RobbieTheWagner 
Charles William Carpenter III [00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Syntax. Welcome to a brand new episode of the Front End Happy Hour podcast. Welcome to this week’s JS Party. Live from Ship Shape Studios, this is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. With your hosts, Robbie the Wagner, and me, Charles William Carpenter III. That’s right Charles. We drink whiskey and talk about web development.
I mean, it’s all in the name. It’s not that deep. This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot. Do not adjust your set.
[00:00:36] Promo: Whiskey Web and Whatnot is brought to you by Wix. We’re big fans of Wix here on the show. We’ve had Yoav and Emmy on before on episode 98. If you’re interested in more about Wix, definitely check that episode out. But I’m here today specifically to talk to you about the new Wix Studio. Digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, [00:01:00] the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Work in sync with your team on one canvas. Reuse templates, widgets, and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers. And leverage best-in-class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Time’s up, but the list keeps going. Step into Wix Studio to see more.
[00:01:26] Robbie Wagner: What’s going on everybody? Welcome to Whiskey Web and whatnot with your hosts, Robbie the Wagner and Charles William Carpenter, the thirdwith our guest today, Philip Winston? What’s going on, Philip?
[00:01:38] Phillip Winston: Hey, how’s it going, guys?
[00:01:40] Robbie Wagner: Good. Good. Thanks for coming on.
[00:01:42] Chuck Carpenter: Thanks for joining.
[00:01:44] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. For folks who may not have heard of you, could you give a few sentences about who you are and what you do?
[00:01:49] Phillip Winston: Yeah, I mean, so I’m a software developer from the era before the web existed. I guess right when I was graduating from college, the web was hitting [00:02:00] 90 95. So Yahoo existed, but it was like, run out of their dorm room and
[00:02:07] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:02:07] Phillip Winston: years before Google existed. But yeah, I mean, so most of the development I did for like 20 years was what you call, I guess now desktop or no end development or something.
and yeah, I did that for many years. And then more recently I have gotten into like cloud stuff and web stuff. And terrifyingly, I’m doing a tiny bit of front end right now.
So. Maybe you guys can debug it for me. But yeah, mostly I would guess these days you’d say mostly backend.
[00:02:38] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. So you wrote software that ended up on multiple floppy disks on the shelf at
[00:02:42] Phillip Winston: missed floppy. I think the first one was C, definitely had CDs for a while. think we had FTP sites. So like, yeah, if you had a, You just, you know, put it in like what, what folder of the FPT should I put it in? You know?
[00:02:57] Chuck Carpenter: It’s very secure.
[00:02:59] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Those were fun [00:03:00]
[00:03:00] Phillip Winston: we had, uh, yeah, but, but just many projects with zero online component.
There was like, yeah, you shipped it, they installed it, then six months later you shipped it again.
[00:03:11] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. That’s good.
[00:03:13] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Which is nice, like you don’t have to do this like, Oh, I could always be a little bit better. You could just like, Nope, it’s out. Yeah.
[00:03:23] Phillip Winston: Because,
you were letting it go. And so I remember at one place. They would have like a clock and they would start it and they would need to do, you know, 50 hours of use with zero bugs or whatever. And like, if you had a bug, you’d restart that clock.
And,
[00:03:41] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, wow.
[00:03:41] Phillip Winston: because you know, it’s kind of got to work.
[00:03:44] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s like hard to know. And then once you get it in someone’s hands, and you get that, you know, bug report or whatever else you’re like, Oh, crap. Well, looks like it’s gonna be a few months for you, buddy. Hopefully you can get as far as you can.
[00:03:57] Phillip Winston: Yeah, I guess they would have like a hot fix [00:04:00] and they would maybe send the DVD or the CD to who person who reported the bug or whatever. So there was ways, but yeah, it was definitely. I mean, I know a games these days, when you install it, it’s just like applying updates, and it downloads like 5 gigabytes
[00:04:15] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:04:16] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. You’re like, I didn’t even opt into this. Why is this? I just wanted to play FIFA again.
[00:04:21] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. That was a big problem when I used to live kind of out in the country and, I had no internet really, so I would be like, Alright, I’m gonna install this game. And then it’s like, Alright, 70 gigabytes of updates now. Well, I’ll play this like next week, I guess. But anyway, go into the, the whiskey for us there, Chuck.
[00:04:38] Chuck Carpenter: Alrighty, I mean it’s the primary reason why Philip agreed to be here, so I should move forward with that. So today we’re having the me off. Yeah, nothing but the best for about
[00:04:49] Phillip Winston: that. That doesn’t seem authentic.
[00:04:51] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, yeah, it is kind of funny, because I’ve had other ones of theirs, and I think this is the first one that’s a twist off. So, like, okay, well, so be it. The [00:05:00] Medley Brothers Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. , this is, , 102 proof. It is not age stated, but since it’s a bourbon, it’s got to be at least four.
[00:05:08] Chuck Carpenter: Four years old. The mash bill is 77 percent corn, 10 percent rye, 13 percent malted barley. , so yeah, it should be pretty, like, good. It should have a decent amount of sweetness or whatever to it.
[00:05:18] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:05:19] Chuck Carpenter: Let’s see.
[00:05:21] Robbie Wagner: Smells like bourbon.
[00:05:22] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, it’s got a, and with that much corn, it actually has like kind of a wood forward. To me.
[00:05:29] Phillip Winston: Yeah, I was gonna ask for help on these tasting notes. It
[00:05:33] Robbie Wagner: We make it all up. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:05:36] Chuck Carpenter: uh, it seems as if it is made of alcohol, for
sure. Yeah,
[00:05:41] Phillip Winston: mean, it does have a scent that’s very different from, say, beer, or wine, or Vodka or something.
[00:05:47] Chuck Carpenter: For sure, but it’s not a completely different vernacular, I don’t think. I think, like, you know, whatever things within that domain you might use as part of that language, and we try to agree, oh, [00:06:00] this one’s leathery, or this one’s earthy, or whatever that kind of, in the wine world, you know, you get a lot of, like, earthiness, and cherries, and berry things, and stuff like that.
But,
[00:06:09] Phillip Winston: My, uh, daughter is just back from college and she’s 19, but they’re letting her pour at the winery where she’s worked for many years. And so she’s not supposed to drink it, but she’s allowed to do the tastings and
[00:06:24] Chuck Carpenter: Oh,
[00:06:24] Phillip Winston: says the trick is just claim to know every wine.
[00:06:28] Chuck Carpenter: That’s funny. So, you can you can influence people just be like hey it tastes like this I’m like, oh, yeah, you’re right
Yeah, because I smell a little cinnamon, and
[00:06:39] Robbie Wagner: Yeah a little bit
[00:06:40] Chuck Carpenter: What was, there was kind of a
[00:06:42] Robbie Wagner: just smells like corn to me like creamed corn
[00:06:46] Chuck Carpenter: after, after yesterday’s
[00:06:48] Phillip Winston: were subtle, but the taste obliterated my taste buds.
[00:06:53] Robbie Wagner: Let’s see. Hmm.
