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Speaker 1: up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome back to dot net rocks. I'm Carl Franklin at
Speaker 1: Amateur gam and this is Show nineteen hundred and twenty.
Speaker 1: There you go, and Chris Sells we can see him,
Speaker 1: you can't see him, but he just shook his head like,
Speaker 1: how did that happen? He was at episode ten. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty was a leap year starting on Thursday of
Speaker 1: the Gregorian calendar, and a leap year starting on Wednesday
Speaker 1: of the Julian calendar. The nineteen hundred and twentieth year
Speaker 1: of the Common era and Anno Dominie designations, the nine
Speaker 1: hundred and twentieth year of the second millennium, the twentieth
Speaker 1: year of the twentieth century, in the first year of
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties decade, of course, don't you feel old?
Speaker 2: Yes? It's also when the League of Nations got formed.
Speaker 1: Ah, are there any other trivial details you want to
Speaker 1: say about nineteen twenty Richard.
Speaker 2: Because women got the vote in the United States.
Speaker 1: You're amazing. We didn't even practice this. No, he just
Speaker 1: looked up to the sky. Yeah, here's a factoid. Pretty
Speaker 1: sure it's nineteen twenty. Yeah, pretty sure? Wow, amazing. All right,
Speaker 1: As we said, Chris Sells is coming up here. I
Speaker 1: know you're interested and anxious to hear from him. But
Speaker 1: first we have this little thing called better No Framework.
Speaker 2: Awesome, bopart man, what do you got?
Speaker 1: Simon Cropps sent me this. It's not his but GitHub
Speaker 1: dot com. Slash Auto dark Mode h slash Windows Auto
Speaker 1: night Mode.
Speaker 2: So night mode versus dark mode.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, so the whole idea is that it goes
Speaker 1: to dark mode at night, right, and then and then
Speaker 1: you know, light mode in the daytime. Now, I work
Speaker 1: in a room with no windows, right, I am dark
Speaker 1: mode all the time, and I like it that way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I know there are people that you know, do
Speaker 1: work out in the daylight, such as you Richard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got natural light coming in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you might you know, you get this feature
Speaker 1: in phones, right, it goes to dark mode automatically. Why not?
Speaker 1: Why not for Windows?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Why should it be in your PC?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Absolutely no, that's a good idea. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if that's the kind of thing you like, there
Speaker 1: you go, know it, learn it. Love at nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: dot po dot me awesome. Who's talking to us today?
Speaker 3: Richard gravity Komatova Show eighteen ninety eight, the one we
Speaker 3: did with our friend Sean Wildermouth earlier this year twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four on being a senior software developer, which I
Speaker 3: would argue kicked off the largest chains of conversation so
Speaker 3: far this year.
Speaker 1: And isn't it interesting that he was like a little
Speaker 1: concerned that it might not go over well and.
Speaker 2: It's like this is not an important show. It's like,
Speaker 2: I think you're wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And he also didn't know that.
Speaker 3: I had Aaron Erickson coming on the following week, which
Speaker 3: the aromatic developer, same age, a little.
Speaker 2: Different career sto story.
Speaker 3: So I thought it was a good comparison and just
Speaker 3: ability to tell that show anyway. I thought one of
Speaker 3: these comments would fit really nicely with where we're going
Speaker 3: to end up going, clearly being three old guys talking.
Speaker 2: On a show.
Speaker 3: This is from Smitty, who said, I am about to
Speaker 3: turn sixty and have been a professional developer for thirty
Speaker 3: eight years. I just discovered this website and podcast as
Speaker 3: a resolve the show that Richard does with Throt that'd
Speaker 3: be Windows Weekly. Anyway, I saw an interview with Sean,
Speaker 3: who I knew from Plural site, and I gave it
Speaker 3: a listen and I really enjoyed it. I've gone through
Speaker 3: this phase a couple of times. They sort of what
Speaker 3: am I doing with my career phase, which I think
Speaker 3: was where Sean was at at the time, and I'm
Speaker 3: in it again. For the last fifteen years, I've been
Speaker 3: working my way up through management and currently in upper management.
Speaker 3: The money is great and has mentioned in the episode.
Speaker 3: My value is the wisdom that I've accrued over the
Speaker 3: decades is useful in my department of forty plus developers
Speaker 3: and directors these days. My question is when do I
Speaker 3: retire five to seven years and what do I do
Speaker 3: after that. I just don't see myself sitting in a
Speaker 3: rocker on a front porch anytime soon. Yep, yeah, I know.
Speaker 2: You know, if you stop, you're going to die, right
Speaker 2: We're sharks here. You need to keep moving.
Speaker 1: But yeah, seriously, though, if you guys are different obviously
Speaker 1: maybe Chris isn't. But if I don't write code at least,
Speaker 1: you know, several hours a week, I feel like, why
Speaker 1: am I even on this planet?
Speaker 2: Yeah? No, I know what you mean.
Speaker 3: And what I realized is like, I don't know a
Speaker 3: project per se, but I'm always writing bits of code
Speaker 3: for things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of it is home automation.
Speaker 3: These days, but it's still you know, you're always trying
Speaker 3: to solve problems with code because you.
Speaker 1: Can, because I can.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but let's face it, there's so many more things
Speaker 3: to do. I'm getting ready to build another machine, and
Speaker 3: the conversation with the local community spun into hey, would
Speaker 3: you build that machine at the high school?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: You know, do a session with every with everyone to
Speaker 3: show walk them through building machine. I'm like, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 3: Like these are things you could do any point in
Speaker 3: your life, that's right. Yeah, and there's more time, yeah
Speaker 3: for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Smittie, thank you so much for your comment. And
Speaker 3: a copy of music Coby is on its way to you,
Speaker 3: and if you'd like a copy of music, go buy.
Speaker 3: I write a comment on the website at dot NetRocks
Speaker 3: dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there,
Speaker 3: and if you comment there and every reading on the show,
Speaker 3: we'll send your copy of music Cobi.
Speaker 1: And Yeah, music to code By is still going strong.
Speaker 1: People are buying it and which is great. And I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about fixing fixing to come up with a new one.
Speaker 1: You're not just fixing to go fixing for uh in
Speaker 1: the right? Yeah for twenty two track number twenty two.
Speaker 3: You were saying an earlier show that you were listening
Speaker 3: to it and it sort of triggered some things in
Speaker 3: your head.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, it's like, you know, this isn't quite half bad,
Speaker 1: And you know, I was only worried that I was
Speaker 1: listening to it as music and not a background stuff,
Speaker 1: but it still did the trick. Well, let's bring on
Speaker 1: Chris Sells. Chris is an advocate for developers, a Flutter fanatic,
Speaker 1: and a consultant and applied AI and developer tools and ecosystems,
Speaker 1: now retired. He enjoys long walks on the beach and
Speaker 1: has technologies and I do not think he is looking
Speaker 1: for another wife, right. I know that long walks on
Speaker 1: the beach thing kind of triggered that thought.
Speaker 3: Ye also the guest on episode ten, which like the
Speaker 3: definitive description of garbage collection. Yes, in two thousand and two.
Speaker 1: And episode one hundred and several episodes.
Speaker 2: After that, but more than a dozen.
Speaker 1: A lot of things have happened since episode ten.
