Christopher Nolan Doesn't Use Top Tabs

Lights, camera, action. Okay, take two. Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts. As always, I am joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm drinking Dr. Pepper today, and I'm introducing Echo into the audio track, so hopefully it's no longer happening. But I was doing a great job of creating Echo a second ago.

Oh, I think it's back, by the way. I don't know. Let's just hope it's not in the recording and it's something weird with the Riverside side. And if it is, I get to deal with a fun edit this week. I have no idea what's going on. So we're also joined by Niléane. Niléane, how are you? Is there any Echo where you are? I don't think so. I think my room last week was sounding very echoey but now it's got more stuff in so

Yep adding stuff definitely helps with the echo that actually could be the thing is that it could be bouncing off your walls re-hitting your mic and that's why no we muted Matt it doesn't matter anyways our doesn't matter because our listeners don't care about that what they care about is some tiny topics I have one for you guys I got my WWDC invite. I will be boots on the ground at WWDC. This will be my fifth Dub Dub, as the kids say. Do the kids talk about Dub Dub? They talk about Dub Dub.

They do, I guess, maybe. They're all excited for the AI and stuff, I think. I don't know. I'm fully expecting this to be a big AI year, and I'm not expecting, you know, like iPadOS 26 again. So, yeah, you can tell as well because they announced the accessibility stuff. Yes. And it's full of AI talk, even though like I'm not sure half of it is really AI.

Because it feels like some of it is iteration on some of the stuff that's been done before and just enhanced. So I don't know. What you have to understand is these companies are talking to investors and that's basically it. And they want to hear AI. You should see my inbox and like everyone has changed their company name to have AI at the end of it. And like I literally get pitches from companies that have nothing to do with software.

And they're like, oh, yeah, and we have AI now. And I'm like, wait, what? Like, I was in, I can't actually talk about it yet, but I'll talk about it on the show when it comes up. But I was in a thing, and there was a thing that was announced that has a dedicated on-device AI model, and you're just like, what? Yeah. No. No, it doesn't. No, it does not. But anyways. Very nebulous, which you just said.

I know. That was probably even more than what I am allowed to say, but whatever, I don't care. But yeah, I'll be at WWDC this year. I believe John and Federico will be there, so it's fun hanging out with them. I'm excited. This is my fifth one. So I wasn't actually sure I was going to be able to go this year because of Riley, but we got that all squared away, and I can go. So I'm excited. I wish you guys were coming. Well, I mean, this is like my 20th WWDC, but I will be doing it remotely. Boots in the Midwest, as I always do.

You get invited to stay home. That's your invite. That's true. That's true. It will be an easier week for me. Just so people know, even if I get invited, I can't cross the U.S. border. So there you go. Look, I was just trying to stay in a positive, everything's okay mindset. You know, like, we don't need to go in all that. You know, I'm thinking we live in a utopia right now. Make it happen in Paris or something. I don't know. There used to be Mac Expo in Paris. There you go. Yeah.

That would be cool. Bring that back. I think the big thing is getting the amount of Apple employees that do something at WWDC. I think getting them outside of the Cupertino area, that's the problem. Nah. Trillion dollar company. that can make it happen. Probably. All right. We got something else in here. And judging by what it is, I'm guessing it's from Niléane. Yes. As we're recording, this broke like an hour ago from...

So by the time you're listening to this, it broke like a week and an hour ago. It's been a few days. But it's massively urgent. It's like an important piece of news that I thought I would bring up. MacGeneration, so the French website that I mentioned before for which Nicolas Furno writes. He's an avid listener of Comfort Zone and he's been in our feedback form a few times. We roasted him his home screen. Anyway.

Yeah, he wrote this article revealing that so end-to-end encryption for RCS has rolled out in iOS 26.5 and like in a bunch of places in the world actually um but one is missing on the map and that's France like all the neighboring countries in Europe all have a end-to-end encryption with RCS and not France which seemed weird so like MacGeneration Nicolas and Mac

Generation has asked around he called a few of the carriers in France to like investigate what is going on and it turns out the French government is blocking it. Not blocking it but they're like it'd be best if you wait on this. They're telling the carriers just you should not roll this out right now because we're doing counter-terrorism which is code for we want to be able to keep reading people's text conversations.

And there's this weird situation like it's a situation on all ends um there are four big carriers in france and one of them is selling out like they're trying to get bought but the other three and because like it's a kind of a it's a high level thing because there will only be three big carriers in france when that happens so there's like a regulation that comes into play like is it a monopoly if that happens is a monopolistic situation

so basically there are tons of negotiations currently happening behind the scenes between the government and those carriers so the government is like asking it'd be good if you wait on rolling out the end-to-end encryption on rcs and the carriers are like sure let's not bother the government right now because we want them to agree with our plan to buy the the one of the carrier so so basically the stephen colbert situation r.i.p to the real one i i don't remember that context

uh because uh paramount same situation it's literally the same thing paramount is trying to buy warner brothers and basically the president wanted stephen colbert off the air so they canceled to show so that way they can buy it. Yeah. So right now, the situation is frozen. Carriers are waiting. Government is waiting. And yeah, no end-to-end encryption for RCS in France right now. Even though everything's ready on Apple's end, everything's ready on the carrier's end.

If you look at the RCS profile that's bundled in iOS, everything's there for the French carriers. So they just have to turn the switch to enable it, and they're not doing it because of this. Very interesting. The governments, they like to snoop. And not the Snoop Doggy Dog way. I don't know. That wasn't funny at all. That wasn't funny at all. I am so tired, guys. I haven't had a full night's sleep since we got Riley,

and I am exhausted. It's okay. You know why it's okay? because I have a surprise tiny topic. Oh. Yes. Okay. It's the browser podcast, baby. Pew, pew, pew. Yeah. You'll handle that. Yes. Vivaldi announced version 8.0 this week with a big redesign, which seems weird because when you update to 8.0, everything looks exactly the same. There's no redesign in sight. But this is mostly seen for new users, like when you do a French install. A French.