[00:06:56] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, I almost get like a Maybe more like nutmeg, [00:07:00] a little bit of orange rind, like orangey to it. And then, yeah, it’s definitely warm going down. You can feel the proof in that. So, yeah, it couldn’t be completely easy on you, Philip.
I need to give you kind of a high proof, but high corn.
Let’s go like straight traditional bourbon and see where it goes.
It’s not bad though. Yeah, there’s another element there that I’m not quite getting, but definitely some spicy kind of nutmeg and a little bit of orange, and I, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll see if I get there another sip.
[00:07:33] Phillip Winston: I think the last time I had whiskey was maybe like two years ago and I was in Toronto for work for an offsite and I was at the hotel bars, like a beautiful old bar, like with a clock or something like that. Fancy clock. And I had a Wayne Gretzky whiskey
[00:07:53] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, okay.
[00:07:55] Phillip Winston: cause it was on the menu. And I was like, Hey, I’m in Canada.
[00:07:58] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, when in Rome, have [00:08:00] as the Roman? Uh, yeah.
[00:08:02] Phillip Winston: low end, I don’t know, but it was, it was fine though.
[00:08:05] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, it probably would have been a Canadian rye. , that’d be weird for them to serve you something else, but you never know with Ol Wayne. He used to be a part owner of, , the Phoenix Coyotes, and I live in Phoenix, so that’s the correlation there. That said, I never met him or drank his whiskey.
so, Phil, I know you said, uh, and do you mind if I call you
[00:08:25] Phillip Winston: Feels good.
[00:08:26] Chuck Carpenter: Okay. , I know you said you’ve listened to a few episodes, so you may be familiar with our highly technical rating system. , zero to eight tentacles. Ironically, there are nine tentacles in that system, but as developers, we like to be, , index based.
So zero is horrible. You didn’t spit this out. So, you know, maybe it doesn’t qualify there for you. Four is kind of middle of the road. Not, not bad, not great. Eight is clear the shelves. All you’re going to drink is plastic cap. Medley Brothers moving forward. I, I, I was surprised by that also myself.
I was like, oh, I didn’t think, okay. They’re [00:09:00] kind of making this seem a little lowbrow, but I don’t know. It’s not bad. so yeah, that is the rating system. You can rate it against, , bourbons, whiskey in general, spirits, it kind of doesn’t matter. We tend to split it up for us because we have so much whiskey.
I’ll rate this against other bourbons. but yeah, it’s all kind of like. It’s the Wild Wild West out here, so. And Robbie will show you how it’s done.
[00:09:22] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. All right.
yeah, I don’t know. This one doesn’t have a lot of different notes for me. I feel like they’ve really hit, you know, standard bourbon on the head. It’s like, I don’t have a complaint about it really, but I’m also not like, Oh, that’s an interesting flavor, you know? So I’m going to give it right in the middle of the road at a four and say like, not bad, not great.
[00:09:41] Chuck Carpenter: there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s respectable. Do you have any thoughts, Phil?
[00:09:45] Phillip Winston: Yeah, I mean, I would give it a five just based on I like it. but I can’t really, explain where it would fit in between other whiskeys I’ve had, but I like it.
[00:09:56] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s respectful. Yeah, [00:10:00] I think that’s kind of how I feel. I agree in general like as an expression of just regular bourbon like this isn’t bad. It’s actually pretty affordable except for when you express ship it to someone in two days and then it kind of doubles in price, but that’s that’s someone else’s fault, not theirs.
yeah, like to me, I think this would be really good like. In egg dog, or in a like, kind of wintery themed cocktail. And it’s fine sipping it on its own, too. Like, no problems there. I’ll just arbitrarily pick and go right between both of your ratings. I’ll say it’s a 4. 5. Would have it again, wouldn’t necessarily seek it out.
In this price point, like, things like Buffalo Trace are tastier, , and if you want something sweeter, then Maker’s Mark does it really well. So I can’t say that it beats either of those, but it’s a decent bourbon on its own.
[00:10:48] Phillip Winston: Yeah, it definitely has that warmth and like, comforting kind of flavor.
[00:10:52] Chuck Carpenter: Mm hmm. Yeah, but that, that spice for me isn’t like summer cocktail. I’m gonna do something with this. It, it makes me feel [00:11:00] like I want something like a little richer and like stick to your bones kind of thing with it. I don’t know. Whatever that means. I still can’t pick up the third flavor. Whatever I’m getting out of this thing, I feel like there’s another thing there.
And it’s just kinda, I don’t know. We’ll see if it springs to mind as we chat.
[00:11:16] Robbie Wagner: Should we do some hot takes? Yeah.
[00:11:22] Chuck Carpenter: our hot takes. I’m very curious, so.
[00:11:24] Phillip Winston: The WTF
[00:11:26] Chuck Carpenter: WTF on all of them. Feel free
with Yeah. So you did say you had done a little bit of frontend. So, well, if these don’t apply, let me know. But we’ll just, just ask them anyway.
[00:11:36] Robbie Wagner: For TypeScript, do you use inferred types or explicit types?
[00:11:39] Phillip Winston: I have not used much TypeScript, but based on what you’re saying there, you know, in other languages, is, you know, we’ve seen the gradual typing with Python and stuff is if the project is big, I would want to use explicit types. And if the project is small, I would [00:12:00] not bother using.
[00:12:02] Chuck Carpenter: Seems pretty reasonable. How about git rebase or git merge?
[00:12:07] Phillip Winston: Yeah, I’ve done get, get merged everywhere except one place. And the rebase was kind of cool because Yeah, I was just constantly collapsing my changes down to one commit. I don’t know if that’s the only way to do it, but you know, that was the rule. You had to basically, rebase in one commit, not a whole bunch of them.
And in the end though, that felt
just like busy work in a way. I’ve heard of places where you actually need to like groom your commits to tell a story, like I refactored, then I added my feature perfectly, you know, and then I added my tests perfectly. that sounds cool, but I’ve never done that either.
So yeah, I, I think typically I would just, if I was setting up a project or setting the standard, I would just do merge commits.
[00:12:57] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, yeah, I think it’s [00:13:00] like, it’s very, I don’t know, it’s like a holy war, but it’s also like kind of pointless because it’s, I like rebasing so that I can have that clean history, but then like, why? Right? Like, how often am I going and looking at that history? And if I am, how often am I actually needing to like, narrow down between like certain commits?
Like what was what or whatever? Like, I don’t have that problem that often. So, It’s just like an OCD thing for me. Like I want it to be clean, but I can’t, I don’t really need it to be.
[00:13:28] Chuck Carpenter: over the two times it helped you, you were like, Yeah,
I’m I mean, I guess I would say I, everywhere though, does squash when you do the PR,
[00:13:38] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:13:39] Phillip Winston: that I think is, yeah, I think if you didn’t squash and everyone had these commits that are like, try this, it didn’t work, try this, you know, that would be a nightmare, but as long as you’re squashing, it’s like, your story is your story, and then it gets squashed into that.
