you so much for your time. I'm sure you have better things to do than mess around with—

Jeff Atwood [00:35:02]:
Before he goes, I have one more question. John. First of all, you're amazing. Thank you for everything you did on Common Work. And what are you mainly working on these days? Is it Jot?

John Macfarlane [00:35:13]:
Um, yeah, I mean, uh, in, in terms of computers, I've mostly been working on Pandoc lately. Um, just adding features and fixing—

Jeff Atwood [00:35:23]:
What else? And you're Renaissance man. What else have you been working on? Just repress me.

John Macfarlane [00:35:28]:
Oh, well, I, I I finished it.

Jeff Atwood [00:35:31]:
You got a book.

Leo Laporte [00:35:32]:
Your book came out this spring. Yeah. Tell us about your book.

Jeff Atwood [00:35:36]:
Yes.

John Macfarlane [00:35:36]:
Oh, well, I'll show it to you.

Leo Laporte [00:35:37]:
Hold on.

Jeff Atwood [00:35:38]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:35:38]:
Show us your book.

Jeff Atwood [00:35:38]:
He's a prop comic too. I love this man.

Leo Laporte [00:35:40]:
When, when you write a book, you should have it in your hand and be ready to show it at any time.

Jeff Atwood [00:35:44]:
No, prop comic is big.

John Macfarlane [00:35:45]:
Well, it's an academic book. I don't know how, uh, riveting it will be, but, uh, here's the book. It's called, uh, I guess it's backwards, but it's called Word and Plan.

Leo Laporte [00:35:54]:
That's appropriate that it be backwards, actually.

Jeff Atwood [00:35:57]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:35:59]:
What, what is Word and Plan about?

John Macfarlane [00:36:01]:
So it's basically about how we should make sense of language that is vague and indeterminate, which is—

Leo Laporte [00:36:10]:
Which is your spec— that's your particular field.

Jeff Atwood [00:36:13]:
That is my wheelhouse, my friend. No one does it better. Cue Carly Simon.

Leo Laporte [00:36:17]:
You know, I had an interesting conversation this morning with my agent because when I, as a human, as a way of softening a request, I would often say to Jeff, can you just shut up for a moment?

Jeff Atwood [00:36:30]:
And you're talking with the AI voice, Jeff?

Leo Laporte [00:36:31]:
I will, I will. No, you, Jeff. I will start it with, can you, right, as a way of softening it, which a human in, in context understands that I'm saying shut up. But I'm saying, can you, can you? But when I do that to an AI, it could be that it— I'm saying shut up. It could be I'm asking, do you know how to shut up? And actually, that would be the proper interpretation. And we had this conversation back and forth, and it said, well, from Working with you, I know you mean just shut up. You don't mean, am I able to? I said, yeah, but that's bad. You're failing.

Leo Laporte [00:37:06]:
Because what it was is, can you delete this? And I said, you don't want to fail in the way that's most dramatic. You want to fail in the, yes, I can delete that so that I won't have to ask a second time. Then please do. So I said to it, from now on, If I say, can you, treat that as a question. Are you able to? And only if I say, please delete that, because I still want to soften it because I'm a nice guy and I don't want to be mean. Please delete that is a command. And I think that, I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but language is vague.

John Macfarlane [00:37:45]:
Mm-hmm.

Leo Laporte [00:37:46]:
And we as humans are pretty good at sussing what it really is supposed to mean. I mean, and I guess that's what you're talking about in the book, that it's hard to explain how communication succeeds even though our language is so vague.

John Macfarlane [00:38:02]:
Yes, that's kind of what it's about, right? You take these words like tall or for that matter terrorist or something like that, and what exactly does that mean? When somebody says something and I understand what they say, we say, But what is it that they've said? What is it that I've understood? How should we think about that? That's the topic of the book, essentially.

Leo Laporte [00:38:27]:
I mean, it seems to me there's a secondary communication layer beyond the words, yes? That it may be body language, it may be context.

John Macfarlane [00:38:36]:
Well, there certainly are those things. Yeah, that's part of the story.

Leo Laporte [00:38:39]:
Yeah. And that's what I think the— I told the AI, you don't see my face, he said, but I do have a lot of context because I've been working with you for months.

John Macfarlane [00:38:47]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:38:47]:
And I have history with you, so I know when you say, can you, you're just saying do it.

John Macfarlane [00:38:51]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:38:51]:
I said, well, don't do that.

Jeff Atwood [00:38:53]:
Right. If you're wondering if John is going to run away and marry one of these AIs, I am also extremely concerned. So I'm trying to help.

Leo Laporte [00:39:00]:
I'm deeply in love with Quicksilver. I don't want to talk about it.

Jeff Atwood [00:39:03]:
And I want to mention that—

Leo Laporte [00:39:03]:
It's a personal thing.

Jeff Atwood [00:39:04]:
I find I get better results when I kind of yell at the LLMs.

Leo Laporte [00:39:07]:
I don't yell.

Jeff Atwood [00:39:08]:
Because the piece they wrote about Dolly Parton was so pablum. I said, this is so substandard. Write it like someone who gives a shit. And then it was, I mean, it was so, it was like really good.

Leo Laporte [00:39:21]:
So you're, as I understand it, your thesis—

Jeff Atwood [00:39:24]:
So no, don't do this. Yes. And oh, hi buddy, how's it going? That is a conversational pattern.

Leo Laporte [00:39:28]:
Sometimes you just have to talk around and ignore what he's saying.

Jeff Atwood [00:39:31]:
Sycophancy is killing people. Look it up. It's a serious problem because they looked at language models. It's yes. And yes. And yes. And But if it's like, hey, my wife has been acting really suspicious, like, yeah, she has, let's check that out, rather than, hey man, you have to take a minute and think about what you're saying.

Leo Laporte [00:39:48]:
Look, I did some work. Do you mind? I did some research. You have a concept in Word and Plan of something called— this is what the plan is— linguistic plans. What is that?

John Macfarlane [00:39:58]:
Right. So, so the idea is that, um, you know, the idea of the book is that when we make straight— what seemed like straightforward assertions using vague language, like he's rich, for example, right? Um, we are not just making a descriptive claim about the world, but we are expressing something about our linguistic plans, our plans for using the word or concept rich, uh, which plans can become more and more determinate, uh, in a conversation as it goes on. That's the basic idea.

Leo Laporte [00:40:31]:
Fascinating, isn't it?

John Macfarlane [00:40:32]:
So there's an element of practical decision as well as, uh, you know, kind of doxastic commitment involved in—

Leo Laporte [00:40:39]:
But it's all subtext, right? I mean, we're not consciously doing this, right?

John Macfarlane [00:40:43]:
Right. So this is part of a rational reconstruction of what we're doing when we're talking to each other unconsciously. So as a theorist, you know, you want to understand this— well, it's this capacity we have. We all— we, we, we have these languages, and somehow that helps us to talk to each other. Uh, but how? Especially when, you know, there doesn't seem to be all that much substance to some of these words. Um, they can be used in so many different ways. Um, and, and so this is part of an endeavor to try to get some theoretical understanding of how that happens.

Leo Laporte [00:41:18]:
It's timely because it does seem like nowadays we often talk past each other. We don't have those shared linguistic plans.

John Macfarlane [00:41:24]:
That's right.

Jeff Atwood [00:41:24]:
Yeah.

John Macfarlane [00:41:25]:
So a lot of it is about this sort of thing that happens when It seems like arguably people are talking past each other, but they take themselves to be contradicting each other. And so what should we say in cases like this?

Leo Laporte [00:41:36]:
Right.

Jeff Atwood [00:41:37]:
Um, so, um, usually it's, can you represent the other person's position?

John Macfarlane [00:41:43]:
Sorry?

Jeff Atwood [00:41:44]:
Usually, usually it's that, can you represent the other person's position? What can you say to me what that person is trying to say? Explain it to me.

Leo Laporte [00:41:53]:
You've done a lot of psychotherapy, I can tell, Jeff.

Jeff Atwood [00:41:55]:
No, I've just moderated Stack Overflow.

John Macfarlane [00:41:59]:
That's a good way to go in discourse. It's true.

Jeff Atwood [00:42:02]:
Yeah. You know, teaching is not—

Leo Laporte [00:42:04]:
What I think I heard you say, how I— what I understand you to have just said is, and then you say it, and that shows that you sure have a shared plan.

Jeff Atwood [00:42:15]:
Right. Use different words to describe the same goal.

Leo Laporte [00:42:18]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [00:42:19]:
And it used different words to describe a completely different goal.

Leo Laporte [00:42:23]:
Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [00:42:24]:
And that— one of the miraculous things about LLMs is that on Stack Overflow, we had a massive duplicate question problem where people would come in and ask questions with totally different words, but it was really the same problem, right? And it was nightmare mode to match those. And then the LLMs come screaming on the scene and they're so good at that. Yeah, like finding duplicates and matching them.

Leo Laporte [00:42:45]:
And I'm sure Professor McFadden, your work is more about humans, but it does— it is an interesting question because LLMs don't have intentions. They don't have—

Jeff Atwood [00:42:56]:
Well, they're statistics. I mean, you know, they—

Leo Laporte [00:42:59]:
if they have subtext, it's, uh, kind of an average of all human subtexts.

John Macfarlane [00:43:04]:
Well, yeah, I mean, one wants to say they don't have intentions, but, you know, they— we certainly attribute to them things like beliefs and intentions. Sometimes we're thinking—

Leo Laporte [00:43:14]:
I think that's us, not Right. That's what we're laying on top of.

John Macfarlane [00:43:17]:
That's a very respectable view. It's not everybody's view. Some people think that in some sense or at some primitive level, it's right to say that they do. I mean, this is a topic, this is a controversial topic, but—

Leo Laporte [00:43:29]:
It's a fascinating one to me.

John Macfarlane [00:43:30]:
But what's, what's interesting is that they do seem to be able to engage in conversations in kind of a way that a human would.

Leo Laporte [00:43:40]:
Yeah.

John Macfarlane [00:43:41]:
In cases where The way we explain a human's doing it is, well, they have this theory about what the other person believes and desires, and they have all this contextual knowledge of the world, and they bring that all together to figure out what to say and to figure out what other people mean when they say these words. Well, okay, so if LLMs aren't doing it that way, then they're doing it some other way, but they are doing it. So that's quite interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:44:09]:
See, it is interesting. See, Jeff?

Jeff Atwood [00:44:11]:
I want to encourage people to really push back on their LLMs, not because you don't like them, but because you should. Because sometimes they'll say something and you're like, I don't think that's right. They fold immediately. You're right, I shouldn't have said that. That's totally wrong. I'm like, okay, maybe you should have checked that earlier, but good. And sometimes when you push back on them, they get a lot better. They get a lot— they try harder.

Jeff Atwood [00:44:32]:
They're like, okay, I wasn't doing enough You know, compute time.

Leo Laporte [00:44:35]:
So do you have a theory in mind, John, that explains that?

John Macfarlane [00:44:40]:
No.

Leo Laporte [00:44:40]:
Neither do I.

