Charles Max_Wood:
Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Ruby Rogues Podcast. This week on our panel we have John Epperson.
John_Epperson:
Hello everybody.
Charles Max_Wood:
Dave Kimura.
Dave_Kimura:
Hey everyone.
Charles Max_Wood:
Luke Stutters.
Luke_Stutters:
Hello everyone.
Charles Max_Wood:
I'm Charles Max Wood from Top End Devs, and this week we're gonna kind of speculate on the future. What's coming next? What does that mean? Where does Ruby fit in? Maybe other stuff that maybe Ruby doesn't quite fit into. We'll kind of see where this goes. Dave, you're the one that proposed this. Did I oversimplify it, or is there more to it that you wanted to talk about?
Dave_Kimura:
Well, most of this comes from me having read an article and found a website called Mojo Vision. And the idea of it is it's wearable technology. It's a contact lens that provides
Charles Max_Wood:
cool.
Dave_Kimura:
a heads-up display for a augmented reality. And just seeing that was really cool, and it kind of made me start thinking about just all the Hollywood interpretations to look like with heads up displays, wearable technology, that kind of thing. And it really made me start thinking like, what is this going to how is this going to shape the world? Because if you think about just 20 years ago, if you had a cell phone, it was a big brick of a thing that you had to carry around, you know, or with some big battery pack.
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Dave_Kimura:
But now today you look at cell phones and they are these anything. You could play games, watch movies, communicate with others visually, via text, or via phone. So just the way technology has changed in the past 20-30 years, let's take a look at it from today, 20-30 years from now. What is it going to look like? So we have a few emerging technologies. We have VR headsets and and whatever else is out there. And so I'm interested, you know, to just kind of talk about how is this going to change the world? Because it is going to change it one way or another, especially as or if it becomes widely adopted like smartphones have.
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Dave_Kimura:
So, you know, I think the whole iPhone really led to the sun setting of Macromedia or Adobe Flash because they never supported it on the iPhone. So that really changed how
Luke_Stutters:
Yeah.
Dave_Kimura:
we developed websites back then. If you remember those days before the iPhone, any
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Dave_Kimura:
website that you went to was all flashy, had a lot of animation, did all kinds of crazy things, and it was all flash-based. And finding, you know, a modern SaaS kind of application back then flashy websites with Flash, ActionScript, with some kind of server back end. So, you know, I'm so glad those days are over. I hated the whole Flash
Charles Max_Wood:
the
Dave_Kimura:
era. But what is that gonna look like for the future if wearable tech like VR headsets become so small factor that you just put on a small pair of glasses that has your prescription or whatever and then you have access to everything that you would computer, a laptop, or your phone. And
Charles Max_Wood:
You
Dave_Kimura:
same
Charles Max_Wood:
know,
Dave_Kimura:
thing
Charles Max_Wood:
it's fun.
Dave_Kimura:
with Web3. Now how is that going to change things with decentralized access to information? Where if something gets shared on the internet today, it may not be the easiest thing to get removed or to get rid of, but it is technically possible to some degree. But with a decentralized platform, there is no calling up some agency or somebody to have something removed. And that could be for the good or the bad. You know, you can have
Luke_Stutters:
Hmm
Dave_Kimura:
propaganda stuff that's put out there that, or deep fakes put out there that can really disrupt the actual truth from getting out. Or you could have the truth or the information that the public needs to know about, but it's whatever.
Charles Max_Wood:
So it's interesting that you bring some of this up. I'm just gonna touch on where I've seen both of these things within the last few years. So I haven't been for the last two or three years, but I used to go to CES every year. And there was a company there that had a prototype of glasses. So I'm gonna go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and
Luke_Stutters:
Yeah,
Charles Max_Wood:
go ahead and go
Luke_Stutters:
so
Charles Max_Wood:
ahead and
Luke_Stutters:
did
Charles Max_Wood:
go ahead and go
Luke_Stutters:
I,
Charles Max_Wood:
ahead and
Luke_Stutters:
right?
Charles Max_Wood:
go ahead
Luke_Stutters:
In January?