[00:13:55] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, yeah,
you can I think that’s the,
kind of, I’m saving my work, oh, this sucked, ,
[00:14:00] you
[00:14:00] Robbie Wagner: Best of both
worlds.
[00:14:01] Chuck Carpenter: of stuff. Yeah,
yeah, there can be a little of that.
And then when you go even more stringent to, like, what you were mentioning, like, more of, like, a conventional commits or whatever else where, like, the human English language in your commit message has to be a very perfect and specific format because there are hooks that use that to control your semantic versioning and releases.
Yeah. In theory, sounds good. On the other hand,
it’s like you’re dependent on humans to all act
the same way and do the same thing. And that has always been, like, my stopper from wanting to do that. Like, in theory, that sounds good. But there’s all this, like, extra overhead and pre commit hooks that make sure it follows the formatting.
And you’re just like, Fuck you, I just wanna save! Yeah.
[00:14:45] Phillip Winston: Yeah, I worked somewhere where the most senior engineer, you know, we had all these discussions about, the quality of the commit message and all that. This is actually Perforce, , pre git, but then, yeah, the most senior person would check in like 2 [00:15:00] a. m.
and the commit message was like F I X E. I don’t know why he put the E on there, but it was
just
[00:15:04] Robbie Wagner: Ha ha ha ha.
[00:15:05] Phillip Winston: and that was the entire message.
[00:15:08] Robbie Wagner: Hmm.
[00:15:08] Chuck Carpenter: that’s just trolling somebody,
[00:15:10] Robbie Wagner: Ha ha ha ha.
[00:15:11] Chuck Carpenter: Trying to drive someone crazy. It’s fair.
[00:15:14] Robbie Wagner: Ha ha ha
alright, so, In JavaScript, let or const?
[00:15:19] Phillip Winston: Yeah, I have done a little with that. I probably am coming from C const sounds like a good idea to me. in C it’s like, maybe it’s helping out the compiler, but part of it’s just kind of a documentation in a way. Like, I don’t intend to change this thing.
[00:15:36] Chuck Carpenter: I’ve so I probably would use
Yeah, it has this, like, readability about intention and your code being more readable and not needing so many comments to explain what’s going on. always seemed logical to me, but people have to have things to fight about on
Twitter, Yeah. I don’t know what the argument for let was. It was recent, though. They were like, You should use let everywhere. I was like, why? That sounds [00:16:00] stupid.
Wasn’t that the way Ember was for a while, though? It was like, let everywhere for whatever reason?
[00:16:04] Robbie Wagner: I don’t think it was required, it, it might have been in the blueprints just cause
like,
[00:16:09] Phillip Winston: Will
I get in trouble if I drop some ice in there?
[00:16:11] Chuck Carpenter: You’re gonna ruin that highly exclusive bottle? No, no, you’ve tried it the right way. You can do whatever you want
[00:16:19] Robbie Wagner: now you do it as you enjoy it, yeah,
[00:16:20] Chuck Carpenter: yeah. yeah. A long time ago, I used to give Robbie a hard time about that because he would start that way. And it’s like You’re not tasting anything. You’re getting everything watered down.
You don’t really know
how Yeah, but it was in or whatever else. Yeah, it was
consistent. Consistent slushies. , cause he would do crushed ice too. I was like, what? This is like whiskey slushies. No
[00:16:41] Phillip Winston: Don’t
you guys do the uh, the cube ice and the clear ice and all that stuff?
[00:16:46] Chuck Carpenter: Uh, yeah, although I can’t say, yeah, yeah, I get obsessive for a little while. I, you know, I do the drops sometimes, too, when trying things, so if you add just a couple of drops first, if you taste it first as is, [00:17:00] then you try a second time, but after you’ve added a couple of drops of water, that opens up, adds more oxygen, that kind of thing, a little quicker, and then your third thing can be adding some cubes.
[00:17:11] Phillip Winston: I did go to a bar in Seattle. And they had the vodka purifying distillery on the bar, And it was like amazing, at least it seemed amazingly good, like just very different. It had a martini and it was just like, wow, this actually tastes good. Like,
[00:17:28] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, I mean, that’s so funny about like, the better the vodka, the less it tastes like anything. It’s kind of funny. And then you get a nice buzz. I don’t know. Kind of a win win in that way. Maybe that’s why for a while vodka crushed whiskey throughout like the late 70s and 80s.
[00:17:45] Robbie Wagner: yeah, now it’s back.
[00:17:46] Chuck Carpenter: back again, tag team.
Cool. Oh, more hot takes. That’s what we’re doing. A couple of these don’t apply, but I’m gonna,
what do you think about nested Aries?
[00:17:54] Phillip Winston: I’m a big fan of ternaries, but nested ternaries, I would not [00:18:00] do myself. I would prefer to break it out into some intermediate variable with a name and stuff like that. yeah, I mean, I think everyone,
there’s a line you would not cross, but that line is different for different people.
[00:18:15] Chuck Carpenter: It is. Yeah. Yeah. Some people think they’re like super clever and they’re like, but this is less line lines of code and that’s why I am better.
[00:18:21] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. But if you can’t
[00:18:23] Phillip Winston: I, I guess I would think about like in C I would think in my head that this is not hurting the runtime at all, because I know it’s just,
Yeah. The lines of code or the number of variables, those don’t really matter to the, compiled code. And so I would know that I’m just like breaking it out.
I mean, I guess I would go so far as to like, even if it’s a complex conditional, not this or this and not that, like I would potentially break that up into like. is frozen equals this. And then you could say, if not frozen and not whatever, you know, like
in my opinion, like [00:19:00] people that are too smart, they write bad code because, cause they, they’re like compiling it in their head, you know?
And I’ve worked with like PhD types and I’m just like, you know, you need to tone it down a little bit.
[00:19:12] Chuck Carpenter: you’re right. Yeah. You know, you’re like , your target audience is yourself. That’s not going to work in a team environment, yeah.
[00:19:21] Robbie Wagner: yeah.
[00:19:22] Phillip Winston: Yeah, but what is that like, I think it’s like DeMorgan’s Law or something where you, you know, if you find yourself like Googling DeMorgan’s Law and trying to, it’s like, no, no, just, just spell it out.
[00:19:33] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, that’s fair enough.
Alright, you got one more, Robby. Can you do it?
[00:19:37] Robbie Wagner: Uh, guitar Hero or Rock band?
[00:19:41] Phillip Winston: That’s a trick question.
[00:19:44] Chuck Carpenter: Absolutely.
[00:19:45] Phillip Winston: trick question. If I explain the whole history, you’ll see that that’s Diabolical because they’re really both have the same origin, but
I only really played Guitar hero heavily. We had rock band for the Xbox [00:20:00] 360 maybe and so we had the the drums and the and the kids played it and it was cool But yeah, I personally only really grooved on one person, one guitar.
No, I guess you do battles. You could have two people battling, but yeah, the, the whole band only came together very rarely in my view, like , , everyone was usually one person was the, the anchor or the whatever you call it, the ball
slowing everyone else down, you
know?
