Introduction to Gastown and Agent Workflows

AI Agents and Political Chaos

Introduction and Host Updates

Christina: [00:00:00] Welcome back. You’re listening to Overtired. I’m Christina Warren. Joined as always by Brett Terpstra. Jeff Severns. Guntzel could not be with us this week, um, but uh, but Brett and I are here. So Brett, how are you? How’s the cold?

Brett: The cold.

Brett’s Water Crisis

Brett: So I’m going on day four without running water. Um, I drove to my parents last night to shower and we’re, we’re driving loads of dishes to friends’ house to wash them. We have big buckets of melted snow in our bathtub that we use to flush the Toyland. Um, and we have like big jugs with a spout on them for drinking water.

So we’re surviving, but it is highly inconvenient. Um, and we don’t know yet if it’s a frozen pipe. Or if we have [00:01:00] a bad pump on our, well, uh, hopefully we’ll find that out today. But no guarantees because all the plumbers are very busy right now with negative 30 degree weather. They tend to get a lot of calls, lots of stuff happens.

Um, so yeah, but I’m, I’m staying warm. I got a fireplace, I got my heat’s working

Christina: I mean, that’s the important thing.

Brett: and that went out, that went out twice, in, twice already. This winter, our heat has gone out, um, which I’m thankful. We, we finally, we added glycol to our, so our heat pumps water through, like, it’s not radiators, it’s like baseboard heat, but it, it uses water and.

Um, and though we were getting like frozen spots, not burst pipes, just enough that the water wouldn’t go through fast enough to heat anything. So we added glycol to that [00:02:00] system to bring the freeze point down to like zero degrees. So it’s not perfect, but we also hardwired the pump so that it always circulates water, um, even when the heat’s not running.

So hopefully it’ll never freeze again. That’s the goal. Um, and if we replace the well pump, that should be good for another 20 years. So hopefully after this things will be smoother.

Political Climate and Media Suppression

Brett: Um, yeah, but that, that’s all in addition to, you know, my state being occupied by federal agents and even in my small town, we’ve got people being like, abducted. Things are escalating quickly at this point, and a lot of it doesn’t get talked about on mainstream media. Um, but yeah, things, I don’t know, man. I think we’re making progress because, um, apparently Binos [00:03:00] getting retired

Christina: I was going to say, I, I, I, I heard, I heard that, and I don’t know if that’s good or if that’s bad. Um, I can’t, I can’t tell.

Brett: it’s, it’s like, it’s like if Trump died, we wouldn’t know if that was good or bad because JD Vance as president, like maybe things get way worse. Who knows? Uh, none of these, none of these actual figureheads are the solution. Removing them isn’t the solution to removing the kinda maga philosophy behind it.

But yeah, and that’s also Jeff is, you know, highly involved and I, I won’t, I won’t talk about that for him.

I hope we can get him monsoon to talk about that.

Christina: No, me, me, me too. Because I’ve, I’ve been thinking about, about him and about you and about your whole area, your communities, you know, from several thousand miles away. Like all, all we, all we see is either what people post online, which of course now is being suppressed. [00:04:00] Uh, thanks a lot. You know, like, like the, oh, TikTok was gonna be so terrible.

Chi the, the Chinese are gonna take over our, uh, our algorithms. Right? No, Larry Ellison is, is actually going to completely, you know, fuck up the algorithms, um, and, and suppress anything. I, yeah. Yeah. They’re, they’re

Brett: is TikTok? Well, ’cause Victor was telling me that, they were seeing videos. Uh, you would see one frame of the video and then it would black out. And it all seemed to be videos that were negative towards the administration and we weren’t sure. Is this a glitch? Is this coincidence?

Christina: well, they claim it’s a glitch, but I don’t believe it.

Brett: Yeah, it seems, it seems

Christina: I, I mean, I mean, I mean, the thing is like, maybe it is, maybe it is a glitch and we’re overreacting. I don’t know. Um, all I know is that they’ve given us absolutely zero reason to trust them, and so I don’t, and so, um, uh, apparently the, the state of California, this is, [00:05:00] so we are recording this on Tuesday morning.

Apparently the state of California has said that they are going to look into whether things are being, you know, suppressed or not, and if that’s violating California law, um, because now that, that, that TikTok is, is controlled by an American entity, um, even if it is, you know, owned by like a, you know, uh, evil, uh, billionaire, you know, uh, crony sto fuck you, Larry Ellison.

Um, uh, I guess that means we won’t be getting an Oracle sponsorship. Sorry. Um, uh,

Brett: take it anyway.

Christina: I, I know you wouldn’t, I know you wouldn’t. That’s why I felt safe saying that. Um, but, uh, but even if, if, if that were the case, like I, you know, but apparently like now that it is like a, you know, kind of, you know, state based like US thing, like California could step in and potentially make things difficult for them.

I mean, I think that’s probably a lot of bluster on Newsom’s part. I don’t think that he could really, honestly achieve any sort of change if they are doing things to the algorithm.

Brett: Yeah. Uh, [00:06:00] if, if laws even matter anymore, it would be something that got tied up in court for a long time

Christina: Right. Which effectively wouldn’t matter. Right. And, and then that opens up a lot of other interesting, um, things about like, okay, well, you know, should we, like what, what is the role? Like even for algorithmically determined things of the government to even step in or whatever, right now, obviously does, I think, become like more of a speech issue if it’s government speech that’s being suppressed, but regardless, it, it is just, it’s bad.

So I’ve been, I’ve been thinking about you, I’ve been thinking about Jeff.

Police Violence and Public Response

Christina: Um, you know, we all saw what happened over the weekend and, and, you know, people be, people are being murdered in the streets and I mean that, that, that’s what’s happening. And,

Brett: white people no less,

Christina: Right. Well, I mean, that’s the thing, right? Like, is that like, but, but, but they keep moving the bar.

They, they keep moving the goalpost, right? So first it’s a white woman and, oh, she, she was, she was running over. The, the officer [00:07:00] or the ice guy, and it’s like, no, she wasn’t, but, but, but that, that’s immediately where they go and, and she’s, you know, radical whatever and, and, and a terrorist and this and that.

Okay. Then you have a literal veterans affair nurse, right? Like somebody who literally, like, you know, has, has worked with, with, with combat veterans and has done those things. Who, um, is stepping in to help someone who’s being pepper sprayed, you know, is, is just observing. And because he happens to have, um, a, a, a, a gun on him legally, which he’s allowed to do, um, they immediately used that as cover to execute him.

But if he hadn’t had the gun, they would’ve, they would’ve come up with something else. Oh, we thought he had a gun, and they, you know what I mean? So like, they, they got lucky with that one because they removed the method, the, the, the weapon and then shot him 10 times. You know, they literally executed him in the street.

But if he hadn’t had a gun, they still would’ve executed.

Brett: Yeah, no, for sure. Um, it’s really frustrating that [00:08:00] they took the gun away. So he was disarmed and, and immobilized and then they shot him. Um, like so that’s just a straight up execution. And then to bring, like, to say that it, he, because he had a gun, he was dangerous, is such a, an affront to America has spent so long fighting against gun control and saying that we had the right to carry fucking assault rifles in the

Christina: Kyle Rittenhouse. Kyle Rittenhouse was literally acquitted. Right?

Brett: Yeah. And he killed people.

Christina: and, and he killed people. He was literally walking around little fucking stogey, you know, little blubbering little bitch, like, you know, crying, you know, he’s like carrying around like Rambo a gun and literally snipe shooting people.

That’s okay.

Brett: They defended

Christina: if you have a. They defended him. Of course they did. Right? Of course they did. Oh, well he has the right to carry and this and that, and Oh, you should be able to be armed in [00:09:00] these places. Oh, no, but, but if you’re, um, somebody that we don’t like

Brett: Yeah,

Christina: and you have a concealed carry permit, and I don’t even know if he was really concealed.

