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Clockwise
648: My Couch Doesn't Get Updated
00:29:54
How far off we are from full self-driving cars, the software systems we wish would never update, the app launchers we use on our Macs, and the ATProtocol moment.
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- [00:02]
A
It's Time for episode 648 of the Clockwise podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, March 18, 2026. Clockwise for people. Four tech topics, 30 minutes.
- [00:27]
B
Welcome back to Clockwise the tech Podcast, where with the luck of the Irish, we'll finish this episode on time. I am one of your hosts, Micah Sargent, who sometimes forgets to change the date in the spreadsheet. But don't worry, because my pal, my good friend, the one and only Dan Moran, will make sure to correct it in his head while he's speaking. Good job, Dan.
- [00:48]
A
Thank you. After almost 650 episodes, I always check first. That's what I've learned. There you go. That's the guarantee, the clockwise guarantee for you.
- [01:00]
B
And while you're checking that first, I'm checking who's joining us today. To my left, it's generally nice person Casey Liss. Hello, Casey.
- [01:11]
A
Hello.
- [01:11]
C
Now, see, I feel like if I am introduced with the title of generally nice person, that really sets a positive tone for the remainder of our time together because I really need to live up to that hype. So I'm gonna have to put away all the mean parts of my life and just be generally kind.
- [01:26]
A
Deep down in a box and to my left this week, it is super gay nerd Brian Guffey. Welcome back, Brian.
- [01:34]
D
Hello. Happy to be here. I figured if Casey's a generally nice person, I'm a super gay nerd. Or is it a super nerd gay? I'm not sure. Honestly.
- [01:42]
A
I think you can be that even without Casey being a generally nice person. I'm just saying your. Your identity is not dependent on his.
- [01:48]
D
Okay, that's certainly true.
- [01:51]
A
You be you. You be the most you.
- [01:53]
D
I love it. You don't know how to be anything else.
- [01:56]
B
Very episode of clockwise. You all know how this works. We've got 30 minutes and four topics. Mine for you is this. I'm just curious. How far off do you think we are from full self driving cars? There is a story in the Atlantic about one of the people involved with fsd, I think for Uber, nearly died in a Tesla car crash. But yeah, I don't know. Are you eager for the future of full self driving?
- [02:27]
D
True.
- [02:27]
B
Full self driving. Kasey, we'll start with you.
- [02:30]
C
Will we ever get to full self driving? Maybe. I mean, I would assume so, because anytime as a youth, when I say, oh, this will never happen, it inevitably happens. But I do feel like it's further away than we think it is. I would say to the order of 10 or 20 years, not to the order of two to five years. But this is the same, I was the same person that when I was a kid argued that one could never use a gigabyte, ever. It's impossible. Now granted this was like I think the early 90s or something like that, but still it would be impossible to use an entire gigabyte, fill a gigabyte worth of data. Couldn't do it. But am I eager for this future in terms of improved safety, if such a thing really is possible? Yes, absolutely. You know, I live in suburban America where I pretty much need a car to accomplish anything. And if I could make that experience safer for everyone involved both inside my car and in the cars around me, then yeah, I am eager for this future. Even despite the fact that like Dan, you know, still drive a Volkswagen with three pedals and I still enjoy doing that every day. And I will. I'm already lamenting the time when I eventually stop doing that and get, you know, an automatic car that's more of an appliance than it is an experience. But I don't know, I just, I think it's further away than everyone claims it is. But maybe I'm just a negative. Ned.
