Sam is back with us for a live episode where we discuss important questions such as “is coffee is good?”, “are people on the Internet good writers?”, and “is content creation consistency actually important?” We also share links about turning your hand writing into a font and hacking McDonald’s delivery app. Finally, we wrap up with a new game FAANG GANG.
Chapters
Chapters
(0:00) Intro
(9:00) Codifying your handwriting
(10:30) I’m loving it
(27:00) Consistency in content
(39:00) FAANG gang game
(9:00) Codifying your handwriting
(10:30) I’m loving it
(27:00) Consistency in content
(39:00) FAANG gang game
Links Shared
- Codifying your Handwriting https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-javascript
- I’m lovin’ it https://eaton-works.com/2024/12/19/mcdelivery-india-hack/
Sponsor
VocalCat: https://fafo.fm/vocalcat
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Creators & Guests
What is Fork Around And Find Out?
Fork Around and Find Out is your downtime from uptime. Your break from the pager, and a chance to learn from expert’s successes and failures. We cover state-of-the-art, legacy practices for building, running, and maintaining software and systems.
Sam Rose: There is an argument to be made where I think more people should be trying less frequent, higher effort. Pieces of work, and I don't see that many people doing it, and I'm looking for them all the time because I really would like to talk to anybody doing this kind of thing.
Justin Garrison: Welcome to Fork Around and Find Out, the podcast about building, running, and maintaining software and systems.
Hello and welcome to Fork Around and Livestream, the most ridiculous livestream podcast on the internet. More ridiculous than Hot Dr. Pepper. If you know what that is, uh, Who
Autumn Nash: drinks
Justin Garrison: hot Dr. Pepper juice? Uh, I thought you meant spicy. I don't know why. No, like, actually, like warm Dr. Pepper. Uh, this is like a thing that used to be, Dr.
Pepper was trying to make it like a big thing back in the, I think it was like 60s, 70s? Um, there's a movie called a blast from the past with Christopher Walken is the dad and he always drank hot Dr. Pepper. And everyone's like, Ooh, he drank it hot. But I saw like ads for people that were, they would do hot Dr.
Pepper. And I tried it this, this last winter. I'm like, I'm going to see it. I'm going to see what it's like. And it tastes like flat Dr. Pepper. It's not good. Uh, but they said put lemon in it, like put a slice of lemon in the bottom and then it just tasted like flat Dr. Pepper with lemon, which was not any better.
Pro tip for everyone. Autumn, you're, you're speechless.
Autumn Nash: Look, Sam's also speechless. Like, we're trying to decide if we still want to be your friend after this. Okay. Sam's
Justin Garrison: face wasn't like, you are ridiculous.
Autumn Nash: That was called being repulsed, Justin. Repulsed. There's, there's not
Sam Rose: a lot I can say. Like, we have a bunch of weird culinary things in the UK as well.
And no, like, not just UK. So, like, my dad, for example, and this is apparently not just a him thing, I've heard other people do this as well, so when he makes toast, he will toast his bread until it is charred. It's, it's, there's black char all around the bread, and then he'll put it in the fridge to cool it down, and then he scrapes the char off one side, and butters it, but it's cool so the butter doesn't melt, and then he eats that.
And like, growing up I was just like Yeah, I was like, this is very strange, and I just recently, like two or three weeks ago, I was telling people in work about this, and someone was like, oh yeah, my mom does that too. Why is this a thing? Where do people get this?
Autumn Nash: To get cold. So the butter
Sam Rose: doesn't melt. I don't like melted butter.
I know, right? That's one of the things.
Autumn Nash: I like literally put my toast in the oven so I can put the butter on it to make sure it melts.
Justin Garrison: You put the toast in the oven with the butter? I just leave my butter on the counter. Toaster, sideways. Problem solved. Yeah. That also works.
Autumn Nash: But then like, you know, I just, I'm the mom.
Like if it goes south, I'm the one that has to clean it up. Like
Justin Garrison: anyone listening to this, leave us a comment of your most ridiculous food.
Autumn Nash: I'm still stuck on the fact, like Like you don't drink coffee. And then you were like, I'm gonna drink hot Dr. Pepper. Like, you don't drink.
Justin Garrison: Why are you surprised? I don't understand
Like I'm not having it for breakfast. That's for sure.
Autumn Nash: Every day that you don't drink coffee, I'm still surprised. Like, and then you add the like, not only is it Dr. Pepper, but hot. Like what? Warm it up, assessed
Justin Garrison: You put
Autumn Nash: it on
Justin Garrison: the
Autumn Nash: stove, you wor wait,
Justin Garrison: put it on
Autumn Nash: a stove, pour out a can, heat it up. Wait, you didn't just.
Drink warm Dr. Pepper? No, you gotta eat it. It's hot
Justin Garrison: Dr. Pepper. It's not lukewarm Dr. Pepper. This is hot Dr. Pepper. It tastes like flat Dr. Pepper.
Sam Rose: Did you used to drink coffee and you quit? Or do you just not like coffee and never have?
Justin Garrison: I cannot stand the taste of coffee.
Sam Rose: Okay, so, so for the longest time I was in the same boat.
And so I grew up in like a real small village in Wales. Very kind of homogenous. No, we're, so it's mandatory to learn Welsh in school. So I, I have like a very. Like, one or two phrases of Welsh, like, I can ask to go to the toilet, which is, Ga i fynd â'r toilet os wel can da, but I can't do any kind of conversational Welsh.
It was very homogenous, very small village feel, so I didn't really learn a whole lot about the world, and like, coffee to me was just like, you put instant coffee in some hot water, and that's what it is, and, you know, grew up not liking coffee. And then I moved to London after I'd been to university to get my first job, and got introduced to, like, metropolitan people in a metropolitan environment, and people started to get me to try things I had not tried before, and I learned all about things like craft beer, and whiskey, and nice food, and steaks that are cooked less than well done.
Um, and coffee, and I went to a nice coffee shop. Justin
Autumn Nash: grew up in California, like, he has no excuse of why he's broken.
Sam Rose: He just knows he doesn't like it. I just didn't know I didn't like it. And then I tried nice coffee, and I like it.
Justin Garrison: I used to go into coffee shops, like, my parents always drank it, and like, it would give me headaches.