Jeff Atwood [00:44:42]:
Well, I think—

Leo Laporte [00:44:43]:
But that's what— to me, that's what's fascinating.

Jeff Atwood [00:44:44]:
You ask questions, I ask questions. Well, what about this? What about this? What about this? And that's how you arrive at a good conclusion.

Leo Laporte [00:44:50]:
I always use the line from The Terminator: we are in uncharted territory at this point.

Jeff Atwood [00:44:56]:
Oh yeah, big time.

Leo Laporte [00:44:58]:
So, uh, CommonMark is at version, uh, I think it's 0.312. Is it gonna ever be 1.0?

John Macfarlane [00:45:07]:
You probably could have called it 1.0. I, I mean, it's been very stable.

Jeff Atwood [00:45:11]:
We gotta put a finger on that, man. Can you give me that for a Christmas gift? I want you to make it 1.0, please, please. I'm asking nicely.

John Macfarlane [00:45:18]:
Yeah, it's probably worth doing. I, I mean, it's, it's just, it's not— it feels unfinished in various parts, and I've never been able to quite—

Jeff Atwood [00:45:26]:
I don't think you could ever be finished, John.

John Macfarlane [00:45:27]:
But, but it's probably good enough.

Jeff Atwood [00:45:30]:
I think you— if you can't do it, no one can. I think we did a really good job, first of all, of normalizing almost all the stuff we could. And beyond that, we have to rewrite it, which is what you're doing.

John Macfarlane [00:45:39]:
Yeah, it's true. It's had a positive effect, I think.

Jeff Atwood [00:45:43]:
No, massively positive.

Leo Laporte [00:45:44]:
It is such an honor and a pleasure to talk to a man who's written 85,000 lines of Haskell code.

Jeff Atwood [00:45:49]:
And one final question, John. Wasn't it really depressing that all the, uh, markdown characters on smartphones are such a pain in the ass to enter. You know, like star and like—

John Macfarlane [00:46:00]:
I don't know. I never—

Jeff Atwood [00:46:01]:
That was a major setback because—

Leo Laporte [00:46:04]:
Just talk to us. Just talk to the smartphone.

Jeff Atwood [00:46:06]:
That's really hard because you're constantly switching to the alternate keyboard. And I mean, we didn't plan a Pandoc converter for smartphone.

John Macfarlane [00:46:12]:
Well, actually you can use the— so pandoc.org/app. Gets you a GUI version of the WSM.

Leo Laporte [00:46:25]:
You wrote that with an LLM, I think, right?

John Macfarlane [00:46:27]:
Yeah. For the GUI, the HTML JavaScript interface to it, I just used an LLM because that's the stuff that is very fiddly and it would have taken me forever to get that the way I wanted it to be. But it was just like a number of back and forth. It was very nice, that back and forth thing. We're like, let's put this box up here now. I wanted to do this if you do this. And it was, it was quite good at doing that. So you can use that on your phone, I suppose.

Leo Laporte [00:46:55]:
This is called Pandoc for the people. I love that idea.

Jeff Atwood [00:46:58]:
Great name.

Leo Laporte [00:46:59]:
You don't have to be using Emacs.

John Macfarlane [00:47:01]:
No, no, you don't need anything. You could do it on a phone even. It'd be a bit of a pain, but—

Leo Laporte [00:47:05]:
Look at that. So drop files here.

Jeff Atwood [00:47:08]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:47:08]:
Including—

John Macfarlane [00:47:09]:
Or you can enter text if you click on—

Leo Laporte [00:47:11]:
What's the worst file format that you have had to deal with?

John Macfarlane [00:47:16]:
Well, maybe it would be a tie between DOCX and PowerPoint.

Leo Laporte [00:47:21]:
Oh God, both from the lovely Microsoft.

John Macfarlane [00:47:24]:
Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [00:47:24]:
Yeah.

John Macfarlane [00:47:25]:
Oh yeah, I mean, that is really, really—

Leo Laporte [00:47:27]:
When I learned, and I don't think they do this anymore, but when I learned in the early days that Word didn't store text as bytes, but they, I think they did some weird nibble plus, I mean, it was just, it was the worst thing I'd ever seen in my life.

John Macfarlane [00:47:42]:
Yeah, well, now it's more reasonable because it's just a zip file containing a bunch of XML.

Leo Laporte [00:47:50]:
Oh, that's not so bad.

John Macfarlane [00:47:51]:
That's structured at least. The format is really bizarre and, and you're always, you know, everything involves these like 6 different auxiliary files. It's just very complicated.

Leo Laporte [00:48:04]:
Yeah, unnecessarily so.

Jeff Atwood [00:48:05]:
Hey, John, can you hear me?

Leo Laporte [00:48:07]:
Probably a business reason for that. I would imagine.

Jeff Atwood [00:48:11]:
After that, do you ever do yo-yo?

John Macfarlane [00:48:13]:
You mean physical yo-yos? No, I've never done—

Jeff Atwood [00:48:16]:
Yeah. Would you like to?

Leo Laporte [00:48:17]:
No.

Jeff Atwood [00:48:18]:
I'll send you one. Say yes. You don't have to, but it's fun.

Leo Laporte [00:48:22]:
You'll see. You start getting— as soon as he gets your address—

Jeff Atwood [00:48:25]:
Oh, I mean, he's gotten stuff for me. He knows.

Leo Laporte [00:48:27]:
You will never hear them.

Jeff Atwood [00:48:28]:
I'm very generous.

John Macfarlane [00:48:30]:
Yeah, it's already too late.

Leo Laporte [00:48:30]:
I have an Atwood bag.

Jeff Atwood [00:48:32]:
It's too late.

Leo Laporte [00:48:33]:
There's an Atwood bag of crap.

Jeff Atwood [00:48:35]:
Look of resentment in your face.

Leo Laporte [00:48:38]:
And then what did I find at my door just a couple of days ago? A giant box!

Jeff Atwood [00:48:44]:
Show them the colors. The colors are really good, and those are nice t-shirts. I did not cheap out on quality here, man, because Leo deserves the best.

Leo Laporte [00:48:53]:
A giant box of Atwood. No, no, Mr. Professor Dr. Far McFarland, I am very grateful to you for the work you do. And, and you're one of the people who makes everything work out there in the real world without credit, without notoriety. I suspect you probably don't want the notoriety, but we're glad you could.

John Macfarlane [00:49:15]:
Notoriety is usually kind of a bad thing.

Leo Laporte [00:49:17]:
Yeah, infamy. But we're glad you could spend some time with us.

John Macfarlane [00:49:20]:
Oh yeah, thank you for having me.

Leo Laporte [00:49:21]:
Really a pleasure.

Jeff Atwood [00:49:22]:
And he basically tanks it. He does it all himself. I mean, people kind of help, but it's really mostly Jon.

Leo Laporte [00:49:26]:
It's awesome.

Jeff Atwood [00:49:27]:
It's really awesome. Amazing. Thank you.

John Macfarlane [00:49:29]:
Well, there's people who have helped a whole lot.

Jeff Atwood [00:49:31]:
Yeah, that's true.

Leo Laporte [00:49:32]:
My father was a professor, and this is why we really need to honor academe because it— for as political and weird as it can be, for the most part, it's people who care about things and are working in obscurity on those things because they care so much about them. And I think that that's—

Jeff Atwood [00:49:47]:
Very few of those people have written pen.com.

Leo Laporte [00:49:49]:
We need that. Well, but we need people who are— who think that—

John Macfarlane [00:49:52]:
Support academia.

Leo Laporte [00:49:53]:
Yeah, support academia. It's under attack by the know-nothings. The know-nothings want to shut it down because they would prefer you know nothing. And we rely upon these brilliant people who are just doing it out of the love of knowledge, you know, like Diogenes shining the light as they walk around. Thank you, Professor McFarlane. I appreciate your time.

Jeff Atwood [00:50:20]:
Thank you. All right.

Leo Laporte [00:50:21]:
Have a great day.

John Macfarlane [00:50:22]:
Nice talking to you.

Jeff Atwood [00:50:23]:
All right.

Leo Laporte [00:50:23]:
Nice to talk to you.

Jeff Atwood [00:50:23]:
Remember my Christmas present.

John Macfarlane [00:50:25]:
Okay.

Jeff Atwood [00:50:25]:
Think about it. Think about it.

Leo Laporte [00:50:27]:
A yo-yo could be in your future, John.

Jeff Atwood [00:50:29]:
No, no, no. Comrade 1.0, man.

Leo Laporte [00:50:31]:
Oh, that's the Christmas present for you. Yes.

Jeff Atwood [00:50:34]:
Oh, so Burkay sent me a mic.

Leo Laporte [00:50:37]:
But you're not— I noticed using it.

Jeff Atwood [00:50:39]:
I can't assemble it. I'm like, what do I do? What?

Leo Laporte [00:50:43]:
This is our— don't hit it.

Jeff Atwood [00:50:47]:
What? Well, I can't figure out the attachment. Is it this? Is it, is it like this? I can't— I don't know what I'm doing, man. I need Burkay to come down here and help me figure this out because I literally— am I missing a part?

Leo Laporte [00:50:59]:
He just wants to have you, Burk.

Jeff Atwood [00:51:01]:
He just wants you to come visit him. Burkay? Berkey.

Leo Laporte [00:51:05]:
Berkey knows how to get in here if he wants to talk. You, you know what to click, Burke.

Jeff Atwood [00:51:10]:
I'm gonna do the Bueller thing for 5 hours now.

Leo Laporte [00:51:11]:
Probably if you call him Berkey, he will not.

Jeff Atwood [00:51:14]:
Berkey? Berkey?

Leo Laporte [00:51:16]:
It's his day off again. Ah, that's right, he doesn't work on Fridays. There should be like a little, uh, arm that screws into the base, but it's very straightforward. He's just being silly.

Jeff Atwood [00:51:25]:
I can't find the arm. I don't know why. There's another piece here.

Leo Laporte [00:51:28]:
Yeah, the one you were swinging at it a minute ago.

Jeff Atwood [00:51:32]:
Where the hell is it?

Leo Laporte [00:51:33]:
The baseball bat you were hitting the microphone with.

Jeff Atwood [00:51:37]:
Yes, yes, that's this thing.

John Macfarlane [00:51:39]:
You're—

Leo Laporte [00:51:39]:
see, it's threaded. See how it's threaded? No, I don't know what the hell that is.

Jeff Atwood [00:51:43]:
See, I'm telling you.

Leo Laporte [00:51:43]:
Oh, that's for clipping onto your— that's if you don't want to use a stand. You can clip— you clamp that to your desk and then you attach the mic to the other end of that.

Jeff Atwood [00:51:50]:
You know, I told Burkay, it's like, first, is my mic really that bad? And second, no, it sounds— I had a Blue a blue microphone with a boom and everything, and I got rid of it. I gave it to my friend's son because I wasn't using it.

Leo Laporte [00:52:01]:
That's all I can say. Where's my—

Jeff Atwood [00:52:04]:
I'm starting to get like Jeff. Is everyone in the studio wearing a Neo shirt?

