 right? Yeah, it's it's I'll stop it and restart it. I trust you. You're good. I have restarted the audition. All right. It's Monday, July 6th, 2020. I'm rim. I'm Scott and this is Geek. Nice night. We are talking about quotes, obsolete, unquote technology. Do I have any opening bit? Is anything going on? Hmm. A lot of fireworks last night, biking. I got something. So, uh, you know, can't I can't do a lot of the things I would normally do during the summer in the quarantine. Like I can't go to the beach. I can't do the super long bike rides or like bike rides that require me to take a train or anything. Like I'm kind of limited to the area I can get to. Can't do any organized bike ride with other people. Yup. So what I'm increasingly trying to do is find new ways to interact with the spaces I have access to. So on Thursday, cause we had a long weekend, Thursday was last day of work. Emily and I, we went out to bike up and down the West side. Now you might say, but Ram, the West side is just a normal bike path. You can go bike there any time. And I often would normally during COVID that bike path because it's really nice is crazy crowded during the day. Like more people are walking and riding up and down that West side path that goes from the bottom of Manhattan to the top of Manhattan. Now then are like on a normal summer. Like it's also not, it's also, even if it's empty, it's not a great path. It's like, you do it. It's like, you do it a few times and then eventually you're like, the novel is off. Like, well, tip of Manhattan again. Usually I usually like, all right. Like you head north on it and then you go over a bridge and you keep going north. So anyway, what we did is around 11, 11 30 PM on Thursday, we went and got our bikes and we went over there to bike around up and down the West side in the middle of the night. Okay. That context makes it really fun. Like that was really worth doing. There's a lot of different animals out. There's a very different type of person who's hanging out in those parks, especially up North in the middle of the night. There were some, there were some chill parties going on. There was some stuff I saw that was fascinating, but that was a very fun experience. And I intend to, all the paths I have biked to death during the day over the last decade in New York, I'm going to do every one of those bike rides again in the middle of the night. Okay. The problem is a lot of the places to bike in the middle of the night are places that are too much car and you'll die because it's night and they're usually, there's a lot less car than usual in a lot. Yeah. There's a lot of closed places at night. Some bridges and bike paths close, some parks close, but the West side never closes. No, it's just, it's open. You can't close it really. Yep. I think technically the parks next to it are closed after dusk, but the path itself is not. All right. So you got any news? Do I have a new Monday? Oh yeah. So check it out. These people announced this camera, right? Called the Pixie camera. And at its core, this camera is actually a kind of good to great idea and concept, right? So first of all, it has a Leica lens mount. So Leica cameras are like, you know, the ultimate luxury brand of camera. They're super duper expensive, but they are sort of unique, right? So it's sort of like they're not, they're not good and better enough to be worth the insane, insane price, right? But they are unique and cool. And their lenses are very high quality, even though they cost like, you know, way, way, way more than other lenses. I own one Leica lens. My entire, my entire I have one. I don't think you have any. My camcorder has a Leica made lens in it. Oh, that's not the same as, it's not the same as a Leica M mount lens. Yeah, it's not a, not like an M mount lens. A Leica M mount lens costs more than your entire camcorder. So if you want to use those lenses, maybe you have one, or there are some other companies that have made lenses for the M mount, which, you know, it's like, well, if you want to use one of those lenses, even if you get a cheap one, like Voigtlander makes some, right? Which are still expensive, but cheaper. It's like, well, you have to get some Leica camera. Or there are some cameras you can get like a Bessa, I think, makes an M mount film camera, but there really aren't M mount digital cameras out there, right? Other than the Leica ones, which cost a fortune, right? So they're making a digital camera that has a Leica M mount on it, and it's, and it's not a Leica camera. So it's like, Oh, that's, that's good, right? And it's a rangefinder format camera, which is what Leica makes. And there aren't enough digital rangefinder cameras out there that are high quality, right? Other than like Fuji and Leica, right? And the other thing is this camera doesn't have an LCD screen on it, which if you have a rangefinder, what do you need a, what do you need an LCD screen for, right? It just, you know, most digital cameras these days have the feature where you hook it up to an app on your phone and it sends the photos over to the phone pretty much immediately, right? Pone's already got a really good screen, like every single, like even my Panasonic GF2 had that feature, but my GH5 has it, GH4 had it. I don't think my GX1 has it. Oh, it might. You may be surprised. I should check. Using Wi-Fi slash Bluetooth, my Fuji GF, whatever it is, 100, whatever, it has it, right? So, you know, it's a common feature, but they're like, Hey, we have that feature now. Why do we need the LCD screen? We'll just have a little tiny screen on top for your settings, your battery life, you know, that sort of thing, right? And we'll have a little bit of memory in the camera to buffer up the photos, right? And then we'll send them over to your phone. So you just look at your phone, which is a better screen than we can put on the back of this camera. Reminds me of what was the Sony, where it's just like a lens and the lens just sent the images directly to your phone. Yeah, exactly, right? So this is actually, like in concept, like, Hey, it's like, I kind of want that. That's pretty great, right? So here's where it stops getting great is, A, the sensor in this camera is only 11 megapixels. So 11, 11.1. So, and it's APSC. So the Leica lenses are designed for like full frame sensors, which is what are in the Leica M cameras, right? Even the older ones, like the Leica eight and nine have full frame sensors. Even though the Leica nines has a better, has more megapixels than this, the Leica eight and let me put $10,000 racing tires on my Corolla. Right. So the thing is, I'm not like a megapixel fiend, like who cares if you're not printing out the image, super enormous. You don't need all those megapixels, right? I'm not making billboards. Right, exactly. But the point is that, you know, it's like, Hey, 11 megapixels, it's like, you just use the camera. If your phone is the screen, the phone has a camera. Yeah, it's a carry around any camera that's not the phone has to be better than the phone. I don't think this is better than the phone camera, right? So that's problem number one. The big problem though, is they're charging how much money for this, right? $3,000. Now, that might make sense because a