Speaker 2: I can't believe you're at episode nineteen twenty? Are you
Speaker 2: kidding me? Now? You're into like the twentieth century, right,
Speaker 2: these are like years, And of course that's what you did, right,
Speaker 2: You went, hey, you know what happened in nineteen twenty,
Speaker 2: and you forgot prohibition, which seems like a bad idea.
Speaker 2: The ACLU was formed, which is a good idea. And
Speaker 2: I didn't know this. I'm sure Richard, you did that.
Speaker 2: Ponzi's schemes were named after a man named Charles Ponzi. Ponzi,
Speaker 2: and he did it in nineteen twenty. Wow.
Speaker 3: I think the biggest esthetic around nineteen twenty is you're
Speaker 3: coming out of World War One and the Spanish Flu,
Speaker 3: and so culturally there was this sense of what we
Speaker 3: now call existentialism. It's like everybody knew somebody who had died,
Speaker 3: and for random reasons, the first industrialized war, this disease,
Speaker 3: we didn't understand. You know, at this point, Pastor has
Speaker 3: figured out what brewers yeast is. But that's about it.
Speaker 3: We're still twenty years away from any any treatments for
Speaker 3: a lot of these things. You still had children that
Speaker 3: died from stepping on a nail, right, and so the
Speaker 3: fact that you had this insanity happen over the previous
Speaker 3: five eight years. This is where the.
Speaker 2: Whole flapper movement comes from. Where a lot of this
Speaker 2: stuff comes from. Was like party today because the day
Speaker 2: is lie. Hey, save this for subsequent shows. Yeah, the
Speaker 2: Roaring twenties, this is it.
Speaker 1: We have a lot of shows to get through.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So these yeah, these are the shows. These are
Speaker 2: your Roaring twenties, your shows.
Speaker 3: Yes, we're going to do It's nineteen twenty and we're
Speaker 3: going to roar through them because they have.
Speaker 2: So many good stories about this. I am happy to
Speaker 2: be your first flapper on your nineteen era of shows date.
Speaker 1: All right, Uh so what have you been up to
Speaker 1: mister Cell's retirement, you said before the show.
Speaker 2: Well, it's funny. I did the math in June, my birthday,
Speaker 2: and I have been a full time software engineer for
Speaker 2: about forty years at that point. And yes, if you
Speaker 2: do the math. I actually started with an Apple two
Speaker 2: plus my parents' basement when I was about fourteen, and
Speaker 2: they made me go to high school during the day,
Speaker 2: but all the rest of the time I was writing code,
Speaker 2: and I've been sixty five two assembler. It was not Oh,
Speaker 2: I did some of that right. I would indexed indirect
Speaker 2: addressing for anyone. I remember really entering these strings of
Speaker 2: sixty five h two just by as numbers as folks
Speaker 2: statements right from magazines. And so for Christmas one year,
Speaker 2: I asked my grandmother to buy me a speech synthesis
Speaker 2: card for my Apple two plus, which she had no
Speaker 2: idea what that was, but you know she I helped
Speaker 2: her track it down and I used it to read
Speaker 2: back to me the listings that I entered from the
Speaker 2: magazine to make sure that I got everything right, because
Speaker 2: you know, you drop one number instead of going eyes
Speaker 2: back and forth, you're literally hearing it say it, and
Speaker 2: you're reading against the magata. That's right. I love it.
Speaker 2: Yeah and yeah. So a Swedish farmer was reading me
Speaker 2: back my code listings to make sure that I entered
Speaker 2: them correctly.
Speaker 1: You're not going to believe this, but I my first
Speaker 1: computer at home was a trsaight model. For I know,
Speaker 1: I'm like the young kid in the crowd right in
Speaker 1: terms of computers. But I also bought a speech synthesis
Speaker 1: card that you could attach to the back of it,
Speaker 1: and I used it to play games with my friends,
Speaker 1: where I taught my friend how to enter in an
Speaker 1: input statement for a particular person that we knew, and
Speaker 1: then it would spit out, you know, a time warp
Speaker 1: that what happened, like you, the game was you woke
Speaker 1: up in the future, and you have a computer here,
Speaker 1: and you want to ask it what happened to you?
Speaker 1: Put in a name, and then it read back a paragraph.
Speaker 1: And we would spend hours just writing up these crazy paragraphs,
Speaker 1: and the thing would speak it back to us. Just
Speaker 1: these are twenty rain stories.
Speaker 2: We talk about, you know, our first computers at Richard.
Speaker 2: I hope you'll tell us what yours is in a minute.
Speaker 2: But Tira Sadi model one. There you go, the Trash eighty,
Speaker 2: the Appleitude plus, right, I mean a friend of mine
Speaker 2: who had a big twenty. I mean, I think anyone
Speaker 2: listening to the show is going to think we're born
Speaker 2: in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 3: No, yeah, I apparently the Tira Sad. I didn't learn
Speaker 3: this till years later when I got smitten with history,
Speaker 3: that the Tandy company did not think it was going
Speaker 3: to do well. So they only manufactured like two thousand
Speaker 3: of them and distributed one to each store, and that's
Speaker 3: all there was. And they just sort of sat in
Speaker 3: the corner. And I was the kid at ten, who
Speaker 3: is this nineteen seventies? So and I went in and
Speaker 3: I could make it work, and they didn't care, right
Speaker 3: that I could make it work, then we're doing anything
Speaker 3: with it. So I had to find time messed around
Speaker 3: with a whole four k a ram, right, But it
Speaker 3: also then became a sales tool, right, like when people
Speaker 3: did get interested in wanted to buy it. The fact
Speaker 3: that the ten year old was making it sing and
Speaker 3: dance so you can do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they didn't realize you were just any ten year old, right,
Speaker 2: So yeah, it's still I guess it was nice for
Speaker 2: the store.
Speaker 3: But I was in a radio shack in the first
Speaker 3: place because I was buying parts for making stuff go boom.
Speaker 3: I wanted to I wanted to rock a countdown timeer
Speaker 3: because saying three to two one is too much work
Speaker 3: for me, right, I want to push a button and
Speaker 3: it counts down for me.
Speaker 1: For me. I did the same thing Richard Nixon. I've
Speaker 1: told the story before, except I was kind of a jokester.
Speaker 1: So I'd go into radio shack where they had the
Speaker 1: Tandies running, and I would press control C to break
Speaker 1: out of the basic program that was running, and I'd
Speaker 1: clear it and write my own basic program. And usually
Speaker 1: it ended up with swearing at the cost inevitably, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Ten print Carl rules twenty go to ten right, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was more like what's your name?
Speaker 2: A dollar?
Speaker 4: And then fu a Dallas, pretty simple man and just
Speaker 4: walk out as a jerk little kid.
Speaker 3: Anyway, so we did you were at Microsoft. There was
Speaker 3: a long gap on I'm just thinking about shows. Then
Speaker 3: we did the Leak Show issue which was thirteen thirty seven,
Speaker 3: I mean literally leaps sure, which was the Google Cloud Show,
Speaker 3: which I thought was really awesome, right, talking about dot
Speaker 3: net on Google Cloud and all the goodness that still
Speaker 3: exists there. And then we certainly fld a lot of
Speaker 3: flutterlove by the edmen on the show. Since you left
Speaker 3: Google for Facebook, what was that about?
Speaker 2: Yeah? What was what were you thinking? What was that
Speaker 2: about I'm pretty sure I phoned you at the time
Speaker 2: and go, dude, what are you doing.