A fresh install. On the onboarding, everything looks new. There's a new default theme. There's a new way to style your themes in Vivaldi, which looks very sleek. I like it. But if you already have configured a custom theme when you upgrade, you will not see a difference. They are preserving everything that used to be there, Which is good because the users of Vivaldi, they are users who have customized heavily the UI, and you do not want to break that over a redesign.

Well, they've wasted half their life just going through the settings page. You know, now they're looking for the... Oh, my God. My brain is broken. My brain is... Don't save them. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The Last Crusade. What was the thing? The Holy Grail. They were looking for the Holy Grail now. What is he saying? Oh, my God. Okay. My brain is broken. We've fully lost Chris at this point. He's talking about the Bible or something? No, we're talking about Indiana Jones. Okay. Oh, my brain.

So, anyway, so for people who thought Vivaldi looks ugly or something, like, you're not, you don't like the looks of it. The new default theme looks very different. I will give them that. It's a new fresh look, and maybe you want to give that a try. And now I'm done. There's no surprise. Okay. Beyond that. Okay. All right. Well, that was the browser podcast. Interesting. Okay. All right. So I have a topic for you guys this week, and I want to talk about Codex and computer use. I'm sorry, Niléane.

We are going to discuss AI. I'm sorry. So like AV1, MP4. Yes. Yep. That's what Codex. Yep. Yep. That's what we're going to be discussing. Let's get nerdy. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. No, Codex is the OpenAI ChatGPT. Well, originally, it was their coding platform. It was their answer to Claude Code. But it's kind of evolved. So it's become its own dedicated app on macOS now. and it has its own tab in the iOS app now, in the ChatGPT iOS app.

And it's become kind of its own thing. It's kind of become a productivity super app. And I'm curious, have either of you used the dedicated Codex app? No. I have used it to try to code, and it did not click with me, so I went back to what works for me. Okay. And is that still Claude Code? Claude Code in the terminal. Okay. Like a real sicko. Nice. No, I get it.

Look, I've been using Claude Code for a while now. But Codex has evolved beyond just being a coding platform, and this is really clicking with me. So a little bit of history. We all know the app Workflow, which became Shortcuts. Workflow was the original automation platform on iOS. Apple bought it. It became shortcuts. And it's the buggy mess that we know today. The original workflow team went to work at Apple.

They left a couple of years ago, and they went off to do their own thing, and they made an app, Sky, which never got a public release. But Federico wrote about it on MacStories. And it was really interesting what they were doing with it. Basically, the idea was you would basically get natural language automation. You would just type a sentence, and it would go do a thing on your Mac. Well, OpenAI bought it and integrated it into Codex, and it is now a feature called computer use. And this is where Codex gets really interesting. So Codex, like I said, is no longer just a coding platform.

It is a productivity platform. There's plugins for Google Sheets and Docs and Chrome and Notion and Jira and all those like big businessy boy apps that Matt uses. Computer use is a little different. It is a plugin, but it allows you to do any, it allows Codex to control anything and everything on your computer. Now, by the time this episode is out, my video on this will be out because it's going to be out tomorrow.

And today's Friday, but this doesn't come out until the following Thursday. These schedules, you know, that's the whole thing. So I will have a video for you that you can go watch. But there's also OpenAI put out a video with Ari, the original creator of Workflow, demoing this. And it's really cool. So basically the way it works is say you want it to go through your email, go through and find all the receipts that were in your email, and then update your expense tracking spreadsheet.

You would literally type go through at the at symbol like an email, at mail, and find all my receipts. I need you to go in and update my expense tracker in whatever spreadsheet document you're using. For my example, I would go at numbers. Numbers does not have a codex plugin. There is no plugin for mail or numbers, but I would type it. I would type at, it would search for all the apps that are on my Mac, find that app. You know, you just natural language, type it out, find it in the list, select it.

And it would go through, find all the receipts that have come in for, you know, stuff I bought, then update my expense tracker automatically. And it works fantastic. I have been using this for so many different things and it is amazing. It is pure natural language automation without needing to know ifs, you know, like what if statements do. You don't need to know terminal commands. You don't need to know what apps need CLI. You don't need to know Python or any of this stuff.

It is pure natural language automation, and it is very, very interesting. I've used it for running our audio through Hush because what you can do is you can use it from your phone. So you can link the ChatGPT app on your phone to your Mac. And I literally had the files download, and then I told it to, hey, look for this zip file. So it's always timeline.zip from Riverside is our audio files.

unzip the file, take the audio files that are in that folder that you unzipped, run them through the app Hush, set the output in Hush to my underscore temp folder, do not change any presets in Hush, and it did it perfect. By the time I got back to my Mac, all of those files were ran, and they were there. They were done. They ran through Hush. They were cleaned up. They were there. Sorry, my brain is broken right now. I really hope this is all making sense. That makes sense. so i i am incredibly impressed with how this is working and like the the team behind computer use

i think this is the next step in automation for your computer and they have timed automation so you can set things up to run at specific times this is really making me want a mac mini or a mac studio like i am i am like i keep checking out like i'm like i could just buy one but like the m5 ones aren't out like oh like maybe but are the m5 ones gonna be so much more expensive i am i i have multiple times this week had a mac mini in my cart ready to go and i was like

maybe just wait and are they back in stock uh i think the one that i wanted was in stock but um i don't remember but uh i i think the one i i but i've been like looking at like the price and i'm like i don't because i want like the m4 pro and like yeah i don't i don't want the base m4 and i want some extra ram and i need some extra storage i wonder um so i'm looking at the video the video from OpenAI that you linked. Uh-huh. It looks quite different from when Federico showed off with Sky. Yes.