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, it's usually in January. Um, but they, so they had a prototype of some glasses that connected to your smartphone and provided a heads up display and things like that and kind of that AR world, right? And it was glasses like you wear now. They were just a little bit heavier as opposed to, you know, kind of the Oculus and stuff where that's, you know, that you've got this giant thing on the front of your face. Um, as far as the web three technologies and decentralized, um, information I did an interview with Stephen Chin from JFrog and they are working on a sort of, and I'm trying to remember the name of it so I'll have to go find it, put a link in the show notes, but they have basically a package repository, kind of like RubyGems or NPM, that they're web three style, you know, a blockchain database. Now, you know, there are like 10 or 12 rather large companies like Oracle and JFrog and some of these others that are participating in the, you know, so it's semi centralized, I guess, because those 10 servers are the ones that form the consensus as opposed to kind of the public consensus you get on Bitcoin and things like that. I see both of these trends starting to pick up or having been innovated on already. Now whether you get to the point where those glasses are completely independent of a smartphone or whether you have some other system out there that moves away from consensus among these 10 nodes or 12 nodes to a consensus of everybody impacts the network. It's interesting because we are... moving that way faster than a lot of people think. It seems kind of pie in the sky, but a lot of this stuff is already being created here. It's interesting to see where this could go. Now, in 20 or 30 years, are we even going to be talking about these kinds of technologies? I don't know. At least within the next five to 10 years, I think we're going to experiment with them enough to know exactly where they fit into the landscape of the world we could have. I just wanted to chime in because you're talking about, hey, this stuff could be coming. My experience says that a lot of it's here already.
John_Epperson:
Yeah, I think speaking to Web3 specifically, right? Because I think that one is probably the one that's going to... I'm not saying that glasses won't affect us, right? Or that VR in general won't affect us, but I do feel like Web3 probably most directly affects us. But my perspective on Web3 in particular is... So I feel like Web2, when people started talking about Web2, it was a backwards look at what had already... A trend that had already been happening, So
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
John_Epperson:
people were like, oh, let's describe this trend that's already happening and has already been happening and let's call it web two but like web three is like people talking about something that's not really even built yet and so like I think there's a little like I definitely feel like there's a lot of reticence in the community about that because we're like Especially after You know, I know we talked a little bit about this But I think especially after like I'm sure that you guys have experienced this too There's so much BS in general around the crypto community, so much scamming and things that has gone on that people, I think people are very sensitive and offended and worried. I mean, I'm not going to lie. I have these fears too that Web3 is just basically a bunch of rich people wanting other people to do this work for them and take the credit. It's like when we were at Rails, I was at RailsConf and there was this, you know, one party events was like a web 3 get-together thing and I was like, sweet, I'm gonna go to this thing because I want to go actually talk to some other developers who might be doing web 3. But I was going with my buddy and I was like, but hey, if it's just a bunch of people trying to hire some people for their companies, I was like, I'm gonna bail instantly. And we went and it turned out that it wasn't a web 3 thing, it was something else entirely, but I feel like that's my posture right now, which is like, I want to talk to other developers about this stuff because it's interesting, but I don't want to talk to somebody who basically wants me to leave my good job, do a bunch of work for them, have the risk that I might not get paid, and have to just deal with that mess all over again. But I also feel like Web3 is risky for me and for other people because I kind of feel like I just really can't think of good use cases outside of really narrow. For example, you're like a rebel in some country, right? That your opinion's not getting out because the government's smushing it. Or you have an unpopular opinion here in America and you think the government's pushing everything, so you want a website. Or you are, you know, like, I feel like activism, like that's a space that might make use of it. I feel like maybe like archival, like, like use cases, but I feel like there's not, I feel like that's like a small subset of like what web technologies do. I don't feel like it makes sense for most businesses. And so like, I guess as
Charles Max_Wood:
I
John_Epperson:
I'm
Charles Max_Wood:
agree.
John_Epperson:
going, like I'm going through these things, like I'm like, well, I don't know that like my job is gonna be supplanted by web three stuff. I could end up doing some web three stuff, but I don't know how much impact it's gonna have you know, websites out there. I feel like it's gonna be like a 10% or 20% maybe at best. That's just
Dave_Kimura:
One,
John_Epperson:
my take.
Dave_Kimura:
there's
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
Dave_Kimura:
a lot of infrastructure issues with it as well, with being able to process a certain number of transactions at a time. So take Amazon,
John_Epperson:
today.