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 2: And I am not and have never been a Facebook user, right,
Speaker 2: I was a I was not a Facebook user when
Speaker 2: not being a before being a Facebook user were cool, right,
Speaker 2: that's right, And so when I interviewed with them, actually
Speaker 2: was funny. I'm like, just to be clear, I'm not
Speaker 2: I don't use Facebook. I don't know if that's a
Speaker 2: deal break or not. And they were fine because at
Speaker 2: that point they had changed their name to Meta Meta.
Speaker 2: So that's how I think about it. I went to
Speaker 2: work for Meta, and I went to work for Meta
Speaker 2: so I could work with my dear dear friend Don
Speaker 2: Box okay fair, yeah, yeah, And he was in Reality Lab.
Speaker 2: He was a VP there driving various AR and VR
Speaker 2: kinds of things, and so I was there doing deb
Speaker 2: tools for AR and VR developers for their well, for
Speaker 2: their so this quest head set now, right, and then
Speaker 2: you know we were working on and still I'm sure
Speaker 2: they're still working on AR hardware, right, you know, more
Speaker 2: like glasses than goggles, right, yeah? Sure? Sure. Did you
Speaker 2: work on Horizon World? No? I did not. I was
Speaker 2: working on the other side. I was working on the
Speaker 2: platform side. That was one of the apps they were building.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they were implementing the tooling you were building.
Speaker 3: Was what helped build the Horizon World, presumably.
Speaker 2: You would, Yeah, I mean there was a platform of things,
Speaker 2: and we had actually a bunch of teams around Meta
Speaker 2: building various things. Obviously Horizon World was one of the
Speaker 2: big clients for that platform, but a lot of building
Speaker 2: a lot of first party apps. The idea being, you know,
Speaker 2: what was the thing that developers needed to build for
Speaker 2: to build compelling VR apps? Apps? Not games? Right? The
Speaker 2: games thing they had locked down and they still do, sure,
Speaker 2: but apps or or mixed reality apps or are augmented
Speaker 2: reality apps? Right, what do you really need?
Speaker 1: And so I thought Unity was that thing. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think you told me as much.
Speaker 2: Well, so Unity was the what they used to build
Speaker 2: games for sure, and absent experiences for uh, for virtual
Speaker 2: reality right where you own all the pixels. Unity is
Speaker 2: great for that and and Meta had a partnership. I'm
Speaker 2: sure it still does with Unity. And you know, one
Speaker 2: of the outputs from the Unity ide was, Hey, I
Speaker 2: want to target something for the quest. But when it
Speaker 2: comes to augmented reality, you know, the the hardware you
Speaker 2: get on a pair of glasses or the hardware they
Speaker 2: were projecting or you know, uh dreaming of right, was
Speaker 2: going to be a lot smaller. It's way too small
Speaker 2: to run something big like Unity, right, so wise, yeah,
Speaker 2: so we were we were looking for something, you know,
Speaker 2: much smaller that you could you know, get the performance
Speaker 2: and and still figure and still build the experiences at
Speaker 2: the same time inventing what those experiences would be. Right,
Speaker 2: what do people really want? What? What's the killer app
Speaker 2: if you were for for your glasses? Right?
Speaker 1: So, really, what you're talking about is an app that
Speaker 1: you can run on the glasses or the goggles or
Speaker 1: whatever that lets you build the experience on them, not
Speaker 1: on a PC.
Speaker 2: No no, no, no, no, no no, you build the
Speaker 2: experiences on a PC.
Speaker 1: Oh you do, okay, that.
Speaker 2: Target the app? Oh yeah, but you are trying to
Speaker 2: do the twolling. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: But if you think you need to paint a vision
Speaker 3: before you know what to build a tool. So for me,
Speaker 3: the thing I've been struggling with with AR is what
Speaker 3: is the information workers app? You know, what is the
Speaker 3: word in Excel that needs a augmented reality?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So, and of course that is that is a question.
Speaker 2: That's the killer app for me. The killer app I want.
Speaker 2: I want the terminator vision, right right. I want to
Speaker 2: walk around and just see all this extra metadata, have
Speaker 2: your reality augmented, that's right. I want you know, Oh,
Speaker 2: I'm great with faces, but terrible with names. Help me understand.
Speaker 2: As I approach this person, write what they're remind me
Speaker 2: of their name. And the last time we talked, they.
Speaker 1: Had that in the seventies. It was called LSD.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 1: It wasn't necessarily accurate information, but.
Speaker 3: If you made sure the person you're talking to was
Speaker 3: taking it too, they didn't care.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so you can think of LSD. I mean
Speaker 2: the other part the reason one of the things I
Speaker 2: cared about was I want useful information. I don't. I
Speaker 2: didn't want it to be just you know, this stream
Speaker 2: of ads shooting shouting it to you from all the
Speaker 2: places around me. Right, yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's there, and therein lies the challenge, right, So
Speaker 3: what's the business model? But I do think it's a
Speaker 3: very challenging space. Like every time I dig into industrial applications,
Speaker 3: like I've looked at some of the HoloLens applications where
Speaker 3: they're working on expensive machines and the fact that the
Speaker 3: software can exactly that augment these are the steps to
Speaker 3: do this maintenance, and then also keeps a detail video
Speaker 3: record of them doing it correctly, like when you're working
Speaker 3: on a fifty dollars million dollar machine doing a five
Speaker 3: million dollar maintenance. A five thousand dollar our headset isn't
Speaker 3: a big deal. Now it's not. But that's very much
Speaker 3: that vertical industry, that certain verticals that makes sense. It's
Speaker 3: not a consumer product.
Speaker 2: Well it was interesting too because while I was there,
Speaker 2: we were definitely focused on the consumer space, but every
Speaker 2: one of our competitors had already transitioned to the enterprise space,
Speaker 2: right Hollo Lens was enterprise and government, and Google Glass
Speaker 2: was enterprise and and Magical Leap who knew what they
Speaker 2: were doing. And then you know, Meta was very focused
Speaker 2: on consumers, and of course, you know they always happen, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, that's just in the DNA of the company.
Speaker 2: Product's always been.
Speaker 1: And they changed their name to Meta presumably to promote
Speaker 1: this idea of the metaverse where they thought that everything
Speaker 1: was going. Did they think they would be there by now?
Speaker 2: Oh yes, for sure, And in fact, in many ways
Speaker 2: as they are. I mean they are easily the number
Speaker 2: one VR headsind right. They keep pumping out better and
Speaker 2: better quests, and the games are really great. They're a
Speaker 2: ton of fun, and they get they get better with
Speaker 2: their regeneration. But the thing that they kind of had
Speaker 2: a kind of unexpected hit in was the fitness apps.
Speaker 2: And I understand this myself, right, I mean, exercise has
Speaker 2: traditionally been something I do not enjoy, and so if
Speaker 2: because it's just boring, right, and so the nice thing
Speaker 2: about the Quest is, you know you can do all
Speaker 2: kinds of amazing things that are actually good for you, right,
Speaker 2: You have fun, you're you're mentally engaged, and and and
Speaker 2: and so they are easily the number one in that space.
Speaker 2: And then nobody's really done the ar thing yet. I mean,
Speaker 2: Apple's Apple what Apple Vision is, uh? What It's it's
Speaker 2: mixed reality, right, Essentially it's Google goggles, not Googles goggles,
Speaker 2: right where they own every pixel and then they use
Speaker 2: cameras to bring it in so it looks like you're
Speaker 2: augmenting the world around you.