Right. Because I think that if you have it on your holster, I don’t even think that counts as concealed to

Brett: was supposedly in

Christina: I, I, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.

Brett: like it

Christina: Which I don’t think counts as concealed. I think.

Brett: No.

Christina: Right, right. So, so, so, so, so that, that, that wouldn’t be concealed. Be because you have someone in, in that situation, then all of a sudden, oh, no.

Now, now the, the key, the goalpost, okay, well, it’s fine if it’s, you know, uh, police we don’t like, or, or other people. And, and, and if you’re going after protesters, then you can shoot and kill whoever you want, um, because you’ve perceived a threat and you can take actions into your, to your own hands. Um, but now if you are even a white person, um, even, you know, someone who’s, who’s worked in Veterans Affairs, whatever, if, if you have, uh, even if you’re like a, a, a, you know, a, a gun owner and, and have permits, um, now [00:10:00] if we don’t like you and you are anywhere in the vicinity of anybody associated with law enforcement, now they have the right to shoot you dead.

Like that’s, that’s, that’s the argument, which is insanity.

Brett: so I’m, I’m just gonna point out that as the third right came to power, they disarmed the Jews and they disarmed the anarchists and the socialists and they armed the rest of the population and it became, um, gun control for people they didn’t like. Um, and this is, it’s just straight up the same playbook.

There’s no, there’s no differentiation anymore.

Christina: No, it, it, it actively makes me angry that, um, I, I could be, because, ’cause what can we do? And, and what they’re counting on is the fact that we’re all tired and we’re all kind of, you know, like just, [00:11:00] you know, from, from what happened, you know, six years ago and, and, and what happened, you know, five years ago.

Um, and, and, and various things. I think a lot of people are, are just. It kind of like

Brett: Sure.

Christina: done with, with, with being able to, to, to, right. But now the actual fascism is here, right? Like, like we, we, we saw a, a, you know, a whiff of this on, on, on January 6th, but now it’s actual fascism and they control every branch of government.

Brett: Yeah.

Christina: And, um, and, and, and I, and I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, right? Like, I mean it, because I mean, you know, uh, Philadelphia is, is, is begging for, for, for them to come. And I think that would be an interesting kind of standoff. Seattle is this, this is what a friend of mine said was like, you know, you know Philadelphia, Filch Philadelphia is begging them to come.

Seattle is like scared. Um, that, that they’re going to come, um, because honestly, like we’re a bunch of little bitch babies and, um, [00:12:00] people think they’re like, oh, you know the WTO. I’m like, yeah, that was, that was 27 years ago. Um, uh, I, I don’t think that Seattle has the juice to hold that sort of line again.

Um, but I also don’t wanna find out, right? Like, but, but, but this is, this is the attack thing. It’s like, okay, why are they in Minnesota? Right? They’re what, like 130,000, um,

Brett: exactly

Christina: um, immigrants in, in Minnesota. There are, there are however many million in Texas, however many million in Florida. We know exactly why, right?

This isn’t about. Anything more than

Brett: in any way.

Christina: and opt. Right, right. It has nothing, it has nothing to do with, with, with immigration anyway. I mean, even, even the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal who a, you know, ran an op-ed basically saying get out of Minnesota. They also, they also had like a, you know, a news story, which was not from the opinion board, which like broke down the, the, the footage showing, you know, that like the, the video footage doesn’t match the administration’s claims, but they also ran a story.

Um, that [00:13:00] basically did the math, I guess, on like the number of, of criminals, um, or people with criminal records who have been deported. And at this point, like in, you know, and, and when things started out, like, I guess when the raid started out, the, the majority of the people that they were kind of going after were people who had criminal records.

Now, whether they were really violent, the worst, the worst, I mean that’s, I’m, I’m not gonna get into that, but you could at least say like, they, they could at least say, oh, well these were people who had criminal records, whatever. Now some, some huge percentage, I think it’s close to 80% don’t have anything.

And many of the people that do the, the criminal like thing that they would hold would be, you know, some sort of visa violation. Right. So it’s, it’s, it’s

Brett: they deported a five-year-old kid after using him as bait to try to get the rest of his family.

Christina: as bait.

Brett: Yeah. And like it’s, it’s pretty deplorable. But I will say I am proud of Minnesota. Um, they have not backed [00:14:00] down. They have stood up in the face of increasing increasingly escalated attacks, and they have shown up in force thousands of people out in the streets.

Like Conti, like last night they had a, um, well, yeah, I mean, it’s been ongoing, but, uh, what’s his name? Preddy Alex. Um, at the place where he was shot, they had a, like continuing kind of memorial protest, I guess, and there’s footage of like a thousand, a thousand mins surrounding about 50, um, ICE agents and.

Like basically corralling them to the point where they were all backed into a corner and weren’t moving. And I don’t know what happened after that. Um, but thus far it hasn’t been violent on the part of protesters. It’s been very violent on the part of ice. I [00:15:00] personally, I don’t know where I stand on, like, I feel like the Democrats are urging pacifism because it affects their hold on power.

And I don’t necessarily think that peace when they’re murdering us in the street. I don’t know if peace is the right response, but I don’t know. I’m not openly declaring that I support violence at this point, but. At the same time, do I not? I’m not sure. Like I keep going back and forth on is it time for a war or do we try to vote our way out of this?

Christina: I mean, well, and the scary thing about voting our way out of this is will we even be able to have free elections, right? Be because they’re using any sort of anything, even the most benign sort of legal [00:16:00] protest, even if violence isn’t involved in all of a sudden, talks of the Insurrection Act come

Brett: yeah. And Trump, Trump offered to pull out of Minnesota if Minnesota will turn over its voter database to the federal government. Like that’s just blatant, like that’s obviously the end goal is suppression.

Christina: Right, right. And, and so to your point, I don’t know. Right. And I’m, I’m never somebody who would wanna advocate outwardly for violence, but I, I, I, I, I don’t know. I mean, they’re killing citizens in the streets. They’re assassinating people in cold blood. They’re executing people, right. That’s what they’re doing.

They’re literally executing people in the streets and then covering it up in real time.

Brett: if the argument is, if we are violent, it will cause them to kill us. They’re already killing

Christina: already doing it. Right. So at, at this point, I mean, like, you know, I mean, like, w to your point, wars have been started for, for, for less, or for the exact same things.

Brett: [00:17:00] Yeah.

Christina: So, I don’t know. I don’t know. Um, I know that that’s a depressing way to probably do mental health corner and whatnot, but this is what’s happening in our world right now and in and in your community, and it’s, it’s terrifying.

Brett: I’m going to link in the show notes an article from Crime Think that was written by, uh, people in Germany who have studied, um, both historical fascism and the current rise of the A FD, which will soon be the most powerful party in Germany, um, which is straight up a Nazi party. Um, and it, they offered, like their hope right now lies in America stopping fascism.

Christina: Yeah.

Brett: Like if we can, if we can stop fascism, then they believe the rest of Europe can stop fascism. Um, but like they, it, it’s a good article. It kind of, it kind of broaches the same questions I do about like, is it [00:18:00] time for violence? And they offer, like, we don’t, we’re not advocating for a civil war, but like Civil wars might.

If you, if you, if you broach them as revolutions, it’s kind of, they’re kind of the same thing in cases like this. So anyway, I’ll, I’ll link that for anyone who wants to read kinda what’s going on in my head. I’m making a note to dig that up. I, uh, I love Crime Fake Oh and Blue Sky.

Social Media and Surveillance

Brett: Um, so I have not, up until very recently been an avid Blue Sky user.

Um, I think I have like, I think I have maybe like 200 followers there and I follow like 50 people. But I’ve been expanding that and I am getting a ton of my news from Blue Sky and like to get stories from people on the ground, like news as it happens, unfiltered and Blue Sky has been [00:19:00] really good for that.

