mergeconflict385 === [00:00:00] James: Before we start this week's podcast, let's thank our amazing sponsor this week, Syncfusion. Yes, that's right. Syncfusion, the company that we've been talking about for the last 18 years. Syncfusion builds the world's best UI components suite. For no matter what you're building, whether it's web, desktop, mobile apps, or so much more. And it doesn't matter what you're building with, whether it's Blazor, Angular, React, JavaScript, Vue, NET MAUI, Flutter, Xamarin, UWP, JavaScript and stuff, WinForms, WPF. They got you covered. They got you covered so much that they have hundreds of hundreds of components, Excel processing, PDF processing, Word, PowerPoint, and so much more powerful power. Like analytics and, and, and BI integration that you can get into your applications is lovely. I use Syncfusion in my personal apps, and I even have a case study on Syncfusion websites because I love them so much. And I integrated them into my Animal Crossing app back in the day. If you're interested in supercharging your applications with a beautiful UI suite, check out Syncfusion. com forward slash merge conflict. That's Syncfusion. com. Forward slash merge conflict to learn more about Syncfusion's awesome controls and so much more. Thanks Syncfusion for sponsoring this week's pod. All right, Frank, here we go. Let's get into it. All right. So, um, many people may be wondering, this is the week after Ignite. This is the week after NET Conf and we... All these things are true. are not talking about it at all this week. Why is that, Frank? [00:01:22] Frank: Uh, that's because we're doing the Time Warp thing, uh, where everything you just said was a complete lie. You're lying to people, James. You're just lying. It's terrible. I'm here to speak the truth. The truth is we're recording before, before the conference because James has to go gallivanting around the world because that is what James does. [00:01:43] James: I am out on holiday. I'm officially disconnected from the internet and the world. Um, and I'm very, very far, far, far away into the future. In fact, um, days into the future. So I'm all over the place. And. I'll be back and forth into different places, you know, not, not transferring over the time to international dayline too many times, but at least once. And, uh, yeah, I'm just gone for a while and we'll be back very close to when this podcast will be out. However, NET Conf will be over and we record things usually on a Tuesday, which would have been perfect for the podcast. Cause we could have put it out after all this amazing stuff that was announced, but I don't know what's announced at all. I mean, obviously I do, cause I was, um, played a big part in the keynote, which I'm super excited for. If you watch this. The NET Conf keynote. What a banger. I'm just saying, John Galloway, me, whole team, amazing people, Damian, Safia, Dan, Glenn, Fowler, Maria, all the people, oh my goodness, are absolutely stunning. Here's the best keynote to keynote ever. If you missed the keynote, it's the best keynote ever, Frank, that I've ever seen at a NET Conf. [00:02:50] Frank: Speaking of missing keynotes, how early does future Frank have to wake up to catch this thing? Because I think Microsoft is notorious for their early keynotes. Oh, the [00:02:59] James: keynote standpoint. Yes. The NET Conf keynote, seeing that this had already happened. So people already watched it live, uh, happens at eight o'clock in the morning on Tuesday. [00:03:09] Frank: So we all know when we missed it. That's when we all slept into 10. We're like, Oh, it was at eight. This is your, your past news announcement. [00:03:18] James: Day two, funnily enough, starts at nine o'clock, which is an okay time to actually start a conference. So. Uh, yeah, the, the NET Confident is fantastic. All those videos are obviously on demand on the NET YouTube. Go subscribe, like, do all this stuff. I will say this though, um, an amazing team over there on the NET team, which happens to be on the community side. My team just put out, um, in collaboration with the PMs and engineers and cloud advocates, uh, eight brand new beginner series, and I recorded a Blazor hybrid one, Frank. So brand new beginner series, you can go to NET DOT. NET forward slash videos. Those are all the beginner videos and there's tons of them. We've got a new NET, NET C sharp with Scott Hanselman and David Fowler. What? Teaching you C sharp? Shut up. We got a machine learning and AI with NET, NET IoT, upgrading your applications, a Blazor hybrid, C sharp and NET with Visual Studio and NuGet package management, VS code in C sharp, what? And even more coming along the way. So anyways, go check that stuff out if you haven't yet. Big shout out to Katie and Jimmy and my team for crushing it. I just love my team. We're just, NET Conf is like the Mecca, right? Cause like Jeff has a big part of the whole team has a big part. It's like all hands on deck, the PMs, engineers, everyone's coming together. Frank, the whole community, right? We've got the 24 hour stream of goodness. Anyways, that all happened and I hope that you all enjoyed