Leica digital camera, the Leica M 10 costs like $8,000. Yeah, right. Now, no, just for perspective, my busted like four year old Android phone has a 19 megapixel sensor, right? So if you wanted to, right, if you wanted to get a Leica M 9, like a used one, right, which is a full frame sensor that's, and it takes the same lenses and is better than this and has a screen on it, you can get one of those for $2,000 to $3,000. So cheaper than the pixie, right? But the real killer is that you could get, this has an APS-C sensor, right? Not full frame. You could get a Fuji like X Pro 3 or whatever it's called, right? The Fuji makes rangefinder digital cameras. Yeah, I tell you, it has a Fuji mount on it, right? As opposed to a Leica M mount, but that thing only costs like $1,800, right? And sure, it has a screen on it, but it also does- The screen's not hurting me. It's cool. It's vastly superior to this camera in every way. Wait, this doesn't even have a SD slot. You can't even put a card into it? Right, exactly. My phone doesn't have enough storage to keep all the raws I take when I go out taking photos. What the fuck? My phone does, but the point is, is that- My phone's a four-year-old buzzed Android. I've got a 64. This camera would make a ton of sense and be amazing if it cost a few hundred dollars. And maybe it was Micro Four Thirds. And maybe it had a better sensor. And then Micro Four Thirds wouldn't help it, right? But just a better sensor. But yeah, charging $3,000, the thing makes no sense whatsoever to exist. I don't understand why anyone would buy this ever, even if you're rich. If you're rich, you can just buy a Leica M mount. So I do get the impression there's a weird segment of the camera market that's because I've seen ads and people talking about this specific area in the business world of trying to sell cameras to people who use their cell phone for most photos, but perceive that a handheld camera will do better. But don't- Camera will do better if you buy one that's better. Yep, but who don't know anything about photography and in practice want to interact with their photos entirely on their phone. Like they just want- It's like an accessory to their phone. The accessories, the wealth- So first of all, this is $3,000. So it's hitting only luxury people, right? Somebody who doesn't know that their iPhone is probably literally better than this. So what I have seen from the celebrity Instagram crowd is people buying Leica cameras that are not the M10, the Leica ones that are easier to use. And I've seen them buying also a very popular thing to do is get film cameras. So the Contax G2 is like an old film camera that's sort of like an instant kind of 35 millimeter deal that does have sort of interchangeable lenses and it's become, it's still, it has become crazy popular and the price of it is very vastly inflated because it's popular. The listener even said you can get a full frame Sony a7RIi 42 megapixel for less than this. Yes, you can. And you know what? You can also connect your phone to that and get your photos sent directly over, right? So I don't know why, what they're thinking with this camera, it makes no sense. Yeah, it just makes no sense to me at this price. It should be like $200 and then it would be amazing. I might buy one like $200, right? Just to, you know, why not? So yeah, that's a thing. And then in sort of related camera news, Olympus, the only maker of Micro Four Thirds cameras, well not the only, I mean, there are a few other ones like Blackmagic makes a few and such and such, but the only major manufacturer of Micro Four Thirds cameras besides Panasonic, Olympus has sold their camera, their consumer, you know, camera division to this other Japanese company. And that, oh, my air condition is still on making noise. That's fine. Mine's on too, but it's fine. Deal with the deal with the noise listener. It's outside. Yeah. So they have sold their camera business to some other Japanese company and that Japanese company is basically a shady liquidator. So I had an article that was my original link for this news that went into a lot more depth about the liquidator. I got a 404 and I tried to go back to that page, so I'm linking the verge instead. Yeah. Anyway, the point is, yeah, what this means for the future of Micro Four Thirds as a camera platform is sort of like a who knows kind of deal, right? Panasonic could keep it alive or not. It's open so people can still make those cameras if they wanted to. Panasonic is the only other company who probably could keep it like fully alive because they have a raw Micro Four Thirds. Right. Right. So so does Olympus. Panasonic has, you know, added and they are making those other cameras that have a full frame sensor. Oh, yeah. Which has their partner with Leica. It's the L-mount cameras, right? So it's like, well, they're still making Micro Four Thirds stuff, but they have also launched this other line of, you know, cameras. Right. So will they continue Micro Four Thirds or not? Right. So if Micro Four Thirds dies and no one makes stuff forward anymore, then A, you might be able to get it for cheap, right? Especially if you're not a professional. Like that's how I get a lot of audio equipment. It's still great. Right. Nothing wrong with it. Right. If it dies, dies, I'll go pick up a bunch of used lenses. Right. Exactly. You can get a whole bunch of stuff. Or B, you could sell your stuff to the people looking to pick up the cheap stuff. Especially someone who's incorporated it into a professional workflow and doesn't want to have to change their pipeline or change their kit. Well, okay. So and then buy something else, right? You switch to a different platform. But I think the professional, you just mentioned, right? That's the people where they sort of can't necessarily stick with it unless they have a ton of stuff because you can't get a repair. You can't get a replacement. You can't get a warranty if this stuff is like if it's I don't know how many of you have used professional camera equipment, but it's getting support for it is really important because things break and weird stuff happens with this. If you're like, if you're like, say a professional photographer, you're doing like, you know, magazine stuff, right? And you're out on a, you're out travel. You're doing, you're traveling the world taking photos. It's like, and you're shooting on Olympus. That's usually because you're like, Olympus is sponsoring and supporting you with stuff, right? So it if anyone who was like one of those Olympus photographers now has to switch to something else, right? Because even though they probably still have a bunch of gear and it will probably still work, they can't be out on a shoot and need help and get boned, right? They need to have a living company behind them. Like your one really, really low light lens gets stolen and now you're just screwed because there's literally no way to get another lens like that for your platform. Right. Except for the one shady guy on eBay who has one for a lot of money. Yeah. And you do as the one he sends you're going to work as a whole. So that's a, that's a thing now. So if you're buying camera, if you're getting into a camera platform from nothing, right? It's like, you know, Marker