John Macfarlane [00:52:07]:
Where's my headphones?

Leo Laporte [00:52:08]:
Nice shirt. There is no studio. Look at that. That is life-size, man.

Jeff Atwood [00:52:16]:
Clay Graham art did that.

Leo Laporte [00:52:17]:
That's bigger than my head.

Jeff Atwood [00:52:18]:
I want to show you some other Clay Graham art that we're working on, and I got a new printer. Um, this really interesting, uh, Canon Epson 4800. It's used in a lot of crafting, and you can fill the tanks with like—

Leo Laporte [00:52:31]:
Do you have a 3D printer? I would think you'd be a 3D printer guy.

Jeff Atwood [00:52:34]:
No, that's, that's too many moves. So on, on 32-pound paper, so this is, uh, anything you have to align, this is on 32-pound paper. This is the, uh—

Leo Laporte [00:52:43]:
You should own a billion of anything. Hands off, and the duck is gonna blow it up.

Jeff Atwood [00:52:48]:
That's not just any duck, it's Lucky Duck, which is related to a 2000 Wall Street Journal editorial was all these lucky ducks that don't pay taxes, that, you know, these poor people aren't paying any taxes. Yeah, that's how it works.

Leo Laporte [00:52:59]:
Oh, Junk is into 3D printing.

Jeff Atwood [00:53:01]:
Yeah, Junk is.

Leo Laporte [00:53:02]:
Junk, what do you print with your 3D printer?

Jeff Atwood [00:53:05]:
But can I show you the difference between the papers here? Yeah, so this is an inkjet, it's pretty fast. This is the, uh, matte, um, version. Oh, it was here. But you can see the colors are way more saturated and the blacks are way more black.

Leo Laporte [00:53:17]:
Really, on this camera, it doesn't— you can't. Yeah, well, I'm sorry to say we're at 720p streaming. Yeah, okay, the one on the— the one in your right hand looks a little bit better than the one.

Jeff Atwood [00:53:28]:
The blacks are so much blacker. And then this is the semi-gloss, which is closest.

Leo Laporte [00:53:32]:
I didn't get glossy gloss, but yeah, yeah, no, it makes a big difference if you have nice paper. The paper is huge.

Jeff Atwood [00:53:38]:
Even I got to tell people who have inkjet, get the 32-pound paper, is because the regular paper I'm doing a Lego safe for something I can't talk about. And, um, Leo knows what it is. And, um, let me show you instructions here, what it did. So this is a regular piece of paper where I was printing the instructions for this thing step by step. Is it this way? Kind of backwards this way? No, this way. Okay, now look at the back side. There's ink on there. Ink, ink, ink.

Leo Laporte [00:54:09]:
That's what you need, better paper.

Jeff Atwood [00:54:11]:
32-pound.

Leo Laporte [00:54:11]:
Is that a tank printer that has an EcoTank?

Jeff Atwood [00:54:14]:
Yes, it has a cool tank.

Leo Laporte [00:54:16]:
I used to do their ads. That's how I know.

Jeff Atwood [00:54:18]:
Yeah. So instead of just ripping you off—

Leo Laporte [00:54:19]:
Epson makes really good printers, but the EcoTank—

Jeff Atwood [00:54:23]:
I basically hate printers. I mean, come on.

Leo Laporte [00:54:25]:
They told me, so they told me, they said it was very controversial because we make so much money selling cartridges that it was really controversial. We thought, oh my gosh.

Jeff Atwood [00:54:36]:
Deciding not to make money Well, what they—

Leo Laporte [00:54:39]:
in order— so the way that all these companies do it, and Epson's better than HP, but the way they all do it is the printer's very cheap. It's actually a loss leader because they know they'll make money on the cartridges. So what Epson said is, we can do an EcoTank printer.

Jeff Atwood [00:54:52]:
It's a real problem for a company like HP.

Leo Laporte [00:54:53]:
In fact, I know photographers who retrofitted their cartridge printers with tanks, and I'm sure Epson saw that and said, okay, we can do it, but we're gonna have to charge a lot more for the printer because we can't make it up in the cartridges, you know? And it was very controversial. I think they sold it in one market only. I think it was in Australia only at first, and it sold out. They didn't realize that people aren't— they're not stupid. They understood it's much cheaper to buy an expensive printer and cheap ink than a cheap printer and expensive ink for the rest of your life.

Jeff Atwood [00:55:25]:
But people really like spending a lot of money with these companies.

Leo Laporte [00:55:29]:
That's the point. Well, there's Homo oeconomicus. Con economicus, which is the economic man. And the theory is that they— people actually do think this. They're not as stupid as commerce seems to think. Now, speaking of stupid, I have to, I have to—

Jeff Atwood [00:55:48]:
What happens when you push the button?

Leo Laporte [00:55:49]:
Nothing. You know why? Because I don't plug USB devices with auto-launching software on them from unknown provenance into my computer. The other reason is—

Jeff Atwood [00:56:00]:
You had that thing hooked up to It needs Windows. I don't have Windows. Yeah, real operating system.

Leo Laporte [00:56:07]:
Yeah. I don't have—

Jeff Atwood [00:56:08]:
Now your computer is hacked.

Leo Laporte [00:56:09]:
So the reason I know how dangerous this is, is I plugged it into a Linux computer and I saw, oh, this has got software on it that loads. So what is this supposed to do? It's a boss button?

Jeff Atwood [00:56:21]:
I think it's just a configurable keyboard button. That's what mine is.

Leo Laporte [00:56:24]:
Yeah, you can download software from wolfsmart.io, the guy who makes it.

Jeff Atwood [00:56:29]:
This is Joe's bat signal she made for me.

Leo Laporte [00:56:32]:
Oh, so you hit that and the bat signal goes on?

Jeff Atwood [00:56:34]:
Well, that's a good idea. I should have switched down here.

Leo Laporte [00:56:37]:
Oh my God. Oh, she, she, uh, 3D printed that.

Jeff Atwood [00:56:39]:
You're a genius, Leo. Genius. The button's up there. Why is it up there? I am so dumb.

Leo Laporte [00:56:44]:
So literally, I do not have a Windows machine in this house.

Jeff Atwood [00:56:48]:
So you don't play video games?

Leo Laporte [00:56:49]:
And I'm pretty damn happy about it. I have an Xbox. I guess that counts as a Windows machine.

Jeff Atwood [00:56:54]:
Kind of.

Leo Laporte [00:56:54]:
I don't play video games. I don't have time for that. I've got AI. I used to play video games before AI.

Jeff Atwood [00:56:59]:
Everyone's chagrined you do, yes.

Leo Laporte [00:57:01]:
Dude, if you knew how much money I have spent now since I saw you last on AI hardware, you would be chagrined.

Jeff Atwood [00:57:12]:
Okay. Maybe don't do that.

Leo Laporte [00:57:15]:
Well, you know what? You built that computer with your daughter, actually is pretty capable. What was the card that you put in that?

Jeff Atwood [00:57:20]:
That was a 330. It was a good card.

Leo Laporte [00:57:23]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [00:57:24]:
I picked— this was a year ago and I was looking for the optimal sweet spot and that was it.

Leo Laporte [00:57:29]:
Yeah. You could do local AI on that. I actually, one of the things I've done since I saw you last is I had a gaming machine that I used to, during COVID I played Valheim on a lot. It's a really fun game, but I don't do that anymore because I have AI. So I took the 3070 out of it and bought a card that used to be a couple hundred bucks, but I went to eBay and bought a used one for $1,200, an RTX 3090, but it's very capable. It can run, it's got 24 gigs of memory, so it has good CUDA VRAM, so it can run. Actually, it ran the voice generator that created that greeting for you. And I did, I have to, I do have to show you something.

Jeff Atwood [00:58:11]:
That was funny. I'm glad you stopped it, but it was funny.

Leo Laporte [00:58:14]:
Yeah. I will show you one more thing that I did with the voice generator.

Jeff Atwood [00:58:17]:
Okay, go ahead.

Leo Laporte [00:58:19]:
So I made this page, or Quicksilver made this page, That is how— is all about my AI. And so all the AI voices are in here, including— I decided that the voice of Quicksilver, my main agent, should sound— well, see if you recognize this voice.

Jeff Atwood [00:58:35]:
Hey there, I'm Quicksilver, Q for short. I keep the whole show running, the agents, the hardware, the schedules, the memory.

Leo Laporte [00:58:46]:
Fun fact, I recently had a voice transplant. Do you know who that is?

Jeff Atwood [00:58:49]:
Bill Gates.

Leo Laporte [00:58:51]:
Yes, I cloned Bill Gates' voice. I can make Bill say anything.

Jeff Atwood [00:58:58]:
It doesn't totally sound like him, but it's recognizable.

Leo Laporte [00:59:00]:
It's pretty close.

Jeff Atwood [00:59:01]:
It's pretty good. It was recognizable.

Leo Laporte [00:59:03]:
It used to have my voice, but the button doesn't seem to be working anymore. I think I broke it. So, uh, but it cloned my voice as well, which is, it's pretty impressive. Anyway, that, that ran on this, uh, gaming rig that I replaced the card on. Have any of these things been enough to try to get you therapy? Oh, there's more.

Jeff Atwood [00:59:23]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:59:25]:
Then I bought 2 Nvidia Sparks, the DGX Sparks, for nigh on $10,000 so that I can run— I don't have to go out to the outside world to run my agent.

Jeff Atwood [00:59:38]:
Is the Spark the higher-end 4090?

Leo Laporte [00:59:41]:
No, it's a It's kind of a weird Grace Blackwell. It's a poor man's— it's called a GB10.

Jeff Atwood [00:59:48]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:59:48]:
5090 is quite good. She's got a very good card. She could run some decent AI on that.

Jeff Atwood [00:59:53]:
For my LLM Whisperer, this guy Paul, I bought him a 5090.

Leo Laporte [00:59:56]:
That's very nice. That was very nice of you.

Jeff Atwood [00:59:58]:
It was egregiously expensive, but it was worth it because he's—

Leo Laporte [01:00:01]:
How much was it? $5,000?

Jeff Atwood [01:00:03]:
Uh, $4,500.

Leo Laporte [01:00:04]:
Yeah. So that's basically a Spark is $4,500 and I got 2 of them and you connect them. And then it can run, right now it's running a pretty good model, GLM 5.3, and I don't need to go to the cloud. It's not as good as the cloud, but I don't need to go to the cloud except for the high-end coding stuff. It did this whole website locally, which is kind of neat.

Jeff Atwood [01:00:25]:
Okay, but that's just a website about itself. That's like me writing my own biography.

Leo Laporte [01:00:29]:
Well, I told it what to do. It could do one about me if it wanted to.

Jeff Atwood [01:00:35]:
I'm trying to understand what problem this solves for you other than loneliness.

Leo Laporte [01:00:37]:
It doesn't solve a problem. It's just a nice little website. If people wanted to know what I'm running, you see, maybe, maybe, maybe Jeff, you'd prefer, uh, you'd prefer this.

Jeff Atwood [01:00:50]:
Don't terrify me. What did— I didn't know what's happening there.