it. Um, I cannot tell you from the inside how much. effort goes into this thing. It's a wild anyways. Um, did you enjoy it? Was it a great conference for you? [00:04:49] Frank: Future Frank, uh, definitely knows when the conference happens because his YouTube subscriptions, I'm an old man. So I go to the subscriptions, uh, tab in the YouTube app and, uh, that gets flooded with, is it going to be purple or. Was it, is it purple or blue? I wonder. Future Frank is already knowing that answer. But yeah, I, I love getting that set of YouTube videos cause then I can just peruse them at my own leisure. I wonder how many I will have gotten through by the time people are listening to this. Uh, yeah, I saw actually on the tweeters that you've become a Blazor hybrid, man. Oh, it's the web. It's the web. You just can't avoid it. And that Blazor is pretty sweet. So it's, but. But it is sad to me, I won't make you a native developer again, but I will let you enjoy your Blazor hybrid lifestyle for now. [00:05:44] James: Let me reiterate, let me reiterate multiple times in every Blazor hybrid video that I mentioned and I've done, I'm not a web developer, right? This is not my day job. However, I love the ability of the blendability and my role goal is this. For me as a native client developer, that's my jam. That's what I'm going to continue to do. However, there are many, many, many, many, many, many web developers in the world, and I want them to come into the NET MAUI ecosystem slowly and surely, if that even means Blazor Hybrid or Hybrid WebViews or anything like that, [00:06:16] Frank: Frank. Complete side tangent, because I actually have absolutely no idea where we're going with all this. Um, it is. Kind of nice integrating web technologies into apps, I just have to say. Like, um, for the past two days, I've been struggling with a list view. And I'm like, it's just not behaving the way I want. I just can't, and I can't get the stuff into it that I want to get into it and all this stuff. And so I just had a moment and I'm like, What if I take that list view and make it a web view instead and just shove everything into HTML and make it render it. Cause you know what, it's pretty darn good at that rendering thing. And, uh, I haven't done it, but I keep thinking I'm like, every time I'm like messing with like this weird template code, I'm like. Maybe I should just convert this to a web view. Maybe I should just convert this to a web view. So I actually can't make too much fun of the Blazor world. Plus it's a good app model. So [00:07:11] James: it's good for that. One thing that the web has gotten really good at is like displaying a whole bunch of data in a bunch of really unique, fun ways, you know, and collect UI collection view went really far right in the recycler view and all these things over on the world of Android. However, there's a lot of work. And the nice thing is that with the web. There's just kind of a lot of stuff out there. You want a waterfall view? You want this flex layout, right? Like there's, well, I guess flex view or flex box. There's flex layout in, in, in NET MAUI. But like also just flex box is probably used for 10 billion years. Like it'd be easy to get super highly customized stuff, you know, like across the board, that's out there for the web. You can easily get the data in there. And then when you click on something, just. pop back over your native view. Right. So I don't know. That's not too bad. Scrolling. [00:07:58] Frank: It actually, it came down to scrolling for me. Like I, I hate websites that scroll jack, you know, they override the scroll behavior with JavaScript, but as an app developer, Mike. Gosh, I really want to take control of that scroller. And I'm like, can't really do it with the native controls, but I know I can do it with JavaScript because browsers are terrible and are awesome. I don't know which word to use. Awesomely terrible. And so I'm like, hmm, scroll behavior. It could be achieved with the HTMLs. [00:08:28] James: And yeah, I go back and forth to be honest with you. The biggest issue I have. Is CSS. I just, um, you know, one day I'll understand it and I'll get into it. I'm not even good at styling on mobile and desktop. Very good. But however, you just apply defaults, kind of like take care of yourself, you know, but CSS and media selectors and this, I'm like, yeah, I don't know, seems complicated. So that's my, that's my downfall to the web, to be honest with you. It's [00:08:59] Frank: not so bad, but like, the web has gotten into, um, the programmable CSS, uh, the SCSS, uh, I can't even think of its name. I'm that much not a web developer. Sorry? Sass? Yeah, maybe. That sounds about right. Um, everyone's rolling their eyes listening to this. Um, but I don't know. I've actually, I've been a web developer since the 90s. I like CSS. I know CSS. I could write CSS, so. I actually don't. Uh, I would say one of the benefits also of an HTML view in your app is CSS because, oh my god, actually go read the spec on what you can do with borders and fill patterns on controls and it's, it's freaky. It's freaky how much styling you can