four thirds is still great, right? Are you going to, are you going to spend a bunch of, you know, you could go and get it for a way cheap from someone dumping it and, you know, get in on the cheap. I'm going to keep an eye on on eBay because I could use a better zoom lens. Yeah. Or you could, you know, get something else and avoid a dying. So in some other news, Supreme Court has a lot of rulings recently and I think historically, they very rarely continue to issue more rulings into July. Like they're doing more than usual. They're doing, you know, I guess, I don't know if the, how the, the online arguments have affected, right? I saw it like screens blog type people just kind of freaking out about the fact that they issued more in July. But they actually did a ruling that I didn't know was the case because I wasn't paying attention. Technology related. Yep. Today, a little while ago, like right before we did the show upheld a 1991 law that bans robocalls to cell phones. Now you might be wondering, but black dynamite, I get an infinite number of robocalls to my cell phone just because this is the law does not mean that anyone has been capable of enforcing it at any point. Oh, there's a law that you're not supposed to drive over X miles an hour on the road. Yeah. Like dynamite, everyone's driving crazy fast on the road and no one's getting in trouble for it. So yeah, I've tried to figure out what the deal was with like, what was the lawsuit around this that took until the year 2020 to resolve? So here's the deal. Basically in 2015, Congress made a bullshit exception to this law that allowed automated robocalls to any phone number, even if it's a cell phone, for the purposes of collection of government debt. Like that's an oddly specific loophole. I think that's, you know, as long as the government is the one doing the collection, right? You know, like you own money. So part of the ruling actually addressed that as well. Quote, Six Justices agreed that by allowing debt collection calls to cell phones, Congress, quote, impermissibly favored debt collection speech over political and other speech in violation of the First Amendment. Interesting. Because it's calling someone a speech. Actually, but the way I would think of it is like you're collecting government debt, right? Is like it would be the actual government is making the call, right? Not some debt collector out there. No, but if a debt collector owns government debt, like a student loan. Yes. See, that's bullshit, right? That shouldn't even be allowed to happen, right? It shouldn't be legal for a non, the non government to hold government debt. It should be like the IRS is calling you because you owe back taxes, right? It's like, yeah, they should be able to call yourself home. So if that's the only way to contact you. So basically the lawsuit was a bunch of political consultants and pollsters were trying to get the entire law struck down because they want to make robocalls to cell phones for a million reasons. Yeah, it's because they're the only ones, right? Cause the ban, right? Is ineffectively banning robocalls from shady people, right? But they are acting, they're legitimate organizations, right? They're political pollsters in the U S right there, right? And so the law actually does stop them from giving you robocalls, right? It's the people who are successfully making robocalls are people outside the law, the legal framework of the United States, right? So basically from what I can gather, the issue was whether or not Congress could allow some speech, but not other speech. And if they can't make those kinds of distinctions, then the whole law should be unconstitutional. But it can't be based on the content of the call, right? So it looks like I haven't read this like just is kind of breaking news. I haven't read the opinion yet, but it looks like this backfired on them and the Supreme Court actually even got rid of that 2015 exception. Okay, there's a money quote here, American from the decision Americans passionately disagree about many things, but they are largely united in their disdain for robocalls. That's true. During arguments in the case, Justice Stephen Breyer got a cut off when someone tried calling him. He said after he rejoined the court's arguments, quote, the telephone started during and it cut me off the call, but I don't think it was a rubble call. So I think I think the online arguments are not going super well. Based on that statement, I feel like they're getting interrupted. I'm curious. I know we have some international listener out there, at least one, right? Are there robocalls a problem in other countries, right? As they are in the US, they're a huge problem. This is the broader part why I brought up this news. In the US, robocalls are bad enough to wear. The idea of a phone number is just fucked. Most people don't answer their phone when it rings at all. There is a setting on my iPhone and everyone should be aware of this setting. My iPhone is set to automatically not ring if the phone number that is calling is not in my contacts. There's a similar Android setting. If somebody wants to call me and it's a legit call, they should be leaving a voicemail. Sometimes it's pretty rare that a robocall leaves a voicemail, but it happens occasionally. I just delete it, no big deal. It doesn't interrupt me or bother me. It happens super rarely, right? And I have an app that I, there's various apps out there. I don't know which ones are better, so I don't want to recommend one or over the other. But I picked an app from the app store that blocks many robocalls. So that helps also. But the broader point here is that because, look, there is a Supreme Court case about they had to pass a law to block spam in the United States on phones because of the very heavy restrictions and regulations around the telephone network because it was invented a long time ago. There's a lot of regulation around it. It is used very differently today from how it was used back then. But basically, by, because of all these restrictions on the ability to restrict phone calls, no one like Verizon or Sprint or anyone who runs a cell network could probably just block these robocalls automatically today by flipping a switch. Like that would be trivial, just like spam blockers. But generally, and I'm not getting into specifics, there's a lot of laws and regulations that say phone calls have to get through. You can't arbitrarily block phone calls, even though most people would gladly let someone arbitrarily arbitrarily block phone calls to them to avoid these robocalls. The only reason people use email today is because there's no such regulation. It's not illegal to block spam. So everyone blocks spam. But it's effectively illegal to block robocalls, thus making phones completely worthless as a means of contacting someone who you have not already contacted. The reason this is an even weirder problem now is that phone calls from numbers you don't recognize are one of the primary means of doing contact tracing for COVID. And it turns out, I read a separate article, nobody answers their phones when the government calls and nobody even listens to the voicemails when the government calls. So contact tracing is not working that well because