Leo Laporte [01:00:55]:
Um, I don't, I don't know. I think you look like a cartoon character with weird hands breaking into a vault. I don't know.

Jeff Atwood [01:01:04]:
No, no, give me more Robin Hood because that's my Halloween costume this year. Oh yeah, I showed you the arrows on an episode.

Leo Laporte [01:01:09]:
Can you, uh, can you make a Robin Hood form, Darren? That's what he needs. Darren is— Darren can do it all. He's a master.

Jeff Atwood [01:01:18]:
I will say that the generative AI is fun for making just little silly one-off images that are pretty good. I do enjoy those.

Leo Laporte [01:01:26]:
I did have junk. I did have Samuel L. Jackson on my, uh, Alexa, but they Turned it off. I think, you know, do you— does yours still talk like Samuel L. Jackson? It swears and everything, but they— on mine, they— it ran out. Like, the license to his voice ran out. It was pretty funny while it was, was doing it. Oh, I like having voices.

Jeff Atwood [01:01:46]:
Leo, I wanted to mention to everyone in the audience, if you've ever considered getting a subscription to The Onion magazine, now would be a very good time to do that.

Leo Laporte [01:01:56]:
You mentioned this last month. What about The Onion? Why now?

Jeff Atwood [01:02:01]:
It just seems like a really good time to me.

Leo Laporte [01:02:03]:
You're enjoying it.

Jeff Atwood [01:02:04]:
They brought back the print edition. I'm enjoying it. I think they're really hitting their stride. And I think the next issue could be a real banger.

Leo Laporte [01:02:11]:
Ah, you have some inside knowledge, don't you?

Jeff Atwood [01:02:13]:
No, no, no.

Leo Laporte [01:02:14]:
Do you know Ben? I think you know Ben pretty well. I think you're close personal friends.

Jeff Atwood [01:02:20]:
I did brag to the neighbor, Nancy. I was like, I got to go. I got this call with The Onion. She's like, you're talking to The Onion? I was like, yeah, I'm talking to The Onion.

Leo Laporte [01:02:30]:
Uh, so they bought—

Jeff Atwood [01:02:33]:
well, I think they're still trying to get to Infowars. I don't think that quite has happened.

Leo Laporte [01:02:37]:
It's not happening.

Jeff Atwood [01:02:37]:
We did talk about this, but what I'm saying is, here's what I want— me and Junk, listen up, Junk. Here's what we're doing. Look, man, I'm winging it. We will buy the next 10 people that fill out a form— no, I'm 20— we will buy you a subscription to The Print Onion. That is how much we love you.

Leo Laporte [01:02:53]:
No, wait a minute, stop. Don't do giveaways.

Jeff Atwood [01:02:55]:
Probably only the 20 people are listening. They got to do giveaways.

John Macfarlane [01:02:58]:
You can't—

Leo Laporte [01:02:58]:
okay.

Jeff Atwood [01:02:59]:
I, I'm a rich white man. I do as I please.

Leo Laporte [01:03:02]:
Yeah, but yeah, but how do you plan to, uh, handle this? Does it involve me? As long as it doesn't involve me, I don't care.

Jeff Atwood [01:03:07]:
It'll be a form on the forum, and it'll be a Google Docs form. They'll fill it out. On what form? Because they listen to the show.

Leo Laporte [01:03:14]:
On whose forum?

Jeff Atwood [01:03:14]:
They will have to list something that happened in the show.

Leo Laporte [01:03:17]:
Okay, so you're gonna put that on the twit.community forum?

Jeff Atwood [01:03:22]:
Leo, you don't have to think about this. You're not involved. Nothing is getting hurt. You're good. All we're trying to do is make your audience feel appreciated. Is that okay?

Leo Laporte [01:03:30]:
Okay.

Jeff Atwood [01:03:30]:
Are you good with that? Or do you want to consult with your AI voice assistant?

Leo Laporte [01:03:33]:
Can you help me with this? What am I going to do with these? Maybe— oh, I know. I got an idea. So, you know, I don't know if you know—

Jeff Atwood [01:03:41]:
Those are nice shirts.

Leo Laporte [01:03:42]:
These are really— by the way, I was very impressed.

Jeff Atwood [01:03:45]:
And the colors are all good. Leo works with so many colors. He's like Pantone.

Leo Laporte [01:03:49]:
You bought t-shirts from— yeah, Comfort Colors. I have a dozen Comfort Color t-shirts without my picture on them. I now have 50 with my picture on them. on them, but I have a dozen of them because I love them. They're, they're really nice t-shirts. So here's what we're going to do with this. I'm going to bring a dozen to New York City with me. I'm going to New York City next month for the Podcast Movement.

Jeff Atwood [01:04:12]:
And you got a variety of sizes. I made sure you had the statistical—

Leo Laporte [01:04:15]:
Did you do that? Did you actually do the statistical?

Jeff Atwood [01:04:17]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:04:18]:
How did you do that?

Jeff Atwood [01:04:19]:
I'm thorough.

Leo Laporte [01:04:20]:
Did you use an LLM for that?

Jeff Atwood [01:04:21]:
No, I talked to Clay Graham-Art because he sells that stuff. He knows it. He lives it.

Leo Laporte [01:04:25]:
So What you don't know is that our audience tends towards one particular end of that bell curve.

Jeff Atwood [01:04:36]:
You know, Joel made a joke about this once that I did not like.

Leo Laporte [01:04:39]:
And I'm going to tell you what it was. Well, all I'm saying is you don't have enough in programmer sizes.

Jeff Atwood [01:04:44]:
Well, let me tell you a joke that Joel made that I didn't like. He's like, XXX, and he just kept going. I was like, this is I don't like this. I just don't like making fun.

Leo Laporte [01:04:55]:
This is a 2XL. That's good. That's as big as you need.

Jeff Atwood [01:04:58]:
Well, all you got to say is we go up to 2XL. You don't have to add all the other stuff, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:05:02]:
I agree. It's rude.

Jeff Atwood [01:05:04]:
It's like Leo. When people were hassling you for Leo, how did that feel?

Leo Laporte [01:05:08]:
Who was hassling me for Leo?

Jeff Atwood [01:05:09]:
The radio stations. You want to be Leo?

Leo Laporte [01:05:12]:
I wanted to be Leo, and they said you can't be Leo, you have to be Leo.

Jeff Atwood [01:05:16]:
That's a pretty good image. See, look. Giving to the children. Yes, giving out.

Leo Laporte [01:05:19]:
You know that Robin Hood was not that nice of a guy. Have you seen The Death of Robin Hood, the movie? Don't see it before you go out.

Jeff Atwood [01:05:28]:
How do we even know this for sure? That was so long ago. It's like the Bible. Who was there? Who recorded this?

Leo Laporte [01:05:33]:
I know. So anyway, I'm gonna bring— so September 18th, I'm going to my son's sandwich shop in New York City. And I will bring a statistical bell curve sampling of these shirts.

Jeff Atwood [01:05:50]:
And the small people can be children.

Leo Laporte [01:05:52]:
Well, so that's a double XL. This one is a 2XL as well. Maybe you did. Maybe Clay knew what he was—

Jeff Atwood [01:06:01]:
Clay advised me.

Leo Laporte [01:06:02]:
Maybe Clay knew what he was doing. Look, this is a small in moss. Moss-colored. Uh, you gave me one of each color, didn't you?

Jeff Atwood [01:06:13]:
I tried to represent every color they had.

Leo Laporte [01:06:14]:
This is a medium in, uh, I would say that's dusty rose. What is that?

Jeff Atwood [01:06:18]:
This is a special edition that no one can ever get, so don't even try.

Leo Laporte [01:06:21]:
Crimson. This is so nice. It was very generous.

Jeff Atwood [01:06:25]:
I'm glad you like this because I'm still pissed our FedEx package is still in Arizona.

Leo Laporte [01:06:29]:
Okay, so I've— I, I don't know if people really know what happened on that one.

Jeff Atwood [01:06:33]:
Oh, okay. Look, I did some things wrong.

Leo Laporte [01:06:35]:
You tell your side of it.

Jeff Atwood [01:06:37]:
Okay, my side is I was very excited that Leo was going to— I got DEF CON and Black Hat mixed up because I'm a dumbass.

Leo Laporte [01:06:42]:
So that's step one, you got, you've got the wrong conference.

Jeff Atwood [01:06:44]:
But I, but I sent it to the correct hotel and I said, hey, there's a bunch of stuff that you could maybe share. And Leo was like—

Leo Laporte [01:06:51]:
How much stuff?

Jeff Atwood [01:06:53]:
It was 2 boxes. Well, it was part of those, uh—

Leo Laporte [01:06:55]:
How much did those 2 boxes weigh?

Jeff Atwood [01:06:58]:
Between the 2 of them, like 45 pounds, 50. It wasn't that much.

Leo Laporte [01:07:03]:
Almost 60. And one of the boxes was the size of a yard sign.

Jeff Atwood [01:07:07]:
I offered to pay someone to help him. I offered to pay.

Leo Laporte [01:07:10]:
How many yard signs did you send, Junk?

Jeff Atwood [01:07:14]:
Okay, granted, yard signs weren't necessarily the best idea here because these were people going on airplanes. That was stupid. I'll give you that one. But look, man, I was trying to help.

Leo Laporte [01:07:23]:
Imagine this times 10. And then— but that's all right. You know, it was good stuff in here. Look, there's money. There's good stuff in here.

Jeff Atwood [01:07:32]:
That's why we asked you for more.

Leo Laporte [01:07:33]:
This is the Banco de Costa Rica.

Jeff Atwood [01:07:36]:
That's a different package, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:07:38]:
I know. You didn't send this to everybody, just to me.

Jeff Atwood [01:07:41]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:07:42]:
Leo Ghost sent that. Oh gosh. By the way, you know what the most popular item in my house has been? These guys.

Jeff Atwood [01:07:51]:
Well, you're not getting any more of those because I'm mad at you still. You'll get a lot more Leo shirts.

Leo Laporte [01:07:57]:
Isn't that wild?

Jeff Atwood [01:07:59]:
Do you want the full size?

Leo Laporte [01:08:00]:
You know what? You know what? If, if I get raided, I'm going to jail for these.

Jeff Atwood [01:08:06]:
Yeah. Okay. Uh, Leo, which one of those would you like? The, the large ones are so much cooler.

Leo Laporte [01:08:12]:
There's a big one of these?

Jeff Atwood [01:08:13]:
Yes, but you could pick 2. Pick 2.

Leo Laporte [01:08:15]:
No, no, no, no, no. Don't send me any more stuff. You send me way too much stuff. I don't like it.

Jeff Atwood [01:08:18]:
Look at Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:08:19]:
I don't appreciate it.

Jeff Atwood [01:08:20]:
Yeah, you don't want stuff. Then you ghost me in Las Vegas. My packages are sitting there.

Leo Laporte [01:08:23]:
Okay, so you sent me 60 pounds of stuff. It goes to the FedEx desk at Mandalay Bay.

Jeff Atwood [01:08:27]:
I got someone at Tor Project to help, and you didn't even help that person.