Dave_Kimura:
for example, if they wanted to improve their logistics by having their warehouses communicate with one another to figure out, throw in some AI in there to figure delivery service possible, it needs to leave from this warehouse, this warehouse, and this warehouse, but you also have to keep track of inventory, make sure that that's all kind of kept up to date. So if you had a quote decentralized private solution for Amazon that it's all interconnected, each warehouse is verifying the other warehouses information and logistics and that kind of stuff, then it can make sense from that kind of aspect. You know, because because you can't just say, oh, no, we didn't have three items. We only had one of this item, so we're not going to send something out where it's an employee or some manager who's pocketing stuff. So, you know, it creates the idea of blockchain in itself, makes it so that if you have enough trusted nodes or enough nodes saying the same thing, saying something that isn't true. You
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Dave_Kimura:
know, when the majority has a general consensus. So it protects against, you know, bad data, I guess. But at the cost of, as far as Ethereum or Bitcoin goes, the slower the transactions are. So I think Ethereum is a lot faster than Bitcoin. but they still have limits on how much they can process at a given time. So for a company like Amazon, if they were to implement everything that they're doing over in Web3, then how fast are they going to be able to process transactions? Or someone like Shopify, are they really going to be able to handle millions of transactions a second on Web3? And I think that's where we are going to kind of see Web3 grow and grow and grow a bit with some adoption then it's just going to die because no big company, I think, will really take it serious enough to make it their flagship products. The infrastructure is just not there.
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, I
John_Epperson:
I
Charles Max_Wood:
will
John_Epperson:
mean, you're
Charles Max_Wood:
say that.
John_Epperson:
good.
Charles Max_Wood:
So I see this trade off, right? Because yeah, I mean, effectively you have to have a certain number of nodes. They all have to do, you know, a lot of the same work in order to verify that, uh, the information they're getting from the blockchain is valid and things like that. Um, and that leads into a lot of these infrastructure issues that are there. The flip side is, is that, um, depending on how you have it set up and how you the nodes and verify work, you can have a number of people on that network that don't necessarily have to trust each other, right? Because they can independently check the work and then verify that it makes sense. And that's how Bitcoin and a lot of these others actually work. And so if you're working in an instance where, yeah, you just want to bring people in and then we're starting to talk about something where blockchain makes sense. But otherwise, yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily see in the case of logistics for Shopify or Amazon or some of these other companies, why it wouldn't just make sense for them to essentially send the information out to the nodes that need it via some kind of API that they already have, or have it check in with the central authority. and just be able to run it that way and not have it run just as efficiently or more efficiently than it would if you were working off of some kind of blockchain system. Now, that's not to say that it's not possible that blockchain couldn't solve some of these issues, but I think it's yet to be seen that it could.
Dave_Kimura:
Yeah, you know, the only real use case I thought of for blockchain, and I know there's a lot of use cases out there because all blockchain is, is for those who don't know, you insert in a record into the blockchain and based on the previous records data, you have a hash and then you create a new hash of that previous hash. know is valid. We can go back and calculate
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Dave_Kimura:
that this record was valid. It was not manipulated because
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
Dave_Kimura:
if you try to inject in a record that wasn't supposed to be there then the hashes won't calculate correctly and then you'll have if it's decentralized you'll have several nodes saying like hey something wrong is going on here. So if you take that idea and make a decentralized Those in the US know what a car fax is, but outside the US, it is a history of a car's activities. So, a lot of companies or maintenance shops will report that so-and-so changed their oil at this odometer reading. The odometer reading on this day was this. The car was involved in a minor accident at this point. There was water damage. The title of the car, it has a salvage title and all that kind of stuff.
Charles Max_Wood:
Right, these are
Dave_Kimura:
So...
Charles Max_Wood:
the kinds of repairs that were affected after the
Dave_Kimura:
Yeah,
Charles Max_Wood:
accident.
Dave_Kimura:
so I think a decentralized blockchain that's globally accessible to all for something like that would be good because
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Dave_Kimura:
I remember going out and buying cars that were like $2,000, $3,000 and you have no idea what's happened to that car. It doesn't really tell you if the car is a good deal or not, but you can get some indication that if this car has been through the wringer and back, it may not last me the four years So I think there was back in the earlier 2000s some issues around people lying about the Carfaxes. You know, they just kind of made up their own document, put it on the window of the car, says, oh, no, this car is great. Never been an accident. But if you go and run the actual Carfax report, it had been in all kinds of things. It has a salvage title and
Charles Max_Wood:
Hmm
Dave_Kimura:
all this other kind of junk. So I think having something like that would make sense for the car. the blockchain because now we can say that
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
Dave_Kimura:
yes, here is the actual truth. It's not been manipulated. This is the history of events that this car has gone through.
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, and
John_Epperson:
this.
Charles Max_Wood:
that's the kind of example that I was thinking of, right? Where, yeah, it's down to, hey, you know, I can't fake this, I can't manipulate it, you know, I can only report what went on to it, right?