- [03:44]
A
I'm kind of, I'm kind of with you, Casey, on a lot of your feelings here in some way. I have a long running argument with my best friend from college who is an emergency room doctor who thinks there's nothing that cannot be fixed by self driving cars. And you know, he is coming at this from the perspective of someone who sees, you know, oftentimes people arriving who have been in horrific accidents, oftentimes people who have been driving under the influence and getting horrific accidents. And I totally understand where he's coming from from that perspective. But as somebody who knows stuff about like software, I'm equally worried. Right. Like I if from the outside it might seem like, oh, it's great, the computer. There's no way the computer could be worse than the people and friends. The computer can definitely be worse people at times now, I mean, in neither case do we have something that's going to be a perfect system. Right. I, I don't think that the certainly it will eliminate, you know, accidents to have computer driving cars. We've already seen plenty of these. I think the, the things like Waymo have proved that self driving is plausible. I think it probably works better in a system where either everything is self driving or nothing is self driving rather than this weird mix of some things are self driving, some things are human driven. I'm not super looking forward to it. From the perspective of somebody who, like Casey, enjoys driving and also is a bit of a control freak. And probably those two things go together. But you know, certainly I agree there are cases where I think it could provide a lot of functionality that might be needed for things like, you know, accessibility and accommodations for that. You know, I've got two aging parents, my father is in his mid-80s and still insists on driving. And, and I feel that at some point that will not be plausible anymore and it will be harder for them to get around. And having a car that could take them places they want to go, much as he would hate that would still leave them the option to have some degree of autonomous movement in a way that they might be able to handle in a way that they're not going to want to call lifts for everything or something like that. I think it goes hand in hand with a lot of other things too. Improvements in public transportation infrastructure and you know, sort of the advent of E bikes and all those things too. But yeah, it's coming not as soon as people want, but also probably sooner than I'd like. Brian?
- [05:59]
D
Yeah, I don't expect it to come that soon. Mainly because I really believe that for it to be really effective you've got to do like everybody all at once. And because the real benefit you get is when all of the cars are self driving and not when like some of the cars are self driving and we still have crazy people on the road driving. So I just like, I don't see us getting over that hump. I think that more likely what we'll start seeing more quickly than that is just like, oh, here's my own little like tiny hovercraft or my tiny little helicopter and I can go where I want and we just sort of skip that whole like let's make cars better to like what if not cars, but still personal conveyances. And then we can still drive cars for fun, but for fun only.
- [06:52]
B
I love to hear that everybody here is still on board with the idea that it is potentially a safer thing. When I've talked to people sort of outside of the tech space about this, there are lots of mentions of the accidents that have taken place and there's not as much of an awareness of how many more accidents are taking place at the exact same time because humans are involved. And also how many times the accidents with the self driving car are the result of another human being involved in the situation. And so I'm glad that there's at least that awareness and I think that that will help make this a possibility in the future. I really like driving as well. And it's also some of, like, my best thinking time. And so I don't want to miss out on that opportunity. But there are other times where, by golly, it'd be nice to just sit in a vehicle and be able to do whatever I want to do and know that I'm going to get to my destination. That's pretty cool as well. So thank you all for your thoughts on that. Let's go to our next topic, which comes from Casey.
- [08:01]
C
So sticking with the car theme, Just stick with me on that. Are there any software systems in your life that you wish wouldn't update? Or perhaps you could say, never update and never ask me to do so again? I know the clockwise expectation is for me to answer my own question last. But to explain my segue that I probably shouldn't have committed to Aaron's car. She has a Volvo XC90 that is due to get a software upgrade imminently that vastly revamps the infotainment setup in her car.
- [08:29]
B
Oh, no.
- [08:30]
C
For all. Well, exactly right. So it could be that it'll be a vast improvement. It might. I'm not sure. But she certainly knows where everything is now. And everything is about to get rearranged. And like any regular human, she's not extremely enthusiastic about, you know, the deck chairs being rearranged, if you will. And so it's one of those situations where maybe it would be better Even if the new version is improved in some small way, you know, in this section or that section, it might be better to just tell the car, no, never, never. Thank you very much. But maybe that's a. Maybe that's dumb. I don't know. Are there any systems like that in your lives that where you. You want to say, you know what, I'm good where I am. Thank you.
- [09:10]
A
I think that you're right in that there are classes of devices that certainly are things where you're expecting, you know, more consistency and disruption can be. Even if it improves things, Disruption can still be unwarrante cause problems. I feel like cars is a good example of that because it is something that is kind of critical to the use of stuff. You don't want people having to figure a new way of doing things While they are also operating an automobile. I might add, like some types of appliances, like, I've never seen a substantial appliance to say, like my induction stove have like a major update that changes. Like, oh, now the things that control the heat go in the opposite Direction.
- [09:49]
B
Right.
