MIX-5 === [00:00:00] James: Last week we decided that we're gonna do something different for maybe the few podcasts. Who knows? Uh, because it's summer and we're enjoying the summer, and it's hard to deep dive on something when you're not even coding. All day, every day. There's so many cool little topics we want to touch on cuz that's what we're dabbling in in the summer. It's experimental summer. So just like we did last week on the pod. If you haven't, go listen to that. Go listen to that. We're gonna touch on some topics, but we have a theme. Frank, we got a theme. [00:00:27] Frank: What's the theme? Oh, the theme this week is great because it was made up by you, I assume about 10 minutes before the show. But it's, it's upgrades. Upgrades. There's a whole podcast called Upgrade, by the way. It's, it's a great podcast. You should listen to Jason. So anyway, we are gonna talk about like, When's the right time. And finally, we're not gonna talk about for our apps, cuz we usually get into that dependency thing where we just talk about our apps and how we don't wanna like update the SDKs for our apps. We're not gonna talk about that this time. I swear. We're not that. We might, we're also gonna just talk about devices cuz we're, we're in a device mode too, right? So we're gonna, we're gonna talk about all the upgrades. [00:01:08] James: Yeah, I think so. And the first one actually came from a Patreon listener who was talking about new Xcode requirements because at Dub dub DC they announced Xcode 15. But additionally, there's new Xcode 14.3 requirements that require, let me look at Mac Os. It's hard. [00:01:31] Frank: It's hard. You need a chart. [00:01:34] James: You do need a chart specifically. I believe they were running big Sir. And I believe that the latest versions of Xcode require Ventura, Ventura, Ventura, which is like the latest, and in fact, Xcode 15 for sure will, uh, require Ventura, um, not Sonoma. Which is the newest, newest one. Uh, but it has you always thinking, right? Because I still have my MacBook. I have my MacBook Pro 13 inch from 2013 when I joined Zamarin a decade ago. And it's, it's a Butte. It's a Butte. And I resisted Frank. I resisted the upgrade. And then Apple was like, well, you can't ship apps anymore, so what do you do? [00:02:21] Frank: Oh, they're so rough. They are so rough. You know, every time, like I, I, I don't know, I'm an old timer and I like to support as many. See, I, I did, I, I got to talking about SDK versions here. I like to support as many old versions with my apps as I can of the os, but Apple's been really making it hard, especially lately, and now they're making it like they're getting very aggressive. With, uh, you're 2013. I'm, I'm curious, does that cap out a big sir? Because when, when we were thinking about this topic, I, I had to ask you, I'm like, I have a 2017 iMac Pro. Can I even it's I'D on Ventura. I know that much. I am currently on Ventura, and according to you, I can even get the latest X code. But Sonoma, you were telling me, uh, am I, am I out of the Sonoma party? No. Sonoma [00:03:16] James: for me. Yeah. So for Big Sur specifically, this one supported a lot of devices and it did in fact support the MacBook Pro late 2013, which is the model I have. So it was the very, very last one specifically, and it did not run well, uh, basically at all, for all intents and purposes. But yes. Uh, so Ventura, you know, here's where becomes interesting. Ventura, which Xcode 14.3 and 15 require, um, specifically are going to be your MacBook, uh, pro and iMac 2017 or later and MacBook Air 2018 or later. So we're talking five, six years, uh, in general, but Sonoma. Those are your MacBook Pros 2018 and your iMac 2019, so sorry, MacBook Pro 2018, Mac Pro 2019, and Mac and iMac 2019 or later. So we're only talking 5, 5, 4, 5 years here. [00:04:15] Frank: Yeah. Four. According, if I know the, the names of these computers don't exactly match their release, but, Hmm four. It seems, yeah, low. Uh, you know, the problem with growing up during the crazy nineties is I felt like simultaneously there was a lot of growth, but also I wasn't buying computers as often. Even though you'd like go try to buy a new video game and it'd say new requirements and. Decide whether your computer could actually do it. The problem is, I grew up in the nineties and time is compressed in your childhood. Like everything seems to take so long cause your brain is just moving too fast or something like that. And time just is incorrect when you're a child and I felt like things move more slowly. But four years, I mean that was definitely the 3 86 toum switch. The problem is computers have really plateaued. And so like, have they really improved since the Pentium 