add. [00:09:48] James: And there's um, CSS. Uh, animations built into, which is wild to do, which is just bananas in general. So it's, it's not that I don't like CSS. It's just that I don't know it. Right. Cause I don't do a lot of web work. So like, I know that there's a lot of power there in CSS. So that's my struggle though. That's like me. I'm already, when I go into HTML, I'm like, I'm okay with it. You know, I can do okay. Some stuff, but some of the advanced stuff, I'm like, I don't know. But then when it comes to CSS, it's like, Whoa, no, you know, it's like, you're going way back in time where I just super day one developer basically. And that's my issue that I have, Frank. [00:10:24] Frank: I, I can write like CSS 1.0 off the top of my head, but for any of the, like I was just mentioning, like multiple borders or multiple fill patterns or generative CSS or like really controlling the selector hierarchy with required parents and things like that, that's when I have the, uh, MDN. MDN, whatever Mozilla documentation up because yeah, I've been doing it since the nineties, but who can remember that stuff? The syntax is so weird, but yeah, the animations implicit. [00:10:57] James: Some are implicit. Yeah. Cool. Okay. We've got two other topics now that we've gone into Blazor hybrid world. Go check it out. Go check out my series. I'll put it in the show notes. Second thing, um, Did you watch any of the OpenAI Developer Days, Frank? [00:11:13] Frank: Oh, I did. Um, I don't know how, like, I caught it like day of, but fortunately the cat wakes me up at 5 a. m. every day. So I was able to wait three hours and still catch her. I actually, it was, I forget what time it was, but, uh, it was quite interesting. Um, I'm Working on releasing an AI app, and so I'm very much in this AI world, and I think I want to do a whole nother AI episode in the future, but I absolutely did. The announcements were pretty cool, um, cheaper. Faster and a new app store, James, which, which one's more interesting to you? Cheaper, faster app store. [00:11:56] James: Break it all down for me. Cause you know what? I know nothing about any of it because I was so busy with NET Conf stuff. I literally was like, everyone in our chat was like, it's happening. And I was like, I don't got time for this. And then like, I didn't even watch the open AI dev day and five minute thing or whatever, like the verge days. I was like, I'm too busy. I'm got, I got stuff going on. So I was like, I So. Well, I don't have the numbers. Nine minutes, 10 minutes go. Let's do this. [00:12:21] Frank: Oh, I can totally do it. I can totally do it. Oh, right. Everyone, the future AI. Okay. That's my business speak part. Uh, I'm going to get all the numbers wrong here. So everyone go watch the real presentation and get the exact numbers here. But you've all heard of GPT 4. Well, let me introduce you to its little cousin, big cousin, GPT [00:12:44] James: 4 Turbo. Not five, not five. Not 4. 5? No, I, I think what, [00:12:50] Frank: like the cost estimates on these things are ridiculous. Like just training time alone is six months and that's not just computer work, but like there's human work involved. It takes time. Anyway, [00:13:02] James: turbo. Turbo. We have 3. 5 turbo, right? As well? Correct. Yeah. [00:13:06] Frank: Yeah. So, uh, the lineage three was the big. Big one. 3. 5 came out. 3. 5 Turbo is what powered chat GPT. So that's kind of the important thing there. That's, that's the one that really broke it into the mainstream. And then what? Sometime after that, GPT 4 came out and now we have GPT 4 Turbo, which is bigger, better, whatever. Those things don't matter because what they actually worked on was improving developer, um, support with it. And That includes things like improving the pricing of it because it's kind of expensive. Um, uh, expensive, whatever. The rough numbers, oh boy, I hope I don't get this wrong. But I think it was something like one cent per thousand tokens or something like that. You can do the math, but, you know, if you're just talking to it on a day to day basis. It's not going to cost you anything, it's not very much, but if you're an app developer, uh, serving user requests to the API, then these numbers make important, important difference in your world, because this is how much you charge your users, etc, etc, and you build your business around these numbers. And they went from, I believe, 3 cents per thousand to 1 cent per thousand, so a 3x decrease. Pretty awesome. Oh, wow. [00:14:32] James: That's great. Yeah. [00:14:35] Frank: And then, um, I believe that they went also for, um, you know, so this, in this world, everything's text, but it's not text. We turn it into tokens and you actually get billed by the tokens. And so it gets a little bit smaller. So like maybe a thousand word, whatever. Thousand characters turn into, who cares, 500 tokens. Well, they're making that better. Now maybe it turns into 300 tokens. So it's actually compressing your data. And I think they said, with these things combined, it's something like a 6x price reduction because it's fewer tokens and the tokens are cheaper. And it's a newer model. [00:15:15] James: Wow, that's pretty cool. [00:15:16] Frank: Okay, so price, that stuff is awesome. But importantly, they're also going to keep it up to date. Uh, GPT 4. 