Speaker 1: It's like Mad Quest too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and medical the Quest does that as well, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, although you know the vastly different price point,
Speaker 2: but nobody's gotten anything close to what you really want,
Speaker 2: which is you know, os running on the glasses, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean you want it self contained, but
Speaker 3: there's always that debate of you know what, what's actually necessary.
Speaker 3: I remember seeing the early prototypes of the HoloLens. They
Speaker 3: called the gargoyle because which is straight William Gibson, you
Speaker 3: know the bridge quote, Because when you put that thing on,
Speaker 3: you look like a gargin painting, right, Like it's just
Speaker 3: a set of cables running down your back, like it
Speaker 3: was a monster.
Speaker 2: Well, and that was the That was one of the
Speaker 2: tensions too, which is mr is a great kind of
Speaker 2: you know, stepping stone to ar right, because it helps
Speaker 2: you build out the experiences, but you are by definition
Speaker 2: limited to those people who are willing to walk around
Speaker 2: the world with those china And.
Speaker 1: I guess that's that's what I was getting at when
Speaker 1: I asked if we were at the vision of the
Speaker 1: metaverse yet. I mean, yeah, you can put the goggles on,
Speaker 1: and you can exercise, and you can have fun and
Speaker 1: play games, but that's not where I live. I live
Speaker 1: in front of my monitor on my desktop computer, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Absolutely, I don't. I can't. I
Speaker 1: can't wear that thing for more than an hour at
Speaker 1: a time because it just hurts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, yeah yeah, And of course that's because
Speaker 5: of the weight, and it's because, I mean, for a
Speaker 5: lot of people, although this is less true over time
Speaker 5: as the graphics get faster.
Speaker 2: Had trouble with sickness, right, and you know me, time
Speaker 2: I put it on, the first thing I did was
Speaker 2: reflexively looked for my hands right, were my hands right?
Speaker 2: And then of course after that I wanted my keyboard
Speaker 2: ring front of me, as you correctly point out, Carl, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, but just to be clear, that stuff isn't
Speaker 2: for us, right, all of our reflexes that we've built
Speaker 2: up over a lifetime. Hey, you know, Richards started in
Speaker 2: the back of a radio shack and has been building
Speaker 2: on those same muscles ever since. This technology isn't for us, right,
Speaker 2: will die, and the next generation will take the new
Speaker 2: technology and develop their own muscles around it, and they'll
Speaker 2: grow up with with whatever it is. Now. I would
Speaker 2: argue that the VR stuff has not made it into
Speaker 2: a place where it's useful for you know, a place
Speaker 2: where you live. As you put it, Carl, that's a
Speaker 2: really good way to say it. Right. It's not the
Speaker 2: place where people live, and I don't think it ever
Speaker 2: will be. I just don't think that that kind of
Speaker 2: bulk on your face is something that people want. If
Speaker 2: I could, yeah, but if we actually when when we
Speaker 2: get too smart glasses not if I believe it is
Speaker 2: absolutely a win. I think people will live in those
Speaker 2: for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I use immersed with the quest you know about Immersed.
Speaker 1: So this is something that you connect either via USB
Speaker 1: or Bluetooth to your computer and you get your computer
Speaker 1: screen in a virtual world, and you can add multiple
Speaker 1: screens to windows and put them wherever you want. And
Speaker 1: also you get to draw these portals, which are holes
Speaker 1: in the space time fabric. Right, try a little square
Speaker 1: where your keyboard is. You can see your hands. And
Speaker 1: so this is a really good thing. I love using
Speaker 1: it with a laptop in a hotel room if I
Speaker 1: really want to, you know, do some real work instead
Speaker 1: of you know, being confined to the screen. It's got
Speaker 1: its drawbacks, but I like it. Interesting cool program. Jeff
Speaker 1: Fritz told me about it.
Speaker 2: I really like it. I like that idea where you
Speaker 2: can you can like move your head over here and
Speaker 2: that's where the hotel TV is and you can you
Speaker 2: can carve out a spot in your in your That's
Speaker 2: a really clever way to do it, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the quality for watching TV or video is not there,
Speaker 1: especially in low light, but you know it's getting better.
Speaker 1: It's a good idea, good enough for me to see
Speaker 1: the keyboard and mouse.
Speaker 2: Well, and that's the it's stuff like this. That's where
Speaker 2: the reason I I thought, I the reason I was
Speaker 2: excited about the technology is I uh, because you know,
Speaker 2: you look at you know, web, the web, and it's
Speaker 2: pretty much done, right. We know how to do things
Speaker 2: on the web, and there haven't been a lot of
Speaker 2: innovations there. And before that, the desktop has been done
Speaker 2: for a long time. And and now you look at
Speaker 2: mobile and it's done too, right, I mean, there's not
Speaker 2: a lot of innovations in terms of user experience and
Speaker 2: new ways of doing things. And so I looked at
Speaker 2: AR specifically but VR two as kind of the next
Speaker 2: generation of user experience for computers, right, I mean, a
Speaker 2: new way of doing thing. Turns out I was completely wrong,
Speaker 2: and I think everyone was. It turns out that the
Speaker 2: new way of interacting with computers is AI is generative
Speaker 2: AI and LLMS. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Before we jump into that, though, I really need to
Speaker 1: point out that Chris, for our listeners that don't know,
Speaker 1: was instrumental in the success of dot net rocks. And
Speaker 1: he may not think so, but back when bandwidth was expensive,
Speaker 1: I was asking my friends and Chris was one of them, Hey,
Speaker 1: is there anything that you can think of to help
Speaker 1: us alleviate this bandwidth bill? And Chris was working at
Speaker 1: MSTN in Microsoft, and I think you said, I literally
Speaker 1: walked over to somebody whose name I can't remember and said, Hey,
Speaker 1: can we help out Carl with maybe like a fee
Speaker 1: on our website? And that's exactly what they did. There
Speaker 1: was an alternate feed RSS feed for the podcast on
Speaker 1: the MSDN website for a while, so thank you for that.
Speaker 2: That was Sarah Williams, my boss at MSDN, and she
Speaker 2: was always a big fan of the community and helping
Speaker 2: out the community, and she was one of the actual
Speaker 2: before she took over MSDN, she was one of the
Speaker 2: original evangelists at Microsoft and kind of started up all
Speaker 2: the programs that we know and love in terms of
Speaker 2: not just Microsoft, but how modern technology works, in terms
Speaker 2: of developer relations and developer evangelism and that whole way
Speaker 2: of doing things. Sarah Williams was one of the people
Speaker 2: who invented all that for the Windows ecosystem. Yeah, back
Speaker 2: in the day.
Speaker 1: There's another story about that feed, the MSDN feed. I
Speaker 1: can't remember what year this was, must have been nineteen no, no, no,
Speaker 1: two thousand and three, maybe two thousand and three. So
Speaker 1: I did. I had an interview with the Guelda Kaza
Speaker 1: And this was back when you know, Linux was the
Speaker 1: enemy and all of this stuff. Microsoft had not yet
Speaker 1: embraced open source or Linux or any of.
Speaker 2: That open sources of virus.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it was. It was deeply embedded in the
Speaker 1: corporate culture and so they did not list that episode
Speaker 1: in their feet.
Speaker 2: It seems so silly now, right. That was the first
Speaker 2: time for us. It was like, hey, this show didn't appear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry about that.