Like the smell of coffee was like something that like, I just couldn't stand. And I was just like, anytime I was like around coffee for the longest time as a kid, I probably never tried like a good coffee. But if there's like a hint of coffee taste in like a Starbucks drink or something, I cannot drink it.
It's just, I do not. A hint of coffee? Yeah. Like I'll get like, it's like a liquid cake with a little bit of coffee in it. Right. And it's just like, nah, I can't like, it's just, it has a coffee taste. I can't do it. Liquid cake? Starbucks drinks are just all sugar. It's like, if you want to drink a slice of cake, go to Starbucks.
Sam Rose: Tiramisu.
Autumn Nash: Tiramisu is amazing. Like coffee, ice cream. Like I, how could you?
Sam Rose: The smell of coffee is one of those. Visceral things like I smell a nice coffee and it's just like this is one of the warmest and most wonderful experiences
Autumn Nash: Like it makes my soul happy Like I just don't like when I hate everybody and people wake me up way too early in the morning like coffee is the like It motivates me to get out of bed and, like, not shake people.
Okay, like, what's, I, I cannot relate.
Sam Rose: One of the main reasons to follow Ahmad Shadid, other than his amazing articles on CSS, is that he posts these pictures of beautiful coffees. And if you don't follow Ahmad Shadid, like, you really should. I think his website is I S H A D E E D dot com. Like Ish Hadid, he does incredible CSS posts, but he also posts this amazing coffee.
Autumn Nash: How did you get through COVID and not get obsessed with espresso makers and all kind of stuff? Because now I'm bougie and I can't go back and like all of tech Twitter lost its whole entire mind. And that's the best thing
Justin Garrison: about Dr. Pepper is I can't get bougie about it. It's just, it's just a Dr. Pepper.
It's
Autumn Nash: just like a You tried to heat it up, so I don't know if I agree with you. I was experimenting
Justin Garrison: with what the past was like. I was not planning on making this my vibe.
Sam Rose: I was gonna say, have you continued this? Is this something that you and I are like, Wow, this was great, I'm gonna continue doing it was
Autumn Nash: terrible, but like I just, I want to know, like, what made you think, like, it's just sugar and like, you have the nerd to talk about Starbucks drinks being cake, you inhale sugar, like, nobody's business.
The other, last time we recorded, he's over there trying to sneak, like, licorice. I can't
Sam Rose: stand licorice. I hate it. I can't.
Autumn Nash: I can't do it. And then he like has like, he was shoving candy and hiding it from his kids in a Lego hat. Like, really? Really? We're talking about Starbucks being cake, sir.
Justin Garrison: Don't give me a hard time about sugar.
If you're going out and getting a Frappuccino, I
Autumn Nash: make real lattes, sir. And I like bougie. Seattle has ruined me. Okay. I can't just, I can't even go to Starbucks anymore.
Justin Garrison: I can't live in Seattle cause I don't like coffee. Like I don't think I'm allowed. That's fine.
Autumn Nash: Though. Okay. Like it's a bunch of breweries, coffee shops and tech and people that like hiking way too much.
Like the REI is like a lifestyle here. Like it's too much.
Sam Rose: So I've been to Seattle twice and I remember the first time I was there, I went for work when I was working at Google, and it was like, you know, you land, get to the hotel, you check in, you go and meet your colleagues, and everyone's like, hey, welcome to Seattle.
Did you know Starbucks was founded here? Let's go to Starbucks. Starbucks is just down the road, the first one, we can go, it's the first one. I'm just like, oh, hello, let's just calm down.
Autumn Nash: Also, like, it's not even the real first one, it's tiny, the line's always super long.
Sam Rose: Is it not the real first one?
Autumn Nash: Supposedly it's not.
Sam Rose: Supposedly. Oh, there's some lore.
Autumn Nash: Yeah, there's lore. Like Seattle lore. But dude, Pike's place is bomb though. Like it is so cute. It is outrageously expensive. Like I bought like tomatoes from that thing from the place, like one of the markets and it was like bajillion dollar tomatoes, but they're really cool.
Justin Garrison: You know what I just realized? We are nine minutes into this and I didn't even do a proper intro for anyone that is listening to this episode for the very first time. Welcome to the podcast. I'm terrible at doing introductions.
Autumn Nash: That's because usually we can like stop like mid thingy and like do it and then they edit it But this is just pure ADHD flow of like
Justin Garrison: and yeah, welcome to our second live stream The first one that's actually posted on YouTube.
So hopefully this one works I'm Justin Garrison with me is Autumn Nash and Sam Rose is back to join us for this fun event of a live stream Thank you so much Sam. It's
Autumn Nash: like an emoji. Okay, like he has like the kindest sweetest smiling Just face does look kind He has the perfect beard
Sam Rose: trim, too. I know!
Your beard is super clean right now. Thank you. I just got it done today, actually.
Autumn Nash: I feel like you just, like, just, like, just, you just look like a nice person. And then his, like, website is so nice. It has, like, Easter eggs and it's adorable.
Sam Rose: I've never been compared to an emoji before. That's a first for me.
But no, thank you. just feel like if
Autumn Nash: somebody was like, I don't know, just have like a nice face. Like just, you can tell you're a nice person.
Justin Garrison: No, I try. To, to avoid this episode going for three hours, we should probably talk about a couple of our You invited Sam.
Autumn Nash: You knew exactly what you were getting yourself into.
You know how excited I am to talk to Sam? Like, this is your fault. Like
Justin Garrison: Well, Sam, why don't, why don't you share one of your
Sam Rose: links first? So this is from a a person called Amy Goodchild, and she does a bunch of creative programming, procedural art, that kind of thing. And she's going through this process at the moment where she is codifying her handwriting essentially into a font.
And she's doing all the work to make it so that the letters join up correctly, if they're next to each other and things like that. And I think part of the process as well is that this handwriting, because it's so specific to her and personalized, it's also a lot smaller than your average font. So I think part of it is to minimize the size of the things that she's making, as far as I remember.
The whole process of going through it though is so cool, and the way that she's using it, if you kind of scroll through the post and you skim it and you go down and you see the bits of artwork she's created with it, so creative, such a really Like, it's an incredible end result, like I think her, her process is really inspiring.