3, I forget which one was notorious for its like, knowledge of the world ended at September 2001. Some just arbitrary date for their training data. Uh, the new one is caught up to something like April 2023. So, it knows something about, has anything happened in 2020? Two in 2023, whatever. It knows whatever happened in those years. That's good. That's awesome. And those things interesting. Well, they did a bunch of developer stuff too that I want to get into, but any of [00:15:55] James: that interesting. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that all makes a lot of sense to me as far as like as they're pushing it forward, right? I think like as you commoditize ai, you can't really make it more expensive, you know? I think it's sort of, well, I mean, you could, uh, I mean, it's kinda like CPUs, right? There's like this curve and there's this, but then it's also sort of like. You know, consumer goods, you know, you look at iPhone, it continues to get faster and better, but the price basically tries to stay the same. But then they also have this other model, it's like a little bit cheaper type of scenario. So it's okay. What mode do you want to go? Do you want to go a hyper mode or this other mode? So that'd be very fascinating, right? It's like you kind of can pick your lever that you want. And I think that seems like maybe the route that they're going or so it sounds perhaps. [00:16:40] Frank: Yeah. And the super cool thing is like. 3 even got even cheaper. So they're like 003, uh, dollars per thousand, because like the newest thing is established at this price. By the way, I forgot to lead with the most important part. Satya Nadella came out on stage and said, hi. And that was cool. [00:17:01] James: Oh, was that it? Just hello. Pretty much just [00:17:04] Frank: said hello. Hello. I like AI. I think that's what he said. I love [00:17:07] James: AI guys. I love it. You love AI. I love AI. Everybody loves AI. I'm into [00:17:14] Frank: AI. I'm into AI. You paraphrased it much better than I did. That's exactly what he said. [00:17:20] James: I, you know, a fun fact about the NET Conf keynote, which you've watched already because it already happened. The amazing keynote. Um, there's a reference sample application, which is It's synonymous in the NET world, which is called eShop, eShop on containers. And there's a bunch of eShop on web and all this other stuff done at Architecture Samples. And there's a new updated eShop with a bunch of new cool stuff that was announced that Frank totally knows because he already watched it because it already happened. But the cool part. The cool part about the eShop app is that the engineering team and teams, like they wanted to reinvent it with all the new NET 8 stuff that was announced and really cool new stuff that's coming out. And we wanted to redo the UI. So that meant recreating it. So it's, it's a, it's a eShop for a sort of a outdoor sporting goods, kind of makes Pacific Northwest sounds. It's called Northern Mountains. And. Uh, the cool part about it is that every single product, name, description, image was all AI generated. [00:18:22] Frank: Oh, interesting. Did you have an intern just sitting there at a prompt? Click, click, click, or whose job was that? I wonder. That's fun. [00:18:33] James: Yeah, I think it was. I don't exactly know how it came out as far as like the product and the styling of it, but I'm pretty sure it was. NET MAUI, James Montemagno, Xamarin Montemagno, Xamarin Forms, Dot Net MAUI, Pretty awesome. I'm not going to lie about it. I'm, I'm, I'm pretty impressed. I'm not going [00:18:55] Frank: to lie. Okay. So that's actually a great segue. So in terms of developer stuff, um, we actually had a request for an episode to do, and I, I, I want to get to it, which is someone's like, how do you actually build an app out of these things? Because they are so weird. They're just these big text processors. Uh, on that note. Um, like, so you're a developer and you want to try to use this to like solve different problems for the user and present interfaces. You want to get data out of the neural network in a format that you can actually interpret and everyone. Um, JSON. You know, just JSON. Just have the neural network output some JSON. So in your case, you could have had it output a JSON list of products. And then you could have said here, given this JSON list of products, give me prompts for image generators, uh, to do all that. But there are no guidelines saying exactly what text it should output. You could say, please give me some JSON, but it might put like a little blurb in the front. It might put like the three ticks for markdown in there. It's a text generator. It's random. You know, sometimes it's going to be crazy with its formatting. Well, uh, And there are solutions, different solutions to this problem in the open source world, but in the open AI world, they've announced from a developer's point of view, this is awesome. You