John_Epperson:
I think for me, I think it's a little bit weak of an argument to say that, oh, this thing isn't going to work because performance, right? Because I think we've all been around enough to know that performance just gets better over time. So theoretically,
Charles Max_Wood:
Hmm.
John_Epperson:
blockchain is probably going to get better, things like that. But
Luke_Stutters:
Definitely.
John_Epperson:
yeah, so while that's a weak argument, I do agree in the sense that obviously Amazon and Shopify aren't going to jump on it today. Right. But whether they jump on it tomorrow, I don't know if I could answer that one. But I do think that the things, like I said earlier, the things that make sense to me, right, are we need this thing to be stored for forever, or we need there to be a source of truth.
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
John_Epperson:
Like blockchain is really good at that kind of a thing. I mean, it's a ledger technology, right? So things
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
John_Epperson:
that you want ledgers for, your car backs. That's why I think that like of stuff, right? You know, this is what's in my bank account. Well, why do I need an archaic banking system to handle that when theoretically blockchain can handle that? Do I think that bank systems are going to get built around it? I do. I think that, okay, so first of all, I want to be like really careful here. I'm not trying to advertise anything by the way. I'm just trying to state examples, right? So there are companies out there that
Luke_Stutters:
McDonald's,
John_Epperson:
allow you to basically...
Luke_Stutters:
McDonald's, is it McDonald's we're promoting?
John_Epperson:
All right,
Charles Max_Wood:
I want my McDollar,
John_Epperson:
there are companies
Charles Max_Wood:
my
John_Epperson:
out there.
Charles Max_Wood:
McCryptoDollar.
John_Epperson:
There are companies out there that let you take your crypto of various kinds and sort of like lend them out to other people, right? And I'm not saying that you should go out and do that tomorrow. That's not the goal of this podcast or anything. What I'm trying to say is that like, I think that that sort of represents like a maybe a first look into probably what banking technologies built around crypto are going to be like, if that makes sense. things like BlockFi and things like that are like, they're like pushing the boundaries on what banking looks like. And I think that, you know, obviously some of them are gonna go bankrupt. Some of them you probably should put your money in cause they're super sus. But like, I think that we're
Luke_Stutters:
you
John_Epperson:
gonna have a new, what do you call it? Generation sort of of banks, like that will exist out there. Because I mean, when it comes down to it, like, I mean, people understand what cash is sort of, you know, but we still use banks, right? Because banks do serve various purposes of, there's like a list of things that they
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
John_Epperson:
do. And I think we'll get the same thing around crypto too, of banks over there. But I think that traditional banks
Dave_Kimura:
Yeah.
John_Epperson:
are either going to do something on crypto or they're gonna go away. But my point is I think there's narrow use cases that we can say, this is what blockchain is good at. And I think that we'll see things get built around those things. So ledger, things that ledger technology is good for. It's definitely a thing that I think is good.
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
John_Epperson:
Which is why I think that the rebel in the country or activist groups that are worried about getting silenced, I think they'll make use of Web3 because they'll be like, well, it doesn't matter what you do, you can take my hosting down a million times. You know, I still say, pirate bay, whether you like them or not, they're probably going to move to blockchain. Like then you can't
Charles Max_Wood:
Ha!
John_Epperson:
die.
Charles Max_Wood:
if I've been on pirate bay since college anyway
Luke_Stutters:
That's...
Charles Max_Wood:
A non fungible toy.
Luke_Stutters:
That's probably gonna
John_Epperson:
Ha,
Luke_Stutters:
happen
John_Epperson:
cheese.
Luke_Stutters:
next year, thanks to you, Dave. What I'm really interested about,
John_Epperson:
Ha ha ha ha!
Luke_Stutters:
and it's part of the way blockchain works, is not so much the idea that it can't be faked, but the idea that the storage is out there and I don't have to take care of it. I find very attractive the idea of a kind of very distributed database, where I can like build a pet project, there and anyone can access it eventually. I really like the idea of decentralized services with the decentralized not only on the front end which we can kind of do now with kind of loads of kind of cloud you know caching stuff but the back end being decentralized as well and potentially around forever as you say. I don't know if you've looked in these systems like which are decentralized
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
open source systems which are essentially attempting to move away from sites like Twitter and Facebook and to kind of run towards more federated model. I would love
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
to see Ruby Rails infrastructure to make those systems a lot more easier to build. That would be something I'd be really interested in for WebPri so that I could build a Rails site underlying technologies to provide a more robust or less insensable setup but I've never seen any kind of gems like that to do it. The other thing looping back to what you were saying earlier Dave about these wearable technologies and the glasses Chuck was talking about I have tried using some of those and in fact I spent about six weeks coding in VR in Japan I And one of the things about having a heads up display rather than interacting with the phone is that the pointer comes back. Remember when mouse overs were like a big deal? Remember when you were kind of coding all your kind of tool tips in your mouse
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
overs? I do think that is very much gonna come back with any kind of wearable display because how are you gonna interact with that? Were you gonna have to kind of some kind of thing on your hand? And if you've used the, the, you know, controls on these things, they shoot out like a literal little laser, don't they, in these other games? That's a pointer, right? So I think we're going to get a kind of, it's the return of the tooltip, web 3.0, where it displays the tooltips coming back.