It looks quite different. It feels like Sky wanted to be way more contextual than this. Yes. Do you agree? I would agree, absolutely. And Sky felt more like a spotlight replacement, Whereas this is a chat bot, like, I'm just going to tell you to go do something, and it goes and does it. Now, I haven't got to the best part of this. Okay. So when you tell it to go do something, it basically creates another cursor on your Mac to go do it.

But it doesn't hijack your computer, unlike other tools. It does this completely in the background. So that mail example I gave earlier of like, hey, go through my mail, find all the receipts, update my expense tracking spreadsheet. That all happens in the background. I can still be editing a video or working on photos or writing a script or whatever while that's happening in the background. It doesn't take over my computer in any way whatsoever. It all happens in the background. That's the killer feature of this. Yeah, that is nice.

I remember when I was last year playing with all these AI browsers that browse for you, they all took over the browser, and so you couldn't do anything, and all you had to do was watch it use your browser slowly and often poorly. So it would be nice not to have it take over your mouse cursor and stuff. Are there other things you're doing with it? The Hush example is interesting. The email example is the example I always hear about these automation tools, and I do them once, and I never do them again.

So I'm curious if there's, like, other things that are clicking for you with this. Yeah, so there's a few other things that I am doing as well. So one of the other things is it works great with Obsidian because Obsidian is file and folder and stuff like that. So I went and I got some... I got to be kind of vague about this part. I got some PDF documents this week for some products. Nothing Apple-related. If you are listening and you're like,

Apple's about ready to release something new, this is not Apple-related whatsoever. Do not... This is not Apple-related. It's from Microsoft. Yes, it's from Microsoft. They're bringing the Surface tablets back. And you can only get real work done on a Surface tablet. So that's what this is. So I got some PDF documents, and they are full of fluff. And one thing I want to be able to go through these PDFs. I want to be able to get the information out of these PDF documents.

But one, I don't want them to be in PDF form, and I don't want all this fluff. So I gave them the codex. I said, hey, summarize these, pull out all the key points, turn them into a markdown file, and then add them to my research folder in at Obsidian. Obsidian does not have a plugin. It does have a command line interface, so it can use all that stuff. But it just did that in the background and went through these fairly hefty PDF documents, found all the key points, and created a pretty big Obsidian document for me to go through.

And now I have all the key points from that document. And I even verified it, because this is fairly new. So I did verify it and was like, yeah, you pulled all the important key points. And it took out all the fluff. There was none of this like patting ourselves on the back. We did this amazing thing crap that I was all over this PDF document. So it did a really great job with that. Another example, and this is another male one, but I get so much spam. But a lot of the spam and like junk email is very similar.

So I created a timed automation to go through and look for all these emails that are fairly similar and just archive them right away. And it's literally cleaning up my inbox every morning. And it's like cutting it down by half. Like it is it is so helpful. Like that is is killer. Another another example. And this one, this one's pretty this one's kind of demo. but I have found it to be really useful is I created a timed automation and it goes through my Todoist and Fantastical every day,

creates a summary and texts it to me and then marks that message in messages as unread. So when I wake up, I have it. Because if you text yourself in messages in the Mac messages app, it's going to immediately mark it as read. So this will actually go in and mark it as unread. So that's kind of cool. And again, this is all using the GUI. Todoist and Fantastical do not hook into Codex whatsoever. This is using the GUI of the Mac. And it's kind of cool. I was like, okay, yeah, it's very demo-y.

But I also thought, hey, if you are somebody that's a big business boy burglary and you have a bunch of different apps with a bunch of different stuff all over the place, you could have this go through and be like, okay, my team is working on this. I have this on my schedule. I have this on my task list. This was the summary of these meeting notes. Like we have a follow-up meeting to this meeting. Here's a summary of those meeting notes because you can have it go out and look and be like, hey, do I have any meetings on my calendar? Oh, were there any meetings related to this in the past month?

Go and find my notes for this and send me a summary of those notes. Like that's the kind of thing it can do. And again, it all happens in the background. And that's the killer part. If this was hijacking your computer, I do not think this would be useful whatsoever. But the fact that this is happening in the background while you can still use your computer is really nice. Say GUI again. GUI. Did I say it weird? I'm a little stuffed up today. I don't know if you could tell. GUI. GUI.

It is a funny word. It is. You know, I grew up in a different generation. And I only saw GUI written out. I liked forums for many years. And so I, in my head, I had always been saying GUI. I had no idea people were saying GUI all this time. Same. I say GUI, but yeah. I always heard GUI. I don't know why. GUI. I don't know. But anyway, so that's kind of Codex. Do you guys have any questions on it?

I think it's very fascinating. Oh, you can use it with the free tier of ChatGPT. You have to download the dedicated Codex app. It's not in the Mac ChatGPT app. It's in the Mac OS Codex app. So you have to download that, and then you go into the plugins and install computer use. But it is free to use, but if you do anything heavy with it, you will blow through your free usage tokens pretty quickly. I'm on the $20 a month plan, and I haven't hit that limit yet, so it's been fine with that.

So I've been pretty happy with it, And I think it's a pretty interesting tool to play with. That was exactly my question. A lot of times these features are in the $200 a month plan. That's an important detail to mention. It is. And honestly, if this was just in the $200 a month plan, I wouldn't even bring it up. But the fact that this is in the free plan and the $20 a month plan. And I think because OpenAI has like an $8 a month plan, so I'm guessing it's in that as well because if it's in the free plan, And it's in the $20.

I'm guessing it's in that $8 plan. But I just went with the whatever. I can't keep track of the name. I think it's the Plus. Maybe that's what it is. I think it's ChatGPT Plus is the $20. Okay. All right. That's what I thought. But yeah. So anyways, I have been really liking this. And I've been liking its results. I also like with ChatGPT, you can tweak its personality. So it doesn't be overly friendly. And you can just strip it down to kind of the bare bones. because I don't need an AI to be my friend. I got you too.