1 66? It's debatable. And so I, I, I do feel like four years is short, but at the same time, I wonder if I'm basing that on just childhood perceptions of time. [00:05:28] James: It's hard, right? Because with these machines as they've progressed, it's not like you can just go upgrade your C P U or put her in a new mobile, right? You gotta buy a whole new machine, and that's really where it comes down to at the end of the day, you're right. [00:05:44] Frank: And, and it's funny, the example I was thinking of the Pentium example, I, we literally had a 4 86 SX computer. This is the one without the math co-processor, but we bought a Pentium chip and put it onto the same motherboard to, to even take out the 4 86. Just left it there. I, I assume it was like playing mine sweeper or something while the Pentium did all the work. Yeah. You used, you can still upgrade computers these days, but you know, every time I try to upgrade the processor in one of my PCs, I end up buying a new motherboard. Like even those aren't so great to upgrade. [00:06:22] James: Uh, no. Yeah, and, and if you're upgrading, you know, little slim. Down machines. Like this is my, my Surface laptop or you have a MacBook hair, you're, you're, uh, there's not even, I'm sure there's little nubs or little screws under here, but I'm not opening that up, you know what I mean? And it's probably all soldered on. It's something, you know, [00:06:45] Frank: I always told myself when the computer's 10 years old, I'll actually crack it open and have fun. Like I, I'm almost excited when a computer breaks, cuz then I can just open it up. But I haven't opened out Apple laptop in years. It's probably just, I haven't [00:06:57] James: pretty boring in there too. My MacBook Pro 2013 has been, it's in a drawer. The poor thing. It's just been there for two years. I refuse to turn it on, but I'm re I'm concerned not to like, get rid of it or like donate it or something. I, I don't know. Uh, but yeah, but [00:07:17] Frank: it's, yeah, it's tricky. Donation might be okay. Um, Yeah, you, you have to find a good place. Uh, donation's hard. There aren't many people that do it because it turns out computer donation services are not profitable, so it's hard to find good ones. Mm-hmm. [00:07:34] James: Apple will take 'em back. They'll recycle them for free, even if it's old and don't give you any money, they'll, they'll pay for it. [00:07:39] Frank: Recycling, not reuse. It's kind of nice if you can just get it to a kid like, then again, you did say you upgraded the operating system and it doesn't run so well, so if it's not running well, then maybe it is better to tear it apart. Sure. [00:07:52] James: That's the problem. All right. Onto number two, which you'll probably won't even have to worry about because I've been doing this on the side, which is one thing that I like about Apple. Okay. Is that they introduce an api. They introduce an api. Okay. Store kit. Now Frank, they've added to store kit. In fact, there's a store kit too. There's a store kit too. It's been there. It's been, it's It's hanging out. It's lingering. It's sprinkling. It's store kit dust all over the place now. But I haven't, I haven't touched it yet cuz it's not required. Who knows when it's gonna be required. Maybe it'll never be required. I do not know. But store kit one. They've added onto it. But here's the thing about store kit. Let's say that you're making purchases, things are purchasing. You could continue to purchase the exact same way with the exact same code forever. Nothing changes. It's like it's the same stuff. Now they've added new api, so you can get additional information, you can do stuff. There's new ways of gathering information and new subscriptions that they've evolved. Android, Uhuh Uhuh. Mm-hmm. They're like, let's just change the API every year and a half and require you to update your billing libraries every two to three years with brand new source code. Okay, now they've done this twice. Because they had the Android billing library, and it seems like every two versions, they're like, we're gonna break everything. All your APIs are completely different. Nothing works exactly the same. Good luck. And like their documentation, subpar and w. I was getting, I was getting ready because this August and November are the dates that Android billing Library V five is required. You get it in the portal, it's super nasty. I'm getting tons of issues on my GitHub. People are like, when are you gonna do it? When are you gonna do it? I'm like, I'm gonna do it. And then I looked at the change log and I was like, I'm not gonna do it tomorrow. I'm gonna have to plan this out. And then Google io happened, and guess what? They released? Android billing Library