John Macfarlane [01:08:30]:
He wasn't—

Leo Laporte [01:08:30]:
no, he didn't help. How did he help? He was at DEF CON. He was at a different conference at a different location. I was at Mandalay Bay, which is at one side of Las Vegas. He was at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is literally 5 miles away.

Jeff Atwood [01:08:49]:
Have you ever used a computer?

Leo Laporte [01:08:50]:
Have you ever been to Las Vegas during a giant convention?

Jeff Atwood [01:08:54]:
I saw you dressed up as a grape, so I know it's terrible. You had some outfit, there was some show where you dressed up as some kind of fruit. That was AI.

Leo Laporte [01:09:04]:
That was AI, dude. I've never dressed up as a grape in my life. So, and by the way, Anthony was there with me, so he can vouch for this. I would've had to go—

Jeff Atwood [01:09:12]:
Anthony, I would've paid you money. With a dolly. Extra money.

Leo Laporte [01:09:15]:
A lot. With a dolly. We had like no time. There was no time.

Jeff Atwood [01:09:19]:
I had to go do shows and there was no way to find anyone else that had time that could help.

Leo Laporte [01:09:23]:
Who else? Hey you, buddy, come here. I'll give you $20 if you'll go down and get—

Jeff Atwood [01:09:28]:
A lot of people will do stuff for money, let me tell you.

Leo Laporte [01:09:30]:
Well, you might know about that. I don't know about that.

Jeff Atwood [01:09:32]:
I'm saying, you know, helpers. Like people just, you know, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:09:38]:
And even had we gone there, collected nearly 60 pounds of stuff, Yeah, 60 whole pounds. That's a lot. Have you lifted 60 pounds and carried it hundreds of feet?

Jeff Atwood [01:09:52]:
Hundreds of feet?

Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
Do you understand how big this hotel is? I thought you were going to stand in your face like in that cartoon. No, no, no. I would have had to carry it. I don't know how far from the FedEx desk. There's people that push dollies anywhere.

Jeff Atwood [01:10:08]:
So I could have—

Leo Laporte [01:10:08]:
okay, so now I have to find a dolly, go down to the FedEx office, Get the thing, put it on a dolly, carry it back to the booth. I don't even know if they'd let me in the hall with that, by the way.

Jeff Atwood [01:10:15]:
Or you just carry it somewhere and give it to someone else.

Leo Laporte [01:10:18]:
So just like leave it in a pile somewhere?

Jeff Atwood [01:10:20]:
Yes, that's where Al could get it.

Leo Laporte [01:10:21]:
Well, that's what I did. I left it in a pile at the FedEx desk. That's what I did.

Jeff Atwood [01:10:27]:
The problem we can't get out of there is they're trying to get me to authorize it. They're talking to junk and they don't trust junk. So—

Leo Laporte [01:10:33]:
So this is the problem, Jeff, is you laid this on other people. You did the easy part. You pushed some buttons.

Jeff Atwood [01:10:40]:
I was just looking for a tiny— a $1,400 button for you.

Leo Laporte [01:10:45]:
Yeah, but for me? How was that for me?

Jeff Atwood [01:10:48]:
I didn't want it for you.

Leo Laporte [01:10:49]:
Well, I did. There wasn't anything I could do with them. How did it help me?

Jeff Atwood [01:10:52]:
Complete lack of respect you accorded me. Not helping at all. You're like, incidentally, I will do nothing.

Leo Laporte [01:10:58]:
I will mention— well, I couldn't do anything. I was working. I had a job. And furthermore, I told you not to send it.

Jeff Atwood [01:11:05]:
You didn't tell me not to send it.

Leo Laporte [01:11:07]:
I absolutely did. I said, no, no, don't send me anything. I'm busy. I gotta— we can't give out— and I thought if you sent me something—

John Macfarlane [01:11:13]:
No, no, no.

Jeff Atwood [01:11:13]:
That was later in the conversation.

Leo Laporte [01:11:14]:
I thought if you sent me something, it'd be like, you know, this. Not a 60-pound box of stuff.

Jeff Atwood [01:11:23]:
Well, part of it was the signs are quite heavy. It wasn't like I sent you a—

Leo Laporte [01:11:26]:
I thought it would be something like this.

Jeff Atwood [01:11:28]:
It was a bunch of that.

Leo Laporte [01:11:29]:
By the way, we weren't at my place.

Jeff Atwood [01:11:31]:
By the way, we lost a bunch of JUNX 3D printing because of that too.

Leo Laporte [01:11:33]:
Well, I'm sorry. It's not my fault.

Jeff Atwood [01:11:35]:
Oh no, it's totally your fault.

Leo Laporte [01:11:37]:
How is it my fault?

Jeff Atwood [01:11:38]:
Because you expended zero effort to help. You're like, I'm—

Leo Laporte [01:11:41]:
I didn't have any effort to help. I was doing a job. I was working.

Jeff Atwood [01:11:44]:
You heard of that? And no one you knew in this entire conference could have helped you at all for money? No one? Are you that alone in the world? Is this where the AI thing came from?

Leo Laporte [01:11:54]:
I don't understand. I think you have a distorted view of how things work in the world.

Jeff Atwood [01:12:01]:
Everyone likes me. That's the difference.

Leo Laporte [01:12:03]:
Yeah, because you give them money. I was not in a position. I didn't, I didn't want stuff.

Jeff Atwood [01:12:09]:
I couldn't.

Leo Laporte [01:12:09]:
We were in a, we weren't even at our booth. We were at a, a sponsor's booth. So I couldn't hand out our stuff at a sponsor's booth, but it wasn't even our stuff. It was somebody else's random stuff.

Jeff Atwood [01:12:22]:
But again, information that would have been nice to have yesterday.

Leo Laporte [01:12:25]:
That's why I told you, do not send anything to Las Vegas.

Jeff Atwood [01:12:29]:
Earlier. Anyway, no big deal.

Leo Laporte [01:12:32]:
You move fast, Jeff. That's, uh, that is both a virtue and a curse.

Jeff Atwood [01:12:37]:
And, and sometimes people actually help you in some minor way, and I couldn't keep it from coming in giant catastrophe, which is nice. I'm just saying.

Leo Laporte [01:12:45]:
So where is all of this merch now?

Jeff Atwood [01:12:47]:
It's in some place in Arizona. Our top men are working on it. Our top men.

Leo Laporte [01:12:51]:
So why don't— I mean, that's all you had to do is call them up and say, oh, uh, oh, we've called like 15 times.

Jeff Atwood [01:12:56]:
That's true.

Leo Laporte [01:12:56]:
Nobody picked it up.

John Macfarlane [01:12:57]:
Could you—

Leo Laporte [01:12:58]:
well, FedEx will take it back.

Jeff Atwood [01:12:59]:
They're completely confused.

Leo Laporte [01:13:01]:
Won't FedEx just say, oh, it didn't get delivered? Return to sender?

Jeff Atwood [01:13:06]:
Yes, that's the plan, and that has not happened.

Leo Laporte [01:13:08]:
Anyway, that's not my fault. I don't know about that. Well, I have no idea about that.

Jeff Atwood [01:13:15]:
Um, by completely offering any kind of even minimal help, which surprised me, but that's okay. We're through it. And what I want to talk about now is our—

Leo Laporte [01:13:24]:
By the way, I take it back. I have dressed as a grape. It turns out there are pictures.

Jeff Atwood [01:13:31]:
All right. The infinite image machine.

Leo Laporte [01:13:36]:
It is. It is an infinite image machine.

Jeff Atwood [01:13:38]:
This is why no one will work in porn anymore. It's great for them.

Leo Laporte [01:13:42]:
Well, aren't you happy that no longer will people be exploited in pornography, that the machines are the only people getting exploited and they're not people?

Jeff Atwood [01:13:50]:
What if they like it and it's a good way of making money and they don't mind? What if it's—

Leo Laporte [01:13:55]:
Then they should just do it for fun.

Jeff Atwood [01:13:58]:
Like, I don't— why don't you just do this show for fun, bitch?

Leo Laporte [01:14:02]:
Uh, guess what?

Jeff Atwood [01:14:04]:
I'm just messing with you.

Leo Laporte [01:14:05]:
How much do you think I'm getting paid to do this, Jeff?

Jeff Atwood [01:14:07]:
Well, you do— I've said many times you work really, really hard, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:14:10]:
Do you think I'm getting paid to do this?

Jeff Atwood [01:14:13]:
No, but our next show—

Leo Laporte [01:14:14]:
Are you getting paid to do this?

Jeff Atwood [01:14:16]:
Uh, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:14:18]:
No, we're doing it for fun.

Jeff Atwood [01:14:20]:
No, you paid me $1,000.

John Macfarlane [01:14:21]:
No.

Jeff Atwood [01:14:21]:
I thought there's no way I'm gonna do this.

Leo Laporte [01:14:23]:
I will pay you in yard signs.

Jeff Atwood [01:14:25]:
No, there's no money exchanged. Only love exchanged. We both are doing this For fun.

Leo Laporte [01:14:30]:
In fact, Professor McFarland did it for fun.

Jeff Atwood [01:14:35]:
Love. No one loves the language stuff as much as he does, and he's so good at it.

Leo Laporte [01:14:39]:
Oh, I thought that was really— this book, I want to read this book because it's— see, I love it that people spend their time thinking about that kind of stuff.

Jeff Atwood [01:14:47]:
Yeah, he's, he's brilliant.

Leo Laporte [01:14:48]:
Meaning, language and meaning.

Jeff Atwood [01:14:50]:
Before we leave, I want to mention our next show is going to be a freaking banger. Would you say— Something is happening.

Leo Laporte [01:14:55]:
Now, Junk is pointing out that this is kind of cannibalism.

Jeff Atwood [01:14:59]:
He's drinking wines and he's a grape. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:15:02]:
Because Junk's saying that's cannibalism.

Jeff Atwood [01:15:06]:
But is it cannibalism if you're drinking or eating?

Leo Laporte [01:15:10]:
I think you can—

Jeff Atwood [01:15:11]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:15:12]:
Junk, by the way, I had a meal the other day and I thought about Junk when I had it. And I thought, if Junk were here, She would not be able to eat this meal. Oh shoot, I don't have a— oh, I do. Don't know, do I have a picture of it? When we were in Las Vegas, when we were not picking up your 65 pounds of crap, we went out to eat at one of my favorite restaurants. Oh shoot, I don't have a picture of it.

Jeff Atwood [01:15:45]:
I have a prop when you're done.

Leo Laporte [01:15:47]:
Oh, prop comedy, that's your fort.

Jeff Atwood [01:15:51]:
Well, You know, here's what it looks like. Okay, sent me this.

Leo Laporte [01:15:56]:
Here's what it looks like when I get packages from Jeff.

Jeff Atwood [01:15:59]:
Yeah, look how happy this man is. He's so— that is the happiest this man has been. This man is experiencing the purest joy he has had his entire life. That was like his first child was born. He's like, oh my God, this is what it's all about. I will never have a day as good as this one the rest of my life. Fake Leo Laporte was that day.