Like, I don't need an AI. I got you too. But yeah, so I don't know. Even if you're kind of like, I'm not sure about this AI stuff, I would play with this because I think it's fascinating natural language automation. And I'm really hoping Apple has something like this at WWDC. At the very least, the ability to create shortcuts like this. You know, Federico just released his Shortcuts Generator thing that he's been working on a really long time.

We should put a link to that in the show notes. Matt, that's you. Shortcuts Playground. Shortcuts Playground. Thank you. My brain is not functioning today, guys. Oh, my gosh. It is so bad. But anyways, I'm hoping Apple has something like that at WWDC. But, yeah. So that's Codex and computer use. like I said, free to try. Just go check it out. I think it's pretty interesting. My only opinion on this

is it freaks me out. So I will not try this ever. I will say they do a really good job with permissions. It will not interact with any app without asking your permission. There is an always allow option that you can check that I've checked for my timed automations, but it won't just go and go rogue and start doing stuff. And I've never had it. Like, I've been having it send messages through the messages app and it's never once messed up. So I've been impressed. And I was an AI skeptic for a very long time and I'm impressed. Freaks me out.

I've used my human hands to create a reminder for four weeks from now. I'm looking for an update. I'm curious if you're still using it, if you still like it, if you found new things. Because I would love to. see how it works in the long run. And like I said, I will have a video out. So today's Friday. It'll be out tomorrow, Saturday. But by the time the audience is listening to this, it's been out for almost a week. So there will be a video out. But I thought this would be an interesting discussion to have with the two of you because I feel like the three of us are on a nice range of the AI spectrum. Oh, no.

This implies that am I the AI sicko who just loved it? Yeah. How many apps have you made so far? None of them are AI apps, though. They're just like apps for normal folks. Yeah, but what did you use to make them? I think that's different. I mean, I guess I also used AI then. Okay, so maybe we're not as far apart as I thought, because I have some internal tools as well. And listen, I, surprisingly, in everyday life,

I, because I started doing this ironically and it's starting to get unironic, but I look up things in ChatGPT all the time in front of my friends just to like annoy them because most of my friends are like radical leftists and they are worse than me on AI. And I just, when we talk about things, I just pick up ChatGPT just to annoy them and it's starting to become like, It started as an ironic thing, and I do it all the time. It's funny. I still find it funny.

ChatGPT's search is actually really good. I mean, you can't find... Sorry. You can't find... You can't find anything with Google. Yeah. No, Google has gotten really bad. Hey, have you guys heard Kagi? Sorry. I couldn't help myself. I couldn't help myself. What is it? If you don't know, it's like everybody on Mastodon is like discovering Kagi this week. Yeah. I have beef with Kagi. Yeah, no, I know. I know. I know. Yeah. Don't use Kagi. Do what you want. Oh, okay. All right. Whatever.

I have a Kagi t-shirt. Yeah, people have Kagi plushies. I don't know. We are a spectrum on Kagi. Yeah. Some people have Arc stickers still on their laptops. I don't know if those. I would put an Arc sticker on my laptop. Absolutely. If you have an Arc sticker, reach out. I will put that on my laptop. It's like having a Netscape sticker, I guess. Oh, if you have a Netscape sticker, reach out. I will send you some money.

Yes. Oh, my God. I bet you I can order one from Netsy or something right now. Oh, by the way, guys, we talked about the Newton last week, right? We did. Tim asked us about it, yeah. Yes. And so I was on the Cult of Mac podcast this week. Oh, nice. And Griffin from Cult of Mac, he told me, so he listened to our show, and he told me, I've got a Newton right here. And I was like, maybe we should come on and talk about the Newton. We should do something about it.

Because I see on Mastodon that also Tim told you that he has a Newton. So maybe we can arrange a Newton focus group on the show or something. But anyway, so we kind of provoked our audience, send us Newtons, and people are actually like, here's my Newton. I can talk about the Newton. Yeah, yeah. Tim linked to, like, there's like a Wi-Fi chip you can get in it. Yeah. Oh, boy. It just seems like if I had nostalgia for that, I think I'd be all over it.

But I just, I missed that whole era. I'm too young. Yeah. I was a baby. Look, if people want to come on and talk about it, they're more than welcome to, but... Are they careful with what you say, Chris? Yeah. Okay, no, you're not welcome. Do not come on. By the way, I found a Netscape sticker. I'm ordering it now. Oh, okay. Do you have nostalgia for Netscape? Yes, because I use Netscape. Okay. For me, it's a legend. It's a real thing. It's a real thing. It was, oh, boy.

My first browser was in eWorld, but anyway. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I had a... Yep. I had to do that back in the day. Yeah. Now, have you guys ever heard of Redbubble? It's like a sticker website. Yeah. They do t-shirts as well, t-shirt prints. They have a lot of really good stuff on here. I'm just like adding a bunch of stuff to my cart right now. Is it one of those?

I think it's one of those sites where you can easily get started if you're an artist. Oh, really? They print everything for you and you just upload your designs. Oh, okay. Well, hopefully they're not problematic because I'm giving them like 20 bucks. No idea. Okay. Don't worry about it. Yeah. No. Oh, my gosh. That was the first place I ever bought stickers, and I regret ever giving them money. Screw Sticker Mule. Anyways, we should probably move on. We started with Codex and ended at stickers.

I'm not sure what happened there. I don't know. You know, podcasts just need the flow. Talk about whatever you're going to talk about. This is going to be one of those four-hour podcasts where we just... No, it can't be. I got Mandalorian Grogu tickets. It can't be four hours. Oh, okay. Oh, my God. Okay. Well, we can move on to my topic, which is more of an idea. Okay. I love when we have one of these.