Justin Garrison: I'm trying to figure out, because she mentions that she has like a cursive, she's lining them up with cursive so it's like the, the lines flow, but like the screenshot isn't cursive. I
Sam Rose: think as you get further down, you'll see kind of joined up examples of it. There's one point where she shows it like side by side with her actual handwriting, which is quite cool.
Autumn Nash: I feel like bad because Sam's a hard act to follow.
Sam Rose: So I had no idea, the, the thing just said like one or two links and I was like, I don't mean it, like whatever.
Autumn Nash: I was gonna post like a super petty link about how they broke into Dodge's website and I was super excited about it, but now
Justin Garrison: I'm
Autumn Nash: like,
Justin Garrison: Oh, the available for anyone to write.
Autumn Nash: It makes me so happy because they're so dumb. But like, Sam has like art and that's so much better and it's not all like petty and I feel like I should have got a cute art one.
Sam Rose: I figured I'd stay in my lane a little bit here. Like I'm, I'm staying in the artistic visual kind of feel. It's on brand. This is, this is a great art.
That is
Autumn Nash: so very Sam and on brand.
Justin Garrison: I will share my link for I'm loving it. It was exploiting McDonald's APIs to hijack deliveries and other foods for a penny. And I found it fascinating because they went through this whole process of like looking at just basically looking at your browser explorer for like what APIs exist.
It's a, it was a angular app. I also love that on this article, your mouse pointer turns into a thing of McDonald's fries, which is just so good.
Autumn Nash: That's just petty. That's like you, it's a McDonald's fry.
Justin Garrison: So, so the thing, like they were looking for hacker sort of like bounty bug bounties. And so they were doing this for a reason to try to bug bounty.
I believe this person is, is not in India, but. McDonald's in India was the only one that had a bug bounty, and so they were going through and like, Oh, where can I get a bug bounty for for just to make some money or whatever? And and they meticulously detailed like everything they did to find the API endpoints.
And then like, Oh, what happens if I curl this? What happens if I just send a message like what data does this need? And they're like making up order numbers and all this stuff. And they're like, Oh, what does that do? And it just really shows like if you've never reverse engineered an API. This is the mindset you just kind of have to have.
It's like, Oh, what's that? Let me try sending data to it. Let me try receiving data to it, whatever, and see what happens. And they ended up in the process of like, they could track any order that was happening at the time. They could see where on the map, the delivery driver was, they could change the prices for things to a cent and then pay for it.
So they had like in their basket, a hundred hash browns, all of them for a penny. I'm like, Oh yeah. All right. And it was just like even creating an account because they didn't have a number in the country that they couldn't verify. So they're like, Oh, well, we can't verify you because you're out of the country.
So they found a way to create an account through an API endpoint that didn't require the verification. Like, Oh, this is just in the browser just by exploring what's going on. And I just I thought it was a really good reverse engineering post. If
Sam Rose: you've never been through the process of doing that before on a website, if you're listening to this, it's so much fun.
Just, there's also like, I think you do have to be a little bit careful that you don't do something accidentally malicious, because I think a lot of people don't realize how easy it is to leave vulnerabilities like this lying around. Even with the absolute best of intentions and, you know, high quality teams or whatever, it's so easy to make it possible to do something.
Autumn Nash: I mean, like I've accidentally scraped stuff with Python and took like DOS attack them on accident. You have to be very careful.
Justin Garrison: Well, even just one of our, I guess it'll go out after this episode. We have a, we have an upcoming episode about how Rachel Ray's scraper was taking down websites and, and just not on, on their fault of like how the scraper was, uh, created, but how the developers and the architecture wasn't.
Set up well to allow scrapers to hit the website and so that's coming up. I think it'll be at the week after this episode. So stick around for that. But and yeah, I think that the whole bug bounty process and they I think they wrote up like a 24 page report giving them all the details of everything they found, how they found it, what they were doing.
And there's a timeline of July 2024 through December 2024. 2024 and just like everything they did of like, Oh, this is, I went to the bug bounty process. I feel a little bad because they only got 200, they got a gift card for 240 at the end of it, which bug bounties are usually a lot more than that. I
Sam Rose: don't know, 250 with, with, you know, everything costing a cent, you can get a lot of McDonald's for that.
If they love that vulnerability.
Autumn Nash: They should have just got the a hundred hash browns. It would have got more stuff. Like that's not a good incentive for bug bounties.
Justin Garrison: So, but it was still a good post. I enjoyed reading through it and just seeing their process. And it reminds me of like, if you've never done also like go to capture the flag event, there's digital ones that you can just join anytime.
Uh, I know Google still does one once a year. There's like hack the box and all these other ones that you can find that are just like, Oh, just, just poke around at things. And these are safe environments where you are intended to like, what does curl do with this? What does, you know, yeah, they're really fun.
Sam Rose: To hack the box in particular is the one that I like the most. So I kind of, on the side, have really enjoyed learning about this side of computing. And I'm not, I'm not good. Like, you know, I, you put me up against like a hack the box medium problem and I don't know what I'm doing. But the, the, the, the curve is quite gentle.
Like, uh, I think hack the box is a paid service now. I'm not sure if they have a free tier still. It used to be the case that you had to kind of hack your way in to make an account as well. Like it was very simple, but you had to go and do a digging in their website source code to get in. Which was kind of fun, but the, yeah, the learning curve is real nice and they have good, like most of the freely available boxes, I think we'll have good write ups if you get stuck and you can read through other people's solutions.
I know on YouTube there's a channel I really like watching is IPSec, I P P S E C, and he does hack the box walkthroughs of how he solved each of them, and he's done hundreds of videos. So yeah, really, really incredible community.
Autumn Nash: That's so cool. I'm gonna go look that up later. I think that would be cool to do with my kids, but I should probably also not teach them to hack things just yet, so.
But that's like the Rubik's Cube of like the internet, like you can just sit there and just play around and just hack things. I feel like that's just so much fun.
Sam Rose: Have either of your sets of kids shown an interest in programming yet?
Autumn Nash: Oh yeah, mine's are nerds. Mine are not.
Sam Rose: Yeah, I think mine are really young still, uh, so my Meldus is five.
But yeah, I think, uh, Ultima Mereldus is a bit older than that, and is, are they sort of making stuff by now?