Speaker 2: Oh it's funny too. Sarah was a shield for me
Speaker 2: when I joined because probably the most popular part of
Speaker 2: my website was the Interview question section where Microsoft interview Questions,
Speaker 2: where I would just collect questions that people would ask,
Speaker 2: these silly questions. You know. It all started with wire
Speaker 2: and into madness after that, and as soon as I
Speaker 2: joined Microsoft, somebody reached out to Stara and was like,
Speaker 2: make him take all of that stuff down off of
Speaker 2: his website now he works for us, to have him
Speaker 2: take it down or fire his ass and She's like, nope, No,
Speaker 2: that's his website, that's his personal stuff. Leave him alone,
Speaker 2: and that's not how we do things.
Speaker 1: That's right, great, great memories.
Speaker 2: All right, let's take a break.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll be right back after these very important messages. Hey,
Speaker 1: dot net six is going to reach the end of
Speaker 1: support this November, and now is the time to upgrade.
Speaker 1: Dot Net eight is well supported on AWS. Learn more
Speaker 1: at aws dot Amazon dot com, slash dot net and
Speaker 1: we're back. This is dot NetRocks. I'm Carl Franklin, that
Speaker 1: is Richard Campbell, and that is our friend Chris Sells.
Speaker 1: And just before we jump back in, I got to
Speaker 1: remind you that if you don't want to hear those ads,
Speaker 1: you can get an ad free feed by becoming a
Speaker 1: five dollars month patron at Patreon dot dot net rocks
Speaker 1: dot com. Chris, before I derailed the conversation, you were
Speaker 1: talking about AI as sort of the next thing that
Speaker 1: you were getting into. But you're retired now, so how
Speaker 1: does AI sort of fit in your post workday life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, like I say, I retired in June, and
Speaker 2: before that, I spent a year as head of product
Speaker 2: at a little at a little startup doing generative AI
Speaker 2: and dev tools and it was, honestly, it was an
Speaker 2: opportunity I could not turn down. Steve vah of from
Speaker 2: Amazon Cloud and Google Cloud kind of drug me into it.
Speaker 2: And the name of the company is source Graph and
Speaker 2: they build uh search product, which they have been doing
Speaker 2: for eleven years, and it's amazing and scalable and you know,
Speaker 2: millions of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 2: super repositories, all instantly available at your fingertips. And what
Speaker 2: they did was they took all of that search ability
Speaker 2: that because they get not only going to do like
Speaker 2: literal search and regular expression search, but they do semantic search.
Speaker 2: They really understand your code. You can configure it so
Speaker 2: it knows about your c sharp code and your Dark code,
Speaker 2: and your Java code and your Python. It knows. It
Speaker 2: has semantic knowledge, right, it knows the types and the
Speaker 2: relationship between the types, and you can navigate in their product.
Speaker 2: And so it takes all of that semantic knowledge, and
Speaker 2: they what they did was they they built out a
Speaker 2: product called Cody and source graph Codey is an AI
Speaker 2: coding assistant that lives in your ID. It works in
Speaker 2: all of the jet brain's IDEs. It works in visual
Speaker 2: studio code, and it does chat and it does you
Speaker 2: know commands, and it does you know autocompletions, and it
Speaker 2: does all the things you would expect, but it does
Speaker 2: it in an environment where for the enterprises, with all
Speaker 2: of those hundreds of thousands of repositories and millions of
Speaker 2: lines of code, it brings those and that understanding of
Speaker 2: that into your into your chats, right into your use
Speaker 2: of the AI. And just I mean that's how I
Speaker 2: spent uh, Like I say, I spent about that last
Speaker 2: year of my career. And then and then in June,
Speaker 2: I was I did the math and figured out how
Speaker 2: long I'd been in in this career, and I thought,
Speaker 2: maybe it's time take a deep breath, right, step back,
Speaker 2: do something else. And uh, uh, you know, I've been
Speaker 2: super lucky. I've got gotten to do amazing things in
Speaker 2: my career. And I looked back over my career and
Speaker 2: I thought, you know, I don't want to jump back
Speaker 2: into some you know, executive role. I don't want to
Speaker 2: jump back into some high level PM role. I've done
Speaker 2: that enough. I really miss Carl. You and I the
Speaker 2: same page. I don't write enough code in a in
Speaker 2: a week, I start to get itchy. Right, And It's
Speaker 2: been a long time where since I've had a job
Speaker 2: where writing code was was part of it, right, And
Speaker 2: so so I I look back over my career and
Speaker 2: I thought, where was I having the most fun? Right, Well,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe I can start doing that again, right,
Speaker 2: And it was it was very much working on the
Speaker 2: Flutter team, but a bunch of the stuff that I
Speaker 2: would do evenings and weekends right where I would you know,
Speaker 2: go and give talks or be on podcasts and talk
Speaker 2: about the technology, or where I would you know, build
Speaker 2: libraries and samples and kind of you know, help fix
Speaker 2: developers uh lives, you know, more directly as opposed to, hey,
Speaker 2: let me understand their requirements and motivate the the pms.
Speaker 2: You know that worked for me to go and blah
Speaker 2: blah blah. Right, I mean it was more direct and
Speaker 2: in fact, I invented the routing package that that Flutter uses,
Speaker 2: and the Flutter team now owns and and is kind
Speaker 2: of their default experience, and that kind of stuff was
Speaker 2: all evenings and weekends, and I thought, maybe if I
Speaker 2: could do that again, And so I send some emails
Speaker 2: out to some of my friends on the Flutter team
Speaker 2: and now I'm up to my eyeballs building AI related
Speaker 2: things for the Flutter and Firebase team. You know, you'd
Speaker 2: never know I was retired based on the amount of
Speaker 2: work I've been doing lately. But it's been all hands on.
Speaker 2: Last week I was in New York giving a talk
Speaker 2: on something called the Flutter AI Toolkit, which is something
Speaker 2: I've been I've been building with Google, which is all about, Hey,
Speaker 2: you want to take you know, a Flutter widget, and
Speaker 2: that is a whole AI chat, multimodal AI chat pluggable
Speaker 2: ll M out of the box support for the Google LMS.
Speaker 2: You drop it into your app and then you hook
Speaker 2: it up to the data in your app, and you
Speaker 2: hook the output out so that you can consume it
Speaker 2: in your app, and suddenly, bang, you can take any
Speaker 2: app and just make it better by you know, this
Speaker 2: interaction with AI. And what I've seen is and I
Speaker 2: started the I mean, I I wanted to build the
Speaker 2: simplest possible demo for this talk. And so I wanted
Speaker 2: a recipe app, right, I started with It's just it's
Speaker 2: just a list of recipes, that's all it is. And
Speaker 2: you can add them and edit them. Right, it's a
Speaker 2: crud interface over your recipes.
Speaker 1: You can scale them, obviously, this is the best thing
Speaker 1: about a recipe app.