- [09:49]
A
Like they're not going to do that. Right. That would be bad. But certainly over time there are things that have updated and I don't like them as much. I'm thinking about, you know, I've got some E readers here. Like a Kindle. I think Kindle software has improved, but there are times when I was. I was used to the way that things worked and then they would rearrange things or they would take features away. And I don't really want to be the person who's stuck in the past and insisting things never change. But there is, you know, I think there is a tendency among many of these companies to keep tweaking and tweaking things and at a certain point there are diminishing returns and things that are changed just for the sake of that don't necessarily improve things and disrupt people's lives. I think rather than me saying don't ever update that I should. Someone should tell them stop doing that. I'm sure they will. I'm sure they will. Listen to this. Brian, what about you?
- [10:38]
D
I mean, I have ADHD and that is probably the best description of all of this. It's just a hit of dopamine every time things change. So I'm like so excited by it. Like all of a sudden I get to rediscover my phone again. And part of this is I really do believe that like the fact that I have ADHD and my working memory is so shoddy that I'm very quick to learn things because often I don't remember them. So it's not a big deal for me to relearn something like over and over and over again because it's, it's what my whole life has been.
- [11:10]
B
Yeah, I really identify with the ADHD of it all. I. Absolutely. And Dan, with your answer as well. I like getting new things to explore and check out and be excited about and be interested in. And when it comes to technology which happens to be the stuff that gets the update, like my couch doesn't get updated unless you buy a new one. But the stuff that I know the most about is the stuff that gets regular updates and I am excited about it. So I think I would love to have like if there was a software system in my life I wish wouldn't update, it would be everyone who, for whom I do tech support's stuff that their stuff doesn't get updated unless they're very, very, very ready for it. So Kasey, round us out here.
- [12:05]
C
Yeah, I mean like I said earlier, it's Basically, car infotainment for me is one that I wish I could opt into and Volvo's done a good job. I don't know if I'll be able to dig up a link, but Volvo has done a good job of there's a website where you can kind of trial with the new infotainment looks like and get, get kind of a gist of what it's going to be. And I do dig that they've done that. I think that's really smart. But still, I feel like this is the sort of thing that it's a safety issue, right? I mean, bringing it back to our earlier topic, it's a safety issue if you're hunting around to change the station and you knew exactly where the button on screen used to be because of course it's an on screen button. You knew where it used to be and now it's somewhere totally different. That's a safety problem. And so something like that. I wish I could opt into it or if there was a way to like roll it back so this way you could try it, you know, and it's not the end of the earth. But of course I understand, you know, from a software developer's point of view, I understand why that's not the case. But from a user point of view, I wish it was.
- [12:58]
B
Alrighty folks, if you can believe it, we have reached halftime here on clockwise. And that means it's time for me to tell you about Vitally bringing you this episode of Clockwise. Vitally is the AI powered workspace for customer success managers. Vitally's purpose built AI is for scaled customer success. It's there to help you better understand customers in order to reduce, churn, unlock growth and always stay a step ahead. Basically all the things that make you great at your job. Vitally delivers the clarity, automation and AI driven insights your team needs so you can move faster, stay aligned and drive customer outcomes at scale. Vitally AI surfaces insights from every customer interaction to unlock another level of CS productivity, visibility and collaboration. It's why Vitally is trusted by more than 600 leading B2B SaaS customer success teams. And how's this for a great offer? Vitally is offering a free pair of AirPods Pro for every clockwise listener who takes a qualified demo call. So if you're a customer success decision maker, schedule your call by visiting vitally IO clockwise. That's V I T A L L Y IO clockwise for a free pair of AirPods Pro when you take a qualified demo. Our thanks to Vitally for their support of this and relay. Alrighty, folks, we are back from halftime. And that means it's time for Dan's topic.
- [14:16]
A
All right, I'm curious if you use an app launcher on your Mac. A tool where you can, you know, press a keyboard shortcut, type in the name of an app, launch that app. Maybe it does other stuff too. And if you do, have you changed recently? Like, have you switched this over or even in the past, have you changed or are you sort of a die hard user? This is the thing I use and I'm going to use it until I drag it from my cold dead hands. Brian.