v6. Why do they do that? What are they doing? Why stop it? Slap. Now V6 and V five are pretty similar, but like what is going on here? Like knock, cut it out. Google. Oh wow. In your library changes. It's up drastically different. It's not even the same. It's not even the same. It's very upsetting and I gotta upgrade. Everyone's gotta upgrade. This is red it for a core piece of functionality. It is so disheartening and so frustrating Frank, in so many ways. Cut it out. Cut [00:10:31] Frank: it out. Google. Let's cut it out. A, a reference to full house. I just have to ask, [00:10:36] James: cut it out. Yes, [00:10:39] Frank: you got it. Excellent. Just, just wanna make sure, reference, acknowledged and all that kind of good stuff. This is the same company that supports eight, that releases 8,000 support libraries and then broke how the support library system works and now releases double the number of support libraries cuz they're like, well, 8,000 libraries is enough. What if we released 16,000 libraries and what if at Android X we break 'em? That company you're saying. Just arbitrary breaks, APIs, the talk to their arbitrary store API service. A a, a shopping cart. Can, can we just call it a shopping cart? Cuz that's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. A shopping cart API keeps on breaking Cause. Is it really that hard? Have none of these people written p h P websites? Like we, we, we used to write stores like this. In our afternoons. Okay, that's old man rant over, uh, new modern programmer is James. You just right click and say upgrade nge and then like nothing changes cause. No one breaks APIs anymore, so do they. The can, can just, can we go back to an old podcast, find a rant where I ranted about semantic versioning and how it's ruined software, and please insert it here. Thank you. Uh, end of ramp. [00:12:09] James: Yeah. Here's my, I'll put my diff I have a, I have a poor request on my in-app billing, uh, plugin that is, is doing this. And you can see specifically that, I mean, it's even silly stuff, right? Because I. I had to change a bunch of my APIs, but they're silly stuff. For example, they're like, oh, instead of calling it like skew something, now it's product skew instead of like, you know, item skew. Yeah, it's pro. Like, what? What are you doing? Knock it off. It's just really, really, really, really silly. Just some of those things were just like, why are you doing that? It's just, and in fact, I started this pool request in like March and it was called Start Implementing VS five and now mm-hmm. It's v6. So in general it's just Absolutely. [00:12:52] Frank: And, and I'm assuming they don't use support libraries for these things, so you have to code five and six separately, or can you code just six? [00:13:02] James: Just six is fine. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they had a, the funny part is they had an upgrade. They had an upgrade doc, which was like upgrading V4 to V five, but then when V6 came out, they're like, here's an upgrade from V five to v6, and they got rid of the other doc. The other doc's like gone. Yeah. It's like, what are you guys [00:13:19] Frank: doing? No way. Yeah. Okay. [00:13:21] James: Yeah, it's real bad. Software people. Okay. Yeah. I had to do all sorts of craziness and then it's even wild because now like every subscription can have like different, Things underneath it, like they're like offers or whatever. And then like they upgraded every single subscription to have a default one. And like they're like, it'll fall back. It'll work. But then like, maybe not in August or November, like, but when will it stop working Google? I don't know. And I'm terrified. And, um, yeah, it, it, it's, it's all out there though. I upgraded it. The, the seven, the my V seven. Which features support for V6 is is out there in the wild, so, It's bananas. I, I [00:14:03] Frank: hope you actually please actually link to the diff, if you will, in this podcast so people can go see it because it is the most inane changes like you described. I, I assume they change the graph structure. They allowed topology of the graph so that they allow these nested offer items. In other words, they finally added coupon codes to their stupid shopping cart. But it, it's the trivial changes that I agree with you. It's like we, we move this field that was named one thing into a subfield, and now it, we also change its name just to be as especially spiteful. These are, these are exactly, again, please copy and paste the ramp from semantic versioning into here. These are the changes that I hate, that people feel entitled. To do. No. Yeah. If your API is 10 years old, you can do these changes. If it's younger than that, no. You are not allowed to do these [00:14:54] James: changes. They're doing this every year. It's mind boggling. It's very upsetting, Frank. It is very upsetting. It's so upsetting that I upgraded my CS language version from version nine to version 10. I needed to use new modern features. [00:15:10] Frank: I love that. My code is so old and I have so many projects that like I'll be in a thing and I'll just start using a language feature and they're like, you're using a C sharp 10 feature. And I'm like, yeah, that's fine. They're like, your project is set for C sharp seven. I'm like, really? Oops. Old, huh? Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. [00:15:30] James: Anyways. Rant dun. All right, new thing. Let's talk about the new hotness cuz everyone's all about the tap to pay. Frank and people around the world beside America have been tapping to paying forever and people are paying with the phones. Did you know you could pay, you could tap with your phone. Boom. In fact, when I go to the at t m, the Adam. As I like to call him the Adam. Okay. Yeah, the Adam. When I go to the Adam, I don't even, I don't even have, I don't just tap my phone. Boom. Cuz it uses that new fangled, nearfield communication. I dunno if you've heard of it, Frank. It's only been around for like five decades, but the iPhone cutting edge. Got it. Four years ago, three years ago. And, um, upgrading that wireless communication, I believe Frank, you're playing around with it. After the, after 25 years of it being an Android, it's now available. I waited. [00:16:14] Frank: 25 years for the ma, the technology to mature. Then, you know, the API was introduced four years ago, so you got, you gotta let that mature a little bit before you look at it and all that. Also, I should mention, I, I learned in New Zealand it's called payWave Pay Wave. You pay wave, I waving, pay wave. I like it. Pay wave, it's, it's, yep. payWave. Turns out you can do other things with nfc. You can open doors at, I don't know, Hotels, corporations, yeah. Places to have that kinda stuff. Hey, maybe my front door someday also. Well, anyway, um, this is all just a short way of saying that. Yeah. I've actually been starting to get into N ffc, even though yes, it's ancient technology, but the iPhone only got it a few years ago and they actually only added API access a couple years ago, like for a while it was pretty locked down to just. Doing pay wave, pay wave. And now yeah, finally apps can actually access it. And I'm starting to play around with it, uh, with ice circuit and it's gonna be a little bit fun where you can have like an N F C element that actually uses the hardware on the phone to do something interesting. These, these are like old features I used to have in there. So like an ice circuit, if you put a gyro component in, it would actually read like the gyro off of the phone. Uh, accelerometer to actually do that. If you put a microphone element in it used the microphone on the phone. Mm-hmm. And it was all fun in the early days, cause like the phones had all these little devices on it, and I was just giving you easy ways to access those devices. And then the great peripheral winter happened, we just didn't get any like new, interesting devices on the phone for a long time. Like they had a, a magnetometer. Even that's pretty old. We just didn't get any new devices. They added cameras cuz they keep adding cameras. But it's just fun to see like an actual new piece of hardware that does interesting things. I don't know if they're using it for their new bump technology, probably not. They probably want to support, uh, phones that aren't n ffc, but on the upgrade. Theme today. I just wanna say I'm getting, I'm getting all the N F C phones because it's fun having a new little wireless technology to play around with. That's not annoying. Bluetooth, you've dealt with Bluetooth. It's annoying. That's not annoying wifi. It's just something simple and easy to program. [00:18:46] James: Well, the cool thing about N F C compared to Bluetooth is that N F C is just already, is kind of always there, right? Yeah. Compared to Bluetooth where users can turn on and off, you have permissions. Like the n ffc is always there. And the cool part about N F C, which is similar to Bluetooth, is that you can read and write and Core N F C also has that ability built in, and Androids has this forever, right? So, which is super great. But I do think it's really, really neat that these, you know, tiny, itty bitty tags are built in. In fact, I was. Watching a video on YouTube. I dunno if you do you know that you can watch videos on YouTube? Frank, I, I [00:19:23] Frank: assume there are 32 pixels by 32 pixels, 10 frames a second, and it takes at least an evening