TWiT+ Club Shows 748 Transcript - Off By One With Jeff Atwood #1
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.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
This is twit, Jeffrey. Hold on, hold on, everybody. We are not orthodox Jews.
Jeff Atwood [00:00:24]:
I love this. This thing's amazing.
Leo Laporte [00:00:26]:
You know, I didn't realize when you gave me this that it also had. Yeah, a red. Yeah, red, which is very nice. If you don't want. I don't know why. In the dark.
Jeff Atwood [00:00:36]:
There's actually three modes. There's red, high red, and then blinking.
Leo Laporte [00:00:40]:
Would you use this in a dark. In the dark room?
Jeff Atwood [00:00:42]:
I just use it to annoy people. Like now
Leo Laporte [00:00:47]:
it looks like a phylactery.
Jeff Atwood [00:00:49]:
Is this good, guys? What do you think?
Leo Laporte [00:00:52]:
I like it that you turned off the lights.
Jeff Atwood [00:00:53]:
Feel the hands of God enshroud you. Oh, I'm reminded of that movie.
Leo Laporte [00:01:03]:
He's just tuning in.
Jeff Atwood [00:01:05]:
Real genius. He's like. They think, is it God? They talked it through his teeth.
Leo Laporte [00:01:12]:
Oh, I didn't turn on Discord. Thank you, Anthony. Or whoever did that. John, Ashley, thank you. I forgot the Discord. I didn't really know how to do it, so. That is bright as heck.
Jeff Atwood [00:01:22]:
Yeah, let me.
Leo Laporte [00:01:23]:
And you can't see it with my shirt, but I am wearing my Stay Gold pin. And I just wanted you to notice that I have put the share the American Dream up here and the QR code that everybody should scan for more information.
Jeff Atwood [00:01:38]:
Don't scan that, Leo. Reverse psychology. Don't scan that.
Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
Whatever you do, don't scan that. You'll be sorry.
Jeff Atwood [00:01:45]:
It's not authorized.
Leo Laporte [00:01:47]:
So sorry if you scan that.
Jeff Atwood [00:01:49]:
Yeah, you're not authorized to see that.
Leo Laporte [00:01:51]:
And your shirt is not a maze. What is your shirt?
Jeff Atwood [00:01:55]:
It's Bandersnatch, the interactive episode from Black Mirror that was on Netflix.
Leo Laporte [00:02:02]:
Because I love you. Which one is that?
Jeff Atwood [00:02:06]:
Let me show you how much I
Leo Laporte [00:02:08]:
know Black Mirror and I've seen some of them.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:10]:
Oh, this is the only interactive episode.
Leo Laporte [00:02:12]:
Oh, it was interactive.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:14]:
It's no longer. And it's about. It's no longer available.
Leo Laporte [00:02:17]:
Oh, John Ashley, our producer, says you can't get it anymore.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:20]:
Yeah, yeah. They actually took it down on Netflix.
Leo Laporte [00:02:23]:
Damn them.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:24]:
Well, you snooze, you lose. Lepore.
Leo Laporte [00:02:26]:
Was it. Was it fun interacting?
Jeff Atwood [00:02:28]:
Best things I've ever seen. Really? Because I'm all in on. I have a cartoon. It's right here. Don't worry, I'm fast. I've planned things.
Leo Laporte [00:02:36]:
This time you're sitting on. Oh, you know what? You're mirrored. That's what's going on here. You'd have to. You're mirrored. So there's a button here. Actually, I think I can unmute. I can Unmute you.
Leo Laporte [00:02:47]:
Wait a minute. You should be good.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:49]:
Otherwise. Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:02:50]:
There you go.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:51]:
Can you teleport me to.
Leo Laporte [00:02:53]:
I just flipped you around. I wish I could teleport you, but this studio does not have a extra place for you to sit. So let me see what. Let me. Let me go full screen so I can see what that says. It says, choose your adventure. Should I be that long?
Jeff Atwood [00:03:09]:
Entry I made my savage chickens.
Leo Laporte [00:03:11]:
You're welcome. Choose X, choose Y. You are desperate. You're a millionaire. I wish it were that easy.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:20]:
No, no, no. Really. Follow them.
Leo Laporte [00:03:25]:
You can't get there from here.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:27]:
That's the joke. Somehow I did get there.
Leo Laporte [00:03:31]:
Get there from here.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:32]:
I wrote this a long time ago. There's a blog entry about this called choosing your own adventure. Literally, I had to make a choice in life.
Leo Laporte [00:03:39]:
We should actually show your coding horror blog, because it is.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:42]:
Yeah, show the one called choose your own adventure. I think that's the title.
Leo Laporte [00:03:45]:
How long have you been writing this coding horror blog?
Jeff Atwood [00:03:48]:
So it's a little bit late, but not super late.
Leo Laporte [00:03:50]:
2001, I think. Yes. Or I'll just do adventure and then coding horror.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:59]:
One word works better than two.
Leo Laporte [00:04:02]:
I typed adventure wrong.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:05]:
Yeah, it's called. That's it. It's blog.
Leo Laporte [00:04:07]:
No, not adventures in Rechargeable.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:09]:
That one. I made so much money from that post back when affiliates were thing. I made like $4,000.
Leo Laporte [00:04:15]:
This is the one you were talking about. Oh, look at these great books. Did you read all these when you were a kid?
Jeff Atwood [00:04:19]:
I love those. I have my original one my mom sent me where I signed it. The star next to this is the best book.
Leo Laporte [00:04:27]:
The third planet from Altair.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:30]:
I send these to a lot of people. And the art was so good. The new ones are terrible.
Leo Laporte [00:04:34]:
This is like the same artist who did fractured fairy tales. Kind of Dessert is so good as that feeling.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:41]:
And they don't always Joey. Everybody map them.
Leo Laporte [00:04:44]:
Oh, you know Joey de Villa.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:45]:
There's a lot of really bad outcomes. It's hard to survive.
Leo Laporte [00:04:49]:
Another prolific blogger.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:52]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:04:52]:
Yes.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:52]:
He's. He's great.
Leo Laporte [00:04:53]:
Yeah. Oh, we should have young with Joey. I had Joey on a Twitter the other day. Here's your. Here is sausage.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:59]:
And I did license that for retroactive. I was like, oh, shit, I should have licensed this. So I went back and I did. Good.
Leo Laporte [00:05:07]:
Good on you.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:08]:
But I found more money now, so it's laser.
Leo Laporte [00:05:10]:
You can afford to do these things.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:12]:
But I realized I should have. That was my bad. And, you know, Joel Spolsky was always on me about that and he was right. He's like, you don't license things. What else? He's like, no, good for him. Because when he started stack overflow it was that guy. A whiteboard drawing equation and then magic happens in X and I just put it up there and Joel said profit and he insisted and he was right.
Leo Laporte [00:05:33]:
Good on him.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:34]:
Yeah, I agree. So I do try to license things when I can. And another props right here. I swear to God, it's right here. Look how fast I'm going to do this. Check it out. I'm so much faster because I actually got sleep this time.
Leo Laporte [00:05:45]:
He, he. He's well rested last. Oh, look, you have it. The retro box.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:50]:
Choose your they re released the original ones. The best ones.
Leo Laporte [00:05:52]:
That's so cool. That's all of them.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:54]:
Not good. The art went really downhill and they got kind of not good. But the first say 50 or 100 are quite good.
Leo Laporte [00:06:01]:
Is that many of them?
Jeff Atwood [00:06:03]:
This one has.
Leo Laporte [00:06:05]:
Is that a dvd?
Jeff Atwood [00:06:07]:
No, no, no, no, no.
Leo Laporte [00:06:09]:
Oh, they're actual books.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:10]:
Words printed on paper, my friend. But here's those spines. How does size work?
Leo Laporte [00:06:19]:
I'll zoom in.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:21]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:06:22]:
Space and beyond by balloons to the Sahara under the sea and the cave of time. Any of you remember. Any of you remember reading these magic packet? Jason?
Jeff Atwood [00:06:34]:
Well, this to me is an early programmer book. It's if this then it is, isn't it? You pop the stack. It isn't and you can try again. Unlike real life where you. Well, maybe depends what you did. But it's really fun and I like this art in particular. Well that's this one now if I but I had another piece of art blown up. I'm not going to show you from choose your own adventure but if I think there's ways to get fans of this have created versions of it.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:01]:
You can play offline. It's really good. Banner snatch is some of their best work. It's very meta. It's a choose your own adventure about them building a choose your own adventure game in the 80s. And there's a part where they break the fourth wall and you're at Netflix. It's insane. It's one of the best episodes I think so if there's ways to see it should and it came out on my birthday December 27th.
Leo Laporte [00:07:24]:
I'm suspecting if I don't care so
Jeff Atwood [00:07:25]:
much about that probably licensing that's somebody else's birth.
Leo Laporte [00:07:29]:
Why should you? I'm sure your birthday, I hate to say it is on Wikipedia.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:36]:
Ah maybe I don't know Actually, it does get out there. It's okay. But I. I didn't try to offer it. I put in random birthdays because, like, you don't need this. I generally worried about something.
Leo Laporte [00:07:47]:
Are you worried about identity? Let me see. Jeff Atwood.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:52]:
So, Leah, are we still wearing headlamps or can I take.
Leo Laporte [00:07:54]:
No, I took mine off. You probably should take yours out because.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:56]:
Well, I'll leave it on because I like to suffer.
Leo Laporte [00:07:57]:
I use women joining us will go. Why is he wearing a black suit?
Jeff Atwood [00:08:02]:
I use Windows, remember? I like suffering.
Leo Laporte [00:08:04]:
I know. I feel so bad for you. That is. And are you still using Windows?
Jeff Atwood [00:08:08]:
Yeah, I like Windows. It's about the games, man. And Windows has gotten better.
Leo Laporte [00:08:13]:
Your birthday is not on Wikipedia. It might now be if anybody made a note of what you said. They don't even know how old you are. You're 55 or 56. They don't know.
Jeff Atwood [00:08:22]:
Well, I'm 55, but I cannot drive 55. And did you know I subjected my whole family to. To that hideous, horrible video, I can't drive 55. And by the way, he's a film school teacher, that guy. He teaches that. That video in his class. Like he made it in the storyboards. Oh, that's hilarious.
Leo Laporte [00:08:44]:
It's not good.
Jeff Atwood [00:08:45]:
And then Sammy Hagar tried to reconnect with a cop that gave him the ticket that sort of started the song and he couldn't find him. So that. That's an unfortunate thing, but Samuel Hagar at least has a sense of humor.
Leo Laporte [00:08:58]:
Jackson repository of geek knowledge. He is a as pretty fly for a CIS guy. Says a high energy dude. I invited Berkay, Berkey said, talking about Burke McCarthy. Who is Berkay Berket?
Jeff Atwood [00:09:14]:
Well, Berkey was here. He visited me.
Leo Laporte [00:09:16]:
No, I know. No, he loves you. Here, I'll show you the slack conversation.
Jeff Atwood [00:09:22]:
Well, I said, want to be in the limelight. And I understand.
Leo Laporte [00:09:26]:
No, he doesn't. He's not an honor.
Jeff Atwood [00:09:27]:
Let me tell everyone. Burke is so cool. Like, I. I enjoy talking to him far beyond. Oh yeah, he's some guy sending me a flo. This guy was cool and fun and I enjoyed, like, talking to him. I said, he has really interesting stories too.
Leo Laporte [00:09:41]:
I said, I had lunch with Jeff Atwood today. He loves you. We're going to do a show on Friday. Join us. To which Burke said, I'm not sure what I will add to the show other than being a distraction. I have many wheelhouses. Only a few might cross over to ones you and Jeff share. I suspect Jeff suggested this? Lol.
Leo Laporte [00:10:04]:
I. I will tell Jeff if it makes it easier. I'm under no illusions. I said, yeah, Jeff did want you to join, but that's okay if you don't want to. On the other hand, if you should show up, that would be great too.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:16]:
I would like people watching this to tell Burke or Berkey, I love the substitute teacher jokes. I. I can't stop.
Leo Laporte [00:10:23]:
Oh. Oh. That's where that comes from.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:25]:
He doesn't have to talk a lot, but he would add to the show.
Leo Laporte [00:10:28]:
I know. Bert's wonderful. We love.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:30]:
You know, what's the guy like? This Johnny Carson. And what's the other guy that talks to case?
Leo Laporte [00:10:33]:
Ed McMahon.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:34]:
He could be the Ed McMahon.
Leo Laporte [00:10:36]:
He. If he had a better laugh. If he went,
Jeff Atwood [00:10:41]:
he has a great laugh.
Leo Laporte [00:10:42]:
And every once in a while said, you all right? I don't even know. I've never heard Burke laugh. I've only heard him cry.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:49]:
Well, then maybe we should turn that frown upside down. No, I can make Burke laugh.
Leo Laporte [00:10:55]:
I've made Burke laugh. I love Burke.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:56]:
Yeah. And with my kids, you get the fake laugh, the dad joke laugh, or the real laugh? Yeah. Well, that's like, ha, ha. And you get the real laugh. It's like. Yeah. When you get the fake laugh, it's like, I gotta up my game.
Leo Laporte [00:11:10]:
Jeff has teenagers, so he knows a little bit about this.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:13]:
Yes, but I have very well behaved teenagers.
Leo Laporte [00:11:16]:
You do? Actually, I'm very impressed by your teenager. I won't name names or anything. Want to preserve their entity.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:21]:
Well, they're on my blog, so.
Leo Laporte [00:11:22]:
Oh, okay. Secrets.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:25]:
Maisie and June.
Leo Laporte [00:11:26]:
And the thing I like is that Henry wants to become a geographer.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:32]:
Well, an urban planner.
Leo Laporte [00:11:34]:
Okay.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:34]:
Basically, Sim City in real life.
Leo Laporte [00:11:36]:
I think that's so cool.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:38]:
It is. Now it's skylines. There isn't really a new Sim City. It's skylines, too.
Leo Laporte [00:11:43]:
Did you. How did you raise your kids? Did you. I mean, you're. You're a geek and a coder.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:49]:
If they didn't do what I liked, I would hit them as hard as I could.
Leo Laporte [00:11:52]:
No, you're never.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:53]:
Tell them to try again.
Leo Laporte [00:11:54]:
And then I know Jeff well enough to know. And I don't know him that well, but I know you well enough to know you. Told you that actually never struck your children once. Not even once.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:00]:
But there's a lot of way to strike without striking.
Leo Laporte [00:12:02]:
That is. Unfortunately, that is true.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:05]:
They don't see it. But my main thing is, like, first, just as much love as you can give love Is like the baseline number two show up. Showing up is 90% pairing. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:12:17]:
And you know what number three is?
Jeff Atwood [00:12:18]:
They're physically in the room like number three. But, like, they're, like, mentally there physically to Yo Yo. Oh, nice. And. And as I recall, it was pretty good. Yeah, Leo's pretty good. He definitely knew some stuff. Because when I.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:37]:
I have a lot of yo yo interest in. They just sent me this new. This is a mistake colorway. It was supposed to be mostly purple. We were gonna do another stay Gold. Can you bring up the stay gold type? Type Deepest state. Yo Yo. And bring that page up, because I want to show something.
Leo Laporte [00:12:56]:
This is the company's deepest.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:57]:
Yeah. And it's two guys in Eugene doing this for love. The only people in the US Making yo. Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:13:02]:
And they are proud of the fact.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:04]:
Start a Yo yo company to become a billionaire. It's not happening.
Leo Laporte [00:13:07]:
No, you do it. I love.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:08]:
For yo yos, they love making stuff. So that's the original colors. So it's Stay gold.
Leo Laporte [00:13:14]:
Oh, look at the gold one. That's pretty. So that's the Stay gold.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:17]:
Spacious skies is the blue one from the song. Like spaces, spacious skies. We're gonna do purple mountain. Like, purple mountain majesty. And when he went to the anodizer, he gave him. The instructions weren't clear, so he got this.