- [14:41]
D
I use an app launcher. It's Raycast. I use it. I wouldn't want to not use it, but I guess if like I had to not use it, I would survive. But it has been, has been really fun. It's the first launcher I ever really stuck with. So I have definitely sort of fallen in love with it even as its updates have slowed a little bit. So, yeah, I think I'm pretty die hard about it. And if anybody ever told me that I couldn't have it, I would whine a lot.
- [15:11]
B
I, yeah, I am. I've been, I've always been, probably will always be a die hard Spotlight person I like. I mean, I consider it to be the way that I use iOS and iPados as well. I search for an app, I don't tap on an app to launch it. So yeah, I mean, Spotlight is the way to go. I've tried a bunch of different ones, including Raycast, and in those cases it's just I didn't get engaged with it early enough that, like, it didn't, it didn't pull me in quick enough that I wanted to devote more time to learning how to use it versus my deep knowledge of how to use Spotlight. Kasey, what are your thoughts?
- [15:58]
C
I've used Alfred for as long as I can remember. I don't know if I've always used Alfred, but it's been so darn long now that it's effectively the entire time I've been using the Mac. I like Alfred a lot. It thinks the way I think, or at least the way it operates is compatible with the way I think. Similar, similarly to Micah. I tried raycast when everyone was losing their minds about it and I didn't get. I didn't get sucked in the way everyone else did. And so I gave it a quick shot and was like, yeah, it's fine, and then went back to Alfred. I know the Spotlight is the right answer to this question. Because it's gotten so much better in the, in the new builds. And to echo what I believe was Dan saying, was saying earlier, you know, I didn't resist any of the new builds, even, you know, macOS. I think the resistance was a bit unnecessary and I think the commenters like myself got a little worked up about it. Although I updated pretty quick, thank you very much. But anyways, I've not really given Spotlight another shake. I think if I wasn't going to use Alfred, it would probably be Spotlight, because my needs are very minor. But the thing of it is, is that I've got just incredible muscle memory for simple things in Alfred. So, for example, you know, I have it down to command space. If you hit command space and hit spacebar again, that lets you search for a file, you know, as a silly example. And there's others like it. But that muscle memory is deeply ingrained. And I don't have any issues with Spot with I want to Spotlight. I don't have any issues with Alfred and, and there's nothing that I'm yearning for it to do. So perhaps ignorance is less. But one way or another. You're welcome. You are welcome. But one way or another, I'm happy with Alfred where I am right now.
- [17:36]
A
Yeah. Thank you all for your thoughts on this. I've used several different launchers in the past. I used to use Alfred, I think I used Quicksilver way back in the day. I've used Spotlight for a long time in large part because it's what's built in. And I think it's worthwhile to be using the built in tools not only to get that experience, but also to be able to figure out when things work, when things don't work, when things improve, etc. Now, a part of the reason that spurred this for me is that Spotlight in The most recent macOS Tahoe update, like 2631, I think is broken. As an example, I was a little late for this podcast recording session because I hit Spotlight, I typed Zoom, I hit Return, and you know what it did? Yep, it opened Zoom in iPhone mirroring on my phone.
- [18:26]
B
Cool.
- [18:27]
A
Not useful and I don't know why. And it's had this issue too where I tried to launch Audio Hijack and it's like, oh, surely you want this file called audio with a long string of numbers. MP4. No, surprisingly enough, I don't want that. And you know, I will say I have used again, I've used Spotlight for a long time. I've used Spotlight up until recently and been pretty happy with. Surprises me that Apple can't make this work a bit better because especially like as it crams other features into this, it feels like the core, at least for me, is I still want to just launch apps. The number of times I want to open a file from Spotlight vanishingly small, but apps literally all the time.
- [19:07]
C
Yeah.
- [19:08]
A
So rather than opening a random preference pane when I type something or you know, again, an app on my iPhone, I'd sure love it if you just open that app. So I'm unlikely to change. Like many of you, I get stuck in my ways and I'm not going to go to a third party launcher just because of this, but I thought it was interesting because it was something that it's a category of apps that has a lot of passionate users and still has a lot of third party applications that are very popular and very competitive, even though Apple has its own option for it as well. So intrigued to see where you all were, but thank you for that. Let's go to our final topic which comes from Brian.