Autumn Nash: Yeah, he uses Scratch, and then PBS Scratch, and he does a lot of making of games. He got mad that I wouldn't let him play Five Nights at Freddy's, so he made his own. He's like obsessed with gaming and making games.
He's like so many different apps. He's got, my kids have gotten around almost every like parent controls. Like at this point they should work for PlayStation and like Apple because they have outs like until the last update. for the iPads. My kid, like, continued to, like, give himself permission to get around the parental controls of, like, keeping him off the internet, but not to do anything bad, but to build his own Lego kit because he wants to work for Lego in Denmark.
And he was like, Mom, do I have to move to Denmark? Can I work from the United States? And I was like, I don't know. You keep hacking into things. You're going to end up either working for the NSA or in jail. Oh, and, and Justin, you're a bestie. At four and three, hacked into Fortnite so many times because he wasn't allowed to play and his brothers were allowed to play.
I blocked it, deleted it, took it off of the library, and that kid figured out how to download it when I would be in meetings. And I'd be in like stand up at Amazon, and he would be like re downloading Fortnite. at three, right after preschool.
Justin Garrison: If you don't know what the rules are, you can, you know, you can figure out a lot of things with some determination, right?
Like kids are so determined. And they have so much
Autumn Nash: time. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Sam Rose: My eldest was super into YouTube and we ended up. Kind of uninstalling it from his iPad because he was getting stressed because YouTube has these things for playables, which I did not know about before I had kids. So there are games in YouTube and he was playing them and getting frustrated with them.
So we removed it from the iPad and was like, look, this is too much. We're going to limit your use of this. And then he. Figured out how to redownload it, and he redownloaded it, and we found him playing it again. We're like, what has happened here? So we put controls in, so he couldn't do that. A few days after that, we find he's in Safari.
He's opened YouTube. com and gone to the Playful section. I'm not even mad. Like,
Justin Garrison: that's great.
Sam Rose: I'm really happy
Justin Garrison: you've done that. Sam and I were talking before recording, uh, about, like, Things that linkedin has like features that he didn't know that had live streaming and and whatnot. But linkedin also has games.
FYI. So if your son ends up on linkedin, yeah, by the way, he might end up over with a linkedin thought leader with top games.
Autumn Nash: My kid came home the other day and decided he was going to start his own tech company. And I was like, bro, you have to read and do math. And he was like, no, I got voice to text to like do my PowerPoint.
And I was like, what are
Justin Garrison: you starting a company? You and every other startup right now.
Autumn Nash: It was a little tech bro ish. It was like, I was like, we can't go down this road just yet.
Sam Rose: He can just do things, you know.
Autumn Nash: The amount of things I've told him he can't do. He's come back and been like, but look at how I figured it out.
Like, he decided he hated writing and it took too long and it was too hard. So he just decided he was going to voice attacks everything. Or like get Alexa to spell things and it's rude being outsmarted by a 10 year old that like has your entire personality. One day I caught him underneath the covers when he was supposed to be sick, coding.
And then I was like, bro, you faked being sick so you could write games on scratch. And he's like, but I got like three downloads on this one. And I was like,
Justin Garrison: doing it for the clout.
Autumn Nash: No, but he really does. He has a ton of downloads. One of them has, like, 150, and I don't even know how he got an account, because I did not make him one, and I think he asked Alexa.
Sam Rose: Going back to the speed of communication, like, speed of reading and things like that, like, I have long thought about this, about human communication in general. What do you think about how fast computers can communicate with each other? Like, speaking is really slow, and reading is really slow. These things are, it's, it's wild.
Like, imagining this kind of counterfactual world where We can communicate with each other at like the same speed computers can, you're talking about gigabit text rates of communication, like what would change, how would things look? I can't even imagine, like it would be incredible if we could perfectly communicate ideas at that rate, basically instantaneously, it would be such a different world.
Justin Garrison: In many ways, that's when you have a coworker that you have been working with for a long time or someone you like if you play a sport with someone, you just have this intuition about what they're doing. Like you get this moment of we can communicate just because we know what the other person is going to do because we're already doing the same thing, right?
Like there's that already happens with a lot of people. But also you remind me of like Crystal was on the show in January and she uses screen readers and she's like 3x speed for screen readers, right? It's like, wow, that's when I try to do anything that's over 1. 5, I'm like, I cannot comprehend what's going on.
But like humans absolutely can do that and they can understand it and they can just adapt to that faster mode of processing. You know.
Sam Rose: So when I was working at Nebula, one of the things that we did just among the backend team, which was just four of us, uh, we would occasionally just do that little watch parties, like whatever the newest Nebula original was, we would get together as a team and we'd watch it.
It was really nice little team building exercise. We kind of, you know, talk about it in DMs while we were watching it. And we learned, the youngest member of the team, I think she was sort of mid twenties, we learned that she had been watching all these things on 2X, and she was like, gradually getting ahead of us.
And I tried watching on 2X and keeping up with her, and I realized my brain really wasn't processing at that speed. And I talked to a few people about this, and you can train yourself. to listen to that. Of course you can, because people do it. So I did gradually train myself, and now I find 2x quite comfortable.
And I was telling a friend about this just a few weeks ago, and he's like, you are an adult, why do you care about the speed at which you listen to things? I can consume information at twice the The rate that I could before, it's just like a really good thing now. I listen to books at twice the rate I did previously with the same comprehension.
It feels like a good skill to learn to me. I
Justin Garrison: mean, like speed reading, like that was a big thing for how long, right? Like people were like, I have to be able to read and consume information faster. And there was training and apps and all these things that would teach you how to speed read faster and all this stuff.
And like, it's just, it's a similar thing where it's like, how can we get more of this more input faster and still retain comprehension? Right. It's like the, one of the things.
Autumn Nash: People already do speed reading now, because I mean, if you look at how people read, they skip certain words and just kind of like, because once your brain gets used to reading in that manner.
Sam Rose: I've become really conscious of the way that I read things ever since I began writing kind of like seriously, so to speak. I, I'm very conscious of just the huge amounts of stuff I skip over and the, if it's a code related post, my first pass is almost always just looking at the code blocks. And if I feel I need to read the rest of the pros, I will, especially if I'm looking for like a solution to a problem or a bug or something like that, I just care about the code.