to download. But I guess you could transmit video over the internet if you waited long enough. [00:19:35] James: Trans transmit nice and slow. Uh, I've been watching, uh, I, I watch a bunch of coffee videos as one would assume by uh, James Hoffman, who is a very big coffee influencer in the world. And James has this video on. Uh, this new coffee machine where you got like these capsules that were actually like coffee, but you tap the thing on top and then you pour the coffee beans in and it grinds in it, and the n ffc like knows the recipe of it. So the whole idea is, oh, I don't know a lot about specialty coffee, but I want this machine to make cool stuff for me. And I thought that was really neat. I was like, whoa, N F C technology, kind of doing a thing that's kind of neat. But the funny part of it all was that I'm getting way off track, but the funny part of it all was that. The whole, like sh one of the shticks that they had was like, oh, like you can compose the cup or whatever, except for the NFC tag. So you gotta take that off and like throw the NFC tag away. Which is hilarious. [00:20:32] Frank: I, I, I, I, yeah, I guess that's true. Silicon and plastic and metal doesn't turn into dirt. Hmm. Yeah. But, oh, that's a little bit, uh, sorry. I, I've, I've heard of those, like little cups having like barcodes on 'em. Cause you could easily just put a QR code or, but you would need a camera for a QR code, whatever. You could do some kind of scanning thing. It's interesting that NFC has been commoditized to the point where they actually thought, Just put it on the little cup thing. [00:21:02] James: Put it on there. Yeah. I think the espresso, the new espresso model has a barcode scanner and then that's how it knows how to do whatever on it. I've, I've 18. He broke that down too. Yeah, which is kind of wild. [00:21:14] Frank: 1980s tech. The nice thing about 1980s tech is it's usually low power, so mm-hmm. You can just put a little, little scanner in there. Real liquidy split these days versus real fast, the complexity of nfc. [00:21:28] James: My favorite technology, like, you know, we're talking about upgrading and all these things that we're talking about, barcode scanning, cameras, blah, blah, blah. But honestly, the QR code, I mean, I know you need a camera in a device, but the QR code. Is really nice. And I'll tell you what my favorite feature of the QR code is. It's giving, um, a QR code for your wifi network. Now, every, every place should have this, every coffee shop, anything like this. You can, you can go and you can create a, a, a QR code and you pull out your iPhone camera. It's like boo boo, boo boo. And you can put your, the, the S S I D and the password, everything in there. Boom, you're good to go. Why type anything anymore, doesn't even need to do it. And then this is brilliant. It's amazing. We're really, you do with NFC too, by the nfc. You can do that, by the way. You can also N F C I it and tap to connect or whatever. So both of those are really cool. But just, yeah, the, you know, the camera universal, it's always there. [00:22:25] Frank: Uh, yeah, absolutely. Uh, QR code, good stuff. I, I have to mention for the wifi, there's also apps on. So if you have a bunch of Apple devices, they can share passwords through the magic of Apple, whatever. Yeah, it's cool. Um, but if, if you have a friend with an Android device, you're like, oh nos, how do we share the wifi? And until the two companies ever agreed with each other, uh, on Android, you can get cool little apps that just generate that QR code. Put it on the screen, and then the iPhone users can just scan the Android code very easily. Nice. I'm sure there's iOS apps that do the opposite. Yeah. Just a little hack for your QR codes, but yeah, absolutely. Everyone, I, I did a lot of Airbnbs recently. They all should do that. They [00:23:15] James: should all do. Yeah. Yeah. Makes so much sense. Uh, okay, let's get onto the next e topic because this kind of has to add everything to do with, uh, coding, machine learning models, gaming so much more now, Frank. I am rocking a GForce, S g t x nine 80. Oh, [00:23:36] Frank: did it? Mm-hmm. Is that from the eighties or is that from the 1990s? When, when did they make that video card? [00:23:43] James: Nine series is, uh, Uh, 2014. [00:23:53] Frank: How's that? Okay. It's not that old. Okay. It's, it's more than four years though, so it's not Apple approved. Uh, this is a topic I wanted to talk about because, um, I like to buy GPUs. Uh, used to be because I was into graphics and now it's because I'm into neural networks. Either way, I keep finding myself in need of buying very expensive GPUs. And I wanted to, I was excited. I just had to tell you before the