Speaker 2: You can search them whatever. Right, And so it's just
Speaker 2: the baarest minimum thing, so classic. But then you just
Speaker 2: drop in the chat and you hook up the data
Speaker 2: and you can start seeing things like, oh, these are
Speaker 2: my food prefences. Can you give me a verse of
Speaker 2: that recipe substituting all the things or go and you know,
Speaker 2: give me a recipe from your training set that matches
Speaker 2: my uh, you know, food preferences and you know the
Speaker 2: I'll take a picture of what's in my fridge and
Speaker 2: my cupboard, or I'll take a picture of you know,
Speaker 2: a recipe card that my grandma gave me, and you know,
Speaker 2: parselll that and give it to me in structured way
Speaker 2: and show it as a flutter widget in line with
Speaker 2: the conversation and press a button and boom, now it's
Speaker 2: in your database and circle all of these features where
Speaker 2: you know that you get by just dropping in an
Speaker 2: ll M and having a normal conversation in a multimodal way,
Speaker 2: and just doing a little bit of input and output
Speaker 2: between the data in your app and the data in
Speaker 2: this chat, and suddenly you get an app is ten
Speaker 2: times more powerful, right because it does the ll M
Speaker 2: is implementing all of these features. That's the amazing thing.
Speaker 2: And I like, I like, I like it from it.
Speaker 3: It's a feature extender, right, that's right, really a new
Speaker 3: ux to the way that you build software. I think
Speaker 3: it's not an app unto itself. It's just this ability
Speaker 3: to make an app way more compelling. It really kind
Speaker 3: of answer hard questions like what substitution is going to
Speaker 3: make here?
Speaker 2: Or that's right? And it's got the because it's been
Speaker 2: trained on the entire internet. Not only right, does it
Speaker 2: have all of the stack overflow in it if I
Speaker 2: want to generate code, but it's got all of the
Speaker 2: recipes from all of the recipe sites around the Internet
Speaker 2: in it, and so I can just say give me
Speaker 2: a recipe with X, Y and Z, and it just
Speaker 2: knows yeah, right, and then you can tell it oh
Speaker 2: and you know, behind the scenes, you can do some
Speaker 2: you know, prompt engineering, so that the recipes come out
Speaker 2: in a structured Jason format so your app can parse it,
Speaker 2: and you can add a little button that says here,
Speaker 2: bring this over to my database. Or when you're doing
Speaker 2: the output, you do a little post processing on what
Speaker 2: the user has entered to enable RAG right, right retrieval,
Speaker 2: augmented generation. Let me look up recipes from the current
Speaker 2: database and plug those in as appropriate and send those
Speaker 2: as input. I mean, it is so amazing how a
Speaker 2: little bit of glue with this fundamental building block and
Speaker 2: suddenly you get all of these features that now is
Speaker 2: a app dep I mean, just that one feature right
Speaker 2: before llms of let me scan a recipe card for
Speaker 2: my grandmother's you know, stack to recipe cards, right, that
Speaker 2: would have been I don't know, six engineers for a year.
Speaker 1: Well, using OCR, you could do it, but you have
Speaker 1: to do a lot of logic to figure out what's what.
Speaker 2: Well, except for my grandmother hand writes all of her
Speaker 2: recipe cards, right, good luck with OCR and that whereas
Speaker 2: I can hand it to the LM and it just works.
Speaker 2: I don't have to do In fact, I don't even
Speaker 2: as an engineer building the app I don't have to
Speaker 2: do anything that's just a feature that comes along out
Speaker 2: of the box because we're using ll ms. And that's
Speaker 2: why I say, as you you know, I thought the
Speaker 2: next way that we were going to interact with computers
Speaker 2: was going to be these you know, three D interfaces
Speaker 2: user interfaces. It turns out that no, it's a textbox.
Speaker 2: It's a textbox, right.
Speaker 3: I mean I would also argue they had the breakthrough, right, like,
Speaker 3: we're still looking for the AR breakthrough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I think.
Speaker 3: Was the killer app. It was the breakthrough. That was
Speaker 3: a breakthrough, and and then I open the door to
Speaker 3: a bunch of other things. They're not mutually exclusive. I
Speaker 3: think AR will benefit hugely by the context sensitivity, likely
Speaker 3: next behavior, probabilistic behaviors that all these language models have, like,
Speaker 3: all of that will make that product experience better. Once
Speaker 3: we find the breakthrough that's going to make people care
Speaker 3: because we that's right.
Speaker 2: And you know, environment generation, right, I mean, let the
Speaker 2: LLM build up an environment around you. In fact, I
Speaker 2: don't know if you've seen this, they actually I think
Speaker 2: it was the DeepMind team at Google. They have got
Speaker 2: a trained a model that will generate as you move around,
Speaker 2: they will generate thirty frames a second of Doom, meaning
Speaker 2: they've trained it on Doom. It's not using the game engine,
Speaker 2: the game is not loaded or running.
Speaker 1: You just discovered a new use for all the old
Speaker 1: shopping malls that are abandoned.
Speaker 2: We can go play Doom in them.
Speaker 1: It's so cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the potential for generative AI. And that's
Speaker 2: one of the points I covered in my talk, the
Speaker 2: core difference. Because of course we've been doing AI for
Speaker 2: long enough, decades, long enough. We've now had been through
Speaker 2: two AI winters, right is what the AI research community
Speaker 2: calls them. We've been doing it for a long time.
Speaker 2: We've benefited, right, But there's all kinds of amazing stuff
Speaker 2: we've got from AI. But genitive AI is the first
Speaker 2: AI that will give us new content. Right was before
Speaker 2: it was like here, let me give you some content.
Speaker 2: You analyze it, and you know, you tell me you
Speaker 2: know as a cat or a dog, or you tell
Speaker 2: me you know, the next number might be a six, whatever.
Speaker 2: But this, this is the first time where you can
Speaker 2: actually give it some parameters and have it generate anything.
Speaker 2: Language like, it doesn't have to be a human language.
Speaker 2: It can be code. It can be adjacent. It can
Speaker 2: be music, it can be anything that is kind of
Speaker 2: has a you know, a description that you can run
Speaker 2: through an ll M. It is amazing. And of course images, Carl,
Speaker 2: you bring that up right. Being able to generate you know,
Speaker 2: stable diffusion and generating images, it is a completely different
Speaker 2: way to interact with the computer.
Speaker 3: There's a challenging step for your recipe app tell me
Speaker 3: what this will look like when it's cooked.
Speaker 2: Well, actually, that's that's part of it, right, being able
Speaker 2: to say, hey, and I'll give you a picture of
Speaker 2: what this recipe is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, did I or you know, take a photo?
Speaker 3: Did I make this ride like that?
Speaker 2: Is that other thing? Being able to say no, maybe not,
Speaker 2: that's not how it's supposed to look.
Speaker 1: I like the idea of taking the recipes from the internet,
Speaker 1: plus all the comments and saying, you know, which version
Speaker 1: of this are people the most happy with?
Speaker 2: For example, yeah, well, one of the things the LM
Speaker 2: can't do is taste it for you, unfortunately, right so,
Speaker 2: but it.
Speaker 1: Can read the comments in the rate.
Speaker 2: It has definitely given me several recipes that I do
Speaker 2: not think any humans would actually like to eat.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: The testing backbone that sort of you know, generate evaluate cycle. Say,
Speaker 3: is this going to actually come out right like that?
Speaker 3: I think we're still tweaking into that. At certainly the
Speaker 3: latest Microsoft announcement for their Wave too, there's been a
Speaker 3: lot of this, how do we make the software iterate
Speaker 3: a few more times to tune itself per request?
Speaker 2: Well, and that's the thing, right because right now we're
Speaker 2: we're doing AI in a way that is very much interactive, right,
Speaker 2: which is I go to a chat engine and I
Speaker 2: say blah, or I invoke a feature in my piece
Speaker 2: of software and it composes, you know, a chat request
Speaker 2: and goes to the LM. We're uh, we're moving to
Speaker 2: a place that is agent based, yeah, right, where you
Speaker 2: can say, hey, I want to I want Cody, which
Speaker 2: is the name of you know, source graphs AI coding assistant.