And if I usually from the code, you can infer what's going on and then you read the rest of the texts. But generally speaking, I don't read top left to bottom right, every single word. And I think a lot of people write like that and It's a bit of a trap. I think you do need to structure your writing in a way that it's friendly to being skipped over.
So little bits of overlap, really descriptive headings, which is something I've historically not been very good at in my own writing. I think I need to get better at logically separating the parts of my posts.
Autumn Nash: The way that you think of everything is both creative and super engineering, and my brain just loves it.
Like, you're like, and then you have to make it aesthetic and all this stuff, but then you're also thinking about how to make it logical and how to make your writing work for people's brains, which is really impressive.
Sam Rose: It's uh, it's certainly a process, I, this is gonna sound really terrible, but I'm gonna say it out loud anyway.
I think most people that write online aren't very good, and uh, I would count myself as that, like, absolutely, and I still am very much learning, but I think most of what you write online is written by people that aren't good at writing, because I think most people aren't good at writing, right, so it can be kind of challenging.
Learning just through what you see day to day, I think specific practice and, and reading things by people that do have really good track records, like I've read several books on writing and I've read a lot of. Stuff by people I know are good writers online, trying to get a feel for their style and trying to find pieces of work where they're specifically pointing out the parts of writing they focus on.
There's a, I can't remember the person's name any now, but there's a great link. I think the post is just called how I edit or something like that. And it's all the things they think about while they're going through and editing a piece of work. Basically. Yeah. Writing is tough. I think it requires way more thought than most people put into it.
Justin Garrison: Autumn, do you have a link? Sure. I
Autumn Nash: have a link. Well, first, what, what Sam was saying is right. It's like a podcast, which like, I think everybody has a podcast, us, like everybody has a podcast and everybody has like a blog. And I think sometimes it's good to have a blog or a podcast or a newsletter, but the fact that everybody's using AI to write half of them, it's just like a just overwhelming amount of the same content over and over.
And sometimes I think people just like to hear it. themselves talk or just write random things and it's so much content.
Sam Rose: I saw something just before coming on here. I can't remember where I saw it, but there's a podcast like whiskey. fm. Uh, I'd never heard of it before and it's a tech podcast like, and has like a whiskey theme.
I'd never heard it. And I saw, just saw on their feed something like the, the key to podcasting is consistency. And I, I've heard this phrase in other mediums as well. Like the key to blogging is consistency. The key to YouTube is consistency. I'm sure consistency does not hurt. I am not sure I agree with that as a broader premise, like this idea that you need to produce like an irregular cadence, like frequently and things like that.
It is something I've specifically not been doing. And I've spoken about this with other people as well. And I think there's probably a bit more value with some types of content where. If you were going to produce like a post a week for 10 weeks, the overall traction of those posts is probably going to be low.
Like, unless you're writing about something very novel or you're doing something nobody else is doing, if it's just your opinions on things, it's almost certainly going to be quite low traffic stuff. Whereas if you spent 10 full weeks, like really thinking about a topic and going deep on it and putting huge amounts of effort into the presentation and you produced.
something incredibly detailed, quality, aesthetic, really, really obviously high effort piece of work. You're probably going to get way more traction with that than you would have done with the 10 posts combined, I think. So I think for, for a lot of people, there is an argument to be made where I think more people should be trying.
less frequent, higher effort pieces of work. And I don't see that many people doing it. And I I'm looking for them all the time because I, I really would like to talk to anybody doing this kind of thing, but it really doesn't feel as many of us out there. And I think people are sleeping on it.
Autumn Nash: I wholeheartedly agree.
Like everybody, I feel like we're just in this like time of the influencers and everything is about just like. Creating so much content and they think that consistency is everything because for one they think they're going to get paid for that and they think it just makes you better. But if you don't have anything interesting or unique to talk about, you're just polluting the rest of the content like market.
You know what I mean? And I think that. Just, I've gotten, people have asked me to be like co writers or, you know, stuff for like newsletters or something. I'm like, if you're just going to generate it with AI, I don't want to do it. Like, and if we don't have anything interesting or different to say than what other people are doing, like, it's okay if like, I think, you know, when it comes to like tech concepts, they're all like the same stuff over and over again, but we're just saying like how you would solve it or how.
We're solving it in a different way or how we found those tools. That's okay. But if you're just like cranking out the same exact opinions as everybody else, or just doing it to hear yourself talk, or just doing it because you want to make content that week. I mean, it's okay if you want to just do what you want to do, but I think sometimes people just do it to be like a tech influencer or whatever.
Justin Garrison: I mean, I will say that a lot of people measure their success against that, the views and the followers and whatnot, which is absolutely a thing that's happening over and over again. And those systems definitely reward some sort of consistency. I will say for myself, that the best thing about having a consistent cadence of any sort of content writing was it forced me to have a cadence for learning.
And as my cadence and habits for learning kind of solidified for probably 10 or 15 years, every Sunday night, I would just go through my pocket queue. I would just read what I saved in pocket for later for that, from that week. And I would read it and I didn't have a backlog of pocket stuff. And I was learning at a regular cadence because it became part of the habit of me in my weekly cadence of life.
And it didn't become like a, I need to go learn a bunch of stuff, or I need to go to a class or I need to do that. But no, I'm just like the constant slow progression for things and making that a habit for myself made it so much easier. To then create stuff because I was just constantly learning without having to put in a lot of effort.
And so I do think that the having the habit of doing the learning like I do think that, you know, deep diving into something really deeply and learning it expertly and then creating something out of that is is a great thing too. But I feel like you need to have the just the common day to day or week to week practice of like, Oh yeah, it just is.
This is how I'm, or when I'm learning that this is my flow of how do I save an article for later? I'm not going to say like, if you're leaving tabs open and not visiting them, like, you're not learning from it. Right. It's just like, like I always had to, I, every week, like on Fridays, I would try to close all my tabs.
I was like, that was like just my cadence of like, I would close my tab. So if I wasn't going to read it, I closed it. I didn't care if I was going to read it, it went to pocket and I knew Sunday, I would probably pick it up and I would finish reading it. Like Sunday night was just my time after kids go to bed.
I'm just going to read for a while. And like that cadence, I think is super helpful for just people's habits, not necessarily on the, on the creator side, but on the learning, how you learn and how you like to learn and where you have space to provide for yourself to do those things is really important.