Leo Laporte [00:13:32]:
Let me. Let me zoom in on you so I can see what he got. That's pretty, though.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:36]:
Oh, but it's not purple. And yet this is beautiful. We were like, this is amazing. It's like, happy little accident.
Leo Laporte [00:13:44]:
I'll show you.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:45]:
And he's like, what should we name this?
Leo Laporte [00:13:46]:
I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:48]:
Yeah, that's Stay Gold. That's the best one. I mean, the coolest. Eddie Van Halen. Because it's mixing the colors, like red, blue, blue, and gold. Stay gold. Retain your enthusiasm for life.
Leo Laporte [00:13:59]:
I've actually reduced the value of it by 1000% by taking out of the box. I'm going to put.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:03]:
I can always give Leo another one. That's how much I like Leo. I like one woman no more.
Leo Laporte [00:14:07]:
I don't need more than two Yo Yos in my life.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:08]:
Well, actually, if you got really good, I would give you one of the tight. I didn't say anything. I said nothing. So we had to come up with a name for this. And I was thinking. I was like, jawbreaker.
Leo Laporte [00:14:19]:
Jawbreaker.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:19]:
He loved it. And I was like, cool. Because naming things is hard. Try naming a human, and then you end up with some Name like Leo. Then he stuck with that name for life.
Leo Laporte [00:14:29]:
You know what's funny is that Jeff and I both named our firstborn or, no, our first four sons Henry.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:36]:
And what's funny is our second choice name legit was Leo. No.
Leo Laporte [00:14:39]:
Well, I'm glad you didn't saddle your poor kid with that.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:43]:
Well, it was a close call. I mean, they were both good names kids have.
Leo Laporte [00:14:47]:
Your kids have great.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:48]:
I joke, but, like, you know. And then there's the parents who name their kid T Rex or Kel El
Leo Laporte [00:14:55]:
or a Ron,
Jeff Atwood [00:14:58]:
spelled that way with a dash.
Leo Laporte [00:15:01]:
So I have a friend, a guy we do tai chi with whose name is spelled Aaron, but he says, no, it's pronounced the Scottish way.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:10]:
Burke, I know you're watching this and I miss you.
Leo Laporte [00:15:13]:
Is it true, Ramsay, that the Scots pronounced Aaron Arron? Because that's what he's insisting. Burke, if you're listening, get in here.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:21]:
Okay, Burke, next show, please.
Leo Laporte [00:15:24]:
We have room. I can do a three box.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:26]:
Yeah, because Burke has really interesting stories. I mean, I was, you know, you
Leo Laporte [00:15:32]:
probably know more about Burke in one lunch than I do in 15 years.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:36]:
And it was so nice of him to come here and see the Batcave, even though it's in constant. I barely had a chaos.
Leo Laporte [00:15:42]:
I did not get to come up to the Batcave.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:44]:
I have to say, it was in chaos state.
Leo Laporte [00:15:46]:
I was only allowed downstairs.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:48]:
It's like Howard Hughes level.
Leo Laporte [00:15:50]:
Are you wearing. Tell me now. It's okay. Are you wearing tissue boxes for shoes?
Jeff Atwood [00:15:55]:
No, no. More actual pants and stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:15:57]:
Okay.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:57]:
What, do you think, I'm a monster? Come on, man.
Leo Laporte [00:16:01]:
Mr. Atwood is famous for a number of things. Started with the Coding Horror blog, right?
Jeff Atwood [00:16:07]:
That's true. In 2004, I started seeing blogs come up in search results a lot. And I was like, I have blogs, diaries, whatever. But it was a lot of useful information in there. Like for programmers in particular. They would write about what they were doing, and it was stuff that helped me directly or indirectly. And then I kept getting more and more Google hits that were blogs. I was like, this is useful.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:31]:
So I'll always remember it was the super bowl with the wardrobe malfunction. Try 10 years of stack overflow or 10 years of coding horror. Bring, use a question, search and do 10 years. 10 years. The number. It's not smart. Like, you know. Yeah, there you go.
Leo Laporte [00:16:52]:
10 years of coding horror.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:54]:
Go down. Little red Corvette.
Leo Laporte [00:16:55]:
Sorry, my phone is ringing.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:57]:
So that was in 10 years. I didn't do a 20 year thing. So sue me. I'm Just gonna keep logging until I die. It's gonna slow, but I'll be keeping doing it.
Leo Laporte [00:17:04]:
It's. Somebody offered you $10,000 to $120,000 to buy your blog in 2000.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:09]:
I had to look it up because I couldn't remember the exact number.
Leo Laporte [00:17:11]:
That's wild. And why. What were they gonna do with it? Just.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:14]:
Well, he had like bug tracking software. The name of the company escapes me, but he was a nice guy.
Leo Laporte [00:17:20]:
He wanted the name, not the.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:21]:
Well, yeah. And the value and stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:17:23]:
And because it's coding, which is great. And by the way, I just want to show you my MediaTek companio laptop with Jeff Atwood coding horror on there. That was about when I got that sticker. I felt like I won a prize that. Tell us where that logo comes from.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:46]:
It comes from the book Code Complete.
Leo Laporte [00:17:48]:
Did you license that?
Jeff Atwood [00:17:50]:
I did. That's one of the few times I actually did things correctly for once. I was like, if I'm going to do this, I should ask permission properly.
Leo Laporte [00:17:57]:
I'll be right back.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:58]:
Ask for forgiveness later.
Leo Laporte [00:17:59]:
I'll be right back. Don't you have control? You have the con number two.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:03]:
Okay. So the way that works is in that book. It's a great book. Code Complete. It's still very relevant because it's mostly about people. It's not. There's some code, but it's about how programmers interact and how you generally build things. So it's still highly relevant and a great book and I do recommend it.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:19]:
And one of the things Steve would do, he had this great, even Midwestern voice. He liked looking at data to see what works. And I thought that was really refreshing versus chat. Do what I say.
Leo Laporte [00:18:31]:
Anything impertinent while I was gone.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:32]:
I did not. I was describing Code Complete and why it's so good and still relevant in classic. Have you had McConnell on the show?
Leo Laporte [00:18:38]:
I have not and I should, although
Jeff Atwood [00:18:40]:
he's such a cool guy.
Leo Laporte [00:18:41]:
This. This book is now 22 years old. This is.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:44]:
But it doesn't matter because it's about the. It's about the process and it's about the people. There is some code in there and
Leo Laporte [00:18:50]:
when something really bad happens, you do something really bad.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:54]:
There's a coding horror like icon next to it there. And I was like, that's me. That's. I was like, that's me. I am. That's me that I'm the problem. And I thought it was hilarious. And the art he had was.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:09]:
He was gonna put there was so bad. I don't have it here. But the other thing was like clip art from hell. That is so much better than the thing he had put there. I would not have used that.
Leo Laporte [00:19:17]:
Where did he get it? Did he have an artist draw it or.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:19]:
I think he had an artist. I don't remember.
Leo Laporte [00:19:21]:
He didn't use clip art.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:22]:
The other option was. I'm not typically.
Leo Laporte [00:19:25]:
This is Microsoft Press. Typically they would just put some clip art there. They wouldn't go to go all out. Look at that. Cup of coffee. Black in a solo cup. Microsoft ergonomic keyboard. And this
Jeff Atwood [00:19:41]:
is.
Leo Laporte [00:19:41]:
No, I'm sorry. It's only 900 page book.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:44]:
That is a great book still.
Leo Laporte [00:19:45]:
I bought it because of you. I had never read it and I thought, well, how can I be a complete coder if I've not read this?
Jeff Atwood [00:19:52]:
Because Steve has had a whole life cycle of this and written a lot of books about estimation.
Leo Laporte [00:19:56]:
Steve McConnell?
Jeff Atwood [00:19:57]:
Yeah, yeah, he's great.
Leo Laporte [00:19:58]:
I have many of the classics but I. I didn't have that. So I've added that.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:03]:
Steve.
Leo Laporte [00:20:04]:
I will if he's still around. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:06]:
So the LUO comes from there and it's about introspection. It's like you're always going to be your own worst enemy. So deal with it. Dot GIF or gif. You know, like always be looking at, you know, I'm imperfect so protect myself from my own imperfectness.
Leo Laporte [00:20:24]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:25]:
Sort of a philosophy.
Leo Laporte [00:20:26]:
You kind of are a coding horror then. And then. Oh, there's the thing is we all. Wardrobe malfunction. So that's when this began.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:33]:
That's a good way to remember it just. It's memorable. I don't know why. It's just memorable.
Leo Laporte [00:20:38]:
It was memorable. It was the most rewound.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:40]:
That's exactly when it started. That's when. And I had discipline around. I was going to write one blog post every day and they weren't necessarily great because I was just starting.
Leo Laporte [00:20:47]:
That's actually a great discipline.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:48]:
Just once a day is heavy.
Leo Laporte [00:20:50]:
It's hard.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:51]:
Look, the world is full of so much interesting stuff. Just don't do the daily news. Everybody's covering the news. That's so boring. I mean just what is currently happening. Create a hot. I mean get over it. Go deeper.
Leo Laporte [00:21:02]:
So your first post was looking at.
Jeff Atwood [00:21:05]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:21:05]:
Oh, you're still. By the way, even back then you were posting pictures from this famous comic.
Jeff Atwood [00:21:13]:
I actually went back and changed that a little. But I made high resolution stuff. I've been doing some digital gardening on the blog. I haven't changed anything materially but I'll improve.
Leo Laporte [00:21:21]:
Cleaning up the images and stuff.
Jeff Atwood [00:21:22]:
Yeah, like higher res images and stuff. And God, think back. Thank God for the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine because I swear, isn't it about half the links on those old blog posts will be completely gone? Yeah, I have no way of getting them at all.
Leo Laporte [00:21:36]:
So you see, this is something. I also started blogging actually in the late 90s, but those early posts are long gone because I moved from platform to platform. You were on at first. You're on Ghost. You're on Ghost now. But you were at first on I
Jeff Atwood [00:21:51]:
love Ghost, by the way. Ghost. Huge recommend for Ghost.
Leo Laporte [00:21:53]:
Ghost is fantastic.
Jeff Atwood [00:21:54]:
It's amazing. And it's open source.
Leo Laporte [00:21:56]:
But originally you were on Movable Type.
Jeff Atwood [00:21:57]:
Right, I also like that.
Leo Laporte [00:21:58]:
But I was also on Movable Type
Jeff Atwood [00:22:01]:
way back in the day to cmse. Yeah, it's trying to do everything.
Leo Laporte [00:22:05]:
You know, I use now, which I really like and it's hosted by Manton Reese. It's based on Hugo, which is the GO based static blog tool. So you write the post and then it turns into static HTML. So you're never making database calls or anything like that. And it's really nice. And I use micro take a long
Jeff Atwood [00:22:26]:
time to generate all the output.
Leo Laporte [00:22:27]:
No Go is so fast. This your entire blog? It would do in seconds. I'm not kidding. It's incredible.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:34]:
Well, computers are a lot faster. But that's movable. Used to work in the early days.
Leo Laporte [00:22:37]:
It's an amazing.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:38]:
It would render.
Leo Laporte [00:22:39]:
Oh yeah, in the early days. But there was no go in the early days. Well, you were doing this in Perl probably. It was Perl, right? Wasn't that movable?
Jeff Atwood [00:22:46]:
Yeah, it was Pearl.
Leo Laporte [00:22:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. I remember writing CGI scripts. Perl CGI scripts.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:52]:
Well, at least it wasn't php.
Leo Laporte [00:22:54]:
Did you have comments even in the earliest days of your blog?
Jeff Atwood [00:22:58]:
I did. And back then, well, comments I always like in general. Although on certain posts like Stay Gold, I am not having comments on that post. I not going to go there. Although I will say Stay Gold. Can you open something up? If you go to not online but open Stay Gold go to the first comment. There's a Behind the Music where I talk about writing Stay Gold because I had an interview with these two. I'm blanking on names.
Jeff Atwood [00:23:23]:
They were coming out this great book about blogging and I was like, this is the perfect time to talk to me about this because I'm working on this thing that's in the hardest thing I've ever written and it's sort of behind the music of, like, what that was like to write. Because normally when I write, I kind of shoot from the hip. I think about it some. I do a little bit of background thinking and I'll research a little and then I'll just kick it out. Like four or six hours usually, typically. Um, but this one, you know, I had to be really careful here because we're talking about really big things and political things. And remarkably, that took three months to write. If you.
Jeff Atwood [00:23:58]:
And. And no one was pissed off by this post. No one. I'm like, how. How did I thread that needle? Like, literally no one was pissed off.
Leo Laporte [00:24:07]:
No one should be pissed off by this because.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:09]:
But do you know how hard that is to write like that?
Leo Laporte [00:24:11]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:12]:
Because.
Leo Laporte [00:24:12]:
Well, you're not.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:14]:
That he does revisions, has all these people review it.
Leo Laporte [00:24:16]:
You're not blaming anybody in this post. You're simply setting out the condition right now in the United States of a good percentage of our people.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:26]:
And I've learned so much more since then. I mean, what. What is there is crack, but it's. It's scratching the surface of what's really deeper.
Leo Laporte [00:24:34]:
Yeah. You have a very nice video about income inequality on your blog, which people. It's actually on this post.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:41]:
Income equality video. I would like everybody to watch that because it's so good.
Leo Laporte [00:24:44]:
But it's gotten worse. That was in 2011. That video came out here. It is wealth inequality America.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:49]:
Imagine if someone updated that video because this.
Leo Laporte [00:24:52]:
I mean, it's gotten so much worse in the intervening 14 years.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:57]:
And not only did it get worse, I think the question is, what can we do about it? And it would be nice if those videos went into that.
Leo Laporte [00:25:03]:
So what you plan what you want to do, what you've been funding. And Jeff, by the way, has pledged to give away half of. Of his.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:11]:
It's been more than half, technically.
Leo Laporte [00:25:13]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:13]:
So I'm kind of pushing the boundaries here.
Leo Laporte [00:25:15]:
You've already done.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:16]:
Yeah. With Betsy understandably wants the family to be safe.
Leo Laporte [00:25:19]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:20]:
Because who knows what's going to happen.
Leo Laporte [00:25:21]:
You have. You have enough to give away a good portion of it and still make sure that everybody's safe in your family, I think.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:27]:
And I held that letterpress sign up. You know, we have everything we need. And my question is, when is enough? Like, what's the per. Thank you. Thank you. And it's beautiful letterpress. That's the small American business in. In Cook County.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:40]:
And Cook county had two PMI studies. If you go to the. The research page on staygold Us one of the research studies.
Leo Laporte [00:25:51]:
I wish I could give you control of this. Of the. Of the switcher, because then you could put it wherever you want. Okay.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:57]:
No, no, for this one, scroll to the bottom where the comments are. Press N. Yeah. Because if the Mac even has that key.
Leo Laporte [00:26:03]:
No, I don't have an end key.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:04]:
That's why that's awesome. Right?
Leo Laporte [00:26:05]:
There are only 2 comments on here.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:07]:
Jeff Atwood on technical blogging. This is a great series for anyone who likes writing. Click on that. Write that blog. It's on substack, which isn't great, but.
Leo Laporte [00:26:14]:
What. So you do some stuff on substack.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:17]:
I. No, no.
Leo Laporte [00:26:19]:
This is somebody writing about you. I'm sorry.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:21]:
I recommend everybody leave substack.
Leo Laporte [00:26:22]:
Yeah, don't do substack.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:23]:
I'm not of them.
Leo Laporte [00:26:24]:
Yeah, that's a Nazi leadership is not good. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:27]:
I'll just leave it at that. But I get it. As long as content gets out. Just whatever. So scroll down a little bit. Scroll down.