people are trained to know that anytime their phone rings and they don't know the number, it's spam and they don't answer it. There's no way to solve this without radically restructuring how telephone numbers are regulated. You could just stop robocalls. If they blocked all robocalls at the telco level, I think it would only take a matter of months for people to regain trust in phones. I think so too. I think it would, it would take like no time at all, right? It's like, but we have to be willing as a society to one, accept false positives. Like occasionally a call would get blocked that you want it just like we do with email. I think it would be pretty rare because almost all of the illegal robocalls are coming from outside the country from a few sources. Oh, but they look all yeah. Yeah. Right. So what I think, I think the way it would sort of work is like, you would report a robocall to like Verizon would see like a flurry of calls coming in and like a few would get through and then they block, right? Like if one source calls multiple phone numbers in the same area code in a short span of time, that gets flagged for review automatically. But or like you would, you would get it, you would get a call and it would be a scam and you'd report it. And then they'd fit, they'd look in the logs, figure out exactly where that came from and then close off that route and that person would lose phone service to the U S right from wherever they are or there would be certain, the problem is you would get into issues where like, let's say there's like a phone carrier, right? And say, I don't know, pick a country, country X, right? And that carrier, you know, there's like a neighborhood and in the neighborhood, there's a bunch of grandmas, right? And one robocall scammer and one robocall as a little office with some scammers in it, right? And they're all on the same phone, you know, network thing, right? But we already accept the risk of what you just described from email and other communication. All of the grandchildren of those grandmas who immigrated to the United States wouldn't, would have a problem with grandma calling them. But we already have that today with email. If you, if your email provider is using IPs that are adjacent to dodgy IPs, your emails don't go anywhere. We already accept that. I guess, I guess that's true. I mean, in the old days, before there was AI driven, grandma's using the shady ISP that the spammers use for her email. You're not going to get grandma's email. In the days before the problem is, is that grandma can choose a different email provider. Grandma can get a Gmail. Grandma can't change the phone company in country X. Yeah, but grandma companies is where you live, but grandma might be banned from editing, editing with Wikipedia forever because grandma only has two ISP options, both of which are blocked by Wikipedia. Could be. Yeah. I remember in the RIT days, I would like when I ran an email server, like I blocked any email that came from an IP address outside of the United States at one point to try to stop spam. Yeah. I think the government could also like eminent domain Google's anti-spam technology. And you don't, you know, you wouldn't even have to force a company like Google to like make a anti-spam for phones. You could just make a government contract to do it. Yeah. They happily had follow over themselves bidding on that. Yeah. You could just be like, Hey, who wants the government's putting up bids for the, you know, the US anti-phone spam blocking software that will be applied to all incoming phone calls who wants to build it? One billion dollar, right? But anyway, things of the day. So I did not know the thing I'm about to talk about. This is the kind of thing that I feel like I should have known. I feel dumb for having not known it. Basically, you ever notice how when you get a deck of playing cards like a standard deck, 52 cards, an ace of spades is always fancier than all the other cards. Like the design on it is usually a lot fancier than the ace of any other suit. Yeah. I mean, it's just sort of like a, it's sort of like a, just an accepted truth. It's like, yeah, the ace of spades is the awesome card. Ace of spades, right? Yeah. You know, the songs, ace of spades, the ace of spades, right? It's like, it just is. So do you ever wonder why? Because I, I not until just now I just sort of accepted it as a truth of the universe. Yeah. I saw this tweet and my brain said, why didn't you ever ask this question? You dumb piece of shit. This is the kind of thing you would want to know about. This is the guy really want to know now. Yeah. So the answer is actually really good. This is a Twitter thread that explains it all. The answer involves King James II. God damn it. And the English tech system and also a specific breed of chicken. I'm not joking. So the short answer is, and you can read this thread to get all the details is that in England in the 1600s, King James II introduced a tax on playing cards. Yeah. There's been a tax on playing cards even in the U S today. There's a little sticker on playing cards, right? Yup. So in order to basically up to that point, there were rules requiring anyone making playing cards to put their printer's logo on the cards in the deck. So people would know who printed those cards to help in the tax investigations. So later in 1765, the English tax office introduced to be able to make better compliance with these taxes, a standard design for the ace of spades, the duty ace. So every deck of cards, the ace of spades was the receipt that you had paid the taxes and had a really complicated design that would have been hard to forge. And everyone who was authorized to make trading cards had like the die to print this standard. I see. So if you were, if you were at the printing, at the printing company where they were making cards, if you dutifully paid your taxes, the government would give you this thing to let you print aces of spades. Yup. And if you were, if you were not paying, if you were not paying your taxes, they would take that away from you or change it for everyone else. So your ace of spades is in your playing cards would look man. And they'd know that that was an illegal untaxed deck. Yeah. If you were caught with a deck of cards that didn't have the duty ace in it, you could be in trouble. What if I just had an old ass deck from pre-tax? I don't know the details of 1765 era English law, unfortunately. But the threat actually links to a bunch of references. I think we could answer that question. So over time, they kept making that design more and more complex to make it hard to counterfeit because people got really good at counterfeiting the ace of spades. Yeah, of course. So they started doing something that today we would probably call more like Baroque like I made a Baroque design, but in the 1800s, for reasons related to those chickens and maybe to a certain women's hairstyle of the day, they called that ridiculous ornamentation that was hard to counterfeit frizzling. They said that it would that the design was frizzled. That ties into a woman's hairstyle and then a particular kind of chicken that was called frizzled because they had the Polish frizzle feather. The frizzle feather chicken kind