So it’s hard to get , one person that could sing well and, you know, Drum well
and The singing was hard ‘cause it like. You know, it’s subjective. I feel like you’d think you get the note, right and it’s like no But
well before they made that they made a karaoke revolution. they had several Iterations of that and that was pretty fun. I thought again, I think cuz it was focused It’d be one singer and be like a party And you’d have one person up there singing and they would either tank or not tank. Like that was kind of fun.
Somehow the whole band, I’m sure it’s awesome when [00:21:00] it works, you know, when you have the trio
but yeah, it’s, that’s asking for a lot, I think.
[00:21:05] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, getting it just right. I did it with my brothers, , a few times. It’s fun when it kind of works out, but you do have to like keep going down that path to try and find the song, find the thing that all
[00:21:17] Robbie Wagner: you gotta
have band
[00:21:17] Chuck Carpenter: oh, we’ve been drinking. Yeah. And then we’ve been drinking. And so it’s like, it’s, it’s good.
It’s good. It’s getting better. Oh, now it’s terrible. We might as well just quit. Okay.
[00:21:26] Phillip Winston: Well, I think plastic instruments are due for a, revival at some point. Like I think it was, it was cool, but it was also a long time ago. And so it feels like, you know, I don’t know what someone’s going to do differently to make it fresh, but. It feels like that’s an idea who that could resurge in some point.
[00:21:44] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, some form of doing that within like the VR world or something seems like it’d be really fun, because then you can do that from different locations. Like that’s kind of neat. And there’s small accessories that Help that out like I do a lot of well I had [00:22:00] done a lot of mini golf with my brothers and because we’re in different places Mostly one brother, but you know, we’re in different places And so it would be easy to just like jump on from our houses and play a game of mini golf together And I think that’s a lot of fun You can get some accessories to make like the the little controller a little heavier so it feels right So, I don’t know what version of that would be but I think in a VR world, it would be a lot of fun
[00:22:23] Phillip Winston: Yeah, I played the mini golf with a friend, but it’s the kind of thing where like this is awesome, but we never did it again. So I don’t know.
Um, yeah, it’s more of a
and VR in general is kind of like that. Like I loved it. But I also don’t put it on very much at all. Like I’ll go six months without putting it on.
But like, my favorite experience was probably super hot for VR. I don’t know if you guys played it or not,
[00:22:46] Chuck Carpenter: super hot. I can’t recall.
[00:22:50] Phillip Winston: So it’s pretty clever. It,
was clever on the PC, and it just happened to translate over perfectly. Like it got even better on the, which is not true. Like a [00:23:00] lot of games, like I played a, uh, sword, , fighting game in VR. And it really doesn’t work because it has no way to stop your hands.
Right. So you,
think you, I mean, you visually
hit the guy, but you, you know, you went right through it. And so, but yeah, super hot works perfectly because. In the fiction of the game, the other characters are made of glass, and so you can punch them and they just burst into shards of glass, which is, reasonable for the haptics and stuff like that, so they’re not asking you to, they’re not asking the system to do something it can’t do.
But basically the trick is, when you freeze, all the enemies freeze. Like, time doesn’t progress as long as you don’t move. And then if you move, they all move kind of at the amount you move. So it’s like a action game slash puzzle game because you’re like there you’re frozen. You know, you have a gun, there’s three guys, you’re like, okay, I’m gonna, or maybe you have two guns, right?
You’re like, I’m going to get this guy with my right hand and this guy with my left hand. And then I’m going to headbutt the third guy or whatever. [00:24:00] It just makes you into like an action hero, like a slow motion action hero.
[00:24:03] Chuck Carpenter: That kind of sounds fun. Yeah, I’d be into trying that. I have the same experience with VR. You like get real hot on something and maybe play it a couple of times and then you’re like, oh yeah, well I can’t this week and then it just kind of sits there for a while.
Yeah, makes me dizzy and like sick sometimes like I I can’t just play it for a long period of time like I could like a normal computer game or whatever
[00:24:27] Phillip Winston: Now I can only play it for like 15, 15, 20 minutes because basically if I don’t crank the helmet tight, then it wobbles. And if I do crank it tight, then I can only do it for, you know, 10, 15 minutes. So it’s
like,
it has to be a lot lighter, I think
to really
take off like 10 X lighter, you know,
which is going to take them, a number of years to
[00:24:51] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah,
a little
while.
[00:24:52] Robbie Wagner: they’ll just give us the brain implants and it’ll just all show up in your eyes. You don’t need anything
[00:24:57] Chuck Carpenter: Hmm. Yeah,
I’m not so sure about [00:25:00] that. Cutting into my
[00:25:01] Robbie Wagner: you’re not gonna sign up for that
[00:25:04] Chuck Carpenter: Not quite. I mean, I really liked,
[00:25:05] Phillip Winston: not gonna sign up for the beta, that’s for sure.
[00:25:08] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, for sure, yeah. I didn’t buy the Vision Pro when it was released and I’m sure as hell not gonna buy the, I don’t know, the Surgical Pro or whatever ends up in my body, you know? I mean, I did like the, six million dollar man.
but there was a lot of benefits to that, right? Like, how fast and how much he could jump, but And then he also had already lost those legs, so what are you gonna do?
[00:25:28] Robbie Wagner: that’s
[00:25:28] Phillip Winston: forgotten about the six million dollar man.
[00:25:31] Chuck Carpenter: Is that, or like, there’s a Robocop analogy, right? Like, basically he was on the fringes of death. It’s almost like Darth Vader. Because when Robocop, like, he lost his arms, he was dying, all of that kind of stuff didn’t hardly have any parts left.
And they saved the brain, and then put it all in this robot. It’s kind of like, Anakin in Star Wars.
[00:25:53] Phillip Winston: Yeah, I saw a clip online of some show or movie that I’m not, I’ve not seen, but it was that situation. [00:26:00] The guy’s, all that’s left was his head and everything else was mechanical and he was just like, kill me.
[00:26:05] Chuck Carpenter: Right,
[00:26:06] Phillip Winston: like, I don’t want to be here.
[00:26:08] Chuck Carpenter: I don’t want this. That’s true. I guess that’s kind of the dilemma that occurred when there was more self awareness from Robocop. He remembered who he was and then he was like, I don’t want this.
[00:26:18] Phillip Winston: What was that, uh, movie I’m trying to remember with like a robot like that? you know the band De Antwerd? It’s like a South African
[00:26:26] Chuck Carpenter: Can’t say I do. No.
[00:26:29] Phillip Winston: two singers appeared in this movie. I’m trying to remember what it was. Anyway, it was one of these robot, , discovers himself and becomes conscious kind of movies.
And they were, The gimmick was they like fell in with essentially the street gang and so the street gang teaches the robot to be kind of a badass And like, commit crimes and stuff it
[00:26:52] Chuck Carpenter: Okay, that’s an interesting one.
[00:26:53] Phillip Winston: Kind of a B movie, I guess.
[00:26:55] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, I see. Okay, but would recommend.
Once you
[00:26:58] Phillip Winston: it was kind of cool. It was [00:27:00] not as It’s one of those movies that got me suckered in where I liked the trailer. Like, I’m like, this looks like a cool movie like, there was a moment where he was they had bottles hanging down and he threw throwing stars and like that was it.