Um, I, it’s. There’s not like an algorithm. I just get my stuff and like Macedon, I have a much larger following and I follow a lot more people, but it’s very tech,

Christina: It’s very tech and,

Brett: there for.

Christina: well, and, and MAs on, um, understandably too is also European, um, in a lot of regards. And so it’s just, it’s not. Gonna have the same amount of, of people who are gonna be able to, at least for instances like this, like be on the ground and doing real-time stuff. It’s not, it doesn’t have like the more normy stuff.

So, no, that makes sense. Um, no, that’s great. I think, yeah, blue Sky’s been been really good for, for these sorts of real-time events because again, they don’t have an algorithm. Like you can have one, like for a personalized kind of like for you feed or whatever, but in terms of what you see, you know, you see it naturally.

You’re not seeing it being adjusted by anything, which can be good and bad. I, I think is good because nothing’s suppressing things and you see things in real time. It can be bad because sometimes you miss things, but I think on the whole, it’s better. [00:20:00] The only thing I will say, just to anyone listening and, and just to spread onto, you know, people in your communities too, from what I’ve observed from others, like, it does seem like the, the government and other sorts of, you know, uh, uh, the, you know, bodies like that are finally starting to pay more attention to blue sky in terms of monitoring things.

And so that’s not to say don’t. You know, use it at all. But the same way, you don’t make threats on Twitter if you don’t want the Feds to show up at your house. Don’t make threats on Blue Sky, because it’s not just a little microcosm where, you know, no one will see it. People are, it, it’s still small, but it’s, it’s getting bigger to the point that like when people look at like where some of the, the, the fire hose, you know, things observable things are there, there seem to be more and more of them located in the Washington DC area, which could just be because data centers are there, who knows?

But I’ve also just seen anecdotally, like people who have had, like other instances, it’s like, don’t, don’t think [00:21:00] that like, oh, okay, well, you know, no one’s monitoring this. Um, of course people are so just don’t be dumb, don’t, don’t say things that could potentially get you in trouble. Um.

Brett: a political candidate in Florida. Um, had the cops show up at her house and read her one of her Facebook posts. I mean, this was local. This was local cops, but still, yeah, you

Christina: right. Well, yeah, that’s the thing, right? No, totally. And, and my, my only point with that is we’ve known that they do that for Facebook and for, for, you know, Twitter and, and, uh, you know, Instagram and things like that, but they, but Blue Sky, like, I don’t know if it’s on background checks yet, but it, uh, like for, uh, for jobs and things like that, I, I, I don’t know if that’s happening, but it definitely is at that point where, um, I know that people are starting to monitor those things.

So just, you know, uh, not even saying for you per se, but just for anybody out there, like, it’s awesome and I’m so glad that like, that’s where people can get information out, but don’t be like [00:22:00] lulled into this false sense of security. Like, oh, well they’re not gonna monitor this. They’re not

Brett: Nobody’s watching me here.

Christina: It is like, no, they are, they are. Um, so especially as it becomes, you know, more prominent. So I’m, I’m glad that that’s. That’s an option there too. Um, okay.

Sponsor Break: Copilot Money

Christina: This is like the worst possible segue ever, but should we go ahead and segue to our, our, our sponsor break?

Brett: Let’s do it. Let’s, let’s talk about capitalism.

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Brett: Awesome that I appreciate this segue. ’cause we, we, we could, we could be talking about other things. Um, like it’s, it feels so weird, like when I go on social media and I just want to post that like my water’s out. It feels out of place right now because there’s everything that’s going on feels so much more important than,

Christina: Right.

Brett: than anything else.

Um, but there’s still a place for living our lives, um,

Christina: there are a absolutely. I mean, and, and, and in a certain extent, like not to, I mean, maybe this is a little bit of a cope, but it’s like, if all we do is focus on the things that we can’t control at the expense of everything else, it’s like then they win. You know? Like, which, which isn’t, which, which isn’t even to [00:25:00] say, like, don’t talk about what’s happening.

Don’t try to help, don’t try to speak out and, and, um, and do what we can do, but also. Like as individuals, there’s very little we can control about things. And being completely, you know, subsumed by that is, is not necessarily good either. Um, so yeah, there’s, there, there are other things going on and it’s important for us to get out of our heads.

It’s important, especially for you, you know, being in the region, I think to be able to, to focus on other things and, and hopefully your water will be back soon. ’cause that sucks like that. I’ve been, I’ve been worried about you. I’m glad that you have heat. I’m glad you have internet. I’m glad you have power, but you know, the pipes being frozen and all that stuff is like, not

Brett: it, the, the internet has also been down for up to six hours at a time. I don’t know why. There’s like an amplifier down on our street. Um, and that has sucked because I, out here, I live in a, I’m not gonna call it rural. Uh, we’re like five minutes from town, [00:26:00] but, um, we, we don’t. We have shitty internet.

Like I pay for a gigabit and I get 500 megabits and it’s, and it’s up and down all the time and I hate it. But anyway.

Tech Talk: Gas Town and AI Agents

Brett: Let’s talk about, uh, let’s talk about Gas Town. What can you tell me about Gastown?

Christina: Okay. So we’ve talked a lot about like AI agents and, um, kind of like, uh, coding, um, loops and, and things like that. And so Gastown, uh, which is available, um, at, I, it is not Gas Town. Let me find the URL, um, one second. It’s, it’s at a gas town. No, it’s not. Lemme find it. Um.

Right. So this is a thing that, that Steve Yy, uh, has created, and [00:27:00] it is a multi-agent workspace manager. And so the idea is basically that you can be running like a lot of instances of, um, of, of Claude Code or, um, I guess you could use Codex. You could use, uh, uh, uh, co-pilot, um, SDK or CLI agent and whatnot.

Um, and basically what it’s designed to do is to basically let you coordinate like multiple coding agents at one time so they can all be working on different tasks, but then instead of having, um, like the context get lost when agents restart, it creates like a, a persistent, um, like. Work state, which it uses with, with git on the backend, which is supposed to basically enable more multi-agent workflows.

So, um, basically the idea would be like, you get, have multiple agents working at once, kind of talking to one another, handing things off, you know, each doing their own task and then coordinating the work with what the other ones are doing. But then you have like a persistent, um, uh, I guess kind of like, you know, layer in the backend so that if an agent has to restart or whatever, it’s not gonna lose the, [00:28:00] the context, um, that that’s happening.

And you don’t have to manually, um, worry about things like, okay, you know, I’ve lost certain things in memory and, and I’ve, you know, don’t know how I’m, I’m managing all these things together. Um, there, there’s another project, uh, called Ralph, which is kind of based on this, this concept of like, what of Ralph Wickham was, you know, coding or, or was doing kind of a loop.

And, and it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s kind of a similar idea. Um, there’s also.

Brett: my nose wouldn’t bleed so much if I just kept my finger out of there.

Christina: Exactly, exactly. My cat’s breath smells like cat food. Um, and um, and so. Like there are ideas of like Ralph Loops and Gastown. And so these are a couple of like projects, um, that have really started to, uh, take over. So like, uh, Ralph is more of an autonomous AI agent loop that basically like it runs like over and over and over again until, uh, a task is done.

Um, and, and a lot of people use, use Gastown and, [00:29:00] and, and Ralph together. Um, but yeah, no Ga gastown is is pretty cool. Um, we’ll we’re gonna talk about it more ’cause it’s my pick of the week. We’ll talk about Molt bot previously known as Claude Bot, which is, uses some, some similar ideas. But it’s really been interesting to see like how, like the, the multi-agent workflow, and by multi-agent, I mean like, people are running like 20 or 30 of them, you know, at a time.

So it’s more than that, um, is really starting to become a thing that people can, uh, can do. Um,

Brett: gets expensive though.

Christina: I was, I was just about to say that’s the one thing, right? Most people who are using things like Gastown. Are using them with the Claude, um, code Max plans, which is $200 a month. And those plans do give you more value than like, what the, what it would be if you spent $200 in API credits, uh, but $200 a month.