show, I'm like, James, Did you know that GPUs are actually cheap now? Like we went through this terrible point in time. I think it was Bitcoin based and I don't know what else people are using GPUs for, but GPUs were expensive. They were super overpriced. You couldn't get 'em. They were all sold out. They were selling for over retail. Who buys anything for retail, namely, and over retail. You gotta be insane. And so, uh, We are in a final place where you can finally afford to upgrade your video cards again, vaguely. And I, I thought A, that's exciting. That's why I wanted to pick this topic. And then b, I have some sad news about it, but how, how do you feel about the GPUs being affordable situation? [00:25:06] James: Well, that excites me. I mean, I still need to, I upgraded everything to Windows 11 recently, and I probably need to upgrade. I probably need to build a whole new computer, to be honest with you. But my machine's working great. I don't really play a lot of games. I don't do a lot of machine learning. So my nine 80 from whenever was a high-end card. It wasn't a ti but it was up there. Yeah. Um, I feel good about life. Like I really feel like. I don't really need to, I don't think I need to upgrade at all. I think my, I'm think for 10, the next 10 years I'm gonna keep this card going. How do you feel about that? Okay. [00:25:41] Frank: Ten's pushing it eventually, like, I mean, do, do you run the latest Direct X on there? Can uh, can I do that? No, no. Yeah, you, you're really pushing it. Windows 12 may not support you. We'll see, actually Microsoft is fantastic about that kind of support. It'll support you, but whether the video games do or not, that's a whole different question. I. Okay. A little bit of sad news. So it's, it's nice and affordable. You can actually, like, did you know, I, I have a, I, I mention it as often as I can in RTX 30 90. Did you know that you can now purchase an RTX 40 90? It's a thousand better, James a thousand. That's [00:26:27] James: good. I really won't. They used to go up by a hundred, but now they're up by a thousand, so Wow. Ten's 10. It's 10 times better. [00:26:34] Frank: Oh my God, it's so much better. And so I, I was feeling a little bit of the fomo. I was like, wow, my 30 nineties looking a little long in the tooth these days. What, what, what are these high-end GPUs like these days? And I did something I don't normally don't do. I signed up for a cloud service and I got some cloud GPUs and I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna be a engineer slash scientist and I'm gonna actually take. Neural networks that I personally use, that I want to use on these video cards and just spend some dollars, see how they run. Yeah. Just for science, right? That's why. And [00:27:12] James: I'm sure they're cheap too. [00:27:15] Frank: Uh, they're rough. So the one I chose, and there's Azure ones, but I just for simplicity, I chose, uh, Google Collab. And they have a thing where for $10 a month, you get a hundred compute hours. However, I learned in retrospect, a compute hour is not what we humans think of as an hour. It is a marketing ploy. What they really do is multiply a bunch of random numbers together to compute, compute, compute hours [00:27:44] James: for a second. Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. That, that sounds good. Yeah. Yeah, [00:27:48] Frank: so I really wish they would just call 'em what they are, computer tokens and be like, I get a a hundred tokens a month, but. God, just grow up Google, call it a token, or stop playing this hour game. Anyway, the nice thing is they have a dropdown dialogue and you can choose your g blah, blah, blah. So there's this other video card, James, the A 100. I've always wanted an [00:28:10] James: A 100. Oh, the, was it AMD or is that Nvidia? What is it? [00:28:14] Frank: It's still Nvidia. Nvidia has of course, such, uh, monopoly in this case. It's so good. It's all Envidia. Yeah. Uh, people make custom hardware and I hear that custom hardware's good. They do have TPUs on Google, but it's all Invidia. Uh, so I ran my neural network on a $14,000 video card. That's what an A 100 is. That's eBay prices too. Woohoo. Who knows, man. They're in the, during the Bitcoin stuff, that might have been a $30,000 video card. Wow. Uh, I ran my neural network on there and it was 20% faster. Been on my 30 90 rtx. Mm. So I was a bit disappointed. Um, full disclosure, there's probably like ways you can take advantage of the video card better and all that stuff, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm like, I have a piece of software I have. I want that software run faster. I'm willing to spend dollars to make that software go faster because I'm not smart enough to