Sam Rose: I agree with everything that you just said, and I think the difference is the goal.
So if your goal is to learn writing regularly, and in the understanding that almost nobody's going to read it, right? And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. You are learning something, and you are building up those writing muscles as you go. Like, you're putting words on paper, and as long as you, I think, make that deliberately, that's why you're doing it, and you also have a deliberate process where you are reading through what you're writing, and you're being critical about what you're writing, and you're thinking about structure, and you're thinking about flow.
That's all fine, but what I see people doing is doing that, and then getting real frustrated that no one's reading it. And it's like, yeah, of course no one's reading it. Like, there's nothing novel about it.
Justin Garrison: Whatever said to that, because like, I only write for yourself. Like, if you're writing for the views and the clicks and stuff like that, like, you're, you're, you're going to get burned out.
It doesn't matter, like, that side of it. I made this very deliberate
Sam Rose: shift at the beginning of 2023 from like writing for myself and then there was an aspect of like I was, you know, frustrated nobody was reading it. I made this real shift and like I really, really want to write things people want to read.
How do I do that? And that's why I started going down that road.
Autumn Nash: But I think both of what you're saying is so very different than just being like, I mean, this is the nicest way possible, but like, we know that there are people that just write to be like a thought leader or whatever, and they're not learning anything like, you know what I mean, like learning something and sharing what you're learning.
I don't care if nobody reads it. That's still cool. Like I've learned so much from random blog posts where somebody was learning something and I'm stuck somewhere and you Google it. And then you find how this person built this thing and they're in the same, having the same problem as you, or, you know, they're starting out somewhere.
That's still interesting because it tells you like, you're telling like your path of learning and how you looked up this thing and got this book. That's still much different than writing to write, like just writing thought leaderships and opinions to either piss people off or, you know what I mean? Like, it's just.
Rage clicks or even when it's not a rage click, it's spicy opinions or just, you know what I mean? Like now if you have a legit spicy opinions, like I'll read that for sure. But like, sometimes it's just having them to have them. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, clickbait
Sam Rose: works. That's exactly what I was gonna say.
Yeah. It's over indexed by the algorithms in the
Justin Garrison: same way
Sam Rose: that
Justin Garrison: consistency is in my opinion. Discovery and everything else is it. Leans towards allowing people to whatever people are clicking on, that's what we're going to feed them more of,
Autumn Nash: but they're different, right? So that's still different than learning that's different than having a real genuine opinion.
And like, for instance, like when me, you and Tim are in the same room, you guys are going to argue for on prem and I'm going to be like, but cloud has like, but those are all legitimate, like opinions. You know what I mean? From all of our experiences or whatever, you know, like people that's like, if it's really your opinion and that's it, like, go for it.
But if you're just pretending to have an opinion to get someone to click on it, that's like disingenuine. You know what I mean?
Sam Rose: That disingenuity annoys me. And it's something I love about Aaron Francis. I know when he says something, it's what he thinks. And it's what he believes and like, there's, I'm not going to say there's so few people that do that.
I actually think the majority of people do that. It's just, I think a lot of people that get big end up not doing that. And it's kind of hard to know where they stand on things. That's why I love Kelsey
Autumn Nash: Hightower because when Kelsey says something's good or bad, I trust that he really thinks it's good or bad.
You know what I mean? Like,
Justin Garrison: like to your point, exactly like Kelsey and a lot of people that we value the opinion, they know when they don't have an opinion. And they're not going to talk about it, right? They're just like, I don't like Kelsey right now is like, I'm just skipping AI. Like, I'm not going to do the AI thing.
Cause I just, I don't want to be part of it. I don't really have an opinion on it. It's fine. Like you go do whatever you want to do, whatever. He's not, he's not outspoken about this thing. He was very outspoken about like Bitcoin and crypto is like, this is bad. Like this is a bad thing. And, and he had to back away from it for, you know, for all the hate and, and things that were happening to him.
Because he was wrong
Autumn Nash: though.
Justin Garrison: No. Absolutely. Like it was just like he, his opinion, it was his opinion and, and he was outspoken about for a while, and then if he doesn't have opinion, it's fine. And those people are, that's
Autumn Nash: what I'm saying of respect. And people will just jump on the fricking like train of what everybody's upset this week.
Like, like okay. Obviously we're getting a lot of news and we're still upset every week. Yes. But sometimes it's just like, Web3 is amazing and then this thing's amazing and then like look at, or like, some people have really good opinions, but they write like there's a few people that. I think are really popular in infrastructure and they write like these opinion things and their opinions are actually good but the way that they write the titles make you mad before you even get there and then it's like to bait you into reading and I'm like bro I like your opinion I would have read it anyways we didn't have to do all this like you know I
Sam Rose: have a lot of respect for those people I don't tend to read it or enjoy it but I have a lot of respect for people that get into that game because it's really it's a really hard content creator train to get on board with because you have to be on the ball all the time and your opinions are going to annoy a lot of people and you're going to be constantly barraged with negativity.
I couldn't, I couldn't personally do it. Like, all of my stuff is very intentionally devoid of opinion.
Autumn Nash: It's not just devoid of opinion, it's like, it gives me the warm and fuzzies. Like, when like, half of like, the world is rage baiting and like angry and like i'm just like like i go on blue sky and i'm like oh god what is it going to be today and then sam posts this and it's like something adorable or like you know what i mean like artsy and i'm just like one bright light because like everything else sucks right now i
Sam Rose: think some of the unsung heroes of social media are the people that just retweet stuff that's really high quality they never post anything but all of their retweets are incredible i follow this there's two people i specifically have in mind Um, and I follow them and they post almost nothing, but their, their retweets are of the best quality I, I could possibly imagine.
I, I've seen people kind of dunk on people like that, like, Oh, like, if you're not going to get involved in the conversation, why are you even here? Like, do you have any original thoughts? And I'm like, no, you're missing the point. They're
Autumn Nash: sharing like good stuff and helping you providing a service. Yeah.
Like it's like putting you on to like the new cool stuff of the day. That's really cool. People
Justin Garrison: have newsletters that are basically doing the same thing. That's what a newsletter is. It's like a retweet in your email.
Autumn Nash: That's what I'm saying. Like some newsletters, you get really good stuff from like, yeah, absolutely.