I don't really know how to start this, but I kind of feel like social media tech, so this is a tech thing, has made us talk like psychopaths. I kind of, I just, the more I like think about it, the more I kind of believe this. This all kicked off a few weeks ago. Whenever the new Fitbit was announced, the new Fitbit like band that like goes after the, the, oh boy. Whoop. Whoop.

Whoop. Thank you. Whoop. There it is. And I don't, I don't have the link to it anymore, but I saw someone post. They were just some influencer I'd never heard of, but some of the people I follow, they're on threads. Some of the people I follow on threads follow them. So anyway, they're clearly trying to build some sort of audience and be influencer. Wow, threads. Let me just come in with the craziest hot takes on threads. I don't even need to believe them. I just need to write the craziest shit possible, and then I'll get a following.

That's threads for you. Maybe. But like the way this post was worded, it was like, it said, it started out, I feel sorry for anyone who's bought a whoop. Fitbit just killed what you love. Like that was like, and I was like, okay, that's a psychotic thing to say. If you said that in the real world, you would like, if you walked into the Best Buy to like buy your Fitbit and you were like, I feel sorry for the losers who bought the whoop. This is cheaper and better. I know I haven't used it, so I don't actually know any of this, but it's definitely going to kill the whoop.

It was just, it wasn't like the worst thing. People say worse things on social media. And we've established whoop is a cult, so if you were to say something like that in person, you'd get punched in the face or stabbed or maybe given Kool-Aid. I don't know. Chris, you're not helping my point here. But like it's just the sort of thing that like social media makes you say. You can't just say like, oh, Google released this new Fitbit that looks kind of cool.

Hopefully it lives up to what seems like it could be pretty decent. That's not going to get any clicks. No one's excited about that. No one's hitting the like button for that. I'm going to be mean to people because they bought a thing that there might be a better thing now. And I feel bad for them because they bought this four years ago and this didn't exist. but they should have known in four years, this was, there was going to be a better thing out. Another thing that I see a lot is people who are like X just killed Y, not like X, the social media platform,

but like this thing just killed this, like this is gone. And it's kind of the same thing of like this. They haven't even used the thing yet. This was another post I saw recently where Datadog has like some sort of tool they're working on that will like, it's, it's, it helps you monitor like software. and they're building some platform that will let you, like, as it notices recurring errors come up, it will generate tasks and code those tasks and can, like, submit them to review and all that. And someone was like,

Datadog just killed Claude Code and Codex. Yeah. Okay. Did it? I don't know. And the other one, and this one really gets me. This one. Oh, this one gets me. when it's always the same. It is always the notes app icon, Apple notes, a greater than symbol. And then it's either notion or obsidian. And it's like, or it's the version of that chart with like the, the line graph. That's like, like zero IQ, medium IQ,

high IQ. And it's like, if you have zero IQ, you use Apple notes. If you, if you have a medium IQ, you use notion because you think you're being fancy. And then once you are really smart, you're using Apple notes because Apple notes is the goat. Cause you didn't actually need all that automation. You didn't need all that complication. So yeah. I think that one is just generally the, I have figured it out. You don't need all that complexity or here's a 17 post thread on how you could optimize using something.

And the thing about it, I don't like is that people go through eras. I feel like sometimes you need complexity. Sometimes you want simplicity and you're going to go back and forth. It's fine. It's okay. I, if I find, no, my iPhone is recording this video, so I can't hold up the camera. If you look at my home screen, I don't have things on there at the moment. The app thing. You don't have anything on your home screen? It's just blank? I don't have things. Yeah, the screen's broken.

That's why it's my camera now. I don't use I'm not using things at the moment I'm actually using reminders for the reminders that I have because Matt's finally high IQ or no IQ where are we on that ground one or the other but like right now I don't need the things that things did for me that's not important to me reminders is totally sufficient and the fact that it can do those like uh urgent alerts that like take over the screen like it's an alarm going off oh yeah you're one step closer

to my way of maybe i'll be there one day maybe i'll just be like whatever if i can't keep it in my head or on a sticky note then it's uh it's not getting done but like oh my god you know you go through phases you have a second brain and then you're like why did i have that second brain that was so stupid you have uh these like crazy automation set up and then you're like i don't need those crazy automations you sign up for a very expensive app that some people call a cult because it really helps you with email and then you kind of get an email under control you don't need anymore like people go through phases and i i am very annoyed when it there's like this one

size fits all or like you're you have achieved enlightenment once you do what i do at this exact moment because in six months i'll do things something different so anyway i think there's I think social media has made us talk like influencers all the time about everything. And it's made us angry in a way. That's just very upsetting. Because everything has to scale now. That's the thing with the way why everyone talks this way is everything has to scale.

I need to be bigger and bigger so I can get bigger and bigger ad deals. And it's annoying and frustrating. and I am making changes to my business because I am sick of that stuff. I am sick of the, I need to constantly scale. I am making some changes because I have been seeing what you're talking about, Matt, and it's driving me nuts as well. And I just can't, I can't, I don't want to be a part of it. Yeah, and all of these posts I'm quoting

are actually Chris Lawley. Actually, it's pretty incredible. Actually, I wouldn't doubt it. Yeah, so it's just a thing. Also, on a related note, I saw Christopher Nolan did an interview, I think it was 60 Minutes, this past week, where they talked to him about tech, and they're like, you don't have a smartphone. And he's like, no, I don't use a smartphone. I have a flip phone. They're like, you don't do email. And he's like, no, I don't do email. And, you know, good for him.