Leo Laporte [00:26:36]:
You should interview with you. Wow. You know, I should have done this interview in writing. What was I thinking? See, I don't do anything in writing. It's so much easier.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:47]:
Go upload it. So last time I was on this up most proud of Stay gold. And then second one is on Parenthood, which I brought up. I said on fatherhood because, okay, real talk, when I was on last, I had not. I had not slept for 48 hours. So as Betsy watched that show, she said they got the full Jeff show and I am sorry I had sleep. So I'm a little more chill.
Leo Laporte [00:27:11]:
So let me. Let me just say something for the chill.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:14]:
But I was extra and I apologize,
Leo Laporte [00:27:16]:
but Jeff was on Intelligent Machines about a month and a half ago. I think you can go back and look at it.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:22]:
Yeah. And what is he.
Leo Laporte [00:27:24]:
It was wild, but it was fun. I thought it was really fun.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:26]:
Everybody said it was fun.
Leo Laporte [00:27:27]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:28]:
No one didn't agree it was fun. It was just. What is wrong with this person? Paris's face was hilarious. The whole show just looking at her face, looking at me was like, what is this?
Leo Laporte [00:27:37]:
Like, was she horrified? What was she.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:38]:
No, no. Just like I've never seen anything like this.
Leo Laporte [00:27:41]:
Yeah. And I just had a lot non plussed.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:44]:
I've never met anyone like you. I hear regularly and I. I will
Leo Laporte [00:27:48]:
say that I have never met anybody like you. But that's, you know, everybody, all of us.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:53]:
I see that of you too.
Leo Laporte [00:27:54]:
Honestly are pretty special and unique snowflakes. But you are a particular kind of snowflake.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:01]:
We tried to pick up ice cream flavor for me and the best we could come up with Funfetti. That weird, fun bay. Of all the flavors that you are,
Leo Laporte [00:28:07]:
the funfetti of coders. Do you still code at all?
Jeff Atwood [00:28:11]:
Not really.
Leo Laporte [00:28:12]:
Do you vibe code?
Jeff Atwood [00:28:15]:
No.
Leo Laporte [00:28:16]:
You do play with AI though, I think.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:19]:
Oh. As a research assistant. Yeah. I heavily research with it.
Leo Laporte [00:28:23]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:23]:
And it's great that way. Ideate.
Leo Laporte [00:28:26]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:26]:
But I. And the thing is, I didn't know this when I went to your show last time, but it is actually true that without the Stack Overflow data set, because it's so high quality, when you're training these LLMs, the quality of the data set matters tremendously. Like the more high quality is it has a powerful power effect. And the Stack Overflow data set is both large and extremely, extremely, you know, detail.
Leo Laporte [00:28:52]:
High quality.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:53]:
Quality.
Leo Laporte [00:28:54]:
We should. We should. For those of you just joining us,
Jeff Atwood [00:28:57]:
so you hear, it's not like a manual. It says do this, do this. But they don't tell you all the bullshit that happens when you do that. Right. They leave that out. But that's on Stack Overflow in the comments and the replies and answers.
Leo Laporte [00:29:06]:
For those who don't know, after Jeff did this blogging for a few years, I was leading up to this, he liked the comments and started thinking about comments. Met up with a guy named Joel Spolsky who ran a software company called Fog Creek Software. It was wonderful. Joel's an amazing person.
Jeff Atwood [00:29:22]:
I'm a great admirer of Joel's blog post. Still am.
Leo Laporte [00:29:24]:
Yeah. You both became kind of friends over blogging and we did. Who came up with the idea that, you know, we should do a website where people coders ask their questions and get them answered.
Jeff Atwood [00:29:36]:
It was Joel's idea. I'm not a great random idea person. I'm more of the execution person that gets the thing done versus the blue sky ideating. That's not necessarily my skill.
Leo Laporte [00:29:47]:
Stack Overflow was born out of that. That idea.
Jeff Atwood [00:29:50]:
Well, there was a frustration with Experts Exchange, which just has a very unfortunate name unless you put a dash in it. Because it was kind of like a question and answer site for programmers, but it was like used car sales.
Leo Laporte [00:30:02]:
Wait a minute. Expert sex change.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:05]:
They're in San Luis Obispo and they're still around.
Leo Laporte [00:30:08]:
I never thought.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:08]:
But no one really knows about them anymore because that's how you know you've won. Because nobody even knows the other thing anymore. It's just forgotten.
Leo Laporte [00:30:16]:
Unless you put a dash in it. It's not the same.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:19]:
And it roughly did that. It would show up in search results, but it was super annoying because it would pretend to hide the answer. But you can't do that. Google won't let you do that.
Leo Laporte [00:30:27]:
I remember those days.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:28]:
All the way down.
Leo Laporte [00:30:29]:
You would do a search.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:30]:
It's all the way down. They would get the answer. And he's like, how about that? Without all the bad. And I was like, great. Because I wanted something where I can involve all the energy I had. I had 40,000 subscribers when I turned on RSS, because I don't care. I had 40,000 subscribers. That's like a small city.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:48]:
I was like, I could go to work and have this minor effect, or I could talk to these 40,000 people and have a massive effect. Yeah. What's my real job? It's like Clark Kenner, Superman.
Leo Laporte [00:30:57]:
I mean, so Joel said, let's do Experts Exchange, but without all the.
Jeff Atwood [00:31:02]:
And I love that idea because I've been talking to people I admired saying, look, I have this energy in the blog and I want to build something with it. I don't be a talking head, just talking, talking, talking. Yeah, I'm tired of that. I want to do some stuff. I like talking, but I like doing even better. And, you know, it's necessary to talk to get to where you are. But like, do, do, do, and then iterate. That's where the magic is.
Leo Laporte [00:31:23]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:31:23]:
And so we got started. There wasn't really any money. I was just paying. I pulled in Jeff Das, Jared Dixon first, then Jeff Dalgas. These are people I worked with at previous jobs that I liked a lot. And I was paying like a thousand dollars a month on my unicorn checks because it wasn't. We had money. And then Joel put in 10k, Michael Pryor put in 10k, and then I put in 10k to form a company.
Jeff Atwood [00:31:48]:
And there wasn't really money until we got approached by venture capitalists. And I took that.
Leo Laporte [00:31:55]:
But was there advertising? How was it monetized?
Jeff Atwood [00:31:57]:
Well, we were trying advertising and oh, my God, there was a Stack Overflow and Meta Stack Overflow. Because it was kind of like Fight Club. It's like, I don't want you to talk about Stack Overflow on Stack Overflow. But they kept on doing it. They kept doing it.
Leo Laporte [00:32:09]:
That's what happened.
Jeff Atwood [00:32:10]:
We're going to set up a PhD. I was like, you have defeated me. I will not allow PHP anywhere near my body or brain.
Leo Laporte [00:32:18]:
That's what happened. The first 10 years of podcasting. Podcasts were just about podcasts. It's what happens so people were taught. So you created Meta, which was the conversation about Stack Overflow.
Jeff Atwood [00:32:29]:
There's something else here, though. That's where your leadership forms and our whole concept was, you know, we're doing it with the community. It's not like, I am Mark Zuckerberg and I own your ass and you'll do whatever I say.
Leo Laporte [00:32:39]:
You'll do what I say.
Jeff Atwood [00:32:39]:
Basically, meta. It's more like, hey, I. Y' all are the ones doing the work. Let's do it together, right? Tell us how to make this better for you. Tell us how to make it better for everyone.
Leo Laporte [00:32:48]:
But if you think about it, Stack Overflow was totally dependent on its users. All the content came from the users.
Jeff Atwood [00:32:55]:
And so is Meta, So is Facebook. It's.
Leo Laporte [00:32:59]:
So is all social media. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:01]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:33:01]:
But they don't acknowledge it. They don't acknowledge it. You're there. You're a content farm for them.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:08]:
I care because I like these people. They're interesting.
Leo Laporte [00:33:13]:
You said early on you understood really
Jeff Atwood [00:33:15]:
good, boring jobs, but are incredible programmers. Do you know what advantage that is in hiring when you have that access to that? That was one of the things we started selling. I was like, hey, look at this programmer. He's in Dipstick, Iowa, but he's amazing. Or she. Whoever. They're in this random county and the Internet happens. And as long as you're okay with people not being, you know, 50 miles from New York City or 50 miles from certain important city that everybody has to be in for reasons.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:43]:
I get so tired of that. Yeah, I mean, I get it. Tokyo's nice, New York City's nice, but
Leo Laporte [00:33:47]:
we don't have to anymore. That's the beauty of it.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:49]:
Yeah, and San Francisco is nice, but I don't want to live in a big city. I just. It's not me. I want to be some intermediate state. I want to be on the sticks, necessarily. Although Sticks is getting very sophisticated because of the Internet, by the way.
Leo Laporte [00:33:59]:
People want to live in the sticks. They should be able to live in the sticks. They should be able to live on an island, on a boat, wherever they want to be. Now, thanks to the Internet, they can still work. It's great. I have a little Starlink mini that I could basically do these shows from anywhere.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:15]:
How come you don't take me in your boat? Is it because you don't love me?
Leo Laporte [00:34:17]:
Leo, I don't have a boat.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:18]:
I thought you had a boat.
Leo Laporte [00:34:19]:
I wish I had a boat. Let's get a boat. Jeff, you and I will get a fishing boat.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:23]:
No, no, only if Burke wants it.
Leo Laporte [00:34:26]:
Burke, do you want a boat? Burke might call in now to say. Yeah. So this is brilliant. So you and Joel created Stack Overflow, Sort of.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:37]:
To sort of annoying thing with something that was built correctly. Creative Commons. So all the data you put in cannot be stolen from you.
Leo Laporte [00:34:45]:
That's huge.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:46]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:34:46]:
Because look what happened to IMDb.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:48]:
Yep. Joel brought cdd. And he's right. Million percent agreement. We were both. I mean, we agreed on most things, Joel and I. Not everything, but mostly we did. Certainly about the main stuff.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:00]:
We did. For sure.
Leo Laporte [00:35:02]:
But a venture capitalist did come along.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:05]:
Yeah. And I took the meeting just because. Well, I don't know. And Joel at the time was like, no, I hate venture capitalist. Hard no. Hard, no. Hard no. But then maybe this makes sense because this is clearly getting really big and we could use the resources.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:19]:
And if we can't, you can only
Leo Laporte [00:35:20]:
scale so far on unicorn checks.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:22]:
I can't pay everybody. And Joel had just done a big remodel of the offices, so he didn't have much time for that particular case.
Leo Laporte [00:35:31]:
How many people are working there now at that time?
Jeff Atwood [00:35:34]:
At Fog Creek?
Leo Laporte [00:35:35]:
No, no. Oh, you're talking about Fog Creek. He just remodeled.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:38]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:35:38]:
Okay.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:39]:
Yeah. No, no. We were fully remote.
Leo Laporte [00:35:41]:
Oh. There was no Stack Overflow Office. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:44]:
I mean, eventually Joel wants to have an office and I agree there's utility for an office.
Leo Laporte [00:35:49]:
Whose idea was the name, by the way? I love the name.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:52]:
What's that?
Leo Laporte [00:35:53]:
Whose idea was the name Stack Overflow?
Jeff Atwood [00:35:56]:
Go to my blog site.
Leo Laporte [00:35:57]:
And I know it was a poll. Look, I've read that, but.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:00]:
Ah, you're.
Leo Laporte [00:36:01]:
You're leading. Look at you. I'm leading you.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:03]:
Look at you doing your job so well.
Leo Laporte [00:36:06]:
I know the answer.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:07]:
I don't.
Leo Laporte [00:36:09]:
If I ask you a question, it's not because I don't know. It's because I think it's interesting. I may not know, but it's interesting for people to know. Was this your idea? It's a great name.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:20]:
I just don't know.
Leo Laporte [00:36:23]:
Are you looking it up so you could find.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:24]:
But I didn't have the name of that point, so it wasn't that colorful. Poll. I'm excuse Google for this. Sorry. Coding Horror.
Leo Laporte [00:36:34]:
Which is also a great name. I think you're good at names is what I think.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:38]:
Name Stack Overflow. Help Name our website. There you go. These are the words that I couldn't. So if you could bring that up on your screen.
Leo Laporte [00:36:48]:
Yes, I shall.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:49]:
On the con.
Leo Laporte [00:36:51]:
Oops. I'm on the.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:52]:
You have the con.
Leo Laporte [00:36:52]:
I have the con. Unfortunately, I can't even give you the con.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:56]:
No, no. Do not give me the con. Don't. Even if I ask for don't, would it be trouble? Don't do it.
Leo Laporte [00:37:02]:
Would we have trouble?
Jeff Atwood [00:37:03]:
Definitely regret it.
Leo Laporte [00:37:07]:
You know what I will bring up, though, while we're talking and while I'm doing some stuff, I have a lot of clicking to do. I will put the chat up because you're right about Community. Right? It's all about Community.
Jeff Atwood [00:37:17]:
Yes. So, hello, Community.
Leo Laporte [00:37:20]:
Did I misspell Chief Twit? I did, Leo.
Jeff Atwood [00:37:22]:
It's just. Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:37:24]:
No, I agree. I am not. I am not the be all and end all. I'm with you. I think the whole thing is all about community.
Jeff Atwood [00:37:32]:
Oh, and I got sent a thing where Mike Arrington was being a complete dick to you about.
Leo Laporte [00:37:38]:
You saw that one, huh?
Jeff Atwood [00:37:39]:
Yeah. And I was like. Because we were talking about that and he said, I know. This weird thing happened. All that tells me is Erick's asshole a complete. It always has been. Yeah, Leo, that was.
Leo Laporte [00:37:51]:
I didn't know.
Jeff Atwood [00:37:54]:
And I already knew that.
Leo Laporte [00:37:57]:
Who named Stack Overflow? All right, I'm gonna find that. No matches. Found.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:03]:
No. No. Name. Help Name our website. I just said this.
Leo Laporte [00:38:06]:
I know. Help name our.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:09]:
You're like Betsy. You never listen to me.
Leo Laporte [00:38:11]:
I am listening, but I don't have a memory.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:12]:
Don't. Shut up.
Leo Laporte [00:38:13]:
No, no, I listened to you.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:15]:
Oh, let me show the card I mailed. Leo, you're wrangling so well on the previous show.
Leo Laporte [00:38:21]:
Focused is why I have it here somewhere.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:23]:
Well, Leo's taking a ridiculously long time to grandpa Internet stuff. I'm gonna show you. Okay. This is a card I made.
Leo Laporte [00:38:31]:
And Leo, I didn't get one of those cards.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:34]:
I wish I had because the mail didn't arrive. What is up with you? All's mail.
Leo Laporte [00:38:37]:
It says, jeff, please shut the F up. I love you.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:41]:
I've said that word several times already, so I know you're gonna. I don't know. Whatever. It's okay.
Leo Laporte [00:38:46]:
I don't want kids ears to be little shell like ears are small.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:50]:
Children really listening to show?
Leo Laporte [00:38:52]:
No, but I want them to if they want to. In this case, probably not.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:55]:
Okay, so check this out. It's neat as I work on the UI prototype.
Leo Laporte [00:39:01]:
You wrote this in what language? C C. C Net. That's right. I've been brainstorming names for the website we're building. I've surveyed some of the finest minds in the software developing development community for very Small values.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:17]:
Fine.
Leo Laporte [00:39:18]:
Naming a website is hard. Really, really hard.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:21]:
Naming things is hard.
Leo Laporte [00:39:22]:
Humbledeveloper.com was a big.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:25]:
These are a bunch that we ideated on fellow whackers.
Leo Laporte [00:39:32]:
Dereference. Still, I really like it. The 25% of the vote, the largest vote, stackoverflow.com.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:40]:
that was a clearly. That was a good, clear winner.
Leo Laporte [00:39:42]:
You let them choose it.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:43]:
And the cool thing is we owned all these names and anybody who wanted them, I would just give them to them if they were a programmer.