Like that’s not an expensive, that’s, you know, that, that’s, that, that, like, you know what I mean? Like, like that, that, that, that, that, that’s a lot of money to spend on these sorts of things. Um, but people [00:30:00] are getting good results out of it. It’s pretty cool. Um. There have been some open models, which of course, most people don’t have equipment that would be fast enough for them to, to run, uh, to be able to kind of do what they would want, um, reliably.

But the, the AgTech stuff coming to some of the open models is better. And so if these things can continue, of course now we’re in a ram crisis and storage crisis and everything else, so who knows when the hardware will get good enough again, and we can, when we as consumers can even reasonably get things ourselves.

But, but in, in theory, you know, if, if these sorts of things continue, I could see like a, a world where like, you know, some of the WAN models and some of the other things, uh, potentially, um, or Quinn models rather, um, could, uh. Be things that you could conceivably, like be running on your own equipment to run these sorts of nonstop ag agentic loops.

But yeah, right now, like it’s really freaking cool and I’ve played around with it because I’m fortunate enough to have access to a lot of tokens. [00:31:00] Um, but yeah, I can get expensive real, real fast. Uh, but, but it’s still, it’s still pretty awesome.

Brett: I do appreciate that. So, guest Town, the name is a reference to Mad Max and in the kind of, uh, vernacular that they built for things like background agents and I, uh, there’s a whole bunch, there are different levels of, of the interface that they kind of extrapolated on the gas town kind of metaphor for.

Uh, I, it was, it, it, there were some interesting naming conventions and then they totally went in other directions with some of the names. It, they didn’t keep the theme very well, but, but still, uh, I appreciate Ralph Wig and Mad Max. That’s. It’s at the very least, it’s interesting.

Christina: No, it definitely is. It definitely is.

Crypto Controversies

Christina: I will say that there’s been like a little bit [00:32:00] of a kerfuffle, uh, involved in both of those, uh, developers because, um, they’re both now promoting shit coins and, uh, and so that’s sort of an interesting thing. Um, basically there’s like this, this, this crypto company called bags that I guess apparently like if people want to, they will create crypto coins for popular open source projects, and then they will designate someone to, I guess get the, the gas fees, um, in, um, uh, a Solana parlance, uh, no pun intended, with the gas town, um, where basically like that’s, you know, like the, the, the fees that you spend to have the transaction work off of the blockchain, right?

Like, especially if there’s. A lot of times that it would take, like, you pay a certain percentage of something and like those fees could be designated to an individual. And, um, in this case, like both of these guys were reached out to when basically they were like, Hey, this coin exists. You’ve got all this money just kind of sitting in a crypto wallet waiting for you.

[00:33:00] Take the money, get, get the, the transaction fees, so to speak. And, uh, I mean, I think that, that, that’s, if you wanna take that money right, it’s, it’s there for you. I’m not gonna certainly judge anyone for that. What I will judge you for is if you then promote your shit coin to your community and basically kind of encourage everyone.

To kind of buy into it. Maybe you put in the caveat, oh, this isn’t financial advice. Oh, this is all just for whatever. But, but you’re trying to do that and then you go one step beyond, which I think is actually pretty dumb, which is to be like, okay, well, ’cause like, here’s the thing, I’m not gonna judge anyone.

If someone who’s like, Hey, here’s a wallet that we’re gonna give you, and it has real cash in it, and you can do whatever you want with it, and these are the transaction fees, so to speak, like, you know, the gas fees, whatever, you know what you do. You, even if you wanna let your audience know that you’ve done that, and maybe you’re promoting that, maybe some people will buy into it, like, people are adults.

Fine. Where, where I do like side eye a little bit is if you are, then for whatever reason [00:34:00] going to be like, oh, I’m gonna take my fees and I’m gonna reinvest it in the coin. Like, okay, you are literally sitting on top of the pyramid, like you could not be in a better position and now you’re, but right. And now you’re literally like paying into the pyramid scheme.

It’s like, this is not going to work well for you. These are rug bulls. Um, and so like the, the, the, the gas town coin like dropped like massively. The Ralph coin like dropped massively, like after the, the, the Ralph creator, I think he took out like 300 K or something and people, or, you know, sold like 300 K worth of coins.

And people were like, oh, he’s pulling a rug pull. And I’m like, well, A, what did you expect? But B it’s like, this is why don’t, like, if someone’s gonna give you free money from something that’s, you know, kind of scammy, like, I’m not saying don’t take the money. I am saying maybe be smart enough to not to reinvest it into the scam.

Brett: Yeah.

Christina: Like, I don’t know. Anyway, that’s the only thing I will mention on that. ’cause I don’t think that that takes [00:35:00] anything away from either of those projects or it says that you shouldn’t use or play around with it either of those ideas at all. But that is just a thing that’s happened in the last couple of weeks too, where it’s like, oh, and now there’s like crypto, you know, the crypto people are trying to get kind of involved with these projects and, um, I, I think that that’s, uh, okay.

You know, um, like I said, I’m, I’m not gonna judge anybody for taking free money that, that somebody is gonna offer them. I will judge you if you’re gonna try to then, you know, try to like, promote that to your audience and try to be like, oh, this is a great way where we, where you can help me and we can all get rich.

It’s like, no, there are, if you really wanna support creators, like there are things like GitHub sponsors and there are like other methods that you can, you can do that, that don’t involve making financial risks on shit coins.

Brett: I wish anything I made could be popular enough that I could do something that’s stupid. Yeah. Like [00:36:00] I, I, I, I’m not gonna pull a rug pull on anyone, but the chances that I’ll ever make $300,000 on anything I’m working on, it’s pretty slim.

Christina: Yeah, but at the same time, like if you, if you did, if you were in that position, like, I don’t know, I mean, I guess that’d be a thing that you would have to kind of figure out, um, yourself would be like, okay, I have access to this amount of money. Am I going to try to, you know, go all in and, and maybe go full grift to get even more?

Some, something tells me that like your own personal ethics would probably preclude you from that.

Brett: I, um, I have spent, what, um, how old am I? 47. I, I’ve been, since I started blogging in like 1999, 2000, um, I have always adhered to a very strict code and like turning down sponsors. I didn’t agree with [00:37:00] not doing anything that would be shady. Not taking, not, not taking money from anyone I was writing about.

Ethics in Journalism and Personal Dilemmas

Brett: Like, it’s been, it’s a pain in the ass to try to be truly ethical, but I feel like I’ve done it for 30 some years and, and I don’t know, I wouldn’t change it. I’m not rich. I’ll never be rich. But yeah, I think ethics are important, especially if you’re in any kind of journalism.

Christina: Yeah, if you’re in any sort of journalism. I think so, and I think like how people wanna define those things, I think it’s up to them. And, and like I said, like I’m not gonna even necessarily like, like judge people like for, because I, I don’t know personally like what my situation would be like. Like if somebody was like, Christina, here’s a wallet that has the equivalent of $300,000 in it and it’s just sitting here and we’re not even asking you to do anything with this.

I would probably take the money. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t [00:38:00] know if I would promote it or anything and I maybe I would feel compelled to disclose, Hey,

Brett: That is

Christina: wallet belongs to me.

Brett: money though.

Christina: I, I, right. I, I, I might, I might be, I might feel compelled to com to, to disclose, Hey, someone created this coin in this thing.

They created the foam grow coin and they are giving me, you know, the, the, the gas fees and I have accepted

Brett: could be, I’d feel like you could do it if you were transparent enough about it.

Christina: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think where I draw the line is when you then go from like, because again, it’s fine if you wanna take it. It’s then when you are a. Reinvesting the free money into the coin, which I think is just idiotic. Like, I think that’s just actually dumb. Um, like I just, I just do like, that just seems like you are literally, like I said, you’re at the top of the pyramid and you’re literally like volunteering to get into the bottom again.