can require that the neural network give you back, uh, Java, JSON, JavaScript. Oh, wow. And yeah, so in that way, you can reliably get back an object that you know you can parse and just interrogate with any programming language. So it's a small thing, but it's a big step in the road of actually making these useful too. [00:20:41] James: That's awesome. I mean, I think that's super duper cool in general. And I, and again, I don't know exactly how it was all generated and how it was all. Coming out at the end of the day, but I do kind of like that prompting mechanism. And, and in fact, I even saw on Bing, for example, recently I tweeted it, it was like, you know, create a C sharp application that does this thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then at the end of the day, I might want to keep talking to it and then have it actually create something. Like a CS project solution, right? Like, Hey, just check this into source code. That'd be pretty cool. [00:21:15] Frank: Yeah. I've, I've, I've been working on trying to like nurse them along the way. I'm like, here is a very vague app description. Generate me a more detailed app description. Okay. Given this detailed app description, tell me what are the main pages of the app? Have it list those out. Okay. Given these, given all of that, you know, this. Big buffer. Um, now generate me every xaml file, now generate me every cs file, generate every html file needed to implement all those pages. And, you know, with the, the right prompting, you can actually get it to generate complete apps. Smallish apps and things like that, but, um, it still takes getting the output to be exactly what you want is still a trick. Um, this JSON thing is a good step forward for that. We are still in the weird world of these are just text generators. [00:22:11] James: Now you said though also that they are doing something in and around an app store of some sort? Like what is that about? [00:22:20] Frank: Mm hmm. Okay, so, it, the JSON thing is like one way to force that general network to give you some output, but what if you actually want to change its whole nature? Like, this thing was always told through all its training that it's a helpful assistant, and it's gonna assist you. But what if you want it to be something else? What if you want it to be like a role playing game? What if you want it to be like a text adventure game? And it just generates like a story for you, an adventure for you. Uh, this is things we would call fine tuning in the world. You would, um, give it a new. new set of data, a new way of acting, and from that data, train it up. You would fine tune it. You wouldn't change all the network parameters, you'd only change some. And so it would try, it would behave in the way that you want it to behave. This is all trying to get it to behave in a way that's useful to us. And what they've done is simplified that process and created kind of, um, kind of a UI, a basic UI, to not fine tune the model, but fine tune the model. Um, so it will guide you through the process of you say, like, you just, in very vague words, say generally what you want the thing to do. And it will either ask you more questions and drill down. Or be more descriptive, or you can even just upload a bunch of files and be like, act like this, or here's some information to consume, and things like that. Um, so it's not fine tuning, but it's almost, it's a very light, it's a lighter step on that. And they're calling these... GPTs, plural, GPT, plural, GPT. Yes. So you, James, can go create a GPT. I can have a GPT. The cat can have a GPT. I could have two GPTs if I wanted to. And the idea is you do this, not fine tuning, but fine tuning of the network, uh, and then you start selling those puppies. I sell to you, Frank's GPT, which, um, responds with a cat limerick at the end of everything. I don't know. Just some, just some tuning of the model that does something interesting. They're calling them GPTs, and they will have a store. So, I, I need to start making some [00:24:45] James: GPTs. Now, where exactly would these GPTs show up? Like in APIs or like inside of, because they have the things that are inside of chat GPT, but like these GPTs would be other Ts that live somewhere? Yeah, [00:24:59] Frank: so GPT has another integration point where it can contact services. Ah. Right, so the, the things that you see inside there are services that integrate with GPT, so it, it, um, it looks for certain clues and then calls a web API or something to get further information and present that to you. These are different, um, these could include that, but they don't have to. These are just more like a behavioral change to the model, not, I think, yeah, I think that's the best way to think about it. about it is you're just changing its kind of primary directive of how to behave when presented with you. Um, and these will be just in the app. Yeah. Um, probably. Um, we'll, we'll see about Apple's rule of no app stores in the app store. So. We'll see how that goes, but, uh, who knows, maybe we'll buy all these things with coins. [00:25:57] James: So it sounds like you're