- [19:44]
D
All righty. Aether OS is an incredible cyberpunk OS in a browser. Tangled just raised 3.8 million euros from by founders and the ex CEO of GitHub for basically its take on GitHub. Is this the at protocol moment? Are you using any at protocol apps besides Blue Sky? If so, which. If not, why not? Are you even on bluesky?
- [20:09]
B
Yes, I'm on bluesky. Do I know even more than just oh, I recognize AT Protocol? Do I know any more than that about AT Protocol? No. Am I using any other AT Protocol apps besides Blue Sky? I don't think so,
- [20:28]
C
unless Threads is,
- [20:30]
B
but I don't think it is. I think it's the one that works with Mastodon. So I don't know much about AT Protocol and I'm looking forward to hearing what Brian has to say when we get back around to them. Casey, what about you?
- [20:47]
C
Again, I echo your thoughts. I mean, I'm familiar with AT Protocol as a thing, but in terms of services or whatever, they use it, I knew that it was a bit of a playground, but I was not aware of the this Aether OS thing. I was fiddling with it shortly before we started recording. It is very impressive, even though I'm not entirely clear what the hell is going on. But it's very cool just to click around in there. I am on bluesky. I found that after the death of Twitter as we once knew and loved Slash hated it, I moved away from Twitter when Elon bought it as many of our peers did. And for me, Mastodon is where I do nerdy things and Blue sky is where I do basically everything else. And so in a perfect world, I would love that for that to be just one service. But I'm not grumpy about it the way it is. And so I am more into Blue sky now than I had been months ago, in part because I'm betaing an app that will let you merge, if you will, like a universal app for both Mastodon and Blue sky, which is really nice. It's an app called Indigo, which I think you can get on a mailing list for that somewhere, some way, somehow. But anyways, so I'm big in on Blue sky, but in terms of anything else at Protocol. Shrug, is there stuff? I guess so, yeah.
- [22:05]
A
I'm kind of. I'm kind of with Casey on this one. I've used Blue sky for a while. I'm beta ing the same app I have. I'm intrigued by it. I think it's a. It's a like Mastodon. It has a good idea behind it, which is the idea that it's like the protocol should be kind of divorced from the services and certainly from the companies behind it. And so I appreciate that aspect of it. Trying for me to like shoehorn, like why I want a browser operating on it is something that I struggle with. You know, a browser that runs an operating system that runs on AT protocol is cool. As a proof of concept, I don't think I'm ever going to have any reason to use it. It is very. I love the aesthetic. I love all the little cyberpunk there. I mean, you know, there's the little browsing thing called Deckard. You know, I just, I just recorded two podcasts about Blade Runner in the last month, so I'm fully on board with all of. But I'm not sure that this is a thing that's ever really going to be for me more than a sort of technological underpinning of a service like a social media network that I use. And I'm not sure how much life AT Protocol has in it beyond that, and neither really how much life it has in it. I think certainly Mastodon, while it's more certainly nerdier and certainly a lot smaller community, has a degree of self sufficiency just because of the way that it's structured, which may encourage it to live longer, even if it is a smaller, more self selected group of people. But it is intriguing. I love to see people playing around with technology this and seeing what they can do. And the idea of implementing an entire OS on this is wild and very cool. Brian, why don't you wrap us up here?