Um, and, or, or b like if you do that and then you try to rationalize in some way, oh, well, you know, I think [00:39:00] that this could be a great thing for everybody to, you know, I get rich, you know, you could get rich, we could all get money out of this because this is the future of, you know, creator economy or whatever.

It’s like, no, it’s not. This is gambling. Um, and, and, and, and you could make the argument to me, and I’d probably be persuaded to be like, this isn’t that different from poly market or any of the other sorts of things. But you know what? I don’t do those things either. And I wouldn’t promote those things to any audience that I had either.

Um, but if somebody wanted to give me free money. I probably wouldn’t turn it down. I’m not gonna pretend that my ethics are, are that strong. Uh, I just don’t know if I would, if I would, uh, go on the other end and be like, okay, to the Moom, everyone let, let’s all go in on the crypto stuff. It’s like, okay,

The Future of Open Source and Cryptocurrency

Brett: So is this the future of open source is, ’cause I mean like open source has survived for decades as like a concept and it’s never been terribly profitable. But a [00:40:00] lot of large companies have invested in open source, and I guess at this point, like most of the big open source projects are either run by a corporation or by a foundation.

Um, that are independently financed, but for a project like Gastown, like is it the future? Is this, is this something people are gonna start doing to like, kind of make open source profitable?

Christina: I mean, maybe, I don’t know. I think the problem though is that it’s not necessarily predictable, right? And, and not to say that like normal donations or, or support methods are predictable, but at least that could be a thing where you’re like, they’re not, but, but, but it’s not volatile to the extent where you’re like, okay, I’m basing, you know, like my income based on how well this shit coin that someone else controls the supply of someone else, you know, uh, uh, created someone else, you know, burned, so to speak, somebody else’s is going to be, uh, [00:41:00] controlling and, and has other things and could be responsible for, you know, big seismic like market movements like that I think is very different, um, than anything else.

And so, I don’t know. I mean, I, I think that they, what I do expect that we’ll see more of is more and more popular projects, things that go viral, especially around ai. Probably being approached or people like proactively creating coins around those things. And there have been some, um, developers who’ve already, you know, stood up oddly and been like, if you see anybody trying to create a coin around this, it is not associated with me.

I won’t be associated with any of it. I won’t do it. Right. Uh, and I think that becomes a problem where you’re like, okay, if these things do become popular, then that becomes like another risk if you don’t wanna be involved in it. If you’re involved with a, with a popular project, right? Like the, like the, like the creator of MPM Isaac, like, I think there’s like an MPM coin now, and that, that he’s, you know, like involved in and it’s like, you know, again, he didn’t create it, but he is happy to promote it.

He’s happy to take the money. I’m like, look, I’m happy for [00:42:00] Isaac to get money from NPMI am at the same time, you know, bun, which is basically like, you know, the, you know, replacement for, for Node and NPM in a lot of ways, they sold to Anthropic for. I guarantee you a fuck load more money than whatever Isaac is gonna make off of some MPM shitcoin.

So, so like, it, it’s all a lottery and it’s not sustainable. But I also feel like for a lot of open source projects, and this isn’t like me saying that the people shouldn’t get paid for the work, quite the contrary. But I think if you go into it with the expectation of I’m going to be able to make a sustainable living off of something, like when you start a project, I think that that is not necessarily going to set you up for, I think that those expectations are misaligned with what reality might be, which again, isn’t to say that you shouldn’t get paid for your work, it’s just that the reason that we give back and the reason we contribute open source is to try to be part of like the, the greater good and to make things more available to everyone.

Not to be [00:43:00] like, oh, I can, you know, quit my job. Like, that would be wonderful. I, I wish that more and more people could do that. And I give to a lot of, um, open source projects on, on a monthly basis or on an annual basis. Um,

Brett: I, I give basically all the money that’s given to me for my open source projects I distribute among other open source projects. So it’s a, it’s a, it’s a wash for me, but yeah, I am, I, I pay, you know, five, 10 bucks a month to 20 different projects and yeah.

Christina: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s important, but, but I, I don’t know. I, I, I hope that it’s not the future. I’m not mad, I think like if that’s a way where people can make, you know, a, a, an income. But I do, I guess worry the sense that like, if, if, if, I don’t want that to be, the reason why somebody would start an open source project is because they’re like, oh, I, I can get rich on a crypto thing.

Right? Like, ’cause that that’s the exact wrong

Brett: that’s not open source. That’s not the open source philosophy.

Christina: no, [00:44:00] it’s not. And, and so, I mean, but I think, I think if it already exists, I mean, I don’t know. I, I also feel like no one should feel obligated. This should go without saying that. If you see a project that you like that is involved in one of those coins.

Do you have a zero obligation to be, uh, supportive of that in any way? And in fact, it is probably in your financial best interest to not be involved. Um, it, it is your life, your money, your, you do whatever you want, gamble, however you want. But, uh, I, I, I, I do, I guess I, I bristle a little bit. Like if people try to portray it like, oh, well this is how you can support me by like buying into this thing.

I’m like, okay, that’s alright. Like, I, I, if you wanna, again, like I said, if you wanna play poly market with this, fine, but don’t, don’t try to wrap that around like, oh, well this is how you can give back. It’s like, no, you can give back in other ways. Like you can do direct donations, you can do other stuff.

Like I would, I would much rather encourage people to be like, rather than putting a hundred dollars in Ralph Coin, [00:45:00] give a hundred dollars to the Ralph Guy directly.

Apex 1.0?

Brett: So, speaking of unprofitable open source, I have Apex almost to 1.0. Um, it officially handles, I think, all of the syntax that I had hoped it would handle. Um, it does like crazy things, uh, that it’s all built on common mark, GFM, uh, like cmar, GFM, GitHub’s project. Um, so it, it does all of that. Plus it handles stuff from like M mark with like indices.

Indices, and it incorporates, uh. Uh, oh, I forget the name of it. Like two different ways of creating indices. It handles all kinds of bibliography syntax, like every known bibliography syntax. Um, I just added, you can, you can create insert tags with plus, plus, uh, the same way you would create a deletion with, uh, til detail.

Um, and [00:46:00] I’ve added a full plugin structure, and the plugins now can be project local. So you can have global plugins. And then if you have specific settings, so like I have a, I, my blogs are all based on cramdown and like the bunch documentation is based on cramdown, but then like the mark documentation.

And most of my writing is based on multi markdown and they have different. Like the, for example, the IDs that go on headers in multi markdown. If it’s, if it has a space in multi markdown, it gets compressed to no space in common Mark or GFM, it gets a dash instead of a space, which means if I have cross links, cross references in my document, if I don’t have the right header syntax, the cross reference will break.

So now I can put a, a config into like my bunch documentation that tells Apex to use, [00:47:00] um, the dash syntax. And in my Mark documentation, I can tell it to use the multi markdown syntax. And then I can just run Apex with no command line arguments and everything works. And I don’t know, I, I haven’t gotten adoption for it.

Like the one place I thought it could be really useful was DEVONthink,

Christina: Mm-hmm.

Brett: which has always been based on multi markdown, which. Um, is I love multi markdown and I love Fletcher and, um, it’s just, it’s missing a lot of what I would consider modern syntax.

Christina: Right.

Brett: so I, I offered it to Devin think, and it turned out they were working on their own project along the same lines at the same time.

Um, but I’m hoping to find some, some apps that will incorporate it and maybe get it some traction. It’s solid, it’s fast, it’s not as fast as common Mark, but it does twice as much. Um, like the [00:48:00] benchmarks, it a complex document renders in common mark in about. Uh, 27 milliseconds, and in Apex it’s more like 46 milliseconds.

But in the grand scheme of things, I could render my whole blog 10 times faster than I can with cramm down or Panoc and yeah, and, and I can use all the syntax I want.