excited overall then. [00:26:00] Frank: I, I am, um, honestly, just because I want to go create some GPTs. I want to have fun with that and see, because I, I think the, you know, um, these neural networks are great as oracles, as the new Wikipedia, if you have a question, just ask it. Um, but they can do such much more hilarious stuff if you can just prod them, if you prompt engineer them into doing more interesting things and it's fun to get them to do much more interesting things than just being a know it all database. [00:26:35] James: I like that. I like that. Uh, well, I'm excited. I didn't want to go back and rewatch or at least watch the, oh, this happened, you know, five minute overview type of thing, but I think I just got it. So I don't think I have to anymore, Frank. So thank you for breaking it down. Now, uh, one final question is what do you, what do you code these GPTs in? [00:26:53] Frank: Unclear. Um, but I will say they said, uh, they are available to programmers, but they have, um, an, uh, an app builder UI, a web UI to build one without doing any coding. So the unclear part is, um, What coding can you do? It's not all together. I'm sure you can have it shell out to services, like I mentioned before. So if you're Expedia or whatever, you can go look up flights or things like that. [00:27:24] James: That makes sense. All right. Last quick one here. Three topics today. Um, wait. Question from our Twitter, you can reach out, reach at us at a X. com forward slash at MergeConflictFM or Twitter. com forward slash MergeConflictFM or just MergeConflict. fm. There's buttons on there to do stuff. Um, this is very fascinating because. Uh, Brad reached out and he said, uh, on an, let's see, uh, this is a thread. This is a thread, but, oh, there's a whole thing. Yes. Christian, who then Brad subtweeted and replied to, so Christian, uh, reached out and was like, Hey, um, I just tweeted randomly was like, Hey, uh, Google is now requiring developers to. Basically authenticate their app if they're a business. There's a whole bunch of things. Um, it says Google announced, well, this other person said there's a few different things. Google has announced that developers with newly created personal play accounts will soon have to require to test their apps with at least 20 people for a minimum of two weeks before applying for access to production. More specifically, Google says developers with personal accounts created after November 13th have to run a closed test for their app with 20 users. For 14 days, continuously, et cetera, et cetera. That's wild. But additionally, I have a business account on it that this is the ensuring high quality apps on Google play. Google also is now requiring that businesses, uh, verify themselves. This is something you have to do on. Apple as well, developer accounts today. Um, so you have to say if you're a personal account or organizational account, I'm an organizational account with my LLC over here. Christian Brad stepped in, has a whole thing about creating a business entity on this stuff. Brad says on an early episode of Merge Conflict, I think one of the pieces as advice was not to bother with personal developer accounts, make an LLC, get an ABN, uh, makes a lot of ease, a lot of. A lot easier in the future. So I want to kind of follow up on this. There's a little confusing LLC, ABNs, EA, EANs, DUNS numbers. They're all different, but let me clear this up. You don't get an ABN number. For creating a sole proprietorship LLC. Um, I have an LLC, um, which is I'm a sole proprietor LLC. One, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a business entrepreneur. Take, read all your due diligence, just like financial advice, do all this stuff. Uh, I have an LLC. The reason I have LLC is because I create apps and I have a business name that I've registered, um, with the state in which I live, or if you have moved states, you can have a foreign entity, um, that redirects to the one that you created it in. So let's say for example, Frank lives in Washington. He has an LLC in the state of Washington. Frank moves to Florida, Frank and create a foreign entity in Florida, pointing back to his entity in Washington. He now has to pay twice, but that means he doesn't have to reset up his entity in Florida, basically. It's very fascinating foreign entities. They're great. And then also you don't want that to be pointing to your home address because it's an LLC. So you actually get, uh, Um, an in between company that has a business address and will forward mail to you. It's a whole thing. Anyways, LLC, limited liability company. The whole reason you get an LLC is for some reason, someone sues you. They're not suing you, suing your company, right? Now, granted you are your company, but your company is the front of the business, right? In general. So I have a separate business checking account. There's business checking accounts that you can get on there. And then there is. Something else though, whether you have an LLC or other things, and Frank can talk about what he has specifically, but there's something called a Dunn's number. The Dunn, what is it? A