John_Epperson:
Your eyeballs.
Charles Max_Wood:
I have to say,
John_Epperson:
Track your
Charles Max_Wood:
I
John_Epperson:
eyes.
Charles Max_Wood:
want to speak to the mastodon approach for a minute because that isn't blockchain, right? We're talking about decentralized systems, but mastodon, I can't remember the other one you mentioned, but it's
Luke_Stutters:
Matrix
Charles Max_Wood:
a federated
Luke_Stutters:
it got
Charles Max_Wood:
system.
Luke_Stutters:
renamed it was something else before
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, but that so effectively what it does is you add it to the Fediverse, I think is what they call it. And then effectively what happens
Luke_Stutters:
That's
Charles Max_Wood:
is
Luke_Stutters:
right.
Charles Max_Wood:
that it begins to discover the other members of the federated universe that's, that's out there. And then they speak over regular APIs. And so it's a different kind of decentralization. And I, I find that interesting too, just from the standpoint of, um, as we model, you know, yeah, some of these are going to rely heavily on the advantages you get from kind of a blockchain setup, right? The immutability of history and things like that. And some of them, it's really just going to be, hey, look, I can go and I can participate in this federated system to the level that I want on a system that's designed for it and interact with it in that way without necessarily having to import the entire history of the blockchain, the entire ledger, what have you. And so there's a lot of interesting interplay that I think comes into that and I really do think that a lot of these decentralized systems, especially since people's trust in large institutions and governments are waning in certain areas, I think drawn to some of these systems that allow them to participate on the level they want to and not have sort of the central censorship or other issues that tend to come out of some of these other places, or biases even. I mean, I've heard some people talk about Facebook or Twitter as a sensorial or systems basically, and then I've heard other people argue that no, it's just the bias of the Having a federated or decentralized system allows me to pick the places that I feel like are best representing the information that I want to get.
Luke_Stutters:
What Dave was talking about getting the NFTs out for McDonald's. I mean, I don't, I don't understand the NFTs, not so much. I understand technology, but I don't really understand art and that kind of stuff. So I'm, I'm coming in. I've got a lot, I've got a lot to learn there, but what I think is really interesting about that concept is the idea that different data has different value and that value of that data is encoded individually. that's a really strong concept. For example, like, you know, what is this movie worth online? And that's how that could somehow be part of the data. Or similarly, if you've got like a chat server like Slack, yeah. And then the kind of history of that is distributed.
Charles Max_Wood:
Hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
Slack already does that. Doesn't it? Slack already charges you for like data older than 30 days. So the recent data is kind of worth nothing in free, but to date just more valuable. I think that is that changing. Oh man.
Charles Max_Wood:
I was looking forward to non-fungible TV, but...
John_Epperson:
Well. It affects different people differently.
Luke_Stutters:
Right, but what I'm saying is this idea, you know, this kind of stuff is already coming through where you can keep the new data is not worth anything but the old data is worth more and a formal system for kind of encoding that. So for example, if there was a global distributed system which could be kind of storing data much like Slack stores messages and if it's a personal project, then you can only ever have like the last 10,000 rows of your database, right? it starts getting revenue, then you can kind of have a more persistent layer. I can see that coming down line.
John_Epperson:
I think NFTs is a really good example of what we're dealing with, which is there is hype about the technology itself and there
Charles Max_Wood:
Hmm.
John_Epperson:
is hype that's coming from the people who want to buy stuff right now and sell it to other people later for a large profit, speculation basically. Which is the problem that NFTs have because whether you like it or love it, that's what's going on. There are some people who are genuinely excited about what the technology can bring. The technology is not ready. a large gap between what they need to do to get that whole ecosystem ready to go, because
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
John_Epperson:
what happens if I just don't give you the art piece for the NFT that you own, right? Until the ecosystem's totally ready for you to get ownership transferred with the NFT, it's not quite ready yet. But people are still
Luke_