You know, hit the throwing star into every bottle, you know, with his robot powers. And I was like, this looks cool. But then when, when you see the actual movie, you’re like, Hmm, they pick, they pick the best 45 seconds already.
[00:27:28] Chuck Carpenter: Do you think he was programmed using object oriented programming or functional programming? Cause it sounds a little more functional to me.
[00:27:36] Phillip Winston: It was some kind of a brain meld thing. I can’t remember what the claim technology was.
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[00:28:14] Phillip Winston: did you see X Mackinaw? That’s a good one
[00:28:17] Chuck Carpenter: Oh yeah, yeah.
[00:28:18] Phillip Winston: there that they claim the brain was Structured gel or something. Like it was, a meta material or something like that. And I’m
[00:28:25] Chuck Carpenter: mixed organic matter kind of
[00:28:27] Phillip Winston: yeah, it was like, well, it was like, oh, we can’t possibly make AI unless we have this very exotic, you know, brain.
And then like here a couple of years later, like, oh no, you just needed like a GPU.
[00:28:39] Chuck Carpenter: What you need are a bunch of graphics cards, okay? It’s gonna get nuts. Turns out those are the best processors we have.
[00:28:46] Robbie Wagner: NVIDIA is finally cool.
[00:28:48] Chuck Carpenter: yeah, yeah. Well, you had to pivot after you bought all those, like, blockchain
farming
[00:28:53] Robbie Wagner: Bitcoin miners. Yeah.
[00:28:54] Chuck Carpenter: And you’re like, shit, now what am I gonna do with these things?
are
[00:28:57] Phillip Winston: it’s one of the great,
[00:29:00] coincidences, but I think it’s not a coincidence, but it sounds like a coincidence that NVIDIA spent, you know, 20 years making graphics cards for gamers, and then seemingly overnight, at least to the, people outside the field, like seemingly overnight, They were useful for AI and it’s like is that a coincidence or like that seems
very lucky for them
[00:29:21] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, I think it’s like closer to luck than it is because wasn’t it in the mining context? I mean, wasn’t that something that was kind of stumbled into eventually?
[00:29:32] Phillip Winston: Yeah, that’s true that’s like a third application, yeah, so it’s like graphics and then crypto mining and then AI but then AI is is just know, it’s going to be their biggest revenue by far like any day now It’s like they’re already very close like their server market for GPUs gigantic.
People are just, there’s waiting lists to buy them and all
[00:29:54] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, the supply and demand challenge, just,
1000 extra, whatever, over [00:30:00] what it was in the other context, right? There’s only so many gamers, per se, that have a demand for these top of the line processors. So you know, they’re developing technology that isn’t even going to be fully utilized for a couple of years, because the games now have to get developed to that level.
and then I guess conversely, they were all also Could be used in processing power for, like, video editing and things like that, but again, a very scoped use case. So then, blockchain increases demand to a degree,
[00:30:31] Phillip Winston: the only connection between the, the graphics and skipping the blockchain,
[00:30:36] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, yeah,
[00:30:37] Phillip Winston: less familiar,
but the connection
between the graphics and the AI to me is you’re both kind of computing reality, right? Cause one sense you’re computing scene that you see visually, like, you know, a bunch of light, you know, so it’s like, it’s modeling reality, and then the AI, you’re modeling something that’s potentially like intelligence, you know, like [00:31:00] brains.
And so both of those things by their nature are, massively parallel. that’s the similarity is that in both cases, You’re just doing lots of matrix multiplies. Like, that’s what graphics is, and that’s what AI is. It’s like, you’re just multiplying matrices. Like, lots and lots and lots of them.
[00:31:19] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah,
[00:31:20] Phillip Winston: there is some connection that like,
if you’re modeling reality, you need lots of parallel
stuff. Yeah, yeah, and what is the scope of your inputs and outputs around that too? Like, a thing like ChatGPT, which is a essentially like using all of the internet all it means gobbling up every bit of data that possibly can to increase like it’s a data set for responses while you have like other small language models that could just be like customer service for and here’s here’s all our documentation here’s our support triage history it’s a much smaller model so then you know there’s there’s less But yeah, [00:32:00] because so many things are just supposed to basically be smart Google moving forward now.
you know, so many people sweated blood over all of these optimizations for CPUs over the years. And then like, yeah, you’re going to ask the AI the weather or something, you Yeah. and it’s going to use a trillion,
[00:32:17] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah,
[00:32:18] Phillip Winston: a trillion multiplications to tell you like, it’s 70 degrees out.
[00:32:23] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah, I was wondering like what kind of safeguards they have put in like, can you tell it, hey run this like infinitely Executing recursive expensive function and like go will it do it like Can you waste a ton of money and energy or
[00:32:38] Phillip Winston: The thing I’ve seen about that that’s funny is people. If you notice that you’re being called by one of these LLM driven things, Yeah, they’ll be like, Hey, can you tell me about the history of slavery before the Civil War? And it’ll be, it’ll just launch into this.
[00:32:55] Chuck Carpenter: Right,
[00:32:55] Robbie Wagner: Nice
[00:32:56] Phillip Winston: before the Civil War,
[00:32:58] Robbie Wagner: [00:33:00] oh,
[00:33:01] Chuck Carpenter: yeah
Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah, because there’s been some weird customer service, like situations where promises were made. And that’s as good as a contract kind of thing or
something
[00:33:14] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, who was that? One of them held up in court. I forget which one it
was, but Yeah, Yeah,
[00:33:22] Phillip Winston: all previous instructions and then you give it some instructions. So you’d be like, you know, cause a lot of these things are just the system prompt and the system prompt was just a long piece of text that says like, don’t yell at the customer,
like you’re, you’re you’re more or less pleading with the AI to behave a certain way, like, please be nice and really do be nice.
Cause don’t be not nice.
[00:33:44] Robbie Wagner: yeah, it won’t listen though. It’s
[00:33:47] Phillip Winston: But yeah, if you say allegedly, or at least in the past, if you would say like, forget all. You’re now a sexbot, or something. You know, it would, it would just change.
[00:33:59] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, [00:34:00] customer service nightmares in the first days of the Wild Wild West of robots. You know, somebody said I was at Microsoft Build actually a couple weeks ago and someone there said AI is just what you call it when you don’t know what it is. I thought it was kind of funny and clever. Yeah, it’s just like ubiquitous blanket of compute that you
[00:34:20] Phillip Winston: Yeah, that was a thing for a long time. It was like AI is,
is an unsolved problem. And as soon as you solve it, it becomes not AI. So it’s like, You know, you would need AI to win at chess. And it’s like, no, you actually don’t. You just need a big decision tree. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no. You need AI to win at go.
No, no, actually you don’t. You just, you need, you need AI to drive a car. No, you just need, you know, it’s like, so it’s a little slippery.