What a life that must be. but uh the the post why he is my god but the post uh that i i saw was like uh now ask his assistants uh if they use email yeah oh yeah 100 yeah i do think it is it is interesting when you see like these people like i find in my line of work when someone's an executive and like are really high up in a company they're they're more likely to just bring like their ipad around or like they're doing everything

from their phone and uh or they just have like a paper notebook in front of them and it's like oh that's how that's how you do it and it's like no no you have assistants you have a whole team behind you that does things for you and it's just uh it's a very different life depending on where you are so yeah there's a reason why i have a bajillion automations that fire off all the time because those are my assistants like that that's that's that's it i instead of instead of hiring people because i i just i can't afford to hire somebody and give them proper salary and health insurance

and all that stuff uh i programmed a bunch of automations and that's my assistants and that's why i can carry around an ipad yeah so anyway and i feel like this is the same at every social network it was like this when i was on twitter uh it's definitely like this on threads threads threads is a nine but it is really like the most vapid stuff i feel like threads is kind of like facebook where there's stuff there and there's apparently hundreds of millions of people using

it but like it never escapes containment it's never like culturally relevant it's all just vapid junk and uh yeah so anyway the the i only have two reasons for having threads still installed is because that is where a majority of my YouTuber friends are. So it's nice to just kind of see what's going on with them. And that's where Formula One News is. Or a lot of Formula One News. At least Formula One News gets reposted there. So that's kind of the only reason.

I rarely, rarely, rarely post there. Because I don't really want to be a part of all that. But I'm just like, yeah, there's just enough there that I'd like to see. But ugh. Threads really seems awful. I don't have an account anymore and yeah every time I have to click a link on there it seems atrocious like the comments and everything are unhinged it feels like it's a second X like it feels like the same kind of vibe as

when you open a thread on X oh man um for reasons that will be revealed later i have opened a few more threads on x recently and it is it is wild in the comments like it is it is yikes sometimes especially on x i i don't know if this is true or not like this is literally just a thing i heard on the internet so who knows if this is true or not take a grain of salt i believe it already whatever okay cool i

I heard that X is now 75% men. Like, they've just, like, ran women off the platform. I heard this as well. And again, based on what I've seen in the replies, it does seem that way. Yeah. Yeah. Again, grain of salt. I legitimately do not know if that's true or not, but it really wouldn't surprise me. It also wouldn't surprise me if that number is actually, like, too low and it's more like 80 to 85 percent i wonder if it's the same on threads i you know

i'd be very curious about that oh i saw some comparison here i think it was better on threads oh i if there's i would not be surprised if men are also overrepresented on threads compared to say instagram for example oh i i would bet that 100 yeah yeah yeah oh yeah compared to instagram yeah absolutely alright anything else on this I mean Christopher Nolan he's fine he is my god I only have two complaints with him during his

Dark Knight series he renamed Ra's al Ghul to Ra's al Ghul for some reason it's Ra's al Ghul and he renamed the League of Assassins to League of Shadows for some reason it's League of Assassins I don't know why he did that I actually think that's probably more his brother because I think his brother was the writer on those but you know there is a better version of Christopher Nolan out there and he's called Denis Villeneuve I mean why choose you know

I choose he's unbelievable he's on an incredible run he is pretty great I'm so excited that he is directing the next James Bond movie Yeah, I heard that. And I could not believe it. I was like, sure. After he finishes Dune 3, Dune 3, he's going to do. And that's true. Wow. Okay, I'm really hoping they go back to the 50s Cold War era James Bond. We did the whole modern James Bond with Daniel Craig. Let's go back to the gadgety 50s James Bond.

Let's revisit that era now because that would be really fun. But yeah, I'm pretty excited about that. I really want him to do a Star Wars movie. I don't know if he would do it, but a Star Wars movie by him? A wasted potential. I don't think he would do well. Really? Yeah, I think Disney would ruin him. Yeah. See, he would need, like, I get full creative control. Yeah, not happening. I don't think he'd get that with Star Wars.

Yeah, that's true. Bob Iger over your shoulder. Bob Iger's gone. We got the new guy. We got the guy that's interested in the parks now. The guy that ran the parks. Bob Newman? It's Bob Newhart. Bob Newhart, yep. Definitely Bob Newhart. Okay, let's move on. All right. We had a challenge. It was your challenge. Yes. So the challenge was prank your spouse slash partner with some smart home stuff.

And yeah, that's it. I think I did well. If you want me to start. Please. So, you know, we just moved in to a new house and this is like we are not in the same city as before. We used to live in Grenoble, which is a fairly large city with plenty of public transit, like tramway lines, buses all around. Anyway, now we live in a very much smaller town that's located in between major cities.

Like it's not a rural town, but it's in the middle, you know. And anyway, so there's just one very busy train line that runs through town. It's very busy train line because it links two big cities. But that's just our only public transit, basically, to get out of the town and go someplace else. So I have surprised my partner with something. They still work in where we lived before, in the bigger city.

So they take the train every day and they need to wake up early and they come home later than before. And they rely on the train schedule and on knowing when trains arrive, when there are like late trains, like when there's an incident on the line or whatever. So I'm surprised them. Niléane blew up a train. Yeah. So I bought a train. So I surprised them with, you remember, we are mad at Terminal. At least I am.

But I still have my Terminal. It's e-waste, basically. It's just sitting there. Oh, the e-ink thing. The e-ink screen from Terminal. For some reason, I was thinking Mac OS Terminal, And I was like, why are we mad at the terminal? How do I do it? We're mad at the terminal. So, yeah, I've not sold it. Like, it is just sitting there. So, I just, I thought I would just use this. Put it near the entrance of our place. And if you unfold the spoiler tag in our document, you will see what it looks like. And maybe try to guess what it does.

Okay. So, it looks like train schedules. Mm-hmm. Are you having them run early? Did you set it up so that they run early and then it freaks out your partner? All accurate. Oh, okay. I think the prank part is just that I did this silently. Like, one day it was just there. Oh, okay, okay. All right, okay. It wasn't a mean prank. It wasn't. Okay. Well, I misunderstood this challenge. I misunderstood as well. I mean, it's okay to do a mean thing.