Leo Laporte [00:39:48]:
Nice. You're very. You've always been a generous person.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:52]:
Well, if you can be generous, I think you should be. Yeah, I mean, I agree.
Leo Laporte [00:39:56]:
Why hold on to it?
Jeff Atwood [00:39:58]:
I mean, what's the point of money? Just sit there and look at it. Yay, I'm rich. Shouldn't it be doing something for someone? I mean, just an idea.
Leo Laporte [00:40:07]:
So actually, Stack Overflow became Stack.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:10]:
We could make a money bin. A money bin.
Leo Laporte [00:40:13]:
A money bin.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:13]:
We'll dive into the money. Like,
Leo Laporte [00:40:16]:
we had one of those at rsac. It was one of those booths where they have a blower and a bunch of dollar bills blowing. And you jump in and you have 60 seconds to.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:24]:
I used to watch that show when I came home from school. I have a distinct memory of that. I watched it every time. That was hilarious. And it was really hard to get the money.
Leo Laporte [00:40:33]:
It's harder than you think.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:35]:
One woman was like. She was jamming it and she wore a bunch of baggy clothes that had a lot of ruffles. And that was awesome. She had a good strat. She had the ruffles filled.
Leo Laporte [00:40:46]:
Good. So you got a name. It became Stack Exchange eventually. Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:52]:
Well, the idea is it became a generalization issue of like, well, if this is working for programming, what else could it work for? And what we found out, and there were some failed experiments here. And Joel pushed this, and I like this. It was Area 51, where you would propose a new site using that engine. And you would have to come up with potential questions and prove that it would work. Like, okay, what will these questions be? It was a neat sort of almost democratic process of like, okay, you want a new state? Well, where will that state be? What will the government be? What will the functions be? And I love that system. It's called Area 51. It's still there. If you search for Area 51, Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange, you'll get it.
Jeff Atwood [00:41:33]:
And a bunch of sites came through that. And what we ultimately found out is this engine is best for stuff that's Based on data, facts and science. And the one where it's not, and it's really annoying, they push it through is where it's just like opiniony stuff kind of. It works, but it's just. It's Reddit. Reddit.
Leo Laporte [00:41:52]:
It's called Reddit.
Jeff Atwood [00:41:53]:
Yeah. And it's like learning by accident. It's just. And what I used to really resent was the ones where on. On the reading or whatever it was, they would come up with these search questions. Like, I remember this book that had this and this and this in it. I'm like, this is not what the engine is for. You know, I mean, I get it, it's fun, but it's like, ah, it just bugged me.
Jeff Atwood [00:42:13]:
I have a blogger. It's like, please don't do this.
Leo Laporte [00:42:16]:
Early on with stack overflow, people could vote up and down questions. So the idea was the best answer, or rather answers. So the best answers would come up to the surface, right? Yes, that was also smart.
Jeff Atwood [00:42:27]:
And that was a hybrid of a couple systems. You know, Reddit, dig, Wikipedia, blogs to some extent and forums. And since you're talking some back and forth, but very. The comments are supposed to be like post it notes, not permanent record stuff. It's like notations that eventually get edited into the post. Not this long back and forth. You suck. You suck.
Jeff Atwood [00:42:49]:
First of all. No, but not a lot of debate. But just what happens? This. Why that. Get that in the post, man. Edit the post. Because almost anyone can edit.
Leo Laporte [00:42:58]:
Did you have to do a lot of moderation?
Jeff Atwood [00:43:01]:
We built extensive moderation systems. Yeah. I wanted, you know, you got to design for evil basically out of the gate because you don't want evil. But it's going to happen at some point, right? Somebody's going to get pissed off. Because people love getting pissed off at each other. I mean, it just happens. What do you do? And then there's fights. So you gotta have some way of mediating those fights and, you know, chilling everybody out.
Leo Laporte [00:43:26]:
Is that the hardest problem that you solve?
Jeff Atwood [00:43:28]:
It was fine for a long time. Yeah, for a long, long time. Because a lot of the people there. Because I think it's so focused on the task. The more general you make it, the more you get.
Leo Laporte [00:43:38]:
I agree.
Jeff Atwood [00:43:39]:
Like, for example, if you have a video about Taylor Swift, the comments will be disaster. If you have a video about some narrow Lego set that only five people in the world have, the comments will be incredible.
Leo Laporte [00:43:48]:
Right?
Jeff Atwood [00:43:48]:
Like really detailed, really specific. It's a really narrow interest niche.
Leo Laporte [00:43:52]:
We found that with our shows as well. The more narrow they are, the more. The better they do.
Jeff Atwood [00:43:57]:
It's just true. Which is why I like, you know, interest driven graphs better than people driven.
Leo Laporte [00:44:02]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:02]:
You know, I get it. We have family and friends. That's fine. But, like, interests are what map people better, I think.
Leo Laporte [00:44:06]:
Oh, that's really interesting. That's a good point.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:08]:
You know, who am I having sex with or, you know, who am I related to? Don't always map to those interests.
Leo Laporte [00:44:14]:
They should, but that's a very good point. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:18]:
And shared interest is huge. I love teamwork.
Leo Laporte [00:44:22]:
You eventually you sold it.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:24]:
Well, I didn't. I left because I had twins and I was basically having a nervous breakdown at that point. As Joel said, I was doing the jobs of three people, probably arguably four or five.
Leo Laporte [00:44:34]:
Were you the chief coder for this?
Jeff Atwood [00:44:36]:
No, no, no, no, no, no. I did some code, but everybody I brought in was at least as good as me or better.
Leo Laporte [00:44:43]:
Yeah, you're coder.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:44]:
I am not an elite coder by any stretch of the imagination.
Leo Laporte [00:44:46]:
Isn't that funny? Because people, I think of you as. As one of the voices, one of the chief voices in coding.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:51]:
Well, I advocate for code that doesn't kill you in so many different ways. You know, it's survivable code. Ideally, no code at all.
Leo Laporte [00:45:01]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:01]:
That's the best code. It's done.
Leo Laporte [00:45:03]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:03]:
Right. I mean, it's a bit Zen statement, but it's true. So I'm an advocate for, you know, good engineering, good process, and a process that recognizes that we're human and we should do this together and we should actually kind of like each other, even it's better together. I mean, how radical? How radical?
Leo Laporte [00:45:23]:
It's funny, though, writing. There. There are some jobs in the world. Coding's one of them. Writing's another one. Photography's another one. They're solo. Solo.
Leo Laporte [00:45:30]:
And I have to tell you, painting.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:32]:
A friend of mine, I can't say who it is, my friend is at Apple and he hasn't been responding to me, and I'm worried about him because when people withdraw like that, watch out when they're not responding. It's. It's not good. And I was like, man, I love you, man. What's going on? Come on. He's like, I'm at Apple and my manager is a narcissist. And I'm like, man, get over here, get over here. Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:58]:
Like. And he is this weekend. I want to make him come.
Leo Laporte [00:46:00]:
Oh, good. Take care of him. Good.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:02]:
Well, and, you know, I want to tell everyone when I was on the show. Leo did something incredible for me. In the first moments, I made you cry. Well, that was interesting. That's interesting. Irrelevant. This is more important. Almost the first lines of that show, if you really listen, almost immediately.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:23]:
Well, there's a pre show where we talk. Y' all didn't get to see that, but almost. To me, it's like, Leo's like, you remind me of someone. And he's like, do you know Andy Hurts film? I'm like, no, because I skipped the Mac. Really. I was on the Amiga and I just hopped over it. I knew about it and I like the engineering. And Bill Budge watches the show and I'm a friend of Bill's.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:46]:
I brought the. I have that up there. We're not going to do more Prop county right now. Soon. But now. And he's like, would you like to meet Andy Hertzfeld? And I stopped reading Emilia and press reply and said, hell, yes.
Leo Laporte [00:46:57]:
This was after the interview.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:59]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:47:00]:
Nice.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:00]:
Bill knows me and we're great friends. Bill.
Leo Laporte [00:47:02]:
So when I made that connection, Bill's watching and he says, oh. Oh, you want to meet Andy.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:06]:
And I talked to Andy and he said, I was only on Leo's show twice. And how did you. How did you. You fucking maniac, man. How did you do this? It was delightful. That was amazing.
Leo Laporte [00:47:18]:
Because you are very much like Andy Hurtsville.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:20]:
I am. And like, not in, like, personality, not like this, but, like, in the way that we want to do. What?
Leo Laporte [00:47:26]:
You're very. You're both. I said this to you. I'll say it in person. You're very pure, and I can't even
Jeff Atwood [00:47:31]:
tell you all the right things this man has done.
Leo Laporte [00:47:33]:
Oh, Andy's amazing. No, I know Andy's amazing, but so are you. And in fact, you're doing something really right. And now I want to get to that.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:41]:
I felt less lonely after meeting this man.
Leo Laporte [00:47:43]:
Oh, I'm so glad I did.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:44]:
Don't.
Leo Laporte [00:47:45]:
I felt less lonely. I'm glad that that connection happened. Thank you, Bill Budge. Thank you.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:49]:
Yeah, no, really. Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Andy.
Leo Laporte [00:47:51]:
I didn't know Bill watched the show because One of the best.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:54]:
Because we haven't done it, but there's something else we're going to do. It's going to be incredible.
Leo Laporte [00:47:58]:
What's that?
Jeff Atwood [00:47:58]:
I can't talk about it.
Leo Laporte [00:48:00]:
It's a secret.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:01]:
Well, I'll give you a hint if
Leo Laporte [00:48:03]:
you go to folklore.org I love folklore.org that's Andy. Yep.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:07]:
There's a certain character there. I'm not gonna say who it is.
Leo Laporte [00:48:13]:
Really.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:14]:
Yeah. And it's one of those people. That's all I can say. Ah. The other hint I'll give you is Andy wrote this whole site. Pretty much, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:48:25]:
This is an amazing site.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:27]:
It is. It's great. It's fantastic. It's just good stories about people working together.
Leo Laporte [00:48:32]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:32]:
And when you work together, what works and what doesn't?
Leo Laporte [00:48:35]:
It ended up being this book, which is a wonderful book. Although you don't. I mean, you can get the book, which I do have.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:41]:
I recommend folklore.org over the book, but I don't.
Leo Laporte [00:48:43]:
The website is incredible. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:45]:
I just. The Mac frustrated me because I couldn't afford it. I wanted it, but I couldn't afford it. And I get it. The fact that they could bring it down to that price was a miracle.
Leo Laporte [00:48:54]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:54]:
Because it was so advanced, you know.
Leo Laporte [00:48:56]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:58]:
I wish I could tell you more on future shows. I will. Hopefully. There's pieces of work I haven't done to get it going. I have been granted permission to do it, but I gotta start.
Leo Laporte [00:49:06]:
There are some people and I wish they were better known or maybe they had existed earlier in the media, later in the media cycle. People like Jeff Raskin. Alan K. Jeff Raskin is incredible.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:22]:
Alan Kay posted on Stack Overflow. Of course, we had to close this off topic.
Leo Laporte [00:49:26]:
No, I read the post. It's a very post. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:29]:
Alan K. My God.
Leo Laporte [00:49:31]:
Those are. Those are two people
Jeff Atwood [00:49:34]:
over here. I'm not going to get it. It's on that bookshelf.
Leo Laporte [00:49:37]:
No, he's brilliant.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:37]:
Actually, it might be that one. This is more my favorite stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:49:40]:
That's all the books you favorite.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:43]:
This is. This is the atm. Let's do it.
Leo Laporte [00:49:46]:
Let's do a tour of your.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:48]:
Wait at him there. You reversed me, man. Stop that.
Leo Laporte [00:49:52]:
No, I put you back where you belong.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:54]:
Oh, you did.
Leo Laporte [00:49:55]:
You were reversed when you joined us. I had. I had to reverse you back.
Jeff Atwood [00:49:58]:
Who's reversed who here, pal?
Leo Laporte [00:50:00]:
So. So Joel sold Stack Overflow, not you.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:03]:
Joel and Prashanth. Prashanth is a CEO. A great CEO. I mean they really need someone who was a good. Like the business and I. Were you doing.
Leo Laporte [00:50:14]:
You left in roughly when? 2020.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:18]:
2012. When we had the twins.
Leo Laporte [00:50:20]:
You left in 2012 and what were you doing? Just raising the raising.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:24]:
I sat aside and cried a lot and pushed publish on that blog post. That was the one after. On Parenthood. It was.
Leo Laporte [00:50:32]:
Yeah, I forget. So what were you doing then after you left in 2012?
Jeff Atwood [00:50:41]:
Dealing with two babies at the same time.
Leo Laporte [00:50:44]:
Just raising the kids? Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:45]:
Some people call it twins. I call it two babies at the same time.
Leo Laporte [00:50:48]:
You already had one.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:49]:
It is.
Leo Laporte [00:50:49]:
And. And everybody who's been a parent knows. You think, oh, I'll have a second one. I'll make it easier because they'll play together. It's more than twice as hard. I can't imagine it's X squared having twins on top of a kid. Henry was what, three or four at the time?
Jeff Atwood [00:51:06]:
Yeah. We did try to time it so that, you know, too many. And Henry was great on the whole thing.
Leo Laporte [00:51:11]:
Did he? Did Henry. How did Henry feel about the twins?
Jeff Atwood [00:51:16]:
He. Oh, on parenthood. Is that post, actually.
Leo Laporte [00:51:19]:
Oh, okay.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:20]:
Well, no, no. When I announced the twins, I find this. So Henry was great. Betsy had preclampsia, and preclampsia is risky because it can turn really fast. So for the last two months, she was in the hospital. Ultimate.
Leo Laporte [00:51:34]:
Yeah. He's bed rest.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:35]:
And Henry and I would drive over every night. Oh, notice there are a lot of weird massage places open at night, which I had not noticed before. I was like, massage, massage. I was like, why are there so many massage places?
Leo Laporte [00:51:43]:
I don't even know.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:44]:
I don't know. It was weird. It was like so many. But it was. It was night. It was like, okay, whatever. And I would drive with him, park and go in and hang out with Betsy and watch, you know, play with toys. And one time was really cool.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:57]:
I parked in the garage. I don't want to park. Park. And I finished parking in the van and Henry in the back goes, good job, Dada. I was like, yeah, yeah, good job. That's my teammate. That's awesome. This is hanging out.
Leo Laporte [00:52:10]:
This is a great post. And I think really, your posts, despite the name coding horror, are best when they are deeply personal like this. I mean, they're really good. You really. Because you give of yourself and your. In your blog. You're very present. Look at that.
Leo Laporte [00:52:27]:
49 comments.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:27]:
We're having two babies. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:52:29]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:30]:
But there was another one for Henry. I'm trying to find it. It had. Oh, it had. Where he's holding it. Where he's holding. Okay. Do you remember the Mac versus PC?
Leo Laporte [00:52:37]:
You sent me this picture.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:38]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, let me tell this story.
Leo Laporte [00:52:40]:
Okay.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:41]:
Please. So that's Henry at birth. And scroll down to show them the image of the mat. So there's an ad where they're getting each other Christmas presents. You know, John. John Hodgman being a complete dork. Although he's very cool. And he's Windows name.
Leo Laporte [00:52:56]:
Oh, I can't remember, but I.
Jeff Atwood [00:52:58]:
He's funny too. They're both really great comedians. He's the Mac and PC gives him. I got you a gift too. A C GUI programming. So when Henry was born, I made one. It's like O for Windows, some horrible book.
Leo Laporte [00:53:11]:
Oh God.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:12]:
You know, from Microsoft Press. And I print it out, put the green room. Here you go. Henry set for life. And then I got another picture of him recently. I gave him a Chromebook. The Chromebook that you recommended. And I gave.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:25]:
I don't know if you could bring up that picture.
Leo Laporte [00:53:28]:
Let's see if I can find it.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:30]:
Well, it's not on my blog. I'll leave it to you.