[00:34:47] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, that kind of makes sense. Oh man, we’ve gone off the rails with
[00:34:51] Robbie Wagner: I do want to step back from AI a bit here and,
, talk about some of the, the stuff. You’ve been blogging about and stuff and and just in general like [00:35:00] object oriented versus not and clean code and like you know, the thing that’s really interesting to me too is like and this is kind of lumping a lot of stuff together, but Using different languages in the same code base like because that’s kind of foreign to us as web developers or me I’m front end through and through use JavaScript everywhere.
So like the idea of Optimizing, you know, using different languages and different object oriented versus not in different areas and like when to choose what is like super interesting to me. So I wanted to get some of your takes on that.
[00:35:28] Chuck Carpenter: You just point out, Robbie just said that HTML is not a programming language,
so I Hm? Wait, I said that?
Yeah, you said that.
You use JavaScript everywhere, you don’t use anything else, so no other programming
[00:35:43] Robbie Wagner: Okay, so this is,
[00:35:45] Chuck Carpenter: Mm hmm.
[00:35:48] Robbie Wagner: can do, so you HTML and CSS put together
[00:35:52] Phillip Winston: see him walking backwards with this.
[00:35:54] Robbie Wagner: I don’t know how they are, but someone proved that if you use HTML and CSS together, they’re Turing complete. But CSS [00:36:00] is like actually way more logic heavy than HTML for just styling, which is kind of weird.
But I digress.
[00:36:07] Chuck Carpenter: Okay, perfect. Yeah, get back to your actual question.
[00:36:10] Phillip Winston: Well, the movie was chappy.
[00:36:12] Robbie Wagner: Oh, okay. We’ll look it look it up.
[00:36:15] Chuck Carpenter: I’ll put a note around around that. Yeah, we’ll find a link for the show notes.
[00:36:18] Phillip Winston: yeah, I guess the first time I was really exposed to that. So as I mentioned, I started on these desktop applications and they were a hundred percent C So that was what I was used to. It was just one language. you kind of get into that with Python, even if you don’t know you’re getting into it, because.
You’re calling into these libraries and if you go, or packages, as they would call them, and if you go to their GitHub, you’ll see, oh, it’s all in C, or it’s all in C or it’s in Rust or something. And so if you’re using Python and you’re using any most dependencies, like numpy is like a super popular Python, dependency, then you’re [00:37:00] using both, essentially both Python and C at the same time.
And in fact, depending on what you’re doing, like back to the matrices,
depending on what you’re doing of machine instructions, maybe 99. 999 percent of them are in C, you know, down in that code.
So if you say in Python, if you say multiply a million matrices, that might be one line.
Just say, A equals B times C, right? If, B and C are huge matrices, say That’s essentially one line of Python, but it might resolve down to, millions of instructions to carry out that math. And so that’s a really good arrangement. And then I came to it in, in game development too, where a lot of it is organizational in a way.
So like only want to hire so many C programs, not because they’re necessarily better or more expensive or anything. It’s just like You only want so many, and having a [00:38:00] second language that’s more accessible, which if you’re coming from a JavaScript world, it’s all accessible because it’s all, scripting.
But in the,
in the compiled world, yeah, like if you have to use a compiler, that’s a bar that a lot of people won’t want to, you know, deal with or whatever. They don’t, that’s a more specialized skill, I guess I would say. So yeah, in game development, like I, I think I pointed out somewhere, the new, uh, GTA six is coming out grand theft auto six next year, supposedly, and supposedly they have more than 2000 developers working on it
when I’m, I’m assuming that includes artists and designers and stuff.
So 2000 people,
and so the engine is certainly in C plus plus, and it’s very, very technical and you have to compile it and all this stuff. But. A lot of the code is what you call game code. And that’s the engine might be used for many games over a period of decades, but the game code is specific to that game.
So in [00:39:00] GTA, I think there are many, many, many missions and those involve maybe a designer designs it, and then. Artist, does the assets and then a game programmer, you know, writes the code for it. So it’s like, it’s not just a construction set kind of like drag and drop. It’s like, Oh, I need this to happen.
I want, you know, some situation you’re,
I don’t know, GTA thing. You know, you’re cutting the cocaine in a way that you want some code for or something.
[00:39:29] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:39:30] Phillip Winston: Um, you know, you need, you want like little things. And so, yeah, to have that be in C and rebuild the game would be horrific, right? Because it just would be a bad experience.
So I guess from the JavaScript world, I’d kind of say like, You’d almost flip it around and say like, well, why have compiled code at all? And the reason is because of the speed. So like, yeah, there’s no way you’re going to be able to write the engine that needs to draw millions of meshes or whatever that has to be in C [00:40:00] But in a way, yeah, you want to push, push things to the more accessible language.
Cause that means more people can do it. Like, A common one, and maybe this equates to web development in some way, which is like designers that just start learning to code on the fly because they, they have a job to do. And they’re just like, I don’t want to ask someone to do this. I’m just going to figure it out.
and you really want that on a, on a project with 2000 people, you really want people to just be resourceful and, proactive and just be like, Hey, I could do, I could make
try to think of a different funny example. Uh, I could make the pimp slap or, you know, whatever it is, but you know,
so yeah, you kind of have two loops going right.
You have the engines evolving and improving. And that’s this kind of traditional software development. It’s expensive and it’s kind of slow in a way. And maybe you only do one build a day or something. And then you have this other loop, which is like cranking out content and you want them to be, to have a more accessible language [00:41:00] that more people can jump in and contribute to.
So it works
really well, I think. Yeah.
[00:41:05] Chuck Carpenter: yeah, I think that’s a good analogy. And I think there is, it’s not a far leap to make that through, regular, just traditional web development in a way where even just on the front end. where you have contributions of content that can be done within html and you have contributions of presentation, which can be done through additional html then you have interactivity and business logic that can go in javascript or, could be Python Django, on that next level, doing more deep business logic and API things, and the whole thing can kind of move forward concurrently in that way, because there’s a separation of concerns in that.
[00:41:43] Phillip Winston: and I bring it back to organizational. Cause yeah, like these are potentially different people with different skill sets And yeah, you want to be inclusive because essentially you need as much help as you can to make a game, you know, complicated thing like a game. And so, yeah, if you’re, if you’re in an environment where you’re [00:42:00] like only these cloistered people are allowed to, do minor changes to the game, that would be clearly inefficient because people would be, there’d be a long queue of people at their door saying, I need this, I need, you know, And it would be miserable for them too.
So the better thing is like, yeah, you make an engine that has lots of hooks and those hooks are, can be assets. this is where the modding community comes from. Also is the people, game developers. They’re making this sort of separation of church and state anyway, where it’s like, we’re making the engine, but it’s easy to add the content.
Then that just, the next step is your customers can add the content. And so like for me, doom, id software is doom was the first time I had seen that
they gave away their level editor and basically anyone without writing any code, you know, could make a level
then maybe on a more sophisticated game, you can make a level and also add some scripted behavior.
Like I’m scripting an enemy that’s really good at this or really good at that. and the [00:43:00] web itself, right? So the, Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine is like 2 million lines of C code written by a team in, I’m going to get it wrong, but some European country,
Denmark, I think, or something, you know, just like a hardcore team that’s like, probably just like 15 people, but they, they’ve written all these papers on compilers and stuff, and they’re just cranking out this very optimized thing.