It's funnier, at least. So, yes, this is basically... So, you know, I don't know. You're not used to trains. You don't even know how to get on a train, do you? Why? I've got a car. I don't need a train. Everything I know about getting onto a train is from jet lag. Everything I know about trains is from Thomas the Tank Engine. That's a start. Jet lag is a start. So, to get on a train, you go to the train station. Inside the train station, you look up at the big screens. There are two big screens always. There's one for departures and one for arrivals.

this terminal at in our entrance of the house is displaying the real-time departure screen from our local train station and it's showing so the next trains with the scheduled departure the destination on the right side there's a letter that's the the platform a or b it's a small station so there's just ARB. And as you can see, the third and fourth and fifth and sixth train on this photo

right now are late. They are scheduled to be late, five minutes late. There's one that will be 20 minutes late, apparently. And it's displaying beneath that the reason for why it's late. So the incident that's currently ongoing. So right now, it's saying there's one train that's out of how do you call that? It's out of order. It broke down, basically. You blew it up. Yeah, I blew it up. But the others, the ones which have

a lesser late scheduled are saying that it's just because there's busy traffic on the train line. So there you go. And that's it. And they were very happy. Very, very happy. to explain how I did this by the way this was much more complicated than I imagined I had to make a Python script to screenshot a website because where does this departure table come from it comes from somebody

who made a website yeah I linked it in the show notes if you want to look at it. It's called Carto Chou. Basically, this is a real time, interactive, live map of all the trains currently running in France. It's absolutely amazing. This thing is amazing. You can click on any train on this map. There are the blue triangles. You will see their current trajectory, like the stations are coming through. You can click on any station

and see their departure schedule. You can see the disruptions currently ongoing. You can enable a heat map of all the late trains in France. This is absolutely amazing. This is all done using open data that's provided by the French state. So it's all free data provided by the government, basically, that you can use to build things like this. And they, yeah, obviously our local, very tiny local station is in there.

I will not link it. I'm not going to talk to myself. But if you click on that, on our local train station, you will see the departure table and all the schedules and everything. And you can see as well the trains coming and going on our line. This is an amazing website. Just wanted to mention it. This is wild. My Python script, what it does is it screenshots that departure table from this website every five minutes by spawning like a Chromium instance, blah, blah, blah, on our Linux server at home.

It screenshots that and then serves it on a local HTTP web server, like on the local network. And the terminal is just fetching the URL that's served from my Linux server at home, which is displaying just the tiny screenshot of the departure table. The script also turns it into black and white, so it's easier to control how it will look on the e-ink display. So it turned out to be a rabbit hole.

I thought this would take 10 minutes to set up. I spent many hours on this, but I'm very happy. this will stay in our home entrance because this is actually very useful. This is very impressive. This is very cool. Oh, man. Okay. Okay. This is cool. Yeah. So, yeah, not mean. I did not go the mean route. Just something fun, and I surprised them with something. Okay. Okay. Well. You guys were nice to your spouse as well, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went a slightly different route. Yeah, I heard prank. I didn't hear do something nice for your partner. Yeah. Okay. That's fine. Okay. So what I did, actually, this would have actually been a nice thing for Codex to do or for maybe Federico's shortcut playground thing would help. I created about 20 automations in the home app. to lower the brightness of the lights in our living room

by just like 2% at a time. Oh, that's genius. That's great. During the evening? During the evening, yes. And so my wife would be like, why did it get so dim? So I literally gaslit my wife. It's great. That's fantastic. How dim did it get? It got dim enough to notice, but it was definitely a kind of a frog in a pot situation

where you don't really notice it at the time. And there's no way to have them fade slowly. I was really wishing I could be like at 6 p.m., start fading it for two hours, but you can't really do that. So it was just a lot of like every, I forget how many minutes, every like five minutes it would like just tick down 2%. Just a little. Just a little. That's fantastic. It was fine. There were no like enormous moments, but I did have to give it up that I was doing it. Oh. It took forever to set up the automations. It was so annoying.

I can't imagine. Like, and then to be sitting there like watching like a TV show and be like, it's happening. It's working. but it's so little like you can't even tell like it's happening so like i was kind of in the same position as her as like uh is it actually is it darker i can't really tell so it's fun but i i've disabled those all because they were very annoying and then you blew up a train and then i blew this is how you blow up a pipe a pipeline this is uh

We are so going to be on an FBI watch list after this episode. Wow. So I did something kind of similar to Matt, sort of. I built an automation so that when you would turn on a light, a specific light that I knew Danielle would turn on, that it would wait five seconds and then turn off, so that way she would have to get up and hit the button again. But guys, so I built the automation and I tested it while she was gone. So I know it worked.

But this was not a good week for that. We have a new puppy. She had a crazy work schedule. This was I so I know that no point did I turn it on for her. I built it, but I didn't turn it on for her because I was like, this is how I get dumped. Like, this is how I lose my relationship. I lose everything. This was not a good week to do that. We've been chasing Riley around. We've been like, at one point, Riley stepped in her own poop and ran inside.

It was like, okay, this was not a good week for that. And on top of that, she had a crazy work schedule. So I built it and it was ready to go. I just never enabled it. You chickened out. I did chicken out. I didn't want to get dumped. I mean, what you could have done apparently, is just do something really nice. Yeah. See, that's what, like, if I would have known that's what the challenge was, because that was not the state. Yeah, I didn't realize a prank could be nice. It could be just do something nice for your partner.

It's not going to be nice. I mean, it can be funny. That's not really a prank. But I feel like they should have a moment where they're like, what the hell's going on? What is happening? Yeah. They were surprised to see that thing in the entrance. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I could have done something really nice for Danielle. You know what? I'm going to give her the Xbox in the living room this whole weekend and let her play Lego Batman. I'm just – that's – because she is very excited about a new Lego game. So that's the nice thing I'll do for her. Okay.