of looked like the standard design for the ace of spades. Once the laws were updated to where they relaxed it and you were no longer required to do the duty ace, they came up with modern stuff like that little thing you see on a bicycle deck today. People just kept making fancy ace of spades because they had been throughout all of history and many of the card makers included bird wings and or that frizzled chicken in reference to the frizzling. That's why you'll often see a cock on the ace of spades and a fancy deck of cards. Oh, I've seen cocks on the ace of spades before. So this actually answered a lot of vague questions I had never asked. Yeah. That sounds great. Yeah. So what do you got? So when I was in college learning the basics of logic and computer science, there was a little like free software kind of program they had a download link for that I think ran on, I think it was like a Java app. I think someone might even written at the school. I don't know. But it was like a little GUI that would let you basically virtually build electronic logic circuits with gates and flip flops and clocks and voltage, ground, light bulb, little LCE displays with numbers on them, all the basic circuitry without having to get out your breadboard or your soldering iron or any of that bullshit. You could just do it right on your screen with your mouse and keyboard because even though I went to school 20 years ago, it wasn't that one. And it saves the school a lot of money. You don't have to buy, have a whole electronics lab full of all these supplying all the students with gates and everything. It's like everyone can just do it at home all they want. So I haven't seen an app like that around. Probably because I haven't looked for one. I'm sure there's plenty to choose from. But I discovered this one recently. I don't know how old it is. It might be around for a while, but it's new to me. It's a website called logic.ly, logically, but the dot goes after the C. And their app costs $60. It is not free. But they have a free demo, logic.ly slash demo that lets you use the app in some limited extent for free. But even though it is a very limited extent, it runs in a browser. It runs beautifully. It looks like a desktop app. I really don't see why you need more features than what I see in this demo if your purpose is to learn the basics of electronic logic, which is all you would really want to do with this. What else do you want? I see a few flip flops. Even if you just need a refresher on how the different kinds of flip flops work, it's like you could just pull one out and mess around with it and be like, oh, yeah, that's how it works. Just hook up some light bulbs to the outputs and hook up some clocks and switches and power to the inputs, and you'll figure it out. And also, I guess, if you're a student getting started in the computer science land or electronic engineering land or anything like that, if your school did not teach this to you, or is maybe recommending some other app, this app might be worth it to you. And if you're really doing a lot of this kind of stuff, maybe the $60 might even be worth it if you're actually designing circuits for some projects or something. I actually like the simulation option that traces the path of all the logic. Yeah, it's way better than the app that we had in Figure 2000. And it's in a web browser. So there you go. I just thought it was really cool. And if anyone knows there's a better one, let me know, because I imagine there's probably better ones that run on the desktop. I don't know if there's better ones that are in a browser. This reminds me a lot of a very similar app I use inside of Atlassian Confluence to draw flow diagrams, almost the exact same user interface. But those are just something like... Yeah, it doesn't simulate my flow chart. Yeah, this is actually simulating the electricity, right? You're making the actual circuit. Yeah, this is cool stuff. All right, in the middle of the moment, we're just hanging out in quarantine. Stay tuned. We're going to be appearing at a bunch of online conventions. And as many as we can work our way into, we'll figure it out. I guess we'll figure right some panels, I don't know. We got to put in the rest of the packs online ones, at least. I got to put in the new one you and I were talking about. The packs online panel submissions are live. So if you're out there and you have never ever done a panel at a PAX, maybe you live somewhere, you don't have enough money or whatever, you don't have the means to go to a PAX, right? And you have any panel idea whatsoever, right? I highly recommend submitting a panel submission to PAX online. A, you have nothing to lose. There's no penalty for getting rejected. Yeah, worst case, they say, sorry, we can't fit you in this year. It costs nothing to submit, right? So submit. B, there's going to be a lot of acceptances because PAX online is going to be so many days long, right? That they're going to need content to fill it up. So I'm willing to bet, I don't have confirmation of this, but I'm willing to bet that content that would not be accepted at an actual in-person PAX, where time and space are more limited, will be more likely to be accepted to PAX online. Like we're submitting like, so, you know, we're submitting our normal kind of stuff or we're going to submit some weird or like some forward thinking types of panels that we normally wouldn't even bother trying to submit to PAX. And lastly, it could be, you know, your chance to like get out there, right? So, you know, maybe you, you know, you're not someone like us, who's like a media podcasty person who's got like a thing to say, maybe you're just making, maybe you made a tiny little indie game, right? It's like, do a panel and promote it. It's, you can get free promotion. Just, you know, find some way to spin it to make it look like your panel is not just an advertisement for your little indie game, right? And go out there, right? Make it happen. Yeah. If you're passionate about a title like a genre, like say you play 18XX games and that's your whole life. I'll bet a panel just explaining what the deal is with those and like walking through like the history of them would probably, I would go to a panel like that. It's like I've played enough 18XX that I could do that panel, but there's people who are way deep and 18XX is the only thing in life and they are the ones who should do that panel. Yeah. We, we can, we'll focus on the panels where we actually have some expertise. Right. It's like, there's a lot that I could do, but I want, you know, there's only something that I should do. So it's like, think about what you should do, right? Because guess what? You can. Yep. And you know, even if like, I know some people who've submitted panels to PAX for like a decade running and been denied every year, but the people who read those submissions at PAX and other kinds like it, like they notice a lot of times you might be surprised. They'll see like, I used to run a panel's department. I'd look through submissions and I'd see panel ideas that I thought were cool that I couldn't fit in. But over the years, I'd see like, oh, that same person keeps submitting that idea that I think is cool that I can't fit in. And