Leo Laporte [00:53:32]:
Oh, you sent to me. Oh, okay. Well, yeah, I'm not sure I want to bring up the whole channel.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:38]:
Copy it to like a file and bring if you can. I really want them to see this because it's funny.
Leo Laporte [00:53:46]:
It's funny. I will have.
Jeff Atwood [00:53:47]:
I sent it to Gruber as a joke and I said, this is Joke Gruber. And there's a. There's a. He had an iPhone in his pocket. There's an iPad behind him. We're Apple to the hilt. And I was looking my boy. I got him the best gift I could ever give him.
Leo Laporte [00:54:03]:
I saw that, I thought, oh my God.
Jeff Atwood [00:54:07]:
Oh my God. It was the one you recommended too. Oh my God. I apologize. This is good. Oh my God.
Leo Laporte [00:54:14]:
Oh, you know what? This is bad because we're on signal. I think it's deleted.
Jeff Atwood [00:54:20]:
Okay, okay, audience, you need to see this. Just. Just let us, let us be old people using phones for women here, you have to put it up.
Leo Laporte [00:54:27]:
It's deleted.
Jeff Atwood [00:54:28]:
I know, I'll put it back in all.
Leo Laporte [00:54:31]:
Everything older than a week is gone.
Jeff Atwood [00:54:33]:
Guys, I promise you this will be worth it. Sorry guys. Whatever audience you are, guys and gals.
Leo Laporte [00:54:39]:
Well, and people have a third mammals denomination. I think they're all mammals.
Jeff Atwood [00:54:43]:
Whoever wants to watch the show?
Leo Laporte [00:54:45]:
I don't think we have any invertebrates watching the show. You're watching A conversation with Jeff Atwood. We will get around to the main purpose for this conversation in a little bit. But actually it's kind of fun just wandering down Memory Lane with Mr. Atwood. It is creator of not merely Stack Overflow, but the forum software that we use that we love called Discourse not written in php. I think it's the only forum software not written in PHP and having suffered under PHP BB and other similar God awful code.
Jeff Atwood [00:55:27]:
I'm glad to hear that because I'm encountering a Lot of Discourse in the wild, which is great. That's exciting.
Leo Laporte [00:55:32]:
This course is great. We're, we're very happy and as I said, I told you, John o' Bacon recommended, he said you have to use.
Jeff Atwood [00:55:37]:
Jono's a great guy.
Leo Laporte [00:55:39]:
Yeah, he's the king of community. And he said you gotta have a Community A and it's gotta be Discord B, Discourse B and Hawk, who's running
Jeff Atwood [00:55:47]:
the company now, we hired her away from the company she was at that was used in Discourse. We liked her so much, we're like, get over here Hawk, get on in here.
Leo Laporte [00:55:57]:
So you're still involved in that? You're not involved with staff overflow very lightly?
Jeff Atwood [00:56:01]:
Extremely. I try to like not bother them. I am getting a bunch of really cool stickers made for Discourse. I don't have any here to show unfortunately.
Leo Laporte [00:56:12]:
But, but the newest thing, your use, call it, your third startup is RGM I I. Yeah, that's where Stay Gold comes from, right?
Jeff Atwood [00:56:22]:
Staygold Us is the short memorable version that'll take you to that site and hopefully, excuse me, hopefully, the site is self explanatory and anyone who goes to that site, when you fill out the contact form, it goes to me. So if you really want to tell me something, please. People are hesitant because they're like, oh, you're just going, it's going to me. I read everything and we don't get that much feedback from that site.
Leo Laporte [00:56:43]:
So the premise behind this and you've, you've put your money, if you have
Jeff Atwood [00:56:46]:
feedback of how it can be made better, if you're just going to tell me it sucks and I'm wrong, maybe keep that to yourself because. Okay, but like if you have like something that you think could be better, please, because it should be understandable.
Leo Laporte [00:56:59]:
The thing that was very dramatic to me is that a large portion of the look, we're one of the richest countries countries in the history of the world. I mean, immeasurable natural resources, immeasurable brain capital. Really an amazing country. And yet in this rich, rich land of ours, between 25 and 50% of our people are underwater. They don't make enough to pay for food, rent, clothing. You know, I've done some research on that figure and it's at least 25%, which even that is, it's more than it should be. If a quarter of our population, and you know, here's a corroborating statistic. Last month, actually the month of March, 25% of all the buy now pay later loans were for groceries.
Leo Laporte [00:57:56]:
These are People who cannot afford to buy groceries. And they're taking out loans, loans they'll never be able to pay off, by the way, to buy groceries. So there's an issue in this country, and the issue is income inequality. Elon Musk is about to become the first trillionaire. Nobody needs a trillion dollars. Nobody needs a billion dollars.
Jeff Atwood [00:58:17]:
But imagine what we could do with that trillion dollars for everyone if we had it.
Leo Laporte [00:58:23]:
Yeah, well, and the defense budget is, in this country, a trillion and a half. So there.
Jeff Atwood [00:58:30]:
I'm just saying, put the money to work.
Leo Laporte [00:58:31]:
There is money. And your idea, and I think this is maybe a little controversial with some people, is a guaranteed minimum income. Sometimes they call it universal basic income. But this isn't the same thing exactly.
Jeff Atwood [00:58:44]:
Well, no, universal is, I think, ridiculous.
Leo Laporte [00:58:47]:
Nope. Not everybody needs this. Well, it's like a minimum wage. Some people will make more than the minimum wage, but there should be a bottom, a low end.
Jeff Atwood [00:58:56]:
You help the people that need the help the most.
Leo Laporte [00:58:59]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:58:59]:
Just like if there's a fire in the street, do you spray water all over the city?
Leo Laporte [00:59:03]:
No. Why would you do that? Put out the fire.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:05]:
And also conceptually, giving money to everyone devalues it for everyone. Well, if everyone gets it, they're not really helping me. They're just paying a fee.
Leo Laporte [00:59:14]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:15]:
It's not for me. It's for everyone.
Leo Laporte [00:59:16]:
So your idea, I really like guaranteed minimum income, is that everybody should have
Jeff Atwood [00:59:21]:
a base level offensive to me. That we would give money to Elon Musk. That's like the last person I want to give money to. Him. I'd like to give something else to him, but not money.
Leo Laporte [00:59:29]:
Not money. He doesn't need it. Now. What I like about Jeff is he's not just rhetoric. You've done this, you're doing three studies right now in three rural areas, one of which. Rural area. Your dad grew up in West Virginia.
Jeff Atwood [00:59:45]:
That's true. And then we knew this would happen. I had him reorder the counties because my dad, you know, and I can say this about myself, doesn't always make the best life choices. I know, but it depends. Some are worse than others. And, you know, he was an alcoholic for a long time, heavy smoker for a long time, but also had these incredible DNA redneck genes. My 23 me report is incredible. I'm a rapid metabolizer.
Jeff Atwood [01:00:18]:
I'm basically immune to thc.
Leo Laporte [01:00:20]:
Well, that's too bad.
Jeff Atwood [01:00:22]:
A good thing in my book.
Leo Laporte [01:00:26]:
I didn't know you could have that.
Jeff Atwood [01:00:27]:
You went from 30% kidney function to 50% the nephrologist said he had never seen that in his entire career. He got better, but he worked really hard at it. He did.
Leo Laporte [01:00:37]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:00:37]:
Well, he also had a partner who was amazing, Liz. And since then, he did pass, which he knew was going to happen. And I'd always planned the. Really interesting. Here he. This is tough because this happened recently.
Leo Laporte [01:00:52]:
We should say it was actually between the time we first interviewed you and now.
Jeff Atwood [01:00:56]:
That's okay. That's okay. I'm figuring this out of fact, because I knew, dad, we said everything we're going to say to each other. I knew it was good. It was really coherent, too. He had a mind that was very sharp all the way, which is a good sign for me, too. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:01:12]:
That's where you got it.
Jeff Atwood [01:01:13]:
But he planned to die at sea because he would make us call Captain John, which is ridiculous, but he wanted to die at sea.
Leo Laporte [01:01:20]:
You know, I kind of understand that. I would love to die at sea. I think that's a good place to die. And he did it, didn't he?
Jeff Atwood [01:01:26]:
And the other way they knew is like, he was. He was ordering food that he wasn't supposed to eat. Ah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:01:31]:
He was on a cruise.
Jeff Atwood [01:01:33]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:01:33]:
Where was he?
Jeff Atwood [01:01:35]:
I don't remember exactly.
Leo Laporte [01:01:36]:
He sent me a picture.
Jeff Atwood [01:01:38]:
In the vast. In the sea. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:01:39]:
Yeah. What a great place to go. That's going back to the mother.
Jeff Atwood [01:01:44]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:01:46]:
So did he. Was he poor as a kid? Did he suffer as a child
Jeff Atwood [01:01:52]:
a lot? Yeah, it was really. I mean, bad. These rural counties, but pretty bad.
Leo Laporte [01:02:00]:
These rural counties are really suffering right now.
Jeff Atwood [01:02:03]:
When we were down there, that's the last time I saw him was in October. We were there launching the GMI program. And I knew that was the last time I see him. It's fine. That was why we were doing it, kind of. And he's like, oh, this is where I walk 11 miles to Princeton to see a movie and then walk 11 miles back. I was like, wow, man. And Liz is like, well, what did you do when you got sick? He's like, he just died again.
Jeff Atwood [01:02:24]:
He didn't say that. He's like, nothing.
Leo Laporte [01:02:27]:
Survival of the fittest.
Jeff Atwood [01:02:28]:
Yeah, I guess it works.
Leo Laporte [01:02:29]:
Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like that these days.
Jeff Atwood [01:02:33]:
And it.
Leo Laporte [01:02:34]:
For a lot of people, but they
Jeff Atwood [01:02:35]:
did spread his ashes. Part of my deal was I don't need to be there. And Liz didn't. Betsy thought she. Liz would. And I was like, I don't think she will. I think she feels the same way I do. And she did.
Jeff Atwood [01:02:46]:
And so I Got some of the ashes and I shipped it. The team Give Directly the suing execution. That's now Dustin Palmer. Laura Keane got promoted to chief of staff, which she's amazing, deserves it all. But Dustin is worked for Code for America and is now head of US operations at GiveDirectly. Great person. Love him.
Leo Laporte [01:03:06]:
So Give Directly. Did you fund and set up Give Directly? Is this your company?
Jeff Atwood [01:03:10]:
No. They've been around a while.
Leo Laporte [01:03:11]:
They have.
Jeff Atwood [01:03:12]:
What I did was look at who's been doing this the longest. It's really them now. They do a lot of stuff outside the US too. They do stuff in the US but they also. It's like a split brain org kind of. And I kind of told Nick. I was like, I think at some point you gotta like figure that out because I, I want to help the whole world. But like our house is on fire kind of like I, I love Africa and I think Africa eventually will be a superpower.
Jeff Atwood [01:03:38]:
But you know, put the oxygen mask on yourself.
Leo Laporte [01:03:41]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:03:42]:
Kind of thing. And plus I just want to do stuff here. There's so much poverty here. Extreme poverty. Like selling your blood to eat poverty. Like the plasma. There's more plasma sales centers than Costcos now. Wow.
Jeff Atwood [01:03:57]:
It's a 4.7 billion dollar industry with B billion.
Leo Laporte [01:04:01]:
This is people donating plasma for money for cash so that they have cash to eat.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:07]:
Eat. So they can buy a happy meal.
Leo Laporte [01:04:10]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:10]:
And when I posted that on Mastodon, I got replies. Yeah, that was great. And then on Thursdays my brother could give blood twice. Then we could eat more. And then I cried some more.
Leo Laporte [01:04:19]:
Yeah. Wow.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:21]:
Because that's my superpower. Thanks.
Leo Laporte [01:04:26]:
So how does a guarantee they're spreading the ashes? Yes.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:30]:
They just finished that. I could barely look at that email. I looked at. I don't want to look right now. But they spread it as ashes. And our only requirement was there was a post office that at Rock, West Virginia. He called it rock bottom, as in and it is a valley. Dad's funny.
Jeff Atwood [01:04:47]:
He had to have a dark sense of humor that I enjoyed. Betsy doesn't like it so much. And not too much. I get it. But I enjoy it. And I called it the last season of the John Atwood show. Oh, it's gonna be a real banger. And it was, it was, it really was because we would.
Jeff Atwood [01:05:03]:
We won capitalism. And then we went back and made it better for everyone. And I don't think it's better than that for me.
Leo Laporte [01:05:10]:
So it's. The studies are ongoing right now, but what are the initial Results. What are you finding?
Jeff Atwood [01:05:16]:
Well, on the Argument blog, we're trying to be very public, and the initial positive results, you have to opt into the research. It's not mandatory, but the opt in rates are extremely high, like ridiculously high.
Leo Laporte [01:05:28]:
Oh, that's interesting. People want to talk about it.
Jeff Atwood [01:05:30]:
I told them, I said, I know what you can do here. I come from here. I know what you're capable of if you just give the room to do it and the means to do it. And I said, I want you to show everybody what you can do so that we can help everyone.
Leo Laporte [01:05:46]:
These stories on the RGMI blog are really interesting.
Jeff Atwood [01:05:51]:
Well, that's the research studies from before.
Leo Laporte [01:05:53]:
Right. It's not a lot of money either, is it? I mean, what kind of.
Jeff Atwood [01:05:59]:
It's 15 million to just do the. The study execution.
Leo Laporte [01:06:03]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:03]:
And then 3 million for the research. But you really want the research because. Go to blog at the top, the word blog. You really want scientific proof that this works. Right. So scroll down the voluntary research participation. Click on that, please. And this will show you some data, initial data on how many people opted in to say, hey, I want to help you bring this.
Leo Laporte [01:06:30]:
Wow, look at that. That's amazing.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:31]:
I mean, those rates are incredible.
Leo Laporte [01:06:33]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:33]:
Because they see and people who have struggled are generous. They share more than rich people do by far. Because of course, rich people don't even know struggle. Everything was just given to them. It's like, yeah, shit's easy. Well, well, sir, shit isn't actually easy for people.
Leo Laporte [01:06:50]:
So how much?
Jeff Atwood [01:06:51]:
Maybe.
Leo Laporte [01:06:51]:
So you're giving them a thousand a month? What are you giving them?
Jeff Atwood [01:06:54]:
1500amonth?
Leo Laporte [01:06:55]:
1500amonth.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:56]:
I mean, 16 months.
Leo Laporte [01:06:57]:
For 16.
Jeff Atwood [01:06:58]:
And this, this is another study pointing out that in Oregon for, for unhoused youth that they had a place to sleep and didn't have to sell their blood for money.
Leo Laporte [01:07:07]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [01:07:08]:
As a result of that program.
Leo Laporte [01:07:09]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [01:07:10]:
You know, and the other thing is, you can just run the math on this. I've posted several times on Macedon and other places and LinkedIn. My. I've done some research and if we simply collected a fair tax from billionaires, we could literally eliminate all poverty in this country at the 100% FPL level, which is $15,000 a year. All poverty. We would have zero poverty. We have the means.
Leo Laporte [01:07:35]:
That's really important.
Jeff Atwood [01:07:36]:
We lack the will.
Leo Laporte [01:07:37]:
Say, say this again, if we. At what level? By the way, this is how I met you as Wesley Faulkner, who's a part of your.
Jeff Atwood [01:07:44]:
Wesley's great. He's working with Jeremy Naino, who's. It's fantastic.
Leo Laporte [01:07:50]:
Yeah. And here's Jeff and his family who, who are the program sponsors for this. So what's. So you say this again. If you tax the billion, tax them how much? Like took all their money, fair rate. Not even take all their money, tax them 30%, 40%.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:11]:
Yeah. Some fair rate you could.
Leo Laporte [01:08:13]:
That would be enough to take care, to give. Eliminate all, eliminate all these people who are below the poverty.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:19]:
That's $15,000 a year, but a lot. I mean that's enough to survive. I mean not New York City, but.