Good prank. Yeah. I'm not sure that's a prank, but I'll let her have it. Maybe I'll take the batteries out of her Xbox controller. There you go. that's way on the other end of the spectrum. I'll throw out her extra batteries. It'll be great. I'll throw out her controller. You know what I'll do? I'll take the HDMI cable out of the wall so there's no HDMI cable going from the TV to the Xbox. And our TV's mounted on the wall, so it goes into the wall. There you go. That's what I'll do.

No, I'm not going to do that. Anyways, yeah, so I chickened out. I'm sorry. I didn't want to get dumped. That's okay. That's okay. You didn't win, but it's okay. That's fine. Dimming slowly the lights. That was pretty good. That was pretty good. You know what, Matt? I think we'll give you one. Sure. We'll allow it this one time. It's a nice thing we're doing for you. Matt, but it's your challenge this next week. What do you got for us?

You may regret this immediately. My challenge is just three words. join a cult can I start a cult no I really think I would make a great cult leader all cult leaders do I really do think I would make a great cult leader I think I could be a really good like I'm animated I could get people to follow me join a cult I mean I would say join a cult don't start a cult kids don't start cults does it have to be a real cult I mean well

listen there's more of a software cult so you could use superhuman of course the absolute goat of software cults don't pay for anything necessarily obsidian is a cult notion is a cult I would argue BBEdit is a cult LaunchBar is a cult I'm installing linux linux is a cult Linux is definitely a cult Linux, once you're in you're in, you're in for life yeah, so you may escape a little bit but they'll bring you back so join a cult use a cult

use an app or something with a cult following that you don't typically use use it a little bit oh, okay okay, okay interesting I have to think on this a little bit That was good. See, the problem is I'm already a part of cults. Canon, Apple, Obsidian. Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper. That's like a cult of one, though.

I don't know if there's a huge cult of Dr. Pepper. Is Mastodon a cult? Mastodon's definitely a cult. You talk about any other social media on Mastodon, people will get mad at you. Well, they're not federated. They're not properly federated. That's true. How dare they? That's not a cult. That's just true. They're not federated. By the way, the Verge. Did you see what the Verge did? Yeah, they federated the QuickPost things. Yeah, they announced that they were federating the QuickPost on their homepage. And when you look at the fine prints.

I really don't know what that means, by the way. Yeah, so I don't want to trash talk them, but I will a little bit. It seems like by federating, they mean we are just duplicating that post. And so basically cross-posting on Bluesky threads. And there was another one, and that's it. Isn't that it? Not even Mastodon? There's no Mastodon because they're saying the Threads account is federated.

So it shows up on Mastodon. So technically, it's on Mastodon. So they're not actually federating anything. What they're doing is they literally just have an automation set up to take a quick post and post it to these other accounts. It seems like it. But also they're saying the replies to the posts are supposed to show up on the website. And they do. I did see that. Yeah. Which seems weird. It seems like they have two bots set up. One to cross post and the other to scrape the replies and copy them. Why? First off, why do you even have comments on?

Yeah, that's... If it wasn't so ingrained into YouTube culture, I would turn comments off. You cannot turn comments off. You cannot turn comments off. It is ingrained into... Like, Apple is the only people that turn comments off. And even they are starting to come around on that. Did it like penalize you in the algorithm? Well, people just are like, this guy has no confidence. He's doing something. It is a huge faux pas. It is like. Oh, okay. And comments are part of the engagement algorithm too. Yeah. True. So anyways, but yeah, no. Wow.

Mastodon is not a cult, but I do have a sticker right here on my mic. Mastodon's definitely a cult. That's a sign of a cult. That is Mastodon's definitely a cult. I got this tattoo of the elephant. I'm going to join the Ford cult. Can I just buy another car? Chris, you are actually not short on cults. You are pretty heavy on cults. But my cults are good cults. I've got good cults. I've got great cults. I've got the best cults. Nobody's cults are as good as mine. You should see my cult numbers.

My cult numbers are off the chart. We have the best cult numbers. Oh, boy. Okay. Okay. All right. So that brings us to the end of the show. And I got an end of the show question for you. And it's mostly a follow-up question. But I want to know what web browser are you currently using? What web browser is open right now? Not what might be your default browser, but what web browser is currently open? That has 10 browsers open. What do you mean web browser? Oh, God. You can type a URL into it and it resolves.

There's a bar in there. You can type it. You can type in birchtree.me.co.uk.gov.edu. What if I have a couple of them open? Okay, what are they? You know what? It's three Chromium browsers and my battery life is great. Helium is my go-to. It remains my go-to, just day-to-day browser. Dia is my work browser. And Vivaldi, for whatever reason, is where I just have Comfort Zone siloed in here. So this is where I have the tier list app bookmarked. This is where I have Riverside ready to go.

So I have three apps open right now. And again, all Chromium, great battery life. Niléane, can I just answer for you? Yeah. Chrome. What do you mean? No. I'm just kidding. No, it's Vivaldi. It's got to be. Vivaldi, yeah. Vivaldi, okay. I'm still all in on Vivaldi. Nice. I'm still using Dia I'm pretty happy with Dia I'm still using Dia Oh you were supposed to give us an update I'm pretty happy with it I tried the tabs at the top like you suggested

I immediately went back to the sidebar I love the sidebar the sidebar is great I haven't finished I'm in the process of setting up 1Password and all that stuff I just haven't quite it's been a crazy week it's been sidebar in browsers. I think I'm turning it wrong. Then you should just use Safari. This is what I'm saying. Sometimes sidebar, sometimes tabs, sometimes top. It doesn't matter. The sidebar killed top bars. Anyone who uses top

bars is overthinking it. And I feel sad for people that are using the top tabs. Christopher Nolan doesn't use top tabs. title that is the title of the episode Christopher Nolan doesn't use top tabs thank you all so much for listening have a great day