Challenges and Innovations in Markdown Processing

Brett: Did I tell you about, did I tell you about, uh, Panoc Divs? The div extension, um, like you can in with the panoc D extension, you can put colon, colon, colon instead of like back, take, back, take backtick.

So normally, like back ticks would create a code block with colons, it creates a div, and you can apply, you can apply inline attribute lists after the colons to make, to give it a class and an ID and any other attributes you wanna apply to it. I extended that so that you can do colon, [00:49:00] colon, colon, and then type a tag name.

So if you type colon, colon, colon aside and then applied an attribute list to it, it would create an aside tag with those attributes. Um, the, the only pan deck extension that I wish I could support that I don’t yet is grid tables. Have you ever seen grid tables?

Christina: I have not.

Brett: There, it’s, it’s kind of like multi markdown table syntax, except you use like plus signs for joints and uh, pipes and dashes, and you actually draw out the table like old ASCI diagrams

Christina: Okay.

Brett: and that would render that into a valid HTML table.

But that supporting that has just been, uh, tables. Tables are the thing. I’ve pulled the most hair out over.

Christina: Yeah, I was gonna say, I think I, they feel like tables are hard. I also feel like in a lot of circumstances, I mean obviously people use tables and whatnot, but like, [00:50:00] only thing I would say to you, like, you know, apex is, is so cool and I hope that other projects adopt it. Um, and, uh, potentially with the POC support as far as you’ve gotten with it, maybe, you know, projects that support some of POC stuff could, could, you know, uh, jump into it.

But I will say it does feel like. Once you go into like the Panoc universe, like that almost feels like a separate thing from the markdown Flavors like that almost feels like its own like ecosystem. You know what I mean?

Brett: Well, yeah, and I haven’t tried to adopt everything Panoc does because you can als, you can also use panoc. You can pipe from Apex into Panoc or vice versa. So I’m not gonna try to like one for one replicate panoc,

Christina: No, no. Totally

Brett: do all of panoc export options because Panoc can take HTML in and then output PDFs and Doc X and everything.

So you can just pipe output from Apex into Panoc to create your PDF or whatever

Christina: And like, and, and like to, [00:51:00] and like to me, like that seems ideal, right? But I feel like maybe like adopting some of the other things, especially like, like their grid, you know, table, things like that. Like that would be cool. But like, that feels like that’s a, potentially has the, has the potential, maybe slow down rendering and do other stuff which you don’t want.

And then b it’s like, okay, now are we complicated to the point that like, this is, this is now not becoming like one markdown processor to rule them all, but you

Brett: Yeah, the whole point, the whole point is to be able to just run Apex and not worry about what cex you’re using. Um, but grid tables are the kind of thing that are so intentional that you’re not gonna accidentally use them. Like the, the, the, the impetus for Apex was all these support requests I get from people that are like the tilde syntax for underline or delete doesn’t work in Mark.

And it, it does if you choose the right processor. But then you have to know, yeah, you have to [00:52:00] know what processor supports what syntax and that takes research and time and bringing stuff in from, say, obsidian into mart. You would just kind of expect things to work. And that’s, that’s why I built Apex and

Christina: right?

Brett: you are correct that grid tables are the kind of thing, no one’s going to use grid tables if they haven’t specifically researched what

Christina: I right.

Brett: they’re gonna work with.

Christina: And they’re going to have a way that has their file marked so that it is designated as poc and then whatever, you know, flags for whatever POC features it supports, um, does. Now I know that the whole point of APEX is you don’t have to worry about this, but, but I am assuming, based on kind of what you said, like if I pass like arguments like in like a, you know, in a config file or something like where I was like, these documents or, or, or this URL or these things are, you know, in this process or in this in another, then it can, it can just automatically apply those rules without having to infer based on the, on the syntax, right.

Brett: right. It has [00:53:00] modes for cram down and common mark and GFM and discount, and you can like tell it what mode you’re writing in and it will limit the feature set to just what that processor would handle. Um, and then all of the flags, all of the features have neg negotiable flags on them. So if you wanted to say. Skip, uh, relax table rendering. You could turn that off on the command line or in a config file. Um, so yeah, everything, everything, you can make it behave like any particular processor. Uh, but I focus mostly on the unified mode, which again, like you don’t have to think about which processor you are using.

Christina: Are you seeing, I guess like in, in circumstances like, ’cause I, in, in my, like, my experience, like, I would never think to, like, I would probably like, like to, I would probably do like what you do, which is like, I’m [00:54:00] going to use one syntax or, or one, you know, processor for one type of files and maybe another and another.

Um, but I, I don’t think that like, I would ever have a, and maybe I’m misunderstanding this, but I don’t think I would ever have an instance where I would be like mixing the two together in the same file.

Brett: See, that’s my, so that’s, that’s what’s changing for me is I’m switching my blog over to use Apex instead of Cramdown, which means I can now incorporate syntax that wasn’t available before. So moving forward, I am mixing, um, things from common mark, things from cram down, things from multi markdown. Um, and, and like, so once you know you have the option

Christina: right. Then you might do that

Brett: you have all the syntax available, you start doing it.

And historically you won’t have, but like once you get used to it, then you can.

Christina: Okay. So here’s the next existential question for you. At what point then does it go from being, you know, like [00:55:00] a, a, a rendering engine, kind of like an omni rendering engine to being a syntax and a flavor in and of itself?

Brett: That is that, yeah, no, that’s a, that’s a very valid question and one that I have to keep asking myself, um, because I never, okay, so what to, to encapsulate what you’re saying, if you got used to writing for Apex and you were mixing your syntax, all of a sudden you have a document that can’t render in anything except Apex, which does eventually make it its own.

Yeah, no, it is, it’s always, it’s a concern the whole time.

Christina: well, and I, I wouldn’t even necessarily, I mean, like, and I think it could be two things, right? I mean, like, you could have it live in two worlds where, like on the one hand it could be like the rendering engine to end all rendering engines and it can render, you know, files and any of them, and you can specify like whatever, like in, in, in like a tunnel or something.

Like, you know, these files are, [00:56:00] are this format, these are these, and you know, maybe have some sort of, you know, um, something, even like a header files or whatever to be like, this is what this rendering engine is. Um, you know, with, with your projects to have it, uh, do that. Um. Or have it infer, you know, based on, on, on, um, the, the logic that you’re importing.

But it could also be one of those things where you’re like, okay, I just have created like, you know, the omni syntax. And that’s a thing that maybe, maybe you get people to try to encourage or try, try to adopt, right? Like, it’s like, okay, you can always just use common mark. You can always just use GFM, you can always just use multi markdown, but we support these other things too, from these other, um, systems and you can intermix and match them.

Um, because, because I, I do feel like at a certain point, like at least the way you’re running it yourself, you have your own syntax. Like, like, you know.

Brett: yeah. No, you have perfectly encapsulated the, the major [00:57:00] design concern. And I think you’re correct. It can exist, it can be both things at once. Um, but I have like, nobody needs another markdown syntax. Like there are so many flavors right now. Okay. There may be a dozen. It’s not like an infinite number, but, but there’s enough that the confusion is real.

Um, and we don’t need yet another markdown flavor, but we do need a universal processor that. Makes the differentiations less, but yeah, no, it’s, I need, I need to nail down that philosophy, uh, and really like, put it into writing and say, this is the design goal of this project, uh, which I have like hinted at, but I’m a scattered thinker and like, part of, part of the design philosophy is if someone says, Hey, [00:58:00] could you make this work?

I just wanted a project where I could say, yeah, I’m gonna make that work. I, I, I’m gonna add this somewhat esoteric syntax and it’s just gonna work and it’s not gonna affect anything else. And you don’t have to use it, but if you do, there it is. So it’s kind of, it was designed to bloat to a circuit certain extent.

Um, but yeah, I need to, I need to actually write a page That’s just the philosophy and really, really, uh, put, put all my thoughts together on that.