- [23:45]
D
I think there's actually a lot of misconception from some people out there in the world about the way that the app protocol is architected. Actually, like, it's pretty fully decentralized at this point. You can run any piece of the stack. The difference between it and Mastodon is ultimately, are you running a whole server for a bunch of people, or are you basically hosting what is called a PDFs or personal data server, which is basically just like a git repo at the end of the day, and you get to hold on to your stuff and take it wherever you want? And what I. What I particularly like about the app protocol ecosystem is how open and welcoming it is from both the developer standpoint and the community. One of the things that I sort of found for me on Mastodon was just that, like, you had to find the right server to get the right people. And also then sometimes things didn't sync and then you weren't getting things from other things. And it was sort of heavy and the way that it was built made it sort of difficult. And I think the coolest thing to me that has popped up on top of all of this is NPM X. But NPM X is a new browser for NPM. It has had like over a thousand PRs in the past month with people just building on it and working together. Sort of all came from the AT Proto community. They actually integrated AT Proto into it. And sort of the whole idea about this is just I can take my social identity with me wherever I want. There's an app on AT Proto called. I mean, there's like seven different ones that are all about like writing your own blog and having your own blog. But I don't have to find all of my friends on there anymore. If I sign in with my handle, then all of the people I already follow, they will already show up there. So it's that ability to sort of make my social connections portable that I think is particularly interesting. So am I using other ones? Absolutely. I'm about to release my own that's really focused just on like moderate, like helping. It's basically a new take on block party, but using a little bit of machine learning to like identify where you have topic overlaps with people and then how often are they posting in a toxic manner? The idea being like, can I catch people before they drive by and show up and say mean things? To you for no reason. I think something that Dan said that I really do love is this idea of just like how much fun energy there is on there. There's a replacement for Last FM, there's replacement for GitHub. And now right now the protocol is. It's. It's a default open protocol. So all your stuff is out there, everywhere that is. They actually are working on permissioned data now, but it's a tricky. It's a. They intentionally built it to this sort of open way, but as you can tell that it spun out of Twitter at one point. And the other interesting thing is they just got a new CEO. Yeah, that CEO used to be the CEO of WordPress. But yeah. So I like, I really love the app protocol. I'm actually going to a conference about it next week in Vancouver and I think there is actually the moment here, but I do think it is a little bit of a different lift for people to understand that effectively what you're doing is you're like wandering around, wandering around with all of your data, all of your posts, all of your connections to people, like, not literally in your pocket, but that's what this allows you to do, is like, they can't take my friends away from me.
- [26:58]
B
That is. Yeah, that's pretty nice. Alrighty, folks, we are nearly at the end of the show. My bonus topic for you all. Can you whistle? And do you remember when you learned how to do so? Kasey, we'll start with you.
- [27:15]
C
Can I whistle? Yes, I can, but only the regular kind of more melodic whistle. Not the, hey, kids, you're halfway down the block, it's time to come home whistle. That I yearn to be able to do. And I'll be darned if I remember when I learned.
- [27:32]
A
What I will say about whistling is I actually, I remember very vividly that as a kid, I first learned to whistle only via bringing air into my mouth.
- [27:44]
C
Oh, interesting.
- [27:45]
A
And it was. It's hard because you run out of air much faster. And so I remember having to learn how to do it the other way, which obviously is counter. Counterintuitively. Feels like it should be more difficult because the air is coming out. But yeah, anyways, yes, I can whistle. And I do remember learning as a kid, probably in like eight or nine to like, okay, let me see if I can figure out how to do this the other way. My kid also tries to whistle, but he's only three and a half. And so he just does a.
- [28:17]
B
Brian, what about you?
- [28:18]
D
Yes, kind of like, I can half whistle. I'm okay at whistling. I'm not great at whistling. So do I remember learning to do so? No, I don't remember learning to do so. I don't remember a lot about my early years.
- [28:35]
B
I also don't recall when I learned to whistle. I can. And I, I can, I can do that whistle. I can do the, the hand flute, which I think sounds a lot like a whistle.
- [28:52]
A
Wow.
- [28:52]
B
Anyway, thank you all for your answers on that. Very fascinating to me and I appreciate it. If you out there would like to get ad free episodes with an extra unwound episode every week where Dan and I talk about a given topic you can become a member of Clockwise. Go to Relay FM Clockwise to sign up $7 a month, $70 a year to help support the show. And with that, we have reached the end of this episode of clockwise. All that's left is to thank our awesome guests. Casey Lys, thank you so much for being here.
- [29:20]
C
Thank you. As always. It is a blast and I did not expect that whistles were going to be the topic of conversation when I woke up this morning, but I am always glad to find these little gifts from you to me.
- [29:31]
A
And Brian Guffey, thank you so much for joining us as well.
- [29:35]
D
Happy to be here and as always, love when I get that text from Micah.
- [29:40]
A
And Micah, we'll be back next week but until then we remind everyone listening out there, watch what you say and
- [29:45]
B
keep watching the clock.
- [29:47]
A
Bye everybody.