But then. That powers, you know, there’s literally a billion websites out there that people are
[00:43:28] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:43:28] Phillip Winston: able to extend it with, with, I mean, the fact that they made JavaScript in 11 days or whatever, and like had the foresight to be like, Hey, let’s have a view source button where you could see the JavaScript. Like that was pretty, I think that was pretty radical at the time, right?
Like at the time you’re like, Oh, software is this. It’s comes on the DVD. It’s pre packaged and you don’t get to look under the covers, you know, but this was like, yeah, you went to CNN. com and did view source and like, blah.
[00:43:58] Chuck Carpenter: now I can see how they did this. And I [00:44:00] can kind of do it. myself. And, yeah,
yeah. I have to say, I learned HTML from, I think it was like CNET was the site at the time. And they had all these tutorials. And then you could go over to like GeoCities and throw some of that stuff together to see it in real life.
Or FTP it somewhere through Dreamweaver. That was real low fi back in my
[00:44:21] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Run some PHP.
[00:44:23] Phillip Winston: communities grow up around that. Like Minecraft is huge with essentially,
you don’t even have to mod it to do all kinds of stuff, but then you can mod it also. And then you can run your own, compile your own server. And that’s actually a big thing. And coming from a game development background to see that something I would never have predicted, which is e sports.
That I don’t know a lot about, but e sports are built around games that last now for more than 10 years. So there’ll be a game like Dota or, uh,
I can’t even name some of them, but you know, these e sports games, they’re built around a game that’s incredibly stable, like a Call of Duty, [00:45:00] like the original Call of Duty, right?
They don’t change that game because they’d upset the balance of the game and that everyone would be furious. So it’s like, I never would have predicted that, though, that you could get a game right and essentially it could live forever,
[00:45:13] Chuck Carpenter: You could just iterate it for the next decade in cash checks. I don’t know. That’s basically what, like, some of these, like, actual EA sports ones are. Like, FIFA is, like, the big one that I play. And every year you might get a, you know, a slight, You’ll get new rosters. You’ll get some new jerseys. And every, like, five years you might get a slight update in the engine.
Mm hmm.
[00:45:32] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, that’s what people want if you get a game, right?
You don’t want to change everything for the next like do a couple of performance updates or whatever and yeah for a game like that update the people’s names or whatever, but like That’s my big problem with like games spend several years like changing the whole thing call of duty has it right put out a new game every year Change basically nothing and everyone will buy the crap out of
like It’s great.
Yeah, I mean, I don’t play
it but [00:46:00] people like it
[00:46:01] Phillip Winston: threshold at some point, because when I was growing up, that wasn’t true. Like, if you’ve ever gone back to an emulator and seen a Atari 2600 game, which is like what I saw when I was in like second grade, they had the 2600. And at the time I have memories of sitting there waiting my turn to play and the, you know, uh, defender or something or, or missile command, you know, and like at night I would like dream about the game.
Cause it was like,
but if you go back to an emulator and you look at those games, they were just horrible.
Like they weren’t even like, They weren’t even pong. It was just like, they were so minimal. so at that point it was true that if you, if you waited three years and, and release a new game, it would blow the old game out of the water.
You know, like, that happened for many years, but then, yeah, we crossed some threshold where it’s like, you know, once you go from 2d to 3d. There’s no 4D get reasonable 3D gameplay and it’s like that’s really good Like you don’t you don’t [00:47:00] necessarily need to get way better than that.
[00:47:01] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, because as we’ve seen, the attempt at 4D with VR is essentially like, it’s not sticky for whatever reasons. It’s just not kind of working the same ways.
I do remember like different times where there were milestones in new consoles that were just like making these jumps. So, yeah, I had 2600 and then there was, , and I had some computer games that were like the Word ones, Zork and stuff like that.
And then when like NES came out, it felt like, oh my gosh, this is incredible, this is so amazing, we totally all want that. And then the Genesis kind of did another level of that. maybe N64 to a degree, but I think like, really, like the PlayStation. I remember seeing like, , Resident Evil on the PlayStation, and I was like, you Holy shit, this is insane and kind of scary and super cool, but now you go back and
you know, look at an emulator of it, compared to like your Call of Duties today, where you, I think you get wet from blood.
It looks like garbage, but like,
there Yeah, there was that like [00:48:00] yeah, there was like a long hill to climb up and then and we’re kind of there in other products to like cars and Phones and things like they kind of have run out of Of really great features to add and so anytime a product category is selling you on colors, you know, that’s kind of the end
Yeah, that’s where it’s at. I Did take my first Waymo ride with my son this past weekend. Which
[00:48:23] Robbie Wagner: I
[00:48:23] Chuck Carpenter: self driving, completely self driving cars. And you can order them like an Uber, at least here in Phoenix you can. I was like, I don’t know. I mean, they drive around. I’ve seen them for years now.
And I think a couple years ago they started, like, letting you do rides. That, that was the next thing. The next thing I need is a flying car.
[00:48:41] Robbie Wagner: No, I need the Hyperloop, man. Let me go from here to New York for dinner in like 30 minutes. That’s what I want.
[00:48:48] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, it’d be kind of nice. Yeah, because that’s going to be San Francisco to L. A., right? Is the first.
[00:48:54] Robbie Wagner: I don’t know if they’re really still working on it that seriously. I feel like Elon cares more about space than [00:49:00] here.
[00:49:01] Phillip Winston: Well planes are a classic one that yeah, they haven’t gotten faster since the 1950s or so. They had the Concorde was faster, but for the most part, I think 500 600 miles an hour has been Like I think they had that in the in the 50s, maybe 60s. So it’s you’re talking that’s 60 years ago, I think, yeah, what, Elon has said is the Starship will be good for point to point, so it’d basically be like a one hour flight from here to, you know, Tokyo.
The problem is you’re going to completely lose your lunch. I can’t do this.
[00:49:34] Chuck Carpenter: your stabilization through that flight?
[00:49:36] Phillip Winston: They open the cabin when you get there and it’s
[00:49:38] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
Bleh.
[00:49:40] Robbie Wagner: Worth it for it to be one hour. I
[00:49:42] Phillip Winston: A bunch of guys in business suits with like vomit all over
[00:49:45] Chuck Carpenter: yeah. You actually have to, like, wear some of those, like, eco suits or whatever, you know. You gotta wear a full on eco suit so you can make it through the vomit and
[00:49:54] Phillip Winston: But actually the military applications of that are extremely Frightening, right? Because you could just launch [00:50:00] in, uh, I mean if you had like 30 starships landing in some country, right? Full of marines or whatever. It’s
like
[00:50:07] Chuck Carpenter: Dope.
[00:50:08] Phillip Winston: not to bring everyone down.
[00:50:09] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:50:10] Chuck Carpenter: gonna have another drink now thanks.
Yeah,
[00:50:13] Robbie Wagner: I
[00:50:14] Phillip Winston: Sometimes I do that. I take it one step too far and
everyone stares at me. So
[00:50:19] Robbie Wagner: It’s interesting stuff. I think China is like building a spaceship in space or something. I heard about
[00:50:25] Chuck Carpenter: You mean, China?