Leo Laporte [01:08:25]:
And that's the other thing. It's not a lot of money, is it?
Jeff Atwood [01:08:27]:
I mean it's the difference between sleeping on the street and sleeping not on the street.
Leo Laporte [01:08:31]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:31]:
It's different eating and not eating.
Leo Laporte [01:08:33]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:08:34]:
And I for one think poverty is a bad thing. And you. I'll go on record with that, you know, old man. I know, but like some people, they're like, well, they just want to be in poverty. No one wants, no one wants this.
Leo Laporte [01:08:48]:
No. And there's also. I see this all the time, especially among people who have more. I, it's not. I don't want to share what I have. I, I got this. I worked hard for this. I earned this.
Leo Laporte [01:09:04]:
Why should they have any of what I've got?
Jeff Atwood [01:09:07]:
But it's. What can you buy that would bring the satisfaction of seeing another person lead an amazing life. Right. For my money, that's the best thing I could get. Right. And that makes a much better world. Do you want a world for people just pissed off, working four jobs, barely surviving? How is that a good world? I guess if you're on your private island, it's great.
Leo Laporte [01:09:27]:
You know, America was at its best in the post war period where there was a large and growing middle class there. The poverty line was much lower. There weren't as many super rich.
Jeff Atwood [01:09:39]:
There's a certain year where all this started. 1980. After 1980. Yeah. And I'm not blaming that particular person, but that was intentional. That was a game that they are playing and are playing intentionally.
Leo Laporte [01:09:52]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [01:09:53]:
And I realized that if people don't
Leo Laporte [01:09:55]:
believe that happened in 1980, I think there's no question in there in people's minds now there's a whole.
Jeff Atwood [01:09:59]:
What's going on right now titled something like that. Like 1980 being this year, the special year when things happened. And the whole thing of, you know, the four scary number, scariest words someone can say is I'm here from the government and I'm here to Help. And I think the scariest words I can hear is, I'm. I'm a Republican and I'm here to help. It's like, I don't think that's myself. In other words, I mean, I get it. The Democrats are not doing a great job either.
Jeff Atwood [01:10:25]:
But, like, they're like, this is. Honestly, now, this is not a.
Leo Laporte [01:10:29]:
This is not a partisan issue at this point. This is an issue for America that we have to solve.
Jeff Atwood [01:10:35]:
Do we still respect basic human dignity?
Leo Laporte [01:10:38]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:10:38]:
Do we still respect.
Leo Laporte [01:10:39]:
This is not about conservative, liberal, right or left Democrats.
Jeff Atwood [01:10:43]:
These things I will give no quarter on.
Leo Laporte [01:10:45]:
This is just. These are human needs. And it. It's not right in this nation that so many people are suffering, and it's not suffering because of some flaw in their personality.
Jeff Atwood [01:10:58]:
Except Elon Musk a little.
Leo Laporte [01:11:01]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:11:01]:
Well, just test.
Leo Laporte [01:11:02]:
There's no. Nobody needs to be that rich. Nobody needs to be that rich.
Jeff Atwood [01:11:06]:
And ironically, I think Elon Musk is suffering terribly.
Leo Laporte [01:11:09]:
I don't think he's the happiest man I've ever seen.
Jeff Atwood [01:11:12]:
He's on K all the time.
Leo Laporte [01:11:13]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:11:14]:
And second, like, I don't want anyone to really be hurt, but sometimes you. The bad apple thing. I've written about this on my blog a couple times. One bad actor really can cause a lot of damage. Like, a lot.
Leo Laporte [01:11:27]:
Well, we've structured this country so that money talks.
Jeff Atwood [01:11:30]:
Yeah. Citizens United.
Leo Laporte [01:11:32]:
Yeah. And so if you have enough money, if you can. If you can, for instance, as Elon Musk did, donate a quarter of a billion dollars, you can dictate the direction the company goes in. And when you're a trillionaire, a quarter of a billion dollars is nothing. And so we've set that up. It's not a good thing
Jeff Atwood [01:11:53]:
and poor lesson.
Leo Laporte [01:11:54]:
But I don't want it to be political because I think that politics will get in the way of this. This is just a basic fairness issue. It's not about politics. This is just about basic fairness. It's about helping our fellow.
Jeff Atwood [01:12:08]:
Helping other people and their right to live and have a decent life.
Leo Laporte [01:12:12]:
Yeah. I agree with you.
Jeff Atwood [01:12:14]:
They can't even pursue the American dream, much less have it.
Leo Laporte [01:12:16]:
Right. They can't go to college.
Jeff Atwood [01:12:18]:
That's a tremendous thing.
Leo Laporte [01:12:19]:
They can't pay their medical bills. You know, they're watching 11 months.
Jeff Atwood [01:12:23]:
Giving them money. It's not complicated.
Leo Laporte [01:12:26]:
That's what's surprising. A little bit maybe counterintuitive.
Jeff Atwood [01:12:29]:
I think it's exercise, I think.
Leo Laporte [01:12:31]:
Yeah. I think people think, well, if I give them money, they're going to spend it on drugs and liquor or something. I don't. I think people are a little leery that, oh, you just give them money and that solves it. But it. And it's not even that much money.
Jeff Atwood [01:12:43]:
It does have to be a period of time, I think, so they can. Possibility. You can't just give them, like, you know, lottery winners don't have to. Yeah. So, I mean, dumping a lot of money on someone tends to mess them up.
Leo Laporte [01:12:54]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [01:12:55]:
See also trust fund babies. I'm just saying, that's not a good strat.
Leo Laporte [01:13:00]:
Did it mess you up, Jeff? You got a lot of money dumped on you. How did you keep stuff?
Jeff Atwood [01:13:05]:
It does a little.
Leo Laporte [01:13:06]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:13:06]:
I mean, the main thing is you. You really do stop looking at prices because I don't really buy extravagant stuff. So I bought that PB doll that's here. I don't know if you see the corner here. And my friend Jason was like, that's really cool. How much did it cost? I don't know. I don't know. It wasn't like a billion dollars.
Jeff Atwood [01:13:24]:
It was like a number that would scare me, but I just didn't care because I wanted it and I got it and I don't. I just don't need a lot of stuff, except I definitely need my PV dolls and all this stuff. I need all.
Leo Laporte [01:13:34]:
I. I have never met a more generous person. I was embarrassed. You kept giving me things, and I was like, stop.
Jeff Atwood [01:13:41]:
I'm embarrassed I didn't give you all the stuff I wanted to give you.
Leo Laporte [01:13:45]:
Well, you know, I. I've used.
Jeff Atwood [01:13:47]:
Look at this. And Burke, When Burke was here, he started refusing things, too, and I understood because it's just what you like, what you don't like.
Leo Laporte [01:13:53]:
I. Well, I. I thought about it later, and I feel bad refusing it. I just say thank you. You're a very. He gave me the. I've always wanted one of these terminal things.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:01]:
Oh, thank you. I was going to show that on the show. And that is a great product. I know the. I talked to the founder.
Leo Laporte [01:14:06]:
I thought the founder, though. Somebody said the founder is a little sketch.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:10]:
I have heard that, but I've talked to him. I don't know what. I don't know what stuff.
Leo Laporte [01:14:14]:
This is my. This is my Weight Curtain product.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:16]:
And as a human being, I got no, like, scary vibes.
Leo Laporte [01:14:19]:
Okay.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:20]:
But I don't know.
Leo Laporte [01:14:21]:
It's a cool product and I always wanted one, but I was never going
Jeff Atwood [01:14:24]:
to buy it because I almost never see companies doing everything right. And I think he was this Is so.
Leo Laporte [01:14:29]:
It's an E ink screen that you can program. It's open.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:31]:
I have the color one.
Leo Laporte [01:14:32]:
Yeah, I have the color one too, but not from him. I just bought from Terminal. No, I didn't buy it from Terminal. I just bought it.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:40]:
You show them that. I'm going to get my terminal.
Leo Laporte [01:14:42]:
I bought it from. This is the inky impression 73. And I. And I vibe coded a little.
Jeff Atwood [01:14:50]:
I'm saying vibe coding. Hang up. Please. Stop it. You must stop with this.
Leo Laporte [01:14:55]:
My AI wrote a little routine to update this at 11 in the morning, telling me how generative AI.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:03]:
Maybe your generative AI wrote that.
Leo Laporte [01:15:05]:
Maybe. Maybe using all of the things it learned from Stack overflow.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:11]:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte [01:15:12]:
I mean, I give you credit.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:13]:
Invent that.
Leo Laporte [01:15:15]:
No, I give you credit.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:16]:
And it's good for what it is. But if you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, I agree. You're not going to train crap anymore.
Leo Laporte [01:15:22]:
I agree. You can't do that. And they're trying to say, well, maybe synthetic data will do it. Anyway, it's a Raspberry PI in the back. It's just. Oh, you got a big one.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:35]:
Yeah, I do.
Leo Laporte [01:15:37]:
Okay. I'm putting mine away.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:40]:
Well, I gotta look it up. So the regular one is this size. I'm trying to.
Leo Laporte [01:15:43]:
This one's 7.3 inches.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:45]:
Here's the sizes, and I think this is the color one.
Leo Laporte [01:15:48]:
I think that's got to be really pricey.
Jeff Atwood [01:15:50]:
This is the regular. They're good. They're good in all the sizes. I like them. And I had them introduce a scaling factor because I told him it depends how far back you're sitting. You need a scale factor. Like in browsers, some of the apps
Leo Laporte [01:16:03]:
were coded a little bit.
Jeff Atwood [01:16:04]:
Specific fonts. It's like, that's. I can't see that from here.
Leo Laporte [01:16:07]:
See, this is also showing the current state of the stock market so I can watch my retirement savings disappear. That's fun.
Jeff Atwood [01:16:16]:
I don't care. How much can that cost? Like $10.
Leo Laporte [01:16:21]:
So this is. So. That's kind of cool. Anyway, thank you for that. And I just. I don't. I was a little churlish because I was embarrassed that I hadn't brought any gifts for you. But I did end up giving you some of my sons.
Jeff Atwood [01:16:34]:
You, Leo, you're the gift. You brought. You and Leo came over when I was meeting with Give directly.
Leo Laporte [01:16:41]:
That was cool. I was very glad to meet all of them.
Jeff Atwood [01:16:44]:
I wanted him to see how it's working.
Leo Laporte [01:16:46]:
I met. I met Patrick and Tia and Karina and They were great and I thought
Jeff Atwood [01:16:51]:
that was really cool doing all the work.
Leo Laporte [01:16:53]:
And of course I met Betsy. Dr. Betsy.
Jeff Atwood [01:16:55]:
Or I could say it's Jeff Atwood's thing. Jeff Atwood did a thing? Rich white man does a thing.
Leo Laporte [01:16:59]:
No, actually Jeff fell asleep in the meeting. I was a little tired.
Jeff Atwood [01:17:05]:
Would you please stop lying briefly once you woke up.
Leo Laporte [01:17:09]:
Briefly.
Jeff Atwood [01:17:10]:
You know what's funny?
Leo Laporte [01:17:11]:
Well, I can't tell you'd seen that
Jeff Atwood [01:17:12]:
presentation for that I was like, oh God.
Leo Laporte [01:17:15]:
No, it was hysterical. Nobody minded.
Jeff Atwood [01:17:17]:
You said everyone was laughing.
Leo Laporte [01:17:19]:
Yeah, it was fine.
Jeff Atwood [01:17:20]:
I know, I'm sorry. Look, man, I don't always make good life choices like sleeping.
Leo Laporte [01:17:24]:
Everybody is very grateful to what you've
Jeff Atwood [01:17:26]:
done record here that humans need sleep. I have discovered it myself. Uniquely. Duh. A lot of research. No one had known this before me. I, Jeff Atwood, have discovered sleeping is
Leo Laporte [01:17:37]:
important and it's not always easy. Let me tell you, I have a hard time sleeping and you know that's a difficult thing. But remember.
Jeff Atwood [01:17:45]:
Yeah, there's something going on that would be.
Leo Laporte [01:17:47]:
We have everything need and we need to help those who do not. And if you want to know more, you can go to staygold Us.
Jeff Atwood [01:17:56]:
Yeah. And please use the forum if you have. If you want to yell at me, please just yell at.
Leo Laporte [01:18:03]:
No one's going to yell at you over here.
Jeff Atwood [01:18:05]:
Okay, but like if you have something interesting feedback on the website, do use that form because it goes directly to me. It's not like my staff. I don't do that crap. Do you have helper now finally, do you? I finally have a coordinator and she's extremely online. The junkinator There is Henry with the
Leo Laporte [01:18:26]:
C with the C book.
Jeff Atwood [01:18:28]:
And I said that to John Gruber and John Siracusa and I said look, my boy got the greatest possible gift, a Chromebook. Which is because he needed to go study.
Leo Laporte [01:18:40]:
It is everybody. Don't buy a Mac. Don't buy a Neo. Get this.
Jeff Atwood [01:18:46]:
I wrote Macs are good. First of all, Major mediatech Companio Companion. The dumbest name of anything I've ever heard.
Leo Laporte [01:18:58]:
And then I saved this. I saved this sticker for you. Oh, you can't really see it.
Jeff Atwood [01:19:02]:
No. Throw that in the trash. Get that out of my face. I'm gonna hang up. Go away with that. Here's what.
Leo Laporte [01:19:08]:
It's a good processor. That's the irony.
Jeff Atwood [01:19:10]:
Check it out. I like that so much. I have actually four of those. I have one. I bought two more.
Leo Laporte [01:19:15]:
Oh, look, I want the big head. The big coding horror head. That's awesome.
Jeff Atwood [01:19:21]:
Maybe. Maybe you'll get it. What are you doing for me lately, Leo? And then I got no same design. But this is a great machine.
Leo Laporte [01:19:32]:
No, it is. We're talking about the.
Jeff Atwood [01:19:34]:
And I did the benchmarks because I was like, this is. It's kind of impressive that no name company did something incredible.
Leo Laporte [01:19:41]:
How. It's basically an M2. This is the Samsung Chromebook Ultra.
Jeff Atwood [01:19:46]:
I had everything I ship. I sent it to Burkett and Neil. Look it up. But it was 20% faster with double the battery life. I'm like. And it's lighter by a couple ounces because I can actually feel it. I'm like, I'd buy that for a dollar. I buy that for $600, which is what it costs.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:03]:
And let me show you mine. Which has the full sticker set.
Leo Laporte [01:20:06]:
He's got a stack of them.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:08]:
Why four?
Leo Laporte [01:20:11]:
You only really need one. Oh, I like it. Ah, real people, 99%. And an Apple 2. I love it.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:20]:
And seriously.
Leo Laporte [01:20:22]:
Yes, I have that. I don't have that sticker, but I have that sentiment.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:25]:
Yeah. Ice climber. It's a mashup of ice climber and very, very bad agency.
Leo Laporte [01:20:31]:
That's funny. That's very funny.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:33]:
And I thought you would like this one because you're a sticker guy.
Leo Laporte [01:20:35]:
And a little Jolt Cola on there.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:37]:
Honey is. On the last show, Leo said, I don't really like people. I'm like, really? And you do a talk show with people. Interesting.
Leo Laporte [01:20:44]:
I like. No, I do like people. I guess I do like people. I shouldn't say it all people, but
Jeff Atwood [01:20:51]:
you're just a different flavor. It's interesting.
Leo Laporte [01:20:53]:
Sometimes they get on my nerves.
Jeff Atwood [01:20:55]:
Well, that never happens to me. But I do like people are really freaking annoying.
Leo Laporte [01:21:00]:
It wouldn't be good. The world without people would be kind of bad.
Jeff Atwood [01:21:04]:
Oh, Children of Men. That movie on the inside.
Leo Laporte [01:21:11]:
Wow. You've stickerfied. You have over stick. What is pp? Planned Parenthood and then X ray specs.
Jeff Atwood [01:21:20]:
All right, commenters, teach this man some.