Justin Garrison: And it's just like
Sam Rose: boost other people's stuff. And it's great. I love the lab notes newsletter for that. Sorry.
Justin Garrison: Shifting gears here and this live stream, we're supposed to have a game. The goal of the game is autumn. You are playing this. We have our guests and we're going to play. It's usually multiple choice.
It's, it's usually kind of ridiculous and it's, it's somewhat technology themes. Uh, we like to have. Sponsors for this, but this week, if you were listening to this episode, you are the sponsor. Thank you for sponsoring this episode. Uh, please share. This episode with someone share a link, read, read, retweet it, repost it wherever.
So just share it out there and just let other people know that you enjoyed the episode and the game is, is like I said, it's always something that I make late at night when I'm not thinking clearly.
Autumn Nash: To see that face he's making, Sam, we should be so worried.
Justin Garrison: This one is called the Fang Gang and it is about Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, the top five tech stocks, which also people, if you want to use the new names With meta and alphabet fine.
We just call that man, uh, something. I don't know, like it's just three A's in there, but anytime, anytime in this game. So we're, we're going to, we're going to take one of those five companies and you're going to guess something around that company. Uh, we're gonna try to put them in order for things such as like, when, when did the company start, which company started first out of Fang.
And that one might be, if you, if you know a little bit of history, like Apple is clearly the first one. Apple started in 76, 1976. Why
Autumn Nash: don't you take the one question that I know like the answer to. That's right, that's right.
Justin Garrison: I gave you that one. So, so, and this is now a question for both of you. Who started next?
Who was the second company out of Fang that started?
Autumn Nash: Amazon.
Justin Garrison: So I think I wouldn't guess
Sam Rose: Amazon. I would guess Microsoft.
Autumn Nash: But Microsoft isn't one of them, is it? No, it's not.
Sam Rose: Oh, I thought we were going with them. Okay. Uh, so it's Facebook, Amazon, Apple. Netflix. Google. Yeah. That's right. Amazon.
Justin Garrison: Yeah.
Sam Rose: I would go Amazon.
Yeah.
Justin Garrison: Okay. And this is, this is a game so that everyone listening could also play. I was trying to find more games. If anyone knows audio only games, I was really trying to find some, like, what is a game that you can play as a party game? And you are both right. Amazon was started in 1994, followed by Netflix in 97, Google in 98 and Facebook in 2004.
And again, I know it's meta now, I know Google is alphabet, whatever, we're using the fang names here. Which company has the most revenue?
Autumn Nash: Apple was one of the first billion dollar companies, but
Justin Garrison: This isn't net
Sam Rose: income, this is total revenue. This is, so they have, I don't know if they have the highest market cap, but they have the highest revenue.
Autumn Nash: I think it's between them and Amazon, because Amazon has so many different companies, and
Sam Rose: I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna left field it and say Google. I
Autumn Nash: think it's
Justin Garrison: Apple.
Sam Rose: That's service revenue though.
Justin Garrison: Apple comes in second with 391 billion and this is, this is total for 2024. So if you're listening to this, this was just, I found, you know, and it's, I'm rounding all of the numbers down basically to whole numbers.
So 391 was Apple, 391 billion. Google. 350 billion was third place. Amazon was number one at 637 billion. Because
Autumn Nash: they've got AWS blue origin. Like AWS is very profitable.
Justin Garrison: Yeah. Well, beta versus all the money at Amazon, right? That's yeah.
Autumn Nash: So that's what I'm saying. Like I was like, those two have to be, because it's either like, one has got the highest market cap and the other one's got so much,
Justin Garrison: but more than so.
And, and Facebook is 164 billion. And Netflix is just down there at 39 billion. Like they're like, whatever. But if you take the difference between Apple, if you combine Facebook and Netflix, Amazon still above, like if you combine those three, Amazon still has more revenue.
Sam Rose: I never would have put them that much higher.
Like
Justin Garrison: I didn't realize that at all.
Autumn Nash: But revenue is different though, because it also doesn't like take into, that's not net gains. Yeah, now
Sam Rose: let's talk about net gain. Oh no. That's the next question. Oh no. I know that Amazon actually was a loss making company for a very long time. Amazon.
Justin Garrison: com does not make a bunch of money.
Yeah, like they,
Sam Rose: I'm sure they, like, didn't they, they turn their first profit in like 2013 or something? It's, it's like super late.
Autumn Nash: That's also like partially how capitalism decides they're going to list their profits though.
Sam Rose: I worked for a company that got absolutely destroyed by Amazon. That's, that's a bit of trivia for you.
We, um, relied heavily on Amazon affiliate money and they turned up at our office one day for a meeting and were like, we're not going to pay you anymore. And we were like, oh, okay, that was, that was, that was a fun time.
Justin Garrison: Highest, highest net, highest net income. Autumn, what'd you say?
Autumn Nash: I would say Apple. I'm
Sam Rose: going to say Google again.
Autumn Nash: Apple because of the iPhones and just a lot of the way that they don't. Apple's very smart with what they get into, right? If you notice, they're not in the AI race. They're not making huge contributions. What? Apple's
Justin Garrison: totally in
Autumn Nash: the
Justin Garrison: AI
Autumn Nash: race. It is,
Sam Rose: but it's different. They're not competing, but they're in it.
Autumn Nash: No, but it's different, though. They haven't made the same 150 million data. You know what I mean? They are quick to outsource things. Like Apple doesn't reinvent the wheel unless they think it's quite like they did with like, I don't know, Siri and like the certain things. Right. But they kind of hedge their bets.
on things, you know, they don't do like a huge, like push in the same way.
Justin Garrison: So, and if you're, if you're listening, if you're watching live, feel free to, to fill out your answer for who you think is the highest for these things. So net income, Sam, you said Google, Autumn, you said Apple, and those are in that order.
Google has a hundred billion nets income. Apple has 93 billion. So very, really close on that one. It is a, uh, it is actually almost the whole difference of a Netflix. Netflix was 8 billion down at the bottom. There is Netflix,
Autumn Nash: but if you think of what their revenue and what their net growth is, Netflix isn't doing that.
Justin Garrison: Oh, we can talk about growth next. That's the perfect, you lead into it, but I want to fill out the, so it's Google hundred Apple 93, Facebook 62, Amazon 59. So even though Amazon had 637 billion revenue, they are second to last in net income.