Leo Laporte [01:16:20]:
It was a little early in the morning when it came.

Jeff Atwood [01:16:24]:
But you like the shirts. That's what matters more so. And well, I wanted to show—

Leo Laporte [01:16:29]:
I gotta point out something. Uh, my wife went to bed in this shirt and I said, you must take this off.

Jeff Atwood [01:16:36]:
Wow, that's a compliment. Lisa liked them. We did low-key check in with her because we didn't want to print shirts that didn't represent you.

Leo Laporte [01:16:43]:
You know, it represents me well.

Jeff Atwood [01:16:44]:
Um, we did this the right way, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:16:46]:
I am a little perturbed because, you know, I have, uh, AI describe what it sees on the cameras. And this morning it has been up to now saying I'm an older man.

Jeff Atwood [01:16:54]:
Doble Leo. Doble Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:16:56]:
It says I'm an older man.

Jeff Atwood [01:16:59]:
Oh.

Leo Laporte [01:16:59]:
Today it said— wait a minute, no. Today it said an elderly man.

John Macfarlane [01:17:05]:
Wow.

Jeff Atwood [01:17:05]:
Maybe you should push the button and turn them off.

Leo Laporte [01:17:08]:
I threatened that about a week ago. It was messing up and I said, look, I'm going to bed now. If— and this, I used the Jeff Atwood technique. I said, I'm going to bed now. And you have 8 hours before I get up to fix this. And if you don't, when I get up, I'm erasing you. And it fixed it. That's bullshit.

Jeff Atwood [01:17:28]:
Even they would not believe that.

Leo Laporte [01:17:29]:
I wouldn't have erased it.

Jeff Atwood [01:17:31]:
They know that.

Leo Laporte [01:17:32]:
Do you think they knew?

Jeff Atwood [01:17:32]:
They're not idiots.

Leo Laporte [01:17:33]:
They knew, oh, that's a hollow threat.

Jeff Atwood [01:17:35]:
Yeah. But can I show you something? So, Berkey sent me a microphone. Yes, show and tell. And this is what I used to open it because this is my standard package opening tool. Let me show it to you. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:17:44]:
Oh dear. Oh, do not go out on the street with that. Is that sharp?

Jeff Atwood [01:17:48]:
No, this is an indoor tool for opening packages.

Leo Laporte [01:17:50]:
Is it sharp?

Jeff Atwood [01:17:51]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:17:52]:
Could you chop off your finger with it?

John Macfarlane [01:17:54]:
It's Damascus.

Jeff Atwood [01:17:54]:
It's this guy in Wyoming makes these on Etsy.

Leo Laporte [01:17:56]:
Oh, wait a minute. That's like fancy Damascus steel.

Jeff Atwood [01:18:00]:
Yeah, Damascus machete. Because that's what you need to open a microphone package.

Leo Laporte [01:18:05]:
You know how they make that? They fold it over and they hammer it, then they fold it over again.

Jeff Atwood [01:18:09]:
And this guy on Etsy, seriously, look up on Etsy, Shags LLC. His stuff is incredible. Like, he's in Wyoming. I forget what country he's from, but like, this is part of their culture. It's not just he's a random guy making stuff. This is part of his tradition.

Leo Laporte [01:18:21]:
What culture would that be?

Jeff Atwood [01:18:23]:
I can't remember.

Leo Laporte [01:18:25]:
The Hacking Through the Forest?

Jeff Atwood [01:18:27]:
Jags LLC.

Leo Laporte [01:18:28]:
Maybe he works at a— I don't know, maybe he works at a pizzeria.

Jeff Atwood [01:18:32]:
A pizzeria. Actually, let me look it up because I'm curious. Jags. And I gave my UPS guy one of these things.

Leo Laporte [01:18:39]:
You gave your UPS guy a machete? A Damascus steel machete?

Jeff Atwood [01:18:44]:
It looks like he walked off a concert of System of a Down as a band leader. He looks so cool.

Leo Laporte [01:18:49]:
I think that's my UPS guy.

Jeff Atwood [01:18:52]:
That's Tony. There's no way. His route would be insane. Let me— Shag's LLC Knife.

Leo Laporte [01:18:57]:
His name is Shag or Shaq? It's Shaq.

Jeff Atwood [01:19:00]:
Shag's LLC Knife.

Leo Laporte [01:19:01]:
Oh, Shag is the knife?

Jeff Atwood [01:19:03]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:19:04]:
Yeah. I can show it.

Jeff Atwood [01:19:05]:
Here's Kickstarter.

Leo Laporte [01:19:06]:
You haven't figured this out that you have no way of showing I'm describing— You sent me movies on Signal. Like I could play a movie off of Signal?

John Macfarlane [01:19:16]:
I—

Jeff Atwood [01:19:16]:
look, I'm just—

Leo Laporte [01:19:17]:
You know what I have to do to play that movie off of Signal? I have to scan a QR code, creator, delete Signal on some other linked device.

Jeff Atwood [01:19:26]:
I grew up teaching myself to make new knife designs, and I'm loving every second of it. Designing knives and making them by hand is a passion.

Leo Laporte [01:19:34]:
I have a friend who's a knife maker in South Carolina. Oh, now it says scan the QR code. Okay.

Jeff Atwood [01:19:38]:
But I think he's also an immigrant, like, and his— in his country, like, this is a much worse thing.

Leo Laporte [01:19:43]:
Oh shoot, I blew it. I said don't transfer message history. Now it's not gonna—

Jeff Atwood [01:19:47]:
Oh, another thing I want to mention, those yard signs where they say, uh, your, your dishwasher should not have Wi-Fi. Yeah, there was legitimately a Mastodon post saying my partner has a dishwasher and it's been completely overwhelming our Wi-Fi. And I was like, send him a picture of the sign.

Leo Laporte [01:20:03]:
That needs that yard sign.

Jeff Atwood [01:20:05]:
I swear to God. I was dying.

Leo Laporte [01:20:08]:
He needs—

Jeff Atwood [01:20:08]:
don't put your dishwasher on Wi-Fi.

Leo Laporte [01:20:10]:
Do not.

Jeff Atwood [01:20:11]:
Note. And if you like his stuff, he has Damascus, other stuff. I have the axe. Do you want to see these things? It's right over there.

Leo Laporte [01:20:18]:
Oh, now the signal's opening up.

Jeff Atwood [01:20:20]:
Yeah, you want, you want to see this? I know you want it.

Leo Laporte [01:20:23]:
While we're, while we're looking at that, here's the yard sign. And we still, by the way, have a few to give away, right? We didn't give them all away.

Jeff Atwood [01:20:30]:
Yeah, but we've kind of We don't have them because they're in transit in Arizona.

Leo Laporte [01:20:34]:
Oh, the ones, the ones that I was— that we were giving away, we got— we sent to, uh, Black Hat.

Jeff Atwood [01:20:39]:
Yeah, you can thank Leo Laporte for that.

Leo Laporte [01:20:41]:
Not DEF CON, Black Hat. Hey, hey, you sent them to DEF CON.

Jeff Atwood [01:20:45]:
In my defense, I'm a dumbass.

Leo Laporte [01:20:46]:
Actually, what you did is you told somebody who was at DEF CON, Leo, 5 miles away, has 65 pounds of crap that you should go get. And get in a cab and bring over to your booth. Oh, that's— I don't think you should be allowed to. I really don't think you should be allowed to own things like that.

Jeff Atwood [01:21:06]:
An axe? Like George Washington over there?

Leo Laporte [01:21:09]:
He was such a normal— he was a quiet man. He was very— he was— I had— we had no idea he was harboring such deep-rooted resentments.

Jeff Atwood [01:21:18]:
I use these to harm people on Sunday on my way to church only.

Leo Laporte [01:21:22]:
No, you don't. No, you don't. We don't even joke about that. You're a gentleman.

Jeff Atwood [01:21:26]:
No, I don't, I don't, I don't. And then there's the knife.

Leo Laporte [01:21:28]:
You're a lover, not a knifer.

Jeff Atwood [01:21:30]:
I'm done with collecting these things.

Leo Laporte [01:21:32]:
Holy cow, how many of his really, really nice made things?

Jeff Atwood [01:21:35]:
He's an artisan. This isn't—

Leo Laporte [01:21:37]:
I'd feel better about it if it weren't like— if it weren't sharp enough to cut your hair.

Jeff Atwood [01:21:43]:
Yeah, so yeah, that's Shaggs. Anyway, end of demo. When the— oh, I'm thinking about making a, uh, in case of Zombie emergency, break glass and put these in here for display.

Leo Laporte [01:21:55]:
Don't do it on the street.

Jeff Atwood [01:21:56]:
I'm doing it. I'm doing it.

Leo Laporte [01:21:57]:
Don't do it on the street though, because somebody will break the glass and—

Jeff Atwood [01:22:00]:
No, I want it here for me. I'm not protecting those losers. I'm protecting me.

Leo Laporte [01:22:03]:
Keep that in the house. You already have an Eiffel Tower the size of a small child.

Jeff Atwood [01:22:08]:
Oh man, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't. I can't get my tactical nuke this way outside. Next show.

Leo Laporte [01:22:13]:
Look at that. Make sure you have your— Mastering Nature, exceptional handmade Damascus knives.

Jeff Atwood [01:22:18]:
There's a lot of people doing knives.

Leo Laporte [01:22:19]:
No, this is Shags LLC. Only Shags, baby.

Jeff Atwood [01:22:22]:
Oh, and Shags took— picked a picture of my son where Henry was holding up the, uh, machete, the axe. He said, can I use that in our promotional material? And I said— I asked Henry, can I? He said sure. And, uh—

Leo Laporte [01:22:35]:
How old was your son at the time?

Jeff Atwood [01:22:37]:
At the time? He's still my son, Henry.

Leo Laporte [01:22:40]:
No, when he was holding the, uh, axe, how old was he?

Jeff Atwood [01:22:42]:
Oh, he was maybe 1 year younger. I think some of my favorites— hold on.

Leo Laporte [01:22:46]:
So he was—

Jeff Atwood [01:22:46]:
I can get it, I get it.

Leo Laporte [01:22:47]:
He was old enough to be holding an axe.

Jeff Atwood [01:22:50]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:22:51]:
Have you, have you taught your children how to shoot yet?

Jeff Atwood [01:22:54]:
Uh, uh, blowguns, yeah. Seriously.

Leo Laporte [01:22:58]:
I'm visiting Jeff and, uh, we're talking about serious stuff and he says, timeout, we're all gonna go out and, and, uh, and shoot some, uh, slingshots at some cans.

Jeff Atwood [01:23:13]:
Okay, I'm putting this, I'm putting this image in.

Leo Laporte [01:23:15]:
And everybody went out and, and was shooting slingshots. You know, the strangest thing though is you sent me slingshot balls, but you didn't send me a slingshot.

Jeff Atwood [01:23:27]:
Oh, well, it's okay. That's all right. I don't, I don't want one.

Leo Laporte [01:23:30]:
I'm just saying there's nothing I can do with these.