make my own software faster. And I was greatly disappointed that even if I spent $14,000, I would only get a 20% improvement. So in this episode of upgrades, I wanna tell you about an upgrade I'm not doing. I'm not upgrading my G P U Science has taught me that there's absolutely no reason to upgrade my G P U. If anything, my GPU's old, you can get it for 1100 hours. Now I might just buy a couple more of 'em because they're cheap now and you know, just, just double down. So, reasons to not upgrade. [00:29:49] James: Well, I'm surprised that you can even find them actually because with the AI infusion, you know, now really the gps are going into data centers and actually the most recent Nvidia, you know, quarterly reporter, wherever their stock is, like, I mean, you wanna see a up and to the right. Whoa. Boy, that's just a wild, it's bananas. Well, it's like 185% this year or something like that. That's the [00:30:13] Frank: interesting difference. So during the Bitcoin era, let's call it whatever, you know what I'm saying? Cryptocurrency craze. Yeah. Consumer grade hardware. You could make money on consumer grade hardware. There was an arbitrage situation. If you could afford the hardware, put it in a machine, you could make dollar bills. There was a very simple thing. The problem is all these big networks, all your G P T four s and your co-pilots and all that stuff cannot be trained on consumer grade hardware. Hmm. These, the A 100 that I mentioned that is a server class, uh, Chip that you put, you don't even run on one A 100, you run on a hundred a 100 s or a thousand a 100 s, and you pool their memory together and you pool their compute together. There is a staggering orders of magnitude power difference in what the consumer stuff can do versus what these big, proper scary AI models need, and that disconnect is becoming bigger, which is sad. You want there to be a middle ground. You want stuff to happen on the consumer stuff. Yeah. And we, we'll still find where that is, but we've definitely created a big schism [00:31:31] James: right now. Yeah, it's super fascinating cuz I don't even know what I would buy going into it. Cause my 1980s good. I do. Well the interesting part too is when I play games, I don't really install PC games anymore. I use the Xbox game streaming stuff. So all my compute, yeah, all my G ping is happening in the cloud. Talking about renting device, you know, renting GPUs. Yeah. I mean, for the horizon is looking beauty full and my computer can't do any, it can't render any of it, you know what I mean? But it's a run butter, smooth, 60 frames per second. [00:32:08] Frank: Right. It's impressive. Um, I, I, I'm just assuming you don't have what I call island internet. So with island internet, I don't believe I could get quite 60 frames per second. [00:32:21] James: Well, talking about island internet, let's talk about this because for our final topic today, Frank recently moved to an island and Frank recently upgraded to starlink. Now here's the RV edition, which means that, that we use Zencaster to record these things. So if you're doing audio or you're doing video, the only thing that would really happen is that maybe there's a delay between me and Frank. So we'd be talking over each other. Now, we've been podcasting for 375 billion episodes, so we're pretty good at looking at each other and figuring out when we're talking. But when we do do video, like things are uploading in real time, things are happening. So he's very pixelated to me right now. But for you, if you're watching on my YouTube, it's very crystal clear. So you've been using starlink for like 6, 7, 8 months now. What is the review and what are you gonna do? Is it worth it? What's the breakdown when you were upgrading the Internets on the island? [00:33:15] Frank: Right. Okay. So quickest starlink review ever. I gotta say I, I am blown away and very pleased with the service. That is Frank's review. That's what I want etched into my tombstone, Frank approves of starlink that, that's on my tombstone. Yeah. Um, but with that, can I put 8 billion stars in caveats? Okay. So, okay. All that is true relative to, I live on an island and the only, um, internet access that, sorry, the, the one most people have that is guaranteed to be available is telephone d dsl. Old tech, it's very slow, sadly. Mm. They could probably do some upgrades. They could probably make it faster, but they haven't done the upgrades and it's not faster. Uh, there's an alternative that is fiber optics, and so my review of the starlink is always, I. With a little, a giant pink outfit over in the corner. Me looking over at the pink elephant as I review the starlink here, but okay, starlink review. What an amazing device. Um, it