Autumn Nash: That's because AWS funds a lot of other businesses.
Justin Garrison: Yeah, exactly.
You get one, one that makes the money.
Autumn Nash: You have to be careful when you say net. Revenue and like all that
Justin Garrison: because it's the same thing with Google search, right? Like Google search funds, everything else at Alphabet.
Sam Rose: That shocked me as well. While I was like, it's something incredible, like 95 percent of profit comes from search.
It's crazy.
Justin Garrison: When I was at Disney, I was shocked when I was there 2014 it was like 80 percent of all of Disney's revenue was ESPN cable subscriptions, ESPN. And that has completely flipped now like ESPN is, is, is like the bottom of it. And parks are basically taking over because they're like, we want in person experience now.
Autumn Nash: But I think that's like, well, not just that, but I really think that that's just a lesson of corporate America, right? Like the way that we are set up to make like businesses and corporations and the way that people can umbrella them all under and then share revenue. And then it's a lot, also a lot of just like, What companies want their shareholders to feel.
So it's like if you're all under the same umbrellas, you're always going to impress your shareholders with revenue because all of these companies revenues are combined. So, like, there's, it gives them that added incentive to not break those other companies into their own companies, and then you're giving everybody the same stock.
So I don't even know if these are, like, very company specific. It's just the smartest way to do business. America's tax laws and corporations, you know what I mean? So that none of this is specific to Amazon or anything. It's the way that Americans do business.
Sam Rose: That surprises me because I think one of the stated reasons that Google formed Alphabet was that they wanted investors to be able to invest more specifically in Google properties.
So they didn't want to have everything lumped into the same stock ticker. They wanted to have separate ones.
Autumn Nash: So specifically, but they, it's that option, right? Like you can either keep it all together or you can invest into certain things, but you still get the same overly revenue or like, you know, like, and you get the same like umbrella of things, just like when you do data centers and like each company now, like.
A lot of like at some point they're going to have to start their own like different companies and those countries for those data centers because a lot of places are going to have it where your data has to be within that country. So, you know what I mean? So it's going to be a big thing and it's their data center, but it's going to be under another, you know what I mean?
So they're all, this is all influenced by tax laws and revenue and stakeholders and stock and soon to be data laws. Like,
Justin Garrison: so. One last question. Who had the biggest year over year growth from 2023 to 2024? I
Sam Rose: can't see a world in which that's not Netflix. Really? If we're talking about percentage growth.
Autumn Nash: Let's see, they've had a lot of good studio shows. The cloud isn't as popular, so I don't know about Amazon and Google.
Sam Rose: Can Facebook grow? Are there any more worlds to conquer? Like, what are their daily active views of that now? Like, 28 billion or something?
Autumn Nash: Well, not just that, but they, well, okay, we're not talking about revenue or net, so we can't say it's because they dumped too much money in the metaverse, so like, I mean, but I mean, if they made a hundred billion.
a net last year? I feel like Apple, I mean, they're pretty consistent with the, like, iPhone, but the glasses didn't do anything major. So who would have net growth of that much?
Sam Rose: I have some of those, by the way, right there.
Autumn Nash: Are they good?
Sam Rose: Uh, I like them a lot. Uh, I didn't pay for them, so I'm, I'm biased. I won them in a competition, but I, I like them.
They have obvious deficiencies, but Either of you have a guess? I would say Netflix.
Autumn Nash: I feel like everybody had a crappy year.
Justin Garrison: I'll pick one.
Autumn Nash: I'm going to go with maybe Amazon.
Justin Garrison: Biggest year of your growth, the top, Facebook, 20%. What? For what? How? What did they do? Right? Netflix, 15%, second place. Google, 13%. Amazon, 10%.
Apple, 2 percent growth year over year. Wow. That's wild. Wild, right? Thinking of it, if you think of that side of it, it's just
Sam Rose: I'm sure that like monthly active user base is 4 billion users. It's something absolutely absurd. I don't know how they can, like, what are they growing in?
Autumn Nash: I think that, well, for one, they forced people to get their own accounts though, and you can't use the same Netflix account.
We should have taken that into account. Because they forced their own IP, which was really smart because now people can't share. That was
Justin Garrison: my Halloween costume, didn't you saw it, right? Hold on a second. Wait one second.
Autumn Nash: Now you know what being Justin's friend likes him.
Justin Garrison: Is he in his garage?
Autumn Nash: Yes. There's a Wreck It Ralph poster over there too.
Sam Rose: You wore that for Halloween?
Justin Garrison: That was, that was the scariest thing I could think of.
Autumn Nash: Show us down Wreck It Ralph.
Sam Rose: Oh, wow, that's a lot bigger than I was expecting. Yep. Great film, by the way. Second one was okay.
Justin Garrison: I agree, and that's the one I'm in, so. You
Sam Rose: were in the
Justin Garrison: second record, Ralph? My name's in the credits, yeah.
Oh, that's so cool! I didn't help with the first one, I helped with the second one.
Sam Rose: So it was your fault! I see it
Justin Garrison: was, I did, I did try to get some, like, they were asking for Easter eggs for like technology memes and Easter eggs. And I really tried to get the, uh, Kubernetes, uh, seven spoke wheel as, as one of the things in the, in the film.
And it said they put the Netflix navigator eight spoke wheel, which was still a good one. So, so a good call out if you know it. Thank you everyone for listening to the show and thank you for participating. If you come join the live stream, we are trying to do these. It's going to be the second to last Friday of every month.
The episode will come out on the last Friday of every month. Thank you so much, Sam, for coming on the show now twice this month and joining us for the game and teaching us all about
Autumn Nash: getting to know you, Sam. Also, Sam has a cool toast behind him with a mustache on it, and that's the coolest toast ever.
Justin Garrison: It's a disguised toast. So thank you, anyone else, if you want to listen to the show again, fafo. fm, we have a store. If you do a slash store, we have some merch out there. We have a couple of shirts and I don't know when this happens is going out next week. Autumn and I are going to both be at scale in Pasadena next week.
So if you are there the week of March 3rd, we will be there. Autumn, you have a talk. I'm just kind of hanging out and yeah, we will talk to you all again real soon.
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