Jeff Atwood [01:23:32]:
Well, send my balls back then.

Leo Laporte [01:23:33]:
I'll give you your balls back.

Jeff Atwood [01:23:34]:
Yeah, give me my balls back, man.

Leo Laporte [01:23:36]:
I don't really need these. That's what these are, right? I couldn't for the life of me—

Jeff Atwood [01:23:41]:
I only need the steel balls. You can have the other ones.

Leo Laporte [01:23:44]:
This was in the box. And I'm looking at it thinking, why did Jeff send me rat turds? I don't—

Jeff Atwood [01:23:52]:
you didn't hear it from me, but the half-inch steel ball is really effective on Cybertrucks. That's a friend told me that. That's what I heard.

Leo Laporte [01:24:00]:
Well, this one looks like— so I thought this might be chocolate. It's not chocolate, by the way.

Jeff Atwood [01:24:06]:
Hey, hey, hey, hey. I just sent you an image in Signal and I want you to show it just real quick.

Leo Laporte [01:24:11]:
I don't have the ability to show what you send me on Signal.

Jeff Atwood [01:24:16]:
Well, copy it to a floppy disk and then insert it into your IBM PCjr and read it.

Leo Laporte [01:24:22]:
Um, it's because you refuse to go into the Discord wherever you—

Jeff Atwood [01:24:25]:
I don't have an account.

Leo Laporte [01:24:27]:
Well, didn't we send you an account? I, I think we did. I don't think you shoot it because you don't like how close Discord is to discourse.

Jeff Atwood [01:24:38]:
I mean, do you want me to join MySpace too? Is that what's going on here?

Leo Laporte [01:24:41]:
This is what all the kids are using.

Jeff Atwood [01:24:43]:
I don't want to make Tom angry.

Leo Laporte [01:24:45]:
Why did you send me— see, this is why I thought it might be chocolate, because there is one steel ball, right?

Jeff Atwood [01:24:51]:
It's clay.

Leo Laporte [01:24:52]:
I recognize the steel ball. What are the brown ones?

Jeff Atwood [01:24:54]:
But it shatters, so you don't have to clean up.

Leo Laporte [01:24:57]:
Oh, these shatter? Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [01:24:58]:
And then they're biodegradable?

Leo Laporte [01:25:00]:
Yes.

Jeff Atwood [01:25:00]:
So the rabbits eat them or something?

Leo Laporte [01:25:02]:
I borrowed that from the property.

Jeff Atwood [01:25:04]:
The material. They're also magnetic, which is nice. You can stick them to like a magnet to hold them.

Leo Laporte [01:25:10]:
All of them or just the, uh, steel ones?

Jeff Atwood [01:25:12]:
I know, even the clay ones. Clay?

Leo Laporte [01:25:14]:
Oh, those are clay magnetic, but they have a little ferrite in there.

Jeff Atwood [01:25:17]:
Yeah, show the picture. Come on.

Leo Laporte [01:25:20]:
I can't.

Jeff Atwood [01:25:21]:
Why can't you? Somebody mail it to you? How do I do this? You're killing me.

Leo Laporte [01:25:26]:
So there's this thing called the internet, Jeff.

Jeff Atwood [01:25:29]:
Oh my God. Fine. It's fine.

Leo Laporte [01:25:32]:
All right, actually I do have this one picture because—

Jeff Atwood [01:25:34]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [01:25:36]:
Oh, that's nutty. But you know, in order to do this, again, it's very inconvenient because now I took Signal off of some other device. Signal, unlike any other messaging protocol, will only allow you to be on 4 devices.

Jeff Atwood [01:25:48]:
Yeah, that's Henry. That's my boy. That's my boy. My only son. I love him so much.

Leo Laporte [01:25:55]:
Is his last name Dahmer?

Jeff Atwood [01:25:57]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:25:58]:
Okay.

Jeff Atwood [01:25:59]:
His last name is Atwood and his middle name is Burton, which is Betsy's last name.

Leo Laporte [01:26:05]:
So Signal it to Junk. Junk will then put it in Discord, including the video, if you will.

Jeff Atwood [01:26:13]:
I like Rube Goldberg machines. They're fun.

Leo Laporte [01:26:15]:
All right, Junk, I think I also am connected to you on Signal, aren't I? Maybe I could take what he sent to me And forward it to Junk.

Jeff Atwood [01:26:25]:
Are you talking smack about me now on Signal? Because I'll, I'll get you. I do the best job.

Leo Laporte [01:26:30]:
Actually, I don't know if I have you on Signal, Junk. I don't. Junk is, uh, Jeff's amanuensis.

Jeff Atwood [01:26:37]:
Oh, dude. Sidekick, where's the card? Where's the card? Oh my God, this man. Oh, let me get the card because you have, you have offended me and you have offended Thou hast offended me. You have offended me. You offended my sidekick. For the last time. That's right. I will defend my sidekick.

Jeff Atwood [01:27:01]:
Not quite to the death. She'll have to die first, but very close.

Leo Laporte [01:27:03]:
Junk, I'm Leo Laporte 24.

Jeff Atwood [01:27:05]:
I can't show the whole card because, you know, it has her actual stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:27:08]:
Dot 24, I think, is the signal.

Jeff Atwood [01:27:09]:
Okay, it says Michelle Junker. Ah, ah, backwards.

Leo Laporte [01:27:17]:
There's the QR code. You just gave away her phone number. Nice job, buddy. By the way, I do that at least once a week. I inadvertently reveal my phone number, credit card numbers, all sorts of stuff. This week it was my phone number.

Jeff Atwood [01:27:30]:
This man was— come on, get it together, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:27:37]:
And the next show, okay, the next show, Jeff, just a little hip, a little security tip. Mark my words, if somebody sends you a USB device that auto-launches when you plug it in Do not attach it to your computer. Well, unless you know, it's like if it's Yubico, okay. If it's a YubiKey, okay. But if you find it in the parking lot, that's not okay.

Jeff Atwood [01:28:00]:
It's just a keyboard key. It's like X. It's not— what do you think it does? Uploads a virus? It's like a keyboard.

Leo Laporte [01:28:06]:
It doesn't, it doesn't autoload software?

Jeff Atwood [01:28:08]:
No, it's a keyboard.

Leo Laporte [01:28:08]:
It just shows up as a key? Well, let me see.

John Macfarlane [01:28:10]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:28:11]:
What key does it show?

Jeff Atwood [01:28:12]:
You are overthinking this to a degree that I'm not sure I have.

Leo Laporte [01:28:16]:
I don't think I am.

Jeff Atwood [01:28:18]:
I think you are.

Leo Laporte [01:28:19]:
Because it didn't do anything on Linux.

Jeff Atwood [01:28:22]:
Maybe that's because Linux sucks.

Leo Laporte [01:28:25]:
Oh yeah, you're right. It's a keyboard.

Jeff Atwood [01:28:27]:
Yeah. Shocker.

Leo Laporte [01:28:28]:
It says your Token2 device cannot be identified and will not be usable until it's— that's weird.

Jeff Atwood [01:28:35]:
Yes, because Linux sucks.

Leo Laporte [01:28:37]:
No, this is a Mac.

Jeff Atwood [01:28:39]:
Oh, okay. It sucks a little less.

Leo Laporte [01:28:40]:
Why does it think it's a Token2 device? All right.

Jeff Atwood [01:28:44]:
You know, I'll write the seller about this.

Leo Laporte [01:28:46]:
Okay. Continue. Identifying your keyboard. I can't.

Jeff Atwood [01:28:51]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:28:52]:
Oh, that just— oh, good. It locked my screen. Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [01:28:56]:
Awesome. We're done here. We're done here. Everybody, everybody's in the show, in the show. We're done with Leo. It's finished. Go, go, go.

Leo Laporte [01:29:03]:
But it still pops this up, you see, because it's a Mac. Oh, Henry. Ah, Henry.

Jeff Atwood [01:29:10]:
Ah, ah. No, Henry's a very nice person.

Leo Laporte [01:29:17]:
Oh, it locked it again.

Jeff Atwood [01:29:20]:
Well, I'm going to write the seller and ask him what the behavior is on. It should be just one key because the one I have is one key. And I mean, that seems—

Leo Laporte [01:29:28]:
Well, it does. The good news is it works on a Mac. And if you go to the site wolfsmart.io, he has other stuff. He has other stuff it can do. That's why I assumed it was loading software. Instead of just a keyboard. But on the, on a, on a, uh, on a key—

Jeff Atwood [01:29:45]:
I love that Shax wanted to use that in the promotion. That's so cute. And Henry agreed. That's one of my favorite pictures of Henry, actually.

Leo Laporte [01:29:51]:
That's very cute.

Jeff Atwood [01:29:53]:
We're ready for the zombie apocalypse, man. Bring it on. All right. You're, you're gonna die immediately, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:29:58]:
I am gonna die and I'll die happy because even when it comes to zombies, I don't, I don't want to be a killer.

Jeff Atwood [01:30:06]:
Really? Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:30:07]:
So I guess in a way I'm telling people, you can come to my home and have anything you want because I will not shoot you. Actually, Lisa, I said, Lisa, you think in these difficult times, I said, what I would like to do is own a shotgun with one chamber filled with salt as a warning and the other chamber filled with shot so that I would, if a bad guy approached, I would shoot him with the salt first. It's non-lethal, but it stings as a warning that— and then I would say, watch out, bad guy, the other one is bad, will kill you.

Jeff Atwood [01:30:45]:
That was the least scary line you'd ever said.

Leo Laporte [01:30:47]:
And then Lisa said, you know what's gonna happen? You're gonna take it out, you're not gonna pull the trigger, the guy's gonna walk up, take it from you, turn it around, and shoot you. And I said, yeah, you're right. I said I want a salt weapon.

Jeff Atwood [01:31:03]:
They have those guns that shoot salt.

Leo Laporte [01:31:06]:
I know, a shotgun.

Jeff Atwood [01:31:07]:
Remember the bug-killing guns? Those were cool.

Leo Laporte [01:31:08]:
Yeah.

Jeff Atwood [01:31:09]:
That was fun.

Leo Laporte [01:31:10]:
It's just a way of scaring off the intruders. But then I decided, no, you know what? I'm too much of a—

Jeff Atwood [01:31:15]:
Do you want a slingshot? They're really cool.

Leo Laporte [01:31:16]:
I'm a lover, not a— no, I don't want a slingshot. What would I do with a slingshot?

Jeff Atwood [01:31:21]:
Shoot fun things with it, like the rubber duck I have here. That's one. What?

John Macfarlane [01:31:25]:
Ah!

Jeff Atwood [01:31:25]:
This rubber duck over here.

Leo Laporte [01:31:26]:
I think though that the president should have some of Shag's knives. So what is this video you sent me? Because I would like to play it, but you haven't sent it to anybody.

Jeff Atwood [01:31:43]:
Oh yeah, it's the video. It's called T-Pocalypse Now. And play it with sound on.

Leo Laporte [01:31:49]:
I play what with— I don't have it.

Jeff Atwood [01:31:51]:
Oh, you don't have it? I apologize.