Speaker 2: I want Cody to be a member of my team.
Speaker 2: I want to give it a badge right at my company.
Speaker 2: And I wanted to look at all of the the
Speaker 2: bugs that come in and I wanted to do that
Speaker 2: initial triage. Is this an actionable bug? Does it give
Speaker 2: me an error message? Does it tell me about expected behavior?
Speaker 2: Does it have a minimal repro can I reproduce the bug? Right?
Speaker 2: And if not, you know, automatically kick it back and
Speaker 2: ask for additional information, or if you can reproduce it,
Speaker 2: take all of that information and then start doing like, hey,
Speaker 2: what might be causing the bug in the state of
Speaker 2: this in my codebase, and what are some suggested fixes
Speaker 2: and stick all that in it, and then even maybe
Speaker 2: being able to say, and here's a pr right, and
Speaker 2: now let me put that in the queue for the
Speaker 2: engineers to get to. That's like eighty percent of the
Speaker 2: work and it's all drudgery. Sure, right, Why do we
Speaker 2: have engineers do that, right when we can have you know,
Speaker 2: a software agent do that for us.
Speaker 3: That could take a lot of that on that's right,
Speaker 3: certainly over on the right as side, I've been talking
Speaker 3: to folks who are doing this with tech support tickets,
Speaker 3: where the tool now is analyzing the submitted ticket and
Speaker 3: there's a bunch of if it falls in a category
Speaker 3: of automated responses, like we'll push back the responses and
Speaker 3: potentially resolve a tick on its own, but when it
Speaker 3: can't actually then goes and does data gathering to further
Speaker 3: the process so that by the time it actually lands
Speaker 3: on a person, right, it's been worked over like that's right, yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's just so that they're working on more meaningful work,
Speaker 3: less toil, more meaningful work.
Speaker 2: Well, and it's interesting too because you know the term
Speaker 2: prompt engineer, right, got a bunch of chuckles from from people, you.
Speaker 3: Know when it's prompt engineer and crypto bro were said
Speaker 3: in the same voice, right, like that's the problem.
Speaker 2: But here's the thing, right, if you I mean this
Speaker 2: was clear. I don't know if you if you've seen
Speaker 2: what Anthropic has been doing with Claude, and you know
Speaker 2: that they have this cool feature where I think it's
Speaker 2: called artifacts, where as it generates code, it pulls those
Speaker 2: out of the stream and sticks them over into like
Speaker 2: you know, the right hand side with the code thing,
Speaker 2: and then when it gets all the code, it actually
Speaker 2: runs it for you. When you get a preview. Somebody
Speaker 2: leaked the implementation of that, and it read like, you know,
Speaker 2: a spec that a PM would put together and hand
Speaker 2: over to an engineer and say can you build this
Speaker 2: for me? Right? The amount of detail that you get,
Speaker 2: it's like how you would talk to a human and
Speaker 2: get them to do it. Essentially, people have switched from
Speaker 2: writing programs in code to they're switching to writing them
Speaker 2: in English. Here's what I want, go and give me
Speaker 2: a thing. And the beauty of that is everyone speaks
Speaker 2: their language, right. I means suddenly anyone that can write
Speaker 2: a precise or reasonably precise description of what they want
Speaker 2: can get it and they don't need an engineer to
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 3: I like LMZ on both ends, where you just write
Speaker 3: a quick set of bullet points for what you want.
Speaker 3: It turns it into fancy pros to asperson for it,
Speaker 3: who then us an LLM to strip out the fancy
Speaker 3: prose to get the bullet points.
Speaker 2: Of what you want. It's funny to say that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like, I don't want to read all this summarize
Speaker 2: it for me. There have definitely been instances where I'm like, hey,
Speaker 2: I need a proposal, I need a a performance review,
Speaker 2: I need a you know, a statement of work. I
Speaker 2: need this long drawn out document right to fulfill a requirement.
Speaker 2: But you know, really I just have the data that
Speaker 2: I care about in bulleted form. You know, let me
Speaker 2: let me let the LLM do that first past, yeah,
Speaker 2: to dress it up. Yeah yeah, yeah. And then of
Speaker 2: course you know it's never good enough, right, you have
Speaker 2: to go through and edit it. But it's easier to
Speaker 2: edit than create. So yeah, you know, well and that's
Speaker 2: the beauty, right. I mean, it's always easier to to
Speaker 2: subtract things out or edit as you say that, it
Speaker 2: is to stare at a blank's piece of paper and
Speaker 2: go Now, which how do I start this? Yeah, so
Speaker 2: you can.
Speaker 1: As soon as you talked about Doom and AR and
Speaker 1: I made the joke that, you know, there's a good
Speaker 1: way to repurpose all these closed shopping malls. It was
Speaker 1: a fun joke, but it just won't leave my brain.
Speaker 1: Like you know, AR requires real space, you know, whereas
Speaker 1: VR you can. I can see us getting close to
Speaker 1: the Ready player one kind of circular walking, you know
Speaker 1: pad that he was using in there.
Speaker 2: To Those are real things. I've been on one of those.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, I mean I remember they were the real
Speaker 1: things years ago.
Speaker 3: But there was a game on the HoloLens where the
Speaker 3: aliens were attacking. Would they come through your walls? Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: so map your surfaces and you'd literally see a crack
Speaker 3: up here on the wall and the alien would pop.
Speaker 1: Out of it. It quest has the same thing. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really cool, but AR requiring real space and VR
Speaker 1: not so, so what's the story there, do you think?
Speaker 1: I mean? Okay, so here's a good AR app, the
Speaker 1: Pokemon Go app, right, hugely popular, requires real space.
Speaker 2: I would say that is that app is the only
Speaker 2: successful AR app.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, arguably because GPS anywhere, you can put these
Speaker 1: things anywhere. Yeah, but what about you know, taking an
Speaker 1: existing space and mapping AR around it.
Speaker 2: Actually, one of the best VR experiences I ever had
Speaker 2: was I was in Vegas and they had taken a
Speaker 2: two thousand square foot space, and they gave you a gun, right,
Speaker 2: a plastic gun, so you had something to pull the
Speaker 2: trigger on. They gave you the goggles, and they put
Speaker 2: the computer in a backpack on your back, right, So
Speaker 2: you were now a soldier going into battle. And you
Speaker 2: went with a bunch of other people and you could
Speaker 2: see them in this virtual world and they would march
Speaker 2: you around through the hallways and stairways and blah blah
Speaker 2: bla in this virtual world. And the way they did it,
Speaker 2: it felt like a huge, vast space. But they were
Speaker 2: just super clever about, you know, using the two thousand
Speaker 2: square feet and reusing it. And definitely if you've got
Speaker 2: that kind of space, you can build some amazing things.
Speaker 2: All that that said, I'm not sure I would be
Speaker 2: super excited about going up and down the stairs in
Speaker 2: an abandoned mall with goggles on my face.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as long as you can see it. Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: face it. Being in Vegas itself is augmented reality.
Speaker 2: Yes, very much so.
Speaker 3: Remember I used to play Own this World, yes, right
Speaker 3: before the game went away, and at one point I
Speaker 3: actually owned the world.
Speaker 2: He is making the world.