Dunn's and Bradstreet number. We did a whole episode on Dunn's number. They're stupid, but basically Dunn's and Bradford. Uh, it's just an InBetween intermediate that verifies businesses and gives them a unique identifier, because you could have an LLC, you could have a, you, you can have AAC, uh, an s-Corp. You could have a secret, all these different things, right? The Dunn number brings that together. That allows you to have like one searchable database that's out there. So I have an LLC, now the LLC, since you're a sole proprietorship, right? Your business doesn't file taxes. You file taxes because it's you, you are the company, even though there's a front to the company. Right? So that's important aspect as well. So you don't get an EAN number, um, which would be if you had a, uh, I guess, a S corp or a C corp or a corporation, that's a business account in which you have a number, right? Am I wrong? [00:32:13] Frank: You were so good up till there. Everything was perfect. Everything was perfect. Well that's 'cause I don't [00:32:17] James: have one. I have an LLC, so I don't have to worry about it. So Frank will tell you all about the business Corp side of it. Go for it. [00:32:24] Frank: Um, oh, thanks for that. Um, no, we'll just talk about the EIN then real quick. In America E, the EA and E, even in the usa, US of a yes. That's your employer identification number. That's only if you have employees. So the moment you hire an employee, you will have to go get an EIN. And that becomes what you file your taxes under. You can request one without employees also. I did that. Um. I got employees quickly, but, um, sometimes you just want an EIN just so you're, um, so you have the pleasure of filing multiple tax returns. The real glory and prize of it all. Yeah. Um, and I do recommend everyone, if you're an app developer out there, don't do a personal account, do go get an LLC. In the United States, you can mostly just do it online. You pay them like 100 bucks and you have a company. Every year, go click a few more buttons and your company will be in good standing. And so then the only thing you have to deal with is taxes, and I won't advise you there, but sole proprietor is nice and simple. Keeps, keeps your personal taxes in line with it. Um, yeah, just do it. It's, it's not that big a deal and you get to have a fun party trying to come up with a fun name for your fun company. Uh, I am sad that Google's doing all this verification, so rewinding all the way back to the beginning there, because speaking of the DUNS number, um, any time you change address, you gotta go update your DUNS database, because being a third party, it is completely random where they get their information. So even if you have a business, go check your DUNS information. You'd be surprised what random junk that they They start posting as the truth there. Um, and then if you're on Apple, if you do an address change, you actually got to go through a whole process and everything. So that I still haven't done embarrassingly enough. I should get on that. [00:34:24] James: That's true. Yeah. So there's a few things that we had talked about, sort of hackish, sort of little workarounds to like, there are like business boxes you can get. I don't know. There's the whole thing. Um, but. One of the things that you most likely want to do is actually get a registered agent. That would be the thing that you want to look at, uh, in general. So, uh, for example, um, there is the place where mail gets sent or things get sent. And ideally it's not your house. J So this is also the important aspect of it well because people could just look up your LC and then they've doxxed you, [00:35:05] Frank: right? Right. But I just wanted to say, that's the whole reason. Otherwise it's very convenient to have it at your house. If you don't mind being doxxed, it's very convenient to have it brought to [00:35:13] James: your house. A registered agent, on the other hand, which you can then pay money for As well. Everyone makes money. It's literally an office that all they do is say yes. The business resides here basically. And then, and then it routes and then you tell them your home address and they route mail to you if accordingly, basically. [00:35:37] Frank: So even better hack than that is if you have an accountant or anyone else, just be like, Hey, can I use your business address as my mailing address? And then slip them a couple bucks every [00:35:45] James: month. Totally. So there's all those different aspects of it, but yeah, I totally agree. And if you have a, uh, a personal account, now you can change it over. It's all right there. Now there there's. There's something different though, is remember on Apple though, there's actually three different types of accounts. There's personal, then there's this personal and yet you're a business. And then there's enterprise. Those are the enterprises, a different thing on Apple. I only pay 99 a year. I don't pay the whatever extra fee as an enterprise. So I'm not an enterprise, but you can register as an organization under the name. So that's where you see refractor or you see, I guess yours is