then one year I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I'm going to make room for that dude who submitted this panel on mushing for like five years. I'm going to put it in the schedule. So good panel. Not enough people went to it, but I went to it. That panel was good. Yeah, that I wish I could have gone to it. I was busy. A lot of dog fix. If I recall correctly, I was sidelined dealing with a convention crisis during that panel. But convention crisis on the scale of real life crisis is the equivalent of someone spilled some water like it's not kids crying because Markiplier is not here. Whatever. All right. Yeah. Otherwise, YouTube, Discord, all that stuff. Let's get into it. There is a lot of technology that people assume based on nothing is obsolete, but in fact is widely used and not only not obsolete, but still like very important. Right. So I thought of this because I was thinking about the earlier news. The picture I put up on the screen is MIDI. Right. Yeah. The earlier news I thought about, you know, because like, you know, with the Micro Four Thirds dying, right? And now it's like sort of obsolete, but also it's like, Hey, actually this that stuff, it still totally works. Right. And it's totally still useful. Right. There's nothing wrong with it. Right. And I look around and it's like, actually, you know, it's like some technology is truly obsolete. Like there is, you know, it had its time and it is just worse. Right. For example, the five and a quarter floppy drive. Right. It is just worse than any other kind of storage, portable, removable storage. The nanosecond, a three and a quarter inch floppy appeared three and a half, three and a half, five and a quarter, three and a half. Not that that knowledge matters anymore. It doesn't matter. That's how it was. That there was my dumb demonic. I always remembered five and a quarter, three and a half. And I messed it up. The only purpose today of a five and a quarter drive and disk is to operate it just for historical museum curation preservation purposes. Right. For places that still have old hardware being used that could be, could and should be replaced. But for some reason, they just haven't upgraded yet. Right. Yeah. But that's the difference. That is something that is obsolete, but is still being used as opposed to something that is not actually obsolete. You just think it's obsolete. Right. So something that you think is obsolete, but is not actually obsolete. For example, the CRT tube, right? Yeah. So it's like, okay, you know, LCD screens are pretty much mostly just better. Why would you still want a tube, right? Television display. Do you need an extremely high refresh rate for some reason? Right. So they are making LCDs these days with extremely high refresh rates. Right. But this, they still have this sort of like, you know, small amount of lag that goes on. Right. And the amount of lag that you get, you know, if you got like a GameCube and you want to play Smash Melee, it's like, you need a CRT. You can't just can't even on an LCD with like no pre processing bullshit. It's like, it is noticeably significant to the point where people who aren't crazy can tell that that's what I would say. The reason it's not obsolete, even though that might sound very similar to the example where you said something is obsolete like a museum, I think the difference is people, there is a current need to actively play these games and non CRT technology cannot completely 100% handle that use case. Once there is, if in the future there's a plasma display or an LCD that is 100% as good as the CRT for that use case, that nanosecond CRTs are now obsolete in that realm forever. Yep. Another thing related, right? It's like analog film, right? It's like, you think analog film, why would you use that? It's just worse, right? Except actually, it's not just worse. The resolution on analog film is actually insane, right, compared to the resolution of even the best digital cameras around. Obviously, if you get like a digital medium format camera, the resolution is so insane that you're not going to improve on that with analog, right? But actually cost wise, right? So to get a full frame camera with a really high resolution sensor costs many thousands of dollars, you can go to the drugstore and still buy a disposable 35 millimeter film camera. And that has the same size sensor as like a Nikon D4. And we don't want to do real the show by talking about film grain and how there is ultimately a resolution on like it's not. There is ultimately a resolution, but the point is, you know, the even though the power of it has been, you know, of analog film has been obsoleted by digital cameras. Yep. It's so much cheaper, right? Well, like regular old cassette tapes were not made obsolete by better technology existing because they were still a like accessible means of accessing audio recording technology to consumers. Like when CDs came out, because that's we're not obsolete because I couldn't record to a CD cassette tape was the only way I could record anything because that's we're not obsolete until well, well into the CDR era. Correct. And this is a nuance that a lot of people who aren't close to specific technologies really like lose track of like it amazes me how many people even like people who are our age. This isn't like an old young thing who just assume tech they haven't seen in a while is obsolete, especially when it comes to things like development frameworks. Like, yeah, Java Webstart that sucks, right? There are still cases where Java Webstart or the successors of Java Webstart make sense. They're not obsolete yet. They're just not preferred. Yeah, there's all if you're not about software, that's not obsolete. It's like, oh boy, right? There's tons, right? It's like, there's weird image formats like, you know, that it's like, oh, you think, oh, we'll just use JPEGs now. It's like, what do we need these other, you know, image compare? It's like, no, there's still a time and a place for, for a bitmap, for a TIFF. Yeah, you know, it's like all these old things or all these video codecs and formats, like another thing we can't get deep into. But there are video when you think, most people when they think of video codecs, what they're actually thinking of is the container format. And inside of that container are audio and video, like codecs. I'm really oversimplifying here. A huge variety of those exist. And a lot of them are in wide use for a lot of reasons. Some things are extremely low CPU usage, like they don't need a lot of power to decode, but they're very large instead, like there's a lot of trade offs there. Or like your film camera example, another example of where you might want a film camera, or where there's a use case for them, is the requirement to photograph phenomena in a place that has an extreme amount of electromagnetic radiation that would prevent a modern digital camera from functioning. But a physical camera with only physical mechanisms and film could take photographs in such an environment. Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. The one I run into the most that I think is the funniest and even in high school, I ran into people who tried to tell me that MIDI was obsolete. Like MIDI MIDI actually MIDI 2.0 came out and is vastly superior, but MIDI one is used extensively in modern music production. MIDI is everywhere. You can't avoid it. If you actually go to music studios, especially songwriters, those sorts of people, it's like there's just MIDI everywhere. It's just like outside of the music industry, like studios, recording studios, that sort of place. It's like, you don't see the MIDI. Yep. Right. It's weird because MIDI used to be a thing that was in everyone's computers in like the nineties and it was removed from everyone's computer. Right. Because we don't need it anymore. We just have, you know, but my computer still has it because I have pro audio equipment and I have two MIDI keyboards. Sure. But most people's computers does not. Most people will have some sort of software that would, if you happen to get a MIDI file and want it to play it with, with somehow play it, right? But, you know, used to have a Sound Blaster 16 that had MIDI hardware in it. Yeah. The audio and chips challenge was MIDI files and it would basically, you know, your chips challenge, when you played chip challenge on Windows 3.1, it wasn't playing a recording of a song. It would actually, it was as if there was a digital keyboard, like a Casio keyboard in your computer and chips challenge would play that keyboard. Right. Like a player piano, like a player piano, this while the game was running. But it doesn't work that way anymore. So this is like MIDI is a good example. I want to go a little deeper in like, why is MIDI not obsolete? Because if you look at the actual protocol, I mean, MIDI 2.0, it came out recently, but five years, 10 years ago, 20 years, like MIDI has survived through the ages, but they were using the first time I saw MIDI. Actually, I mean, MIDI is so old that they were using it. When I was in elementary school, I was fucking around with MIDI on my 486. I mean, I saw the first time I saw it really set up for music production. I had seen it for music on a computer, but for the production in high school, there was if you took the music theory class instead of going in band, they had keyboards with MIDI and computers and stuff. But there was a kid I knew. I think he's, I don't know what happened to him. I think he must be a conductor or some shit somewhere. But like when I was in, it was like my parents, friends, kid, and even when he was like young, he was like that violin, play and conducting prodigy kind of kid, right? You know, that kind. And in his house, he had a Commodore 64 with MIDI hooked up to it. Oh, yeah, I wasn't until the 486 era, but I had a MIDI keyboard connected to my 486, and I was trying to compose music and playing around with it. If you read the spec, MIDI seems archaic to the point that it's laughable, but among all the way, all the proprietary ways people tried to do the simple task of synchronize a bunch of separate instruments together electronically. MIDI was the generic format that could work with everything and become a standard because all it really is is a means to signal basically a piano roll to or from any number of, well, not any number, there was a limited MIDI because this is old technology and arbitrary number of devices. MIDI is also used for things like controlling lights and effects on stages as a result because MIDI, you can plug it Arduino and a MIDI controller and program something to be like, if I hit this key on my keyboard, it lights up a light bulb somewhere or does something on my computer. Like MIDI is an extensible and really useful protocol because it's so low level and so generic, but that makes it very obtuse to learn the details of it's difficult to learn how to use MIDI correctly. It's more, it's easy to learn how to use MIDI to accomplish a task. It's hard to learn how MIDI works at the low level because you have to learn a lot of old archaic crap. That person that I just mentioned, assistant conductor at New York Philharmonic, and it's definitely the right person because it says they made their conducting debut at age 11 with the Greater Bridgeport Youth Orchestra. So it's definitely the same person. So yeah, I guess they went on to go do what they wanted to do. Good for that person. Yeah. Now there is a weird case of technology that is obsolete, but necessary, but still in use, but no one will ever change it. Like there's a gray area I'm thinking about is like nuclear weapon control because that's a weird case where the old technology is objectively obsolete, like to the point of ridiculousness. Like we're talking eight inch floppies. If you've never heard of an eight inch floppy, there's a reason that is ancient compared to five and a quarter floppies. Yes, but it works. So and why are you going to replace it? It's working. It's still working, right? You could replace like they probably have a giant room full of giant computers they could replace with one computer. But why would you go through the effort? You have this thing that works. It's sitting there running. It's doing its very, very important job very, very well. Don't work with it for no reason other than to use less computers. But the fact that it's obsolete introduced became a feature. It's so obsolete that it makes it extremely difficult to hack or mess with that kind of system. Like the amount of expertise you would need to fuck with a system that is as archaic as that became a feature effectively for this extremely narrow use case. Hmm. This is also a similar use cases relating to not the places on earth or different people's life. Right. So it's like, think about something like an iPod, right? An iPod is pretty much obsolete because there are just better portable music playing devices. Like even the shittiest Android phone, but the shittiest UI is going to have like a music playing app on it will have more storage than an iPod, probably more battery life, have a better user interface, right, than an old iPod. Right. So it's like, why would you, why would you want the old iPod? Right? Well, it's like, well, actually the old iPod could be gotten cheaper and people live in a poor place or the battery will last longer. Sony still makes Walkman. There's MP3 players, eight gigabytes of storage that's pathetic compared to a smartphone. I get my Android phone for a quarter of this price. Maybe it's, maybe the iPod is lighter, great, because it's, you know, the super old ones won't be because they have spinning drives in them. Yeah, I had one of those. But like an iPod Nano is going to be smaller than any phone. Some of these are about the size of an SD card. They're like a tiny little clip. Yeah. They're basically iPod shuffle situation, right? Yep. Which if you're running, biking, you just want to bring some music with you, but you want it to be as light and unobtrusive as possible. There's still a use case for that thing. I mean, you know, I guess Apple Watch does it also. But you know, you get the idea is like something that like, you know, it's like, oh, this has no purpose anymore. It has been defeated. But actually, if you have a specific case for it, right, where you're, you're doing a weird thing, right? Maybe you're even, maybe you're going camping and you just want to carry a light load. Suddenly it makes sense to have another