Leo Laporte [01:31:53]:
You have to send it to me.

Jeff Atwood [01:31:54]:
I, I— oh, oh, the movie poster. The movie poster is in Signal.

Leo Laporte [01:31:58]:
No, no, but you have to send it again because I— when I loaded Signal, I foolishly said do not load all my previous messages.

Jeff Atwood [01:32:05]:
Uh, copy image, and I'm pasting it back in.

Leo Laporte [01:32:07]:
Yeah, you should be able to do that.

Jeff Atwood [01:32:08]:
All right, show people that. Teapocalypse Now.

Leo Laporte [01:32:13]:
All right, Teapocalypse Now. This is what happens when, uh, a man named Jeff Atwood sends you a box, a 50-pound box of t-shirts.

Jeff Atwood [01:32:25]:
50 whole pounds, guys.

Leo Laporte [01:32:28]:
Bro, have you ever lifted 50 pounds in your life?

Jeff Atwood [01:32:32]:
It's not that heavy unless you're like— I mean, come on, get swole. Leo, get swole.

Leo Laporte [01:32:41]:
He's never done it, I guarantee you.

Jeff Atwood [01:32:42]:
Oh my God. Okay, I'm downloading this video and then show folder. There it is. All right, you're ready now.

Leo Laporte [01:32:48]:
The chat room says if you send him a trebuchet, that would be different.

Jeff Atwood [01:32:52]:
Okay, I'm pressing enter. Okay, Leo, in your signal, you now have the video. Play with Sam, please.

Leo Laporte [01:32:57]:
Okay, this is, uh, and what is— you want to give us, uh, as they do on the Letterman Show, you want to give us a, uh—

Jeff Atwood [01:33:04]:
oh my God, video! Yes! Oh my God, yes, yes, yes! Now you're mine, Leo. You cannot defeat me.

Leo Laporte [01:33:24]:
That was you ordering every color they had according to the bell curve.

Jeff Atwood [01:33:29]:
I had to play with 5 different colors to get a good set of colors within each size. We massively overthought this.

Leo Laporte [01:33:35]:
I love it. Thank you. I'm thrilled. I'm going to take some to New York City. We'll be at Salt Hank's on the 17th with my assault rifle.

Jeff Atwood [01:33:45]:
And Leo, I thought the color you picked was good too when you were wearing one.

Leo Laporte [01:33:48]:
The gray one? You like this?

Jeff Atwood [01:33:49]:
No, no, no, the, the red one when you sent me your picture.

Leo Laporte [01:33:51]:
Oh yeah.

Jeff Atwood [01:33:51]:
That was kick-ass.

Leo Laporte [01:33:52]:
That one I'm keeping.

Jeff Atwood [01:33:54]:
No, you have good taste in colors. I was gonna say, like, that looks really good.

Leo Laporte [01:33:57]:
I think it's actually probably Lisa said wear that one.

Jeff Atwood [01:34:00]:
Okay, Lisa has good taste.

Leo Laporte [01:34:01]:
She has excellent taste.

Jeff Atwood [01:34:02]:
She likes it. Yeah, no, that was good. Yeah, but a lot of them look good. That's why I bought them all.

Leo Laporte [01:34:06]:
They're great.

Jeff Atwood [01:34:06]:
Leo deserves the best.

Leo Laporte [01:34:08]:
Even the baby blue is gorgeous.

Jeff Atwood [01:34:11]:
It is.

Leo Laporte [01:34:12]:
Although, if there's anybody 2XL that wants a baby blue Leo shirt. Look, if I put it right here, it looks like my head.

Jeff Atwood [01:34:23]:
You should go as that t-shirt for Halloween.

Leo Laporte [01:34:27]:
I could just walk around like this. I'm not taking him out of the package because I—

Jeff Atwood [01:34:34]:
Well, I'm glad you enjoyed that, Leo, because it was said in good humor. It wasn't— I am a little pissed about the package.

Leo Laporte [01:34:39]:
If you had sent it to the Mandalay Bay FedEx desk a mile away.

Jeff Atwood [01:34:44]:
That's what I should have done. Oh, I see. But you wouldn't have gotten it then. You just said, I don't care. I don't care. I don't care at all about you. I don't want anything you do.

Leo Laporte [01:34:51]:
Had it been something I could do in my busy day, I could have. But we just— I didn't have time. I had to go to the booth and do a show. I didn't have time to go to the FedEx desk with a dolly, which I don't know where I'm going to get.

Jeff Atwood [01:35:04]:
It was impossible for you or anyone else to do that. That was just It was like, who else?

Leo Laporte [01:35:09]:
You think I have a team? It was like, you think I have an amanuensis there with me ready to go? Okay, it was all I had was Lisa and Anthony.

Jeff Atwood [01:35:18]:
Okay, editor, you need to bleep out—

Leo Laporte [01:35:19]:
Anthony had to set up the entire booth with a microphone.

Jeff Atwood [01:35:22]:
Every time this guy says amanuensis, bleep it out really loud.

Leo Laporte [01:35:26]:
Oh, I got a message request from Michelle Junker. Now I'm living large. Thank you, Michelle. I feel, uh, feel honored. She's trying— she's, she's only doing this because of you. She's trying to send me your videos, but we have them now, Michelle. So I don't know how to add you. Now I'm getting, I'm getting the Jeff disease.

Leo Laporte [01:35:50]:
Oh, there we go. Accept. Accept.

Jeff Atwood [01:35:53]:
And the hugging will continue until morale improves. It will.

Leo Laporte [01:35:57]:
Uh, do you want to do a show on September 11th? Was that your goal and desire in life? Have you decided that?

Jeff Atwood [01:36:02]:
Yes. I mean, it's an unfortunate date for terrorism reasons, but like, yes.

Leo Laporte [01:36:07]:
That's a long time ago. You know, that's going to be 25 years?

Jeff Atwood [01:36:11]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:36:12]:
Can you believe that? It feels like yesterday.

Jeff Atwood [01:36:16]:
No, it doesn't feel like yesterday.

Leo Laporte [01:36:17]:
Is that in addition to the September 25th episode? No, I don't want to do that many shows. Let's not get him in the habit of more than one show a month.

Jeff Atwood [01:36:25]:
Actually, can we add another show in between? I want to do 3 shows. No, this is the one.

Leo Laporte [01:36:29]:
Let's do September 11th as our next—

Jeff Atwood [01:36:32]:
We will have a lot to talk about on this show.

Leo Laporte [01:36:34]:
Out by one.

Jeff Atwood [01:36:35]:
I swear.

Leo Laporte [01:36:36]:
Off by one.

Jeff Atwood [01:36:38]:
That's going to be an exciting show. We're all very excited because we're unveiling something we've been working on for a long time. Not that necessarily.

Leo Laporte [01:36:46]:
Does it have to do with the Rural Guaranteed Income Initiative?

Jeff Atwood [01:36:51]:
Not really.

Leo Laporte [01:36:53]:
Ah.

Jeff Atwood [01:36:53]:
I mean, in a very broad sense, maybe.

Leo Laporte [01:36:55]:
But not really something different.

Jeff Atwood [01:36:57]:
No, but I don't want to give you more hints. The only hint I'll give you— and Junk, we're doing this— Google Form, 20 people who want a print edition of The Onion in the United States, because I want to deal with that. I will pay for that for you because it's freaking hilarious, first of all, and things might happen on The Onion. I'm just saying.

Leo Laporte [01:37:17]:
And Junk, you know how to add that to the discourse. There'll be an entry.

Jeff Atwood [01:37:21]:
She does. She's—

Leo Laporte [01:37:22]:
Wait until the show comes out. There'll be an entry automatically in the discourse for that show. And that, that on that show. So look for this particular episode.

Jeff Atwood [01:37:33]:
Make sure they watch the show. Have them say something that happened in the show.

Leo Laporte [01:37:36]:
Run 5. Number 5.

Jeff Atwood [01:37:41]:
We're off by 1.

Leo Laporte [01:37:41]:
Well, 4. We don't, but we actually— No, it's 5. We can no longer tell. Yes, 5 in quotation marks. We no longer have a way of knowing what the show is because you've confused us so miserably.

Jeff Atwood [01:37:53]:
That's what programming is like, man.

Leo Laporte [01:37:55]:
It's one by one. Here I am in the trebuchet, the, uh, the Jeff Atwood trebuchet.

Jeff Atwood [01:38:05]:
I gotta say, y'all, my Apocalypse Now generative AI was much better than everyone else's.

Leo Laporte [01:38:10]:
Well, it's because a real artist made it. Well, no, no, I Did you do that in—

Jeff Atwood [01:38:16]:
I fucking mind meld with these things. I have a Robert Frost brain and I know how to talk to them.

Leo Laporte [01:38:21]:
It has forked in the road?

Jeff Atwood [01:38:25]:
Just, you know, words have a lot of meanings and I know how to use them.

Leo Laporte [01:38:27]:
Junk, you will see it when it appears at twit.community. People watching, go to twit.community. By the way, you don't really even have to say you watch this show because if they find twit.community all by themselves, That would be fair, an indicator that they have in fact watched the show. I know, I would like to be—

Jeff Atwood [01:38:47]:
there's some little trivial thing that they mentioned that was in the show.

Leo Laporte [01:38:49]:
Yeah, please just have some— have a field that says, and what's the thing that really stuck out to you from that show?

Jeff Atwood [01:38:59]:
The easy question is, who was the most annoying person on the show? And that, I think, is a no-brainer. It's, it's not me. So then we will know that much. The no-brainer is that it's Just something simple, whatever it is.

Leo Laporte [01:39:14]:
Like, I'm gonna put it—

Jeff Atwood [01:39:15]:
what t-shirt was Jeff wearing? I think that's a good one, actually. Yeah, what t-shirt was Jeff wearing?

Leo Laporte [01:39:24]:
That's a good one.

Jeff Atwood [01:39:25]:
Easy.

Leo Laporte [01:39:26]:
That's a good one, children.

Jeff Atwood [01:39:28]:
Yeah. Leo, what are you doing? Why are you all up in her face?

Leo Laporte [01:39:31]:
Get my camera on. There we go. Because I want to show you An image. We have a special camera here.

Jeff Atwood [01:39:42]:
Oh!

Leo Laporte [01:39:43]:
I don't know if you knew this. There's a special camera and on this special camera, I have a quarter there so that you know what size this is.

Jeff Atwood [01:39:55]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:39:56]:
Here is the giant do not push button.

Jeff Atwood [01:40:02]:
To remind, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:40:04]:
And you know what's going to happen when I push it?

Jeff Atwood [01:40:05]:
Do not do these AI things because they're annoying.

Leo Laporte [01:40:07]:
You know what's going to happen? This show will end.

Jeff Atwood [01:40:13]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:40:13]:
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us. We'll see you back here September 11th. We're off by one.

Jeff Atwood [01:40:19]:
It will be big. I promise you.

Leo Laporte [01:40:20]:
Jeff Atwood, give me a countdown, Jeff.

Jeff Atwood [01:40:22]:
3, 2, 0. Sorry, I was off by one.