just. Kruger systems. Right. So, [00:36:25] Frank: yeah, same org for decades. Now it feels like, um, somehow it's still survived all their account transfers. [00:36:34] James: And LLCs are fun in some States. Like when I had set up mine originally in Arizona, um, and I let that one expire, basically just don't renew it. And then it goes away. Um, you had to get, uh, I don't know if Washington does this too. It was a while ago since I did it in Washington. Um, I, you have to get. Your business published in a newspaper that you were register. You were created entity. So there's literally newspapers in Arizona that all they do have a section of this, but then it's cool is that they're like the nicest people in the world. And then they send you like the, the issue where it's like reflection LLC, like creation date, blah, and blah, blah. It was cute. I was like, wow, that's that maybe issue. Yeah, that was cool. Okay. So I created [00:37:19] Frank: an LLC. LSC, two years ago. I, I, they're like web domains. I love collecting companies. I've been starting companies my whole life. Anyway, I started one two years ago and they didn't, Not make me publish it in a newspaper. Oh my gosh. That is so [00:37:34] James: cool. Uh, and then additionally, uh, a fun fact is like, you know, four year LSC. You could have multiple LLCs, like you're saying, uh, Frank, because at the same time, your LLC should be a specific business or, or kind of technology scene. So my web presence of mobile development. So like this podcast, the YouTube and like my apps that I ship are all under refractor. Cause it's like a brand like refractor ships, mobile blah, blah, blah. Right. But if I start a coffee company. I can't just put that under refractory, you know what I mean? It's gotta be its own coffee. Coffee. LLC. It's gotta be separate entity in general. I don't know where the lineage is. Yeah, if like, it should be super granular, but I'm not a lawyer, so ask a lawyer, I guess. . Well, [00:38:22] Frank: the annoying thing on Apple is they conflate brands with. Government recognized organizations, tax corporations. So me as Kruger systems, if I want to publish anything, um, in every app I release, there's a little Kruger systems part that shows my other apps, which is good, you know. Collect them all, buy all my apps. I want you to do all that. But let's say I want to put an app there that is crazy and wild. And I don't want it as a part of that set. I want it as a part of a different brand or something like that. Then you got to go start another business, basically, because Apple's backend cannot handle that. They cannot handle one business having multiple organizations. Or at least I'm pretty sure they can't. Uh, so that, that's another reason to go spend a hundred dollars a year on an LLC. [00:39:17] James: Got to do it. Go check it out. There's all the things. Ask a lawyer, but you're right. Like, uh, there are services that will do it like from start to finish for you, but every state is different. Um, and some states are like really, really, really easy just to do it yourself, save yourself some money online. It's super simple. 20 [00:39:33] Frank: years ago, it was a pain in the, okay. Even 20 years ago, it was like fill out three forms, put them in an envelope and put in the mail. No big deal. Um, but nowadays like everyone's it's just online. Um, those, I meant, those services did have a purpose back in the day. And if you're doing like a full corporation, they're sometimes still worth it because LLCs are simple. For an S corporation like I have, you might want to actually hire someone to do it all for you, which is what I did. Um, but an LLC, I say, just find the website and just do it. [00:40:09] James: Yeah. Don't, don't lie on the forms. Yes. And you know, like LegalZoom, for example, has a great breakdown. If you're interested in LLC versus S corp versus C corp, uh, versus sole proprietorship, which an LLC is also a sole proprietorship. So there's like, there's members that can be on an LLC, there's multiple LLC types, but sole proprietorship LLC is like what most people will have. It's super simple, but yeah, if you are interested in the other ones. Give them a look. Um, I just usually like their advice. I don't actually use LegalZoom, nor are they endorsed by this podcast. However. Yeah, that's nice. And it's like, here it is. Right. And just, boom, here it is, you know, um, so it's kind of good to know if you're interested in those additional things, but yes, thank you for, for clarifying the EIN until I forgot that that's totally one of those reasons in general. So give it a go. Business. Business. Um, that's it. All right, cool. Thanks everyone for tuning in this week's podcast. Let us know what you thought of NET Conf and all the amazing announcements at the keynote. That was super awesome. And how it was right in the show at mergeconflict. fm or hit us up on Twitter at James Montemagno at Proclaim. That's going to do it for this week's podcast. Until next time I'm James Montemagno. [00:41:20] Frank: And I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for watching and listening. Peace.