example. When DVD came out, it made the purchasing of read only VHS tapes completely obsolete like overnight, especially because of the PS2 coming out rapidly increasing adoption and driving down the price of a DVD player. But no one until really the computer era had an accessible means of recording a TV show to time shift it. Like until we had Teavos and things like that, VHS was the only way to do that. And thus VHS was not only not obsolete, but was in active use way later than you might realize. Oh yeah. Like way longer longevity than the cassette in a lot of ways. You also have some cases where someone has a piece of technology that is so expensive relative to their wealth, right? So that they can't really replace it easily or they wouldn't want to, right? Well, like all my old firewire audio equipment, if I, if I didn't have enough money to upgrade all of that, I would still be using all that old firewire audio equipment. Well, not just that, but like, let's say you have, but let's say you have a car, right? It's like, you don't want to buy just buy a new car, right? I mean, assuming you're in car land, right? You have no choice or whatever, right? Because you shouldn't buy a car, but you got an old car and it still works. There's no reason to replace it. Doing so will be expensive even though there are better newer cars, right? So this car is so old that it doesn't have like an aux audio input or, you know, iPhone Bluetooth integration because it's an old car. So using like an FM transmitting thing, that's an obsolete technology. But because you've got an old car, right? With no reason to replace it, you still need that old obsolete technology to use. You just, you can hear music from your new iPhone. As a kid, I had a device that was an eight track tape and you could put it into a car eight track player and then in the back of it, it had a slot to slide in a regular cassette tape. I had one that was a cassette tape and on the outside of it came a wire that you would plug into your iPod. I had one of those too. And you'd put it into the cassette tape part of the, but I guess the real point I think I can make around this concept because we're just exploring this concept to see if we can come up with like more narrow show ideas. Techno one technology that is specialized and solves a niche problem tends to have a lot more longevity because there are very few people willing and able to try to solve those problems. Midi solved the problem well enough. Nobody really had a vested interest in making something that fully covered the use cases of midi. If anything, large companies have an interest in making a competing proprietary format and trying to steal market share over to their bullshit proprietary platform. Right. It's just because there's something better, right? Doesn't mean it's better. You can't, it's very hard to unseat something that's good enough. If something that's at the current thing that's out there is kind of sucky and has lots of problems, right? Then it is very easy to unseat it with something vastly superior. They were, it was easy to unseat VHS with DVD. For read only. It was not so easy to unseat DVD with Bure. Yeah. Right. Uh, you know, in a lot of ways, DVD is still sort of out there kind of a little bit. Yeah. You know, it's not, it's not totally dead. It's more, it's less dead than VHS was when DVD came around. Set top DVD writers never displaced VHS recorders. Nope. Computers did that instead. Yeah. Right. But the other thing I could say is that you can generally, this is just like a generalized piece of advice, you can make a very good career out of understanding something that a lot of people think is obsolete, but in fact is widely used. Like that is a way to guarantee you will have a job for the rest of your life. I think the last thing is that the, regardless of how much, you know, computers, the actual silicon, right, is replaced with faster, smaller, more energy efficient silicon. IO devices are largely unaffected. Right. It's like, it's like, oh, okay. So I got a camera with a better sensor. The sensor is the silicon, right? A new, a new or better digital camera. Lenses or lenses, man. Right. Oh, I got a brand new awesome computer. Well, your mouse is your mouse and your keyboard is your keyboard. Right. You know, your, your webcam is it? Well, I guess, you know, once we got like modern laser mice or like modern optical mice, there's not a lot more advancements that's going to happen there anytime soon. Right. It's like a microphone's a microphone, you know, I mean, look, we can still do the show. We did the show until like four years ago with the same microphone that Lyndon Johnson used to give presidential addresses. Right. It's like, you know, you can get some fancy new amp with fancy silicon in it, right? You can upgrade that part. And then your speakers from your studio in the 70s are probably going to be almost as great as brand new speakers. Yeah. It's speakers, speakers, speakers, right? Audio, you know, video in, out, audio in, out. It's like those accessories and, you know, ancillary devices, your headphones, you know, that shit does not go out of style. It's really hard to replace it because all of those things are good enough. Yep. And material science advances are not destabilizing enough. Like, yeah, they're slightly lighter drivers and modern monitor headphones, but they're not, it's not like a revolution. Right. And Moore's law, you know, pushed silicon right to obsolete many, many generations very rapidly, right? You know, but now it's Moore's law is kind of slow now. So even the silicon obsolete, just obsolesion is slower than it used to be. So I just googled for obsolete technology. And there's a Wikipedia article that is literally called list of obsolete technology. And it's a list of technology and what replaced it. And then if it's still used for anything. And the number one is bathing machine replacement no longer required due to changing social standards of morality. Old obsolete technology, hourglass replacement clock. Correct. Sundial replacement clock swamp cooler replacement air conditioning still used for dry climates because they're way more efficient if you live somewhere you could use them. Yep. This I'll link to this. This is actually a really interesting list. I wish I googled this at the beginning. We could have probably driven a lot more conversation by looking at this thing. Even think about some dial spear replacement firearms sword replacement firearms. Sure. Forts replacement vulnerable to air attack. I think this Wikipedia article does not have a lot of editors. Maybe listeners. I want all the listeners to go to this Wikipedia article and everyone make one change to it. I'll make one change to it. Yeah. I'll make one as well. Everyone make one edit to this Wikipedia page. It'll be like a brigade. Brigading of a one Wikipedia article. But no, I'm not. Don't play. Don't vandalize it. Put a real update there. Do an honest real update to this page. Rim send me a link to the page. Pack animals replaced by trucks and vans to different articles. Ooh. Ocean liner replaced by airliner. Cobblestone replaced by concrete or asphalt. Okay. Cool. All right. See you guys around. Yeah. All right. That was decent show.