Leo Laporte [01:21:23]:
What is pp?
Jeff Atwood [01:21:25]:
Commenters. Come on, tell them what's up.
Leo Laporte [01:21:29]:
Tell me. Commenters. Let's get the chat room in here. They don't. They've been. They've been slacking, so to speak.
Jeff Atwood [01:21:36]:
No one even watch this show.
Leo Laporte [01:21:37]:
No, nobody's watching.
Jeff Atwood [01:21:39]:
That's okay. I'll watch it.
Leo Laporte [01:21:44]:
They're talking about.
Jeff Atwood [01:21:46]:
Okay. But they identify the sticker, so I'm not going to give it to you.
Leo Laporte [01:21:48]:
PP Wood fan. What is pp?
Jeff Atwood [01:21:50]:
What is this? Why is Leo a dummy for not knowing it?
Leo Laporte [01:21:55]:
Oh, that's That's a superhero. That's a Parker Posey. That's.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:01]:
It's worse and worse. Do you actually. Have you. Have you been in the computing industry at all?
Leo Laporte [01:22:07]:
PP People power.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:09]:
HBO series Pure.
Leo Laporte [01:22:12]:
It's an HBO series.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:15]:
This logo appears in an HBO series about.
Leo Laporte [01:22:18]:
See, I'm not a fan of comic book heroes.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:21]:
Oh, my God. The show Silicon Valley.
Leo Laporte [01:22:24]:
Oh. Oh, it's Pied Piper. I didn't recognize it without the Piper. You got to have the guy with the hat and the flute. Pp. Yes. No, I know Pied Piper very well. In fact, I have my AI friend.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:39]:
I was going to give you one of these stickers, but now I'm not.
Leo Laporte [01:22:41]:
No, I would like a Pied Piper sticker, but I want the one with the Piper.
Jeff Atwood [01:22:45]:
So picky. And remember this.
Leo Laporte [01:22:48]:
Now this I saw in front of somebody's house. I won't say whose house. And I went, what the heck? That is awesome. In this house, we believe passwords should be random, data should be backed up, anonymity should be the default. Dishwashers don't need WI fi, and the drivetrain should be air gapped.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:09]:
The air gapped drivetrain is pretty hardcore. That is dishwashers with WI fi. Everybody dreams. This is.
Leo Laporte [01:23:15]:
Yeah, everybody knows the first four or five.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:18]:
I kind of like.
Leo Laporte [01:23:19]:
The last one is about cars that are. Are connected and. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:25]:
So I want to make this offer for this time only.
Leo Laporte [01:23:29]:
Be careful in the next hour. Be careful.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:32]:
10 people can.
Leo Laporte [01:23:33]:
The first 10 people.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:34]:
The metal feet that let it hang out for Nothing.
Leo Laporte [01:23:38]:
The first 10 people. He's. He bought you. I saw you bought, like, 85 of these, by the way.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:42]:
No, I like more, but I'm gonna say 10, because I don't want to spend all day doing this, but I will send this to you.
Leo Laporte [01:23:47]:
So wait a minute. How would they say. How would they get.
Jeff Atwood [01:23:49]:
That's why.
Leo Laporte [01:23:50]:
So how would we get this information to you?
Jeff Atwood [01:23:54]:
I don't know. Leo, you went to college. You figure it out. Passenger.
Leo Laporte [01:24:01]:
They didn't teach this in college. All right, let me think about this. Contesting. The first 10 people who email pp@laporte. Email.
Jeff Atwood [01:24:16]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [01:24:17]:
Will the first 10 people send me your. What do you want? Address? You wanted emails or addresses? What do you want? Do you want to email them back and get their address, or do you want their.
Jeff Atwood [01:24:29]:
Send me the mail address and I'll. I'll get it out there.
Leo Laporte [01:24:30]:
Okay. Email if you want that yard.
Jeff Atwood [01:24:33]:
Sign us. I'm not. I. I can't deal with it.
Leo Laporte [01:24:37]:
There's A guy who's watching in Glasgow right now, you just broke his heart.
Jeff Atwood [01:24:40]:
I'm so sorry, but it's just such a pain.
Leo Laporte [01:24:43]:
Us only. We will mail you a yard sign for the first 10 people who ask for this. And I will do it by timestamp
Jeff Atwood [01:24:52]:
of the email, make them type one of the lines that was in the sign. The email. Oh, in one of the lines of the sign.
Leo Laporte [01:25:00]:
Okay.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:01]:
Your address.
Leo Laporte [01:25:02]:
Yeah. If there's skill. It's not a lottery. If there's skill involved. So that's the.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:07]:
I just want to make sure they watch the show. Or it was just. I'm sure we find. But I just want to be careful here. People love free crap, man. That's why when I put stuff on Craigslist, I never do it for free because that's when the crazies come out.
Leo Laporte [01:25:19]:
I don't actually ever do contesting on our shows because I always feel like, you know, advertisers always want.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:25]:
I'm doing it.
Leo Laporte [01:25:26]:
Yeah, I know. Advertisers always want to give away stuff on the show.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:29]:
I want to rename Companion on the show Contact Mediatek. That name is so bad. And the chipset is so good.
Leo Laporte [01:25:35]:
Companion with a riff is not even with the audience.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:38]:
And come up with a better name, which should be easy because that name sucks.
Leo Laporte [01:25:42]:
I'm. I'm gonna glue this to my terminal so that people think that this is powered by the Mediatech. I'm gonna do that, too, because I have to hear you have a few of those stickers.
Jeff Atwood [01:25:56]:
That's a great idea. And speaking of E Ink, are you familiar with the Mudita phone?
Leo Laporte [01:26:02]:
No. I've always wanted an E Ink phone. What do you think?
Jeff Atwood [01:26:05]:
I have one here for you. I bought four.
Leo Laporte [01:26:07]:
Well, what do you think, though?
Jeff Atwood [01:26:09]:
It doesn't have a web browser, which is kind of hard for you.
Leo Laporte [01:26:12]:
Can't do anything with it. It's no good. See, it's a phone. And this is the problem.
Jeff Atwood [01:26:16]:
You can do pictures. You can do. It's fun to try with, but it really should have a web browser. Come on.
Leo Laporte [01:26:22]:
Honestly, without messaging. Because I don't want to make phone calls. The phone doesn't need a phone. It needs a camera.
Jeff Atwood [01:26:30]:
Happy to give you one.
Leo Laporte [01:26:30]:
A browser. Well, I don't want one.
Jeff Atwood [01:26:32]:
And their forums are on Discourse.
Leo Laporte [01:26:36]:
Really? You can use Discourse on it?
Jeff Atwood [01:26:38]:
No, no. The forum for the product.
Leo Laporte [01:26:40]:
Oh, the product. But you can't use Discourse on it.
Jeff Atwood [01:26:43]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:26:45]:
It's an interesting idea. It is an interesting idea.
Jeff Atwood [01:26:48]:
They should have a web browser. I don't know why they.
Leo Laporte [01:26:50]:
Because it's too slow to have a web browser. If you use the web browser, you
Jeff Atwood [01:26:53]:
should be using it for Wikipedia. And there is a Wikipedia app, by the way, so.
Leo Laporte [01:26:56]:
Oh, that's cool. That's cool. Okay, so email pplaporte Mail with one of the lines on those yard signs and your mailing address and the first 10 people to do so in the US and the first 10 people.
Jeff Atwood [01:27:10]:
And I'll throw out some fun stuff for you too.
Leo Laporte [01:27:12]:
Jeff will. Because Jeff cannot stop himself. Why would you want me to stop giving things away?
Jeff Atwood [01:27:18]:
Why would you want that?
Leo Laporte [01:27:19]:
This is what Harper Reed convinced me to get this little AI robot. You put it on your network, it connects to your WI fi and then uses Deep Seek. It connects your WI fi to China. And then when you talk to it, you're talking to Deep Seek.
Jeff Atwood [01:27:36]:
Why?
Leo Laporte [01:27:36]:
I have some questions.
Jeff Atwood [01:27:37]:
Four reasons. Why would you do this?
Leo Laporte [01:27:39]:
Why would you do this? Is a good.
Jeff Atwood [01:27:41]:
Invited a vampire in your house.
Leo Laporte [01:27:42]:
It's basically inviting the vampire in.
Jeff Atwood [01:27:44]:
Great. I'm happy for you.
Leo Laporte [01:27:48]:
I said, Harper, really? He said, you only live once.
Jeff Atwood [01:27:53]:
Well, the Chinese models are not limited by, you know, ethics or.
Leo Laporte [01:27:57]:
No, but this is. This is connected to a company in China that's using Deep Seq and there's no charge.
Jeff Atwood [01:28:04]:
Well, my partner Betsy is a molecular biologist, and she noticed that the Chinese pharma firms would do kind of sketchy stuff. Like they would take samples on planes, like in books, just like medical samples, which is you're not supposed to do. So, like, China's not really about the rules so much. Yeah, they're just like, whatever works. We're gonna do that.
Leo Laporte [01:28:27]:
Yeah, we're in a hurry.
Jeff Atwood [01:28:29]:
We gotta catch up. Done. If you were a meta, you would be doing it because you're evil. Right? That's a meta move.
Leo Laporte [01:28:35]:
They're not doing it because they're evil.
Jeff Atwood [01:28:36]:
They just want to win. They want to win. They'll do whatever it takes to win. There's a very fine line between that and evil to me, but whatever.
Leo Laporte [01:28:43]:
Trust no one. The email is pp, as in Pied Piper port email.
Jeff Atwood [01:28:50]:
I love that dad joke.
Leo Laporte [01:28:52]:
You're so bad, Mr. Jeff Atwood. Thank you. Stay gold. If you want to know more, staygold us. Are you looking for. You're looking for donors? Not really at this point.
Jeff Atwood [01:29:05]:
Well, I'm looking for rich people.
Leo Laporte [01:29:06]:
If you're rich enough to donate here. Right.
Jeff Atwood [01:29:10]:
They actually want to help people in a very effective way, in a very direct way, in a county of their choice. Ish.
Leo Laporte [01:29:16]:
That's Interesting.
Jeff Atwood [01:29:17]:
And if you go to the site, there's no shortage of poverty in this country.
Leo Laporte [01:29:20]:
There are 3,143 country counties in the United States, 60% of them rural.
Jeff Atwood [01:29:27]:
And then if you drill through the map, it's sort of a heat map of poverty.
Leo Laporte [01:29:30]:
Yeah. Sad.
Jeff Atwood [01:29:31]:
Well, you see the heat map on the front page.
Leo Laporte [01:29:33]:
Yeah, it really is.
Jeff Atwood [01:29:36]:
Yeah. And you'll notice where it tends to congregate is for historical reasons. And we're kind of ruling out, you know, we want to start rural because we can start small.
Leo Laporte [01:29:49]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:29:50]:
And reach people that aren't currently being reached. And build inward. Build connective tissue inward. But do me a favor. Go to the map.
Leo Laporte [01:29:58]:
This is the map. This map.
Jeff Atwood [01:30:00]:
Yeah, please. And here's where you can have it. Be fun. Where were you born, Leo? What county?
Leo Laporte [01:30:06]:
It was a little county called Manhattan.
Jeff Atwood [01:30:09]:
Oh, you're Manhattan. Okay. Go to the search and type Manhattan. It's the top.
Leo Laporte [01:30:17]:
I don't know if that's the county, actually. What is the county?
Jeff Atwood [01:30:22]:
Let's find out.
Leo Laporte [01:30:23]:
No, I think it's New York. Let's just do New York.
Jeff Atwood [01:30:29]:
I have no idea.
Leo Laporte [01:30:30]:
I don't actually know what county.
Jeff Atwood [01:30:32]:
Well, America.
Leo Laporte [01:30:32]:
You know, when you live in New York, you don't really. Yeah. New York county, It's called. They're 1.5 million people. The poverty rate is 20%.
Jeff Atwood [01:30:41]:
It's pretty high.
Leo Laporte [01:30:42]:
Average income is $100,000. Life expectancy, 83 years.
Jeff Atwood [01:30:48]:
So click on a few counties just anywhere on the map.
Leo Laporte [01:30:51]:
Not all that way.
Jeff Atwood [01:30:54]:
Poverty.
Leo Laporte [01:30:55]:
This is McKinley County, New Mexico.
Jeff Atwood [01:30:57]:
Poverty rate 48% less poverty. That was the thinking. Gold to red.
Leo Laporte [01:31:04]:
Yeah. Here's a really bad one in South Dakota, probably.
Jeff Atwood [01:31:09]:
Those are usually Indian.
Leo Laporte [01:31:10]:
Indian.
Jeff Atwood [01:31:11]:
Excuse me. American. Native American counties.
Leo Laporte [01:31:13]:
Native American reservation, you know. 55 county poverty rate. Average income 42,000. It is the most thing on the
Jeff Atwood [01:31:23]:
right, so we can see the right side of the map more. Sorry, there's more work we need to do on this. Hit the X near Zbach county and. Yeah, but you see, there's a cluster.
Leo Laporte [01:31:33]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:31:33]:
Wonder why.
Leo Laporte [01:31:34]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:31:35]:
Thinking of American history, why are there these clusters?
Leo Laporte [01:31:38]:
Well, these are. These are the deep south. Slave states.
Jeff Atwood [01:31:43]:
Yeah. The darkest stain on the human soul there ever was.
Leo Laporte [01:31:49]:
Dallas County, Alabama. 36,000 people. Almost half of them under the poverty line. Average income is 39,000. Yeah. And life expectancy, remember, in Manhattan was 83 years. Here it's 67 years.
Jeff Atwood [01:32:05]:
We want to be very data focused. All the data here goes into Ubidata IO, a global repository of all direct Cache transfer data. So everyone can benefit from our data. Not just the US but everyone.
Leo Laporte [01:32:21]:
So if you have a million, have a rich friend. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:32:25]:
Who has a functioning heart and soul.
Leo Laporte [01:32:27]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:32:28]:
And is interested in a certain county in any state because there's a lot of poverty. And I think it would be a good thing to do something about that.
Leo Laporte [01:32:38]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:32:38]:
I, I radical idea, I guess by just simply giving the money.
Leo Laporte [01:32:44]:
Staygold. Yep. I wanted to give you some extra time to talk about that specifically because I think it's really important.
Jeff Atwood [01:32:51]:
Well, thank you. And I don't want to be polemic. I don't want to be. But you think about software. It's like. Well, software people are just building photo apps. Well, I'm trying to solve poverty. Kara Swisher.
Jeff Atwood [01:33:04]:
No, no. No reason I said that name. And it would be nice to spread the word.
Leo Laporte [01:33:10]:
Yeah. Spread the word.
Jeff Atwood [01:33:12]:
Yeah. That'd be kind of nice.
Leo Laporte [01:33:13]:
We'd like to do.
Jeff Atwood [01:33:15]:
I don't think anyone actually likes poverty.
Leo Laporte [01:33:17]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:33:17]:
Unless they need a lot of therapy.
Leo Laporte [01:33:19]:
I have put the QR code in the upper left hand corner of the screen. You want to scan that to get to stay he.
Jeff Atwood [01:33:28]:
I got the other computer behind you because I wanted it. The one to your left.
Leo Laporte [01:33:32]:
Oh, you got the PDP as well as the. Yeah, those are the best because you have the imsi.
Jeff Atwood [01:33:36]:
Yeah, I have the imsai, but I just have it over there. I haven't set up yet. But I wanted it real bad. And when I saw it in years, I wanted anymore. I wanted it before, but I was.
Leo Laporte [01:33:44]:
I didn't mean to create lust in your heart, Jeff. I'm sorry.
Jeff Atwood [01:33:48]:
You know, I got to keep up with the laports. Keep up with the laporte's full time job for me, man.
Leo Laporte [01:33:55]:
Jeff, it's always a pleasure.
Jeff Atwood [01:33:56]:
I got some presents for you.