Speaker 3: Because I leveraged using the road trip to collect as
Speaker 3: many the whole world's cut up into squares.
Speaker 1: He was so so antisocial, sitting up in the passenger
Speaker 1: seat the whole time, not talking to any of us,
Speaker 1: just playing on this World.
Speaker 2: The hell has owned this world. I don't know, I
Speaker 2: know what you're talking.
Speaker 3: It's long gone, long gone, but literally, but I was
Speaker 3: always frustated GPS type games, right, games where you're locale
Speaker 3: mata Right. I did some geocaching and that kind of
Speaker 3: thing back in the early days, and On this World
Speaker 3: was an interim game. Was a game in a period
Speaker 3: there that was fun. But you mentioned Pokemon Go, because
Speaker 3: after On This World went away, I started looking for
Speaker 3: a new game, and I found a game called Ingress,
Speaker 3: and Ingress is actually the precursor to Pokemon Go because
Speaker 3: the big piece of data that made Pokemon work where
Speaker 3: the Ingress location site. So this was a game about
Speaker 3: again aliens invading sort of thing. But are they beneficial
Speaker 3: or not? And so you picked a side, are you
Speaker 3: working for them or against them? And what they were
Speaker 3: mainly doing was using GPS to mark up significant locations
Speaker 3: in communities because those would become nodes in Ingress. Well,
Speaker 3: when Pokemon Go appeared is from Niantic, the same team,
Speaker 3: and they basically use the data set from Ingress to
Speaker 3: create all the locations where.
Speaker 2: The kemon here.
Speaker 1: Wow, so's it's.
Speaker 3: Just suddenly had this valuable GPS data set of curated
Speaker 3: locations that they get carried to other games that I
Speaker 3: stopped playing all of those because who's got the time?
Speaker 1: Patrick Hines plays Pokemon Go.
Speaker 3: Pokemon It's one of those quiet be surprised. Lots of
Speaker 3: people play. It's a quiet little obsession, especially for travelers
Speaker 3: because there are Pokemon that are specific geographies.
Speaker 1: Well, there are lots of abandoned buildings now because of
Speaker 1: one of because of COVID, right office space is very
Speaker 1: cheap right now. You can't give these buildings away in
Speaker 1: some cases, and certainly shopping malls aren't going anywhere, but
Speaker 1: they're at least in my neck of the woods, all
Speaker 1: but abandoned. And you know, everybody's trying to think of
Speaker 1: something to do with the shopping mall. What do we
Speaker 1: do with the shopping mall? And it just kind of
Speaker 1: occurred to me that maybe some sort of AR future
Speaker 1: thing I don't think work now, might work with a
Speaker 1: hollow lens, but you know, I don't know, just sort
Speaker 1: of occurred to me.
Speaker 3: It's an interesting idea to just have a safe build,
Speaker 3: a soft walled space, so people crash it and stuff,
Speaker 3: they're not hurt, and you use AR to make it
Speaker 3: into whatever game you want to play at the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anyway, I think that's about it, Chris. You got
Speaker 1: anything else that's on your mind that you want to
Speaker 1: talk about?
Speaker 2: Well, the other thing that has been fun for me
Speaker 2: as I re engage with you know, the kind of
Speaker 2: the most fun job I had in my life, but
Speaker 2: from a you know, from a essentially I've been kind
Speaker 2: of doing DevRel related work, which you know, has always
Speaker 2: been my my heart and soul. Anyway, I have been
Speaker 2: working with Rory Blake. He told me that, yeah, and
Speaker 2: it has been a ton of fun. I mean, I
Speaker 2: have reconnected with the Flutter team, and you know, I
Speaker 2: went to that conference last week and I couldn't walk
Speaker 2: five feet with that. Oh how you do it? And
Speaker 2: how you've been right? That is? That's been fantastic because
Speaker 2: I have a lot of friends there in the community
Speaker 2: is wonderful and I just really love Flutter all around,
Speaker 2: not just the tech, but a nice community. That's right
Speaker 2: for sure. But then I happened to be hanging out
Speaker 2: with Rory a little bit and I'm like, hey, you know,
Speaker 2: you want to do some Flutter work with me, you know?
Speaker 2: And he actually when I wanted to have like an
Speaker 2: existing app that I could drop chat into, because you know,
Speaker 2: what's the point of helping people build whole new brand
Speaker 2: news standalone chats? Right? Those exist there, you know, the
Speaker 2: vendors already have them. But being able to take your
Speaker 2: existing app and drop in a chat, I think that
Speaker 2: would be super useful and helpful. But I needed for
Speaker 2: my talk. I needed an app. I'm like, will you
Speaker 2: build this for me? And he did? I mean, it
Speaker 2: was that was the app I used. He built that
Speaker 2: initial recipes app for medoschool. He's been doing some he
Speaker 2: and I have been doing some fun work together and
Speaker 2: it's just been it's just been really great to reconnect
Speaker 2: with Rory too.
Speaker 1: And I miss him. I keep in touch with him
Speaker 1: on texts and stuff. And apparently we were gonna he
Speaker 1: had another crazy idea to do something, and we almost
Speaker 1: had a meeting about it, and then it kind of
Speaker 1: dropped by the wayside. I can't even remember what it
Speaker 1: was right now, but he's he's just full of good ideas.
Speaker 2: It was he was using llms to build. Actually, Rory
Speaker 2: has been using generative AI for like five or six years,
Speaker 2: using kind of pre chat GTP oriented technology, and he's
Speaker 2: he's found he is an amazing prompt engineer, right. He
Speaker 2: really best time to make an LLM sing and dance,
Speaker 2: and so I've learned a ton of really cool tricks
Speaker 2: from him. And it's all from using this technology prior
Speaker 2: where you had to be super specific. And he's built
Speaker 2: whole command systems and and and he was using that
Speaker 2: to build up the rules for in the world for
Speaker 2: a tabletop RPG that he wanted to he wanted to
Speaker 2: run us through so fantastic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what it was. It was a role playing game.
Speaker 2: Sounds like a show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we could do a show with him. It be
Speaker 1: fun to have him back.
Speaker 2: He totally should reach out to.
Speaker 1: I miss him. I missed the blog too. I missed Neapoleon.
Speaker 1: I understand why he had to shut it down because
Speaker 1: people weren't taking him seriously as a developer, but man,
Speaker 1: I miss him.
Speaker 2: It's so funny. Yeah, he's a great I mean, he
Speaker 2: picked up Fluttering in like a week and he's been
Speaker 2: doing great stuff. So it's been really great to work
Speaker 2: with him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he is the one who coined using objectives. He
Speaker 3: as Stockholm syndrome.
Speaker 2: And he still loves it. He's still Yeah, he's okay
Speaker 2: with Stockholm syndrome apparently. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: All right, Chris, it's been a gas and we'll we'll
Speaker 1: have to keep in touch every so often.
Speaker 2: For sure. Happy to all right you guys. Later, Well,
Speaker 2: we'll have to keep doing it. We'll have to. I mean,
Speaker 2: we have to do this, right, I mean, eventually you'll
Speaker 2: catch up with the present, right, You'll have Show twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four, and then you'll be podcasting from the future.
Speaker 1: That's where those are the we'll be making predictions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, that's where I want to make sure
Speaker 2: I'm on those shows. All right. Cool?
Speaker 1: Well, thanks again Chris, and for you, dear listener, We'll
Speaker 1: see you next time on dot net rocks. Dot net
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