Christina: Yeah, no, ’cause I was just kind of thinking, I was like, ’cause it’s so cool. Um, but the way that I would’ve envisioned using it, like I, I still like, it’s cool that you can mix all those things in together. I still feel like I probably wouldn’t because I’m not you. And so then I would just have like this additional dependency that it’s like, okay, if something happens to Apex one day and that’s the only thing that can render my documents, then like, you know what I mean?

And, and, and if it’s not getting updated [00:59:00] anymore or whatever, then I’m kind of like SOL, um,

Brett: Maku. Do you remember Maku?

Christina: vaguely.

Brett: It’s, the project is kind of dead and a lot of its syntax has been incorporated into various other processors. But if you built your whole blog on Maku, you have to, you have to be able to run like a 7-year-old binary, um, and, and it’ll never be updated, and eventually you’re gonna run into trouble.

The nice thing about Unix based stuff is it’s. Has a, you can stop developing it and it’ll work for a decade, um, until, like, there’s a major shift in processors, but like, just the shift to arm. Like if, if Maku was only ever compiled for, uh, for, uh, Intel and it wasn’t open source, you would, it would be gone.

You wouldn’t be able to run it anymore. So yeah, these things can happen.

Christina: [01:00:00] Well, and I just even think about like, you know, the fact that like, you know, like some of the early processors, like I remember like back, I mean this is a million years ago, but having to use like certain, like pearl, you know, based things, you know, but depending on like whatever your backend system was, then you moved to PHP, they maybe you move, moved to, you know, Ruby, if you’re using like Jekyll and maybe you move to something else.

And I was like, okay, you know, what will the thing be in the future? Yeah. If, if I, if it’s open source and there’s a way that, you know, you can write a new, a new processor for that, but it does create like, dependencies on top of dependencies, which is why I, I kind of feel like I like having like the omni processor.

I don’t know if, like, for me, I’m like, okay, I, I would probably be personally leery about intermingling all my different syntaxes together.

Brett: to that end though, that is why I wanted it in C um, because C will probably never die. C can be compiled on just about any platform. And it can be used with, like, if you have, if you have a Jekyll blog and you wanna [01:01:00] incorporate a C program into a gem, it’s no problem. Uh, you can incorporate it into just about any.

Language you wanna use it with? Um, so like C was important. I like, I’m most comfortable writing in Ruby, but to do something like this in Ruby would A, be really slow and b, have, like Ruby is changing so fast right now, like stuff that worked in 2.7, no longer works, stuff that works in 4.0 doesn’t work in 3.3.

So like, Ruby is moving quickly and all of my

Christina: And breaking.

Brett: constant updates. Yeah. Like, uh, there’s a, there’s a method in Ruby called Exist that you can use on a file object. And so it’s like file exists question mark and it tests if a file exists. But it used to be exists with an S-E-X-I-S-T-S and Ruby.

3.0 broke that. [01:02:00] So you have to use exist singular. And all of my scripts that use exist, plural,

Christina: Oh my

Brett: had to be rewritten. Yeah, yeah. No, Ruby, Ruby is not a, it’s not a stable platform for this kind of thing.

AI in Coding and Personal Assistants

Christina: that seems like that’s a great use case for ai. Um, uh, I’m not even gonna lie. Like, even more than just like a, a, a Reg X sort of thing, like that would be the sort of thing where I would be like, I would feed that into like, uh, to Claude and I’d be like, hi, please find all the instances of this function and update it to this and,

Brett: That’s what with With the

Christina: then run tests.

Brett: Yeah. Yeah.

Christina: run tests and make sure that it, that it doesn’t break.

Brett: that is what I love AI for right now is tests. Like I can say, here’s this new feature I wrote, write test for it, and it writes all the fixtures, it writes all the unit tests, it writes all the implementation tests, and I can just. Run the test and know that it works.

Um, and that’s the kind tests take a fair [01:03:00] amount of thinking to make something that tests, that validly tests the feature and is, is going to break if something actually breaks but isn’t going to break. Do you know what I’m, I’m not saying this very well, but like, test, test, take thinking and AI is really good at writing tests.

AI is really good at analyzing what does this feature do and what are the edge cases for it and how can I test it? And I love AI for that. But yeah, when I get bug reports on gems that I wrote like five years ago in Ruby, I don’t fix them by hand anymore. I feed the pro i, I bring the whole project into like in my case cursor.

And uh, generally I’ll use, um, Claude or sometimes Chet GPT Codex now. But, um, uh, I’ll just have it read the whole project and it be like, here’s the bug. And [01:04:00] I don’t even tell it what files, I don’t even give it like particular context. I just give it the whole project and it usually can solve the bug in about a minute.

So I, I’m, I, I’m a proponent of AI coding. I guess I was a, I was hesitant. I was a, I was a naysayer for a long time, but I wouldn’t go back. Now I worry like if, if something, if something crashes and the market no longer will bear AI development, I would hate to see all these tools go away. ’cause I do not wanna go back to the dark ages of coding.

Christina: Yeah. I, that, that, that, I mean, I, yeah, for lots of reasons I don’t want that to happen. Um, I’m obviously financially vested in, in that, uh, I, I think all of us are, whether we want to be or not. Like, like it’s, it’s like, it’s like if you have any sort of retirement account, like it is,

Brett: It is. It is. The bulk of it is the bulk of the stock index right now.

Christina: but, [01:05:00] but even, even putting that aside Yeah. To your point, like I wouldn’t wanna have to give those things up. And so I, I would hope that, that if, yeah, if, if it becomes too much that. The tools don’t just go away. Maybe they have to evolve, maybe they have to like change a little bit. But I mean, that, that, that is I think why it’s important to have people who are doing open things and um, uh, like, uh, I don’t know if you’ve played with Open Code or not, um, but it’s, it’s like a, um, so it’s basically like a cloud code, but um, it’s open source and you can bring your copilot subscription, you can bring your Codex subscription, uh, you can bring your CLO X uh, subscription.

But Claude is Anthros been real, um, uh, shitty about that, where they’re like, oh no, you can only use your Claude credits on Claude Code, uh, for your subscription price, which like, whatever. Fair enough. Um, but, but like you could actually log in with your Copilot Pro or Pro Plus or enterprise subscription and.

Use those credits in open code, if that’s what you wanna do, if you don’t wanna use the co-pilot, CLI or the SDK, uh, [01:06:00] but you can also use it with Codex and, and, and, um, other stuff. And I like things like that. Like, I like that, that people are creating like these open tools and kind of giving people choice.

And in terms of how the agents work, um, again, like there’s no guarantee, like if this bubble burst, it’s not like the people who are doing this, you know, for free or who are being, you know, sustained by a startup are necessarily gonna still be able to, to be around, but at least it’s not locked behind, you know, some proprietary doors, you know, like the models might be.

But if you can bring other models with it and if you have these, these other agent things, and at least that’s my hope. So. All right.

GrAPPtitude

Christina: Well, I know we’re running out of time. Do you wanna do, um, uh, gude.

Brett: Yeah, we can, mine’s gonna be super quick. Um, I am this week going to mention Backdrop, which is a Mac app that makes, that does animated wallpapers. And they have a really nice library of just short, they’re video loops and [01:07:00] it, uh, it works on your desktop and on your lock screen. And I use like some cyberpunk ones that are like city nights scapes with just like a light rain effect across them.

And I, I, I enjoy it. I get a kick out of it. Um, now that I have enough processing power and memory to, uh, to justify running video in the background, but.

Christina: Right. Right. No, I love that. Um, I don’t think I have, I don’t think I’ve used backdrop, but I think that looks awesome. ’cause that’s been one of the things people have wanted to try to kind of create is like, okay, how do I create the live, you know, lock screens, how to create the live wallpapers? ’cause like that’s a feature that I guess they introduced maybe two versions of Mac West ago and, um, are, are pretty cool.