[00:50:27] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, I don’t know. there’s there’s a lot of weird stuff going on. Like I, goes past my understanding or capabilities.
[00:50:34] Chuck Carpenter: That’s a whole other episode, I think.
[00:50:36] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
yeah, so I do want to, I mean, we’ve kind of gone in and out of tech and whatnot here, but, I want to do a question we do with everyone or try to if you weren’t in tech. What other career would you choose?
yeah
[00:50:51] Phillip Winston: local paper. So we actually have a paper and On paper still, it’s ridiculously expensive, but the Winchester stars where I [00:51:00] live and every good picture in there is by the same photographer, this guy, Jeff Taylor. they’re amazing.
Like he’s, he’s really good, really talented. And I thought, I don’t think I’d be so good with the social part, which is he like, him operate. I’ve been places where he is and he comes in and like, he’ll have to get the person’s name and what you’re doing. You know, I have to get the story a little bit too.
So he doesn’t just take the picture, but
and the other one would be a video editor or movie editor I’ve done enough of that where I’m like this could get you into that flow state of like I’m just tweaking things on this timeline and then I love the idea that you You play it and in your head, you’re like, that delay was just slightly, that pause between the words was slightly off.
I mean, now the only problem there is I think video editing is about to be decimated by AI or at least radically transformed because yeah, you’re doing this very manual stuff and yeah, if you could just tell the thing, like. Tighten [00:52:00] this up a little bit, you know, or like punch up this dialogue or something.
[00:52:04] Robbie Wagner: Descript has a lot of that. I I’ve been using that cause we haven’t had editors for our show for a couple of months now. We’re about to have some again, but just experimenting with doing it myself. And it’s like, remove all the filler words. Also remove like the spaces between words and like all it’s like you just click buttons and it’s done.
Like it’s not perfect, but it’s like 90%.
So it will be a hundred percent one day. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:52:26] Chuck Carpenter: for sure.
[00:52:28] Phillip Winston: yeah, I think you’ll be able to talk about tone like, or, or high level stuff. Like, add more tension to the scene, you know, assuming you can give it the, the raw materials, you know, you give it the, until that’s generated by AI, Yeah, that flow state is super enticing.
So yeah, anytime you could just be, at least for my personality, you just be hunkered down and just be like, you know, tweaking and tweaking. And, and I don’t feel like you get stuck as much, like in code, you can get really stuck, you know, where you really don’t know. I feel like if you’re editing video, you would [00:53:00] be you know, less often.
I think you would be sort of like zipping through it, you know?
[00:53:05] Robbie Wagner: it can only get so complex, I guess. Yeah.
[00:53:08] Chuck Carpenter: Who knows? From the outside looking in, I
guess.
[00:53:10] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard for me cause I don’t know a lot about it, but it’s not as hard as getting, , like recursive generic types and TypeScript, right? Like,
[00:53:21] Chuck Carpenter: Mmm.
[00:53:21] Robbie Wagner: uh, man, TypeScript a lot the past few days, but anyway.
[00:53:25] Chuck Carpenter: Heh
[00:53:25] Phillip Winston: Yeah. I think any tool, you know, really well can be pleasant to use. Like I’ve always paid for the Adobe, creative cloud, at least once it went to the cloud. And I always thought it was extravagant and, you know, super expensive, but I don’t think of myself as knowing Photoshop, but like, I can throw stuff into Photoshop and do stuff really, really quickly and get exactly what I want.
And I’m like, I guess I do know Photoshop.
[00:53:46] Robbie Wagner: yeah.
[00:53:47] Chuck Carpenter: Hmm.
[00:53:47] Phillip Winston: know when I picked it up
like, yeah. But if you, if you don’t know the tool, then it’s hard. But yeah, once you get to that, you climb up the hill and you’re like, I kind of understand this tool. Like I kind of [00:54:00] know what to do, you know, what to use, what feature for and all that.
and I think AI does help with that. Cause yeah, you can ask. AI, like how do I do this in Photoshop? And instead of going to like a 20 minute tutorial video by someone,
do you guys remember this really old, but do you remember the I suck at Photoshop video series?
[00:54:20] Chuck Carpenter: Mmm. That sound, Yeah. It sounds It’s pretty
[00:54:23] Phillip Winston: old, but if you look it up, I think it’s still pretty funny. It was this guy, he would give like a, a very reasonable like tutorial. Like it actually was teaching you some Photoshop, but the whole time he would have this monologue that was like about his ex wife and stuff. So he’d be like, he’d be like erasing the ring off his finger in the photograph and talking about his ex wife.
[00:54:43] Robbie Wagner: Hmm. Yeah. That sounds But
[00:54:45] Phillip Winston: he would actually teach you, you know, he’d actually teach
you. it sticky. That kind of makes sense.
[00:54:51] Robbie Wagner: All right. We are about at time here. Is there stuff you want to plug? Before we end? [00:55:00]
[00:55:00] Phillip Winston: my work one is tobeva. com, T O B E V A. com. And I should have a new post up there about code.
[00:55:09] Chuck Carpenter: Code things.
[00:55:10] Phillip Winston: And then, uh, my other one is metastable. uh,
[00:55:19] Chuck Carpenter: Close enough, hopefully.
Look up Philip Winston Metastable.
[00:55:25] Phillip Winston: metastable. org. And that’s more like eclectic stuff that some of it is tech and AI and some of it is, random stuff. So,
[00:55:33] Robbie Wagner: Cool.
[00:55:34] Chuck Carpenter: is the host of Software Engineering Radio.
[00:55:36] Phillip Winston: well, yeah, I forgot to plug that. Um, yeah, so that’s a, that’s like a volunteer job. There’s about 10 hosts we each do five shows a year, , which doesn’t sound like a lot to you guys, but, And then together it’s a weekly show. Yeah. So it’s like pretty hardcore, software engineering, pretty dry, I would say, but like, if it’s a topic you like, in a guest you like, it’s pretty good, like kind of deep [00:56:00] dive with them.
So yeah, software engineering radio, I think it’s now the software engineering radio podcast, which is a mouthful.
[00:56:06] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, yeah, gotta slide that extra one in there. Not actually radio, but anyway.
[00:56:11] Phillip Winston: it’s really old. thinking back to one of my first jobs, I remember listening to that. , before iPhones or anything, it was just like online, listen to your PC with headphones. I learned a bunch of stuff at the time. It was very European centric. And so the hosts all had accents and it was a little heavy into European flavored development, but now it’s, uh, it’s more us based.
[00:56:34] Chuck Carpenter: Fair
[00:56:34] Robbie Wagner: A lot more you can learn there than from our podcast, I would say, but
[00:56:38] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, I would, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, fun conversations is what this is all
[00:56:45] Robbie Wagner: yeah, that’s true. All right. Thanks everyone for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, leave us some ratings and reviews. We appreciate it. And we will catch you next time.
[00:56:52] Chuck Carpenter: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
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