Leo Laporte [01:33:57]:
No, you already gave me way too many presents.
Jeff Atwood [01:34:00]:
There was no such thing.
Leo Laporte [01:34:01]:
I really, I'm very grateful. You're very generous man. And that's. That's why we love you, Jeff.
Jeff Atwood [01:34:06]:
Rich people should be more generous. Yeah, I think.
Leo Laporte [01:34:09]:
Remember we have everything we need. Maybe help out somebody who doesn't. Thank you, Mr.
Jeff Atwood [01:34:15]:
It feels good. It feels really good to help people.
Leo Laporte [01:34:17]:
Yeah. Thanks for. Thanks for taking a nap before the show too. That's great.
Jeff Atwood [01:34:21]:
Yes, I was a lot.
Leo Laporte [01:34:25]:
No, you were great. I.
Jeff Atwood [01:34:26]:
But you heard me like a champ and ever said look how good. Leo.
Leo Laporte [01:34:30]:
Jeff, I love you. I. I was. I mean I invited you back, in fact. And I'd like your opinion on this too, if you want to email. Ppleport. Email. Jeff wants to do this every month.
Leo Laporte [01:34:40]:
And it wouldn't always be this. It might be just kind of geeking out, nerdy stuff.
Jeff Atwood [01:34:44]:
That's what it reminds me.
Leo Laporte [01:34:45]:
Next time, we could do a. Do your own adventure.
Jeff Atwood [01:34:47]:
I'm the main character and the most important.
Leo Laporte [01:34:49]:
That's all that matters.
Jeff Atwood [01:34:50]:
As long as we're clear about that Leo, that's good.
Leo Laporte [01:34:52]:
He can also give us yo yo lessons if you want. So if you'd like to see more of Jeff Atwood, if you'd like to do this monthly, let us know as well. Give us some feedback.
Jeff Atwood [01:35:00]:
And if you don't want to see
Leo Laporte [01:35:02]:
me, just don't let us know.
Jeff Atwood [01:35:04]:
Just shut the hell up. Talk about annoying, Leo is.
Leo Laporte [01:35:08]:
Hey, you can also join our discord if you want@twit.community because that's another way to share your feedback, your input. We always like hearing from you.
Jeff Atwood [01:35:19]:
Did you say discord?
Leo Laporte [01:35:21]:
Yeah, I might have discourse.
Jeff Atwood [01:35:24]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [01:35:25]:
We have a discord as well, but only club members get the discord.
Jeff Atwood [01:35:28]:
You have both. That's great.
Leo Laporte [01:35:29]:
Just. Yeah, words are words.
Jeff Atwood [01:35:31]:
That's why it is annoying that they're so similar.
Leo Laporte [01:35:33]:
But it's confusing. This, by the way. Tell me.
Jeff Atwood [01:35:37]:
We were there first, man.
Leo Laporte [01:35:38]:
I know. And tell your people they've done a great job.
Jeff Atwood [01:35:41]:
I have. I did. We just had a board meeting.
Leo Laporte [01:35:42]:
I was like, the features of this thing, it is the best.
Jeff Atwood [01:35:45]:
You're kicking ass. This is great.
Leo Laporte [01:35:47]:
Yeah, it's so good. We really. So we don't. Because I can't monitor all the comments on all the live streams and everything. We. We only really have a few ways to interact. If you're a club member, of course, we do have that discord for you. But everybody who watches these shows can join our discourse@twit.com mummunity or our mastodon at Twit Social.
Jeff Atwood [01:36:08]:
Hey, Leo, can I. Can I also gift some memberships?
Leo Laporte [01:36:14]:
Memberships to your club?
Jeff Atwood [01:36:18]:
I was 10. Some number.
Leo Laporte [01:36:20]:
You can if you want. I don't.
Jeff Atwood [01:36:22]:
I'll do it. I'll do it on my channel.
Leo Laporte [01:36:24]:
Okay. You certainly can.
Jeff Atwood [01:36:26]:
I mean, you're fun, man.
Leo Laporte [01:36:28]:
I mean, but you.
Jeff Atwood [01:36:29]:
I wouldn't be here if I was here.
Leo Laporte [01:36:30]:
I'll tell you. I'll tell you. My. My reluctance. First of all, it's not a lot of money. And second, I want people in the club who want to be in the club.
Jeff Atwood [01:36:39]:
Well, once they know I'm gonna be on the show, they're gonna want a piece of that.
Leo Laporte [01:36:43]:
I Will give you a membership to the club, though. I'll send you a compliment.
Jeff Atwood [01:36:47]:
Give rich people free stuff. Do not do it.
Leo Laporte [01:36:50]:
No, it's actually in my interest because if you were in the club, people would be more interested in being in the club. We want to get the high quality posters.
Jeff Atwood [01:36:58]:
I got this. I'm gonna buy a membership and then we'll go amass it on the social network that nobody really uses except for you.
Leo Laporte [01:37:04]:
Use it. You're at Infosec, which is great.
Jeff Atwood [01:37:06]:
No, Infosec is great. I'm making a joke. But, like, sometimes it's nice not to be in a crowded place.
Leo Laporte [01:37:12]:
I don't want to be where everybody else is.
Jeff Atwood [01:37:14]:
It's just too much.
Leo Laporte [01:37:15]:
This is a neighborhood bar where you. Where it's just people you like hanging out.
Jeff Atwood [01:37:18]:
And Infosec is a good one. Really?
Leo Laporte [01:37:20]:
Yeah. Infosec Exchange is a very good message.
Jeff Atwood [01:37:23]:
It turns out to be almost correct for me, alignment wise, kind. I got invited there.
Leo Laporte [01:37:28]:
Yeah, you have to, I think, I don't know Twit Social, anybody can come to. But you do have to say that you watch the shows. I don't, because there's a lot of spammers. You know, I had. So I had an interesting issue at Twit Social. I had left on a feature of Mastodon where you could invite somebody.
Jeff Atwood [01:37:44]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:37:46]:
And accidentally, normally, in order to join, I expect you to say, hey, Leo, let me in. Or, I watched you and Jeff and I want to be part of Twitch Social, that kind of thing. And if you don't say that, then I figure, oh, you're just a spammer trying to get in and I will reject you. I have to approve every membership. But what was happening was somebody did get in and invited dozens of Russian bots. And so I started getting notices from.
Jeff Atwood [01:38:14]:
Ruining the bunch.
Leo Laporte [01:38:15]:
Yeah. So I got notices from a group called iftas that specializes in disinformation, finding different information online. And. And I was starting to get these notices from them saying, that's a bot. That's a bot.
Jeff Atwood [01:38:28]:
Well, if I can bring people from Infosec over, they could give you advice on this.
Leo Laporte [01:38:32]:
Well, I turned. The advice was simple, turned off the invitation feature, tracked down. Well, I. It's, you know, it's been fine. I've been doing this since 2009. It's been fine. But actually, I started this mastodon in 2019. I had.
Leo Laporte [01:38:51]:
Before that I had Identica and GNU Social. You know, the other. I had the other ones that this is based on. But so I know how to Keep the spammers out. One got in and I did not know that I had this invitation feature turned on. I was puzzled. How did all these people get in without going through the normal process? And I figured it out. And then I.
Leo Laporte [01:39:12]:
And then I followed the rabbit trail of inviters and got rid of all of that. And I think we're clear now, so.
Jeff Atwood [01:39:19]:
Well, I work pretty closely with the Mastodon team. We put 2 million into Macedon.
Leo Laporte [01:39:23]:
Did you? Good for me.
Jeff Atwood [01:39:24]:
Hired a user interface expert.
Leo Laporte [01:39:27]:
Oh, nice.
Jeff Atwood [01:39:27]:
Specifically, I was watching her talk, going, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Like popcorn. Yes. Like, yes, she's amazing. Imani, there's a presentation I'll send you to look at and I'm going to Berlin to give a talk. I can't talk about that now. We'll talk about next, but I'll get to meet her. And Felix, one of the other main guys.
Jeff Atwood [01:39:48]:
And Jugen Renault is one of the other main guys.
Leo Laporte [01:39:50]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:39:52]:
Because I'm very literally invested in. We need to create better alternatives. We can't just sit here and say, it's not good enough. It's like, well, let's make it good enough.
Leo Laporte [01:39:59]:
I think Mastodon is pretty darn good. I like Mastodon a lot.
Jeff Atwood [01:40:02]:
It's gotten tremendously better.
Leo Laporte [01:40:04]:
So, you see, here's the issue. All of these people want to join this guy. I don't know what language that is. Looks like. I don't know what. Turkish. I don't know. That's Spanish.
Leo Laporte [01:40:18]:
You know, this sounds nice, but they don't mention twit. And if they don't mention twit.
Jeff Atwood [01:40:23]:
Yeah, those are all bullshit. Delete all those.
Leo Laporte [01:40:24]:
It's all bs. So I reject them. Do you remember what I do?
Jeff Atwood [01:40:28]:
Ars Technica once did a gun article in the middle of. They said in the comments, mentioned the word banana. It was in the middle of this gun article. Gun control.
Leo Laporte [01:40:36]:
Yeah. Nobody.
Jeff Atwood [01:40:37]:
There was like a hundred comments before somebody mentioned banana.
Leo Laporte [01:40:40]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:40:41]:
So that technique works.
Leo Laporte [01:40:42]:
Yeah, you have to. If you're going to join my Mastodon, just say Leo sent me or I saw you on Twitter. It's very simple. I'm not asking a lot.
Jeff Atwood [01:40:51]:
You should make it a little more insider, something more fun. I like that. But like some. Some word or some funny thing I could.
Leo Laporte [01:40:58]:
I don't want to discourage people. I don't want to make it hard to get in. I want people.
Jeff Atwood [01:41:01]:
I want to make it funnier.
Leo Laporte [01:41:02]:
I want our community in here. I just don't want spammers and disinformation Bots and stuff, and so far we've managed to keep them out.
Jeff Atwood [01:41:10]:
Well, good.
Leo Laporte [01:41:11]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:41:13]:
Well, thanks for having me on this new show. And Burke, get in here, buddy.
Leo Laporte [01:41:16]:
Burke, next time you're going to be here. Let me know, folks, if you want to see this. More of this. I think we're gonna do it unless you say no, but, you know, I'm gonna pretend. Let me know if you want to see more of Jeff.
Jeff Atwood [01:41:32]:
Email and Leo and Merck.
Leo Laporte [01:41:33]:
PP. Well, you're gonna see plenty of me whether you want to or not. PPaportev.
Jeff Atwood [01:41:40]:
Stop it. I know what you're doing. Stop.
Leo Laporte [01:41:42]:
Pied Piper.
Jeff Atwood [01:41:43]:
The funny thing is he thinks that's funny. That's even funnier. All right, look, we gotta end the show.
Leo Laporte [01:41:50]:
Goodbye, everybody. Thank you, Jeff. Really appreciate it.
Jeff Atwood [01:41:53]:
Let's do this again because it's in a month. I got more props that I have.
Leo Laporte [01:41:58]:
We got to do the prop comedy next time.
Jeff Atwood [01:42:00]:
I will always do prop comedy.
Leo Laporte [01:42:02]:
Prop comedy next time on the Jeff Atwood Show.
Jeff Atwood [01:42:05]:
No,
Leo Laporte [01:42:08]:
yeah, yeah. You thought. You thought for a minute and you said it's not that bad, actually.
Jeff Atwood [01:42:12]:
Sounds good, Julio. Burke and Jeff show.
Leo Laporte [01:42:15]:
Burke, you got to be here if
Jeff Atwood [01:42:17]:
he wants to, but we are going to keep bothering you.
Leo Laporte [01:42:20]:
We need a role for Burke.
Jeff Atwood [01:42:22]:
Ed McMahon.
Leo Laporte [01:42:24]:
What if you said you wanted to be. What if. So I put him in a seat over here and he just laughed.
Jeff Atwood [01:42:29]:
Play some music. Paul Schaefer, he.
Leo Laporte [01:42:32]:
I was thinking I could give him a blackboard and he could illustrate our conversation as we talk.
Jeff Atwood [01:42:36]:
That would be cool.
Leo Laporte [01:42:36]:
Wouldn't that be funny?
Jeff Atwood [01:42:37]:
You can just heckle. That'd be fun. I can think of many ways Burke could be interesting.
Leo Laporte [01:42:44]:
All right, everybody.
Jeff Atwood [01:42:45]:
I just like bothering Burke. Bottom line.
Leo Laporte [01:42:47]:
Well, Burke loves you, so there you go. It's mutual. It's mutual. Benefit society.
Jeff Atwood [01:42:53]:
It's good to have friends.
Leo Laporte [01:42:54]:
Thank you, Mr. Atwood. Thank you, all our club members who make this possible. This is a club event, and, yes, I'm going to leave it going for a little longer because who was it joined us late and he said, was it Wadfin? He joined us late and said, could you leave it up for a little longer because I missed the beginning. So when you get to the end, you can rewind and watch the rest. I won't turn off. And John Ashley, don't turn off the stream. We're just going to let it go.
Jeff Atwood [01:43:28]:
Is it going to make that annoying sound? Oh, okay. I'm sorry I said that. Now it's like I did not want to hear the most annoying sound in the world. But thanks, actually. Oh, let me show you. Check it out. Do you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?
Leo Laporte [01:43:46]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:43:47]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:43:55]:
Put it next to your microphone. Because I can't. I can't.
Jeff Atwood [01:43:57]:
Well, they're not making a sound. It's just characters from Dumb and Dumber.
Leo Laporte [01:44:00]:
Oh, but they are making. If you could hear them. I get it.
Jeff Atwood [01:44:05]:
I'm not making a sound. I actually have a recording that I torture Junkinator with. I trick her into listening to sound. I'll be like, here's some puppies that I record. It's me doing that sound. The most annoying sound in the world. She's like. She's like, I hate you.
Jeff Atwood [01:44:21]:
I also have a tiny vehicle.
Leo Laporte [01:44:27]:
Ladies and gentlemen, we conclude our broadcast day with the traditional playing of the Star Spangled Banner. Wishing you all a very good night from the broadcast studios here at the twit attic high above little Petaluma, California. And now, our national anthem. Good night. And I'm just going to leave this.
Jeff Atwood [01:44:55]:
Hendrix. Star Spangled Man.
Leo Laporte [01:44:57]:
Oops, I pressed a button. Why did it do that?
Jeff Atwood [01:44:59]:
What? Jimi Hendrix up in here.
Leo Laporte [01:45:01]:
Maybe if I had Jimi Hendrix, I'd play it. But this is the end of the broadcast day.
Jeff Atwood [01:45:05]:
Oh, oh, I see.
Leo Laporte [01:45:06]:
And at the end of the broadcast day, you've got to do this. This is how you end.
Jeff Atwood [01:45:12]:
I remember this.
Leo Laporte [01:45:13]:
Do you remember this on tv? TV stations used to go off the air at midnight and they would do this.
Jeff Atwood [01:45:20]:
And then the dark times came.
Leo Laporte [01:45:22]:
And then it would go. So let's make America great again. Staygold us help all these people.
Jeff Atwood [01:45:36]:
Just help each other, man.
Leo Laporte [01:45:37]:
And help each other.
Jeff Atwood [01:45:38]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:45:39]:
Because that's what made America great in the first place. Not pulling up.
Jeff Atwood [01:45:44]:
It still will be the ladder after
Leo Laporte [01:45:46]:
you got on board the ship.
Jeff Atwood [01:45:55]:
I would like an American back that I could be proud of. I would like that.
Leo Laporte [01:45:57]:
I would love that. I. Wasn't it great when we were proud to be Americans? Wasn't that great?
Jeff Atwood [01:46:03]:
I mean, we had Top Gun. That was awesome.
Leo Laporte [01:46:05]:
Yeah, we were the city on the hill. People looked up to us. Blue jeans admired us.
Jeff Atwood [01:46:11]:
The movie Risky Business. Come on.