But yeah, you do need some processing power. You don’t necessarily wanna, I don’t even know if they, I think they did run on Intel machines, but you don’t really wanna run on an Intel machine. Um, but they, they can be cool, but like, it’s, you know, they, they’ve made the process, like it used to be fairly easy to like, make your own screensavers and like Apple is, you know, deprecated.

I think a lot of those libraries and things

Brett: There [01:08:00] used to be so many cool screensavers.

Christina: I had, um, I had the, the, um, aquarium one.

Brett: Yeah.

Christina: For years. And I love that one. I’ve even bought it and like it got to a certain point, like that guy was like, I can’t update this anymore. And I was like, that sucks. ’cause I loved the aquarium one so much. Uh, I had that one for like 20 years.

Um, I even had that one on Windows, I think, and, and like, it, it, it was great. But I’m glad to see that they’ve done that. And I, I, I guess you pronounced the company’s name. Ri, it’s C-I-N-D-O-R-I. But they have a couple of apps. Um, one that I’ve used is a sensei, which is kind of like, um, uh, I stat. Um, and it’s, it’s like a, a, a system monitor app.

And, um, I, I bought that on a Black Friday sale. Um. A while back, if you have I, stat Plus, I’m not gonna say that you need to get it, because they’re, they’re pretty super, uh, superfluous. But it is a, a pretty cool, like, you know, [01:09:00] um, advanced, like, kind of like, you know, status bar, like, you know, app, but it also includes some things like, I think it has, has like an uninstaller and some other types of tools in it.

So, um, I’ve never, I haven’t used Backdrop, but I have used Sensei and, and I can give that a, a plus one, so that’s cool. Um,

Brett: used to be a. A screensaver that could run shell scripts and apple scripts and put the output on your screen. And

Christina: oh, yes,

Brett: you could have different scripts run, like when it starts and when it ends and yeah, that’s what I ran for like 15 years.

Christina: What was that called? Because I can’t remember, but Yeah. ’cause yeah, ’cause I think, I, I think on, on Windows there was a similar thing. It was called like rain meter or something, and then there was like, I don’t remember what it was called on MA West, but yeah, I think that went away. Like. That went away a long time ago.

Um, but, uh, like, like probably a decade ago.

Brett: Yeah. I wanna say like 2015 was

Christina: yeah, I was gonna say that. That, that, that’s what I [01:10:00] remember too. I was like, oh yeah, ’cause that stuff was cool. ’cause I think I probably learned about it from you. And I had like certain things that it was like, oh yeah, okay, so this’ll run and it’ll, it’ll put the output on the screen and then I can see these things.

And like, that was, that was super slick. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s cool to see, um, animated, uh, live wallpapers that people can create themselves. Like that’s pretty fun. Um, okay, my pick is, uh, we we’re talking about kind of, you know, agents and whatnot. There’s a project, it was known as Claude Bot. And, and so if you’ve been on like Twitter threads, uh, ma on I think a little bit, you might have seen it, it is now known as Mt bot, M-O-L-T-B-O-T.

Uh, because, uh, anthropic didn’t like the name Claude, even though it was spelled with a wd. Um, and it is basically like a personal AI assistant. Um, people are like buying Mac Minis for this thing. You don’t need to have your own Mac mini. You can use it on a BPS, you can use it on a raspberry pie, but it is probably better to give it a dedicated machine or container.

Um, or VPS or whatever, [01:11:00] rather than to run it like, you know, alongside all of your other stuff. But basically the idea is that it’s kind of like a personal assistant. So you can create like, um, like a a, a WhatsApp or a Telegram or like an iMessage account with it. And basically you can text it, um, your assistant thanks to be like, do your research on X for me.

And it will then run, spin up, you know, uh, uh, an instance of of of Claude or, or, or Codex or whatever model you’re choosing, logging in with, with your credentials, and do that task for you and then text you back a link that’s like, okay, here’s all your research. Right? You could also tell us to do things like, okay, go through my inbox and, you know, Filch all these messages and then give me a summary of these things, or clean out my accounts or do this right?

So you can, you can really kind of have it do tasks for you. Uh, you can have it do coding things too, but it’s, it’s pretty cool. Um, Federico, um, uh, wrote about it on Mac stories, but a lot of people have written about it. Um, uh, uh, uh. The, the, the [01:12:00] developer, um, is, is pretty, um, active. He’s actually in, in incredibly active.

Um, he has actually gone on record as to be like, I am not going to do any sort of, you know, crypto thing. And so if you see anybody with a coin in my name, it is not me. Um, but no, but, but, but, uh, malt Bot is is really cool if you have like a, an older Mac line around, like, it doesn’t have to be the latest or anything.

’cause all it’s basically doing is acting as like a message gateway to basically be like a way to,

Brett: Would it work? Would it work on like a 2012 Mac mini,

Christina: Oh yeah. It’ll,

Brett: those laying around.

Christina: yes, it’ll work on that. It’ll work on a raspberry pie, right? Like it’ll work on a, it’ll work on a $5 a month VPS. Um, but yeah, no, it’ll work great on, on, on a Mac mini.

And, and that would actually be cool ’cause then you could use iMessage, you know, to, to communicate with it. Um, but you could use Telegram, you can use WhatsApp, and, um, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty cool. So I, uh, that’s, um, that’s. That’s my, um, my pick. The only thing I [01:13:00] will say is that like, it, it runs best kind of using like Claude Opus 4.5 that is the most expensive Claude.

So, you know, you can spend a lot of money on that if, if you’re using API keys or if you don’t have like subscriptions you can log in with, with accounts from, you know, various services. But, um, people are building all kinds of extensions for it so that you can do all kinds of things. Like you can control your Sonos, you can, uh, you know, uh, transcribe things.

You can use it with obsidian. You can, uh, generate images with nano banana like you can do. All kinds of, uh, you know, you, you can like do searches across the web and then like extract those results and like have them sense you. Like there’s, you can control your lights. Like people are building a ton of stuff, um, for that and, and building, um, you know, kind of their own things too.

And so, um, anyway, big fan. Um, and it’s kind of taken over the world. People are like joking where they’re like, oh, there’s gonna be a run on Mac Minis because of Claude Bot. And it’s like, okay, there’s, there’s not, but also I would not say, do not buy a Mac mini for Claude Bot. I do think, [01:14:00] uh, the M four Mac mini, I still, especially with the Ram crisis, I still feel like for $500, which is what you can usually get them for, um, especially if you use the, the, the student pricing that they don’t ever check anything on, um, I feel like it’s, that’s the best deal in tech.

But, you know, there are plenty of things to, to do on that. Like, you, you don’t have to, you definitely don’t need to, to, to spin that if you just wanna to, um, play around with them multiple. So that’s, that’s my pick of the week.

Brett: Awesome. I, uh, I have a couple Mac minis and a raspberry pie laying around. I might have to give this, uh, a

Christina: Yeah, I give it a shot. Yeah, I give it a shot. ’cause it, I, I, I think, I think you, I think this is exactly the sort of shit that you’d be really into.

Brett: Yeah.

Conclusion and Upcoming Plans

Brett: Alright, well that was a wide ranging episode.

Christina: It was,

Brett: Um, yeah. Well, thank you. Have a good, have a good rest of your week. I’ll let you know if I get water back.

Christina: Yeah, let me, uh, let me know. And, uh, yeah, I’m gonna be gone for a couple of weeks ’cause I’m having surgery, [01:15:00] um, in six days. Um, but, uh, but I’ll talk to you, um, when I’m back and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll let you, I’ll let you know. I’ll, I’ll see if I can like, maybe record a message or something if I’m not on the next episode, just to like, let everybody know like I survived.

Brett: Yeah. We’d wanna know. We’d wanna

Christina: yeah. If, if I didn’t survive, I’m sure that like, there will be ways that people find out. But, but yeah.

Brett: All right. Well, good luck with your surgery and get some sleep.

Christina: Get some sleep.