comes in a nice box. That's a nice color. It's very nice. You pull this very heavy thing, it was way heavier than I thought it was gonna be out. And you stand it up and it has this little stand and you'd stand it up and it's like, plug me in. And you're like, what do I do? And it's just like, plug me in. So you plug it in and you download the app. And the app is really responsive and really nice. And it's like, I found you a starlink and it's connecting and it's trying to find some stars. And you're like, great. And then you watch the animation in the app and then it's like, all right buddy, you got internet now. That's amazing. Everyone. I don't know, maybe people have been using satellite internet longer than I have, but that, that's amazing. So it gets good reviews for that. Where it doesn't get good reviews is, um, the uplink speed. I can actually tolerate the downlink speed just fine. I average about 50 megabit. It's fine, you know, for watching YouTube and that kind of stuff. It's fine downloading Xcode. It's a little bit annoying, but it's fine. Mm. What really kills me is the upload speeds. Uh, when I'm trying to Twitch Stream or when we record this show or when I try to upload a neural network to hugging face, then I really feel the pain and suffering of the upload speed. But I wanna say as a service, amazing app, amazing hardware, amazing. Download speed. Okay. Upload speed. Ugh, not good enough. [00:35:45] James: That makes sense. I think that's been my, my main problem ever since I moved out an apartment that had, uh, you know, a gig up, gig down, basically whatever the fiber was. It's, that's always just amazing and it just works brilliantly. So I totally, I totally get it. Well, it's good to know. And so you're gonna be getting new internet. What's gonna happen now? [00:36:08] Frank: Well, uh, the problem is, uh, I I wanted to give starlink a good, fair shot, so I wanted to use it for a few months and see how I felt. But I think what my, my sad conclusion is that I should have gone with my gut and gone with the fiber optics right away. So I will be doing the fiber optics. The problem is, I dragged my heels on it and now it's summertime and they gotta do construction. They gotta like dig holes and put glass inside holes inside dirt. Inside air. I don't know, it's complicated. They gotta do that. And then wire's gotta come to my house and then a wire has to get from there to my computer. Like I don't, do you just jam the fiber optic into the back of the iMac? Is there like a fiber optic port? So I assume I gotta buy some more networking equipment. So it's just a whole project and I stink at projects. So, ah, that's all to say. Thank goodness the starlink is okay because it's gonna take me a while to upgrade my internet, but I will. [00:37:08] James: Well, there you go, Frank. We've upgraded and you can see if you're watching this on YouTube, it's gotten darker here where I live, which is why Have you noticed I've been getting like dramatically darker and just, it's just my, it's just my screen. You, I'll turn this on, right? Ready? Hold on. I thought your camera just had a [00:37:26] Frank: noir mode. [00:37:28] James: No, no it did not. Uh, well the question is, yeah. Uh, oh wait, I can't get that working. I thought I was gonna get my, oh, can I get both on my, I changed all my internet cause I upgraded my internet wifi and then now it's just like, oh, I can't find half of your, everything is so isolated that it can't find half of the wifi devices anymore. You know what I mean? [00:37:53] Frank: Security. It's for your safety. If those devices could talk to each other, God knows what they would [00:37:58] James: say to each other. Can only find one now. Come on Alga. [00:38:04] Frank: I give up. I do enjoy watching your background shift. [00:38:08] James: Uh, all right. Well, Frank, I think that's gonna do it, um, for this podcast. And if y'all want to write in and you have topics of upgrading or other things that you're interested in, write to us merge conflict.fm. You can, there's a contact button you can test up on Twitter, on Macedon, on Patreon, on YouTube, on anything. And if you do like this podcast, feel free to share it with a friend. Be like, Hey, check out this podcast. That I'm listening to, you can rate and review on platforms that support rating and reviewing, and, um, if it doesn't support rating reviewing, you can just rate and review us by sending us a tweet together at merch conflict fm or at proclaim at James Monte Magno. Let's go do it for this week's merch conflict. So, until the next time, I'm James Watson [00:38:57] Frank: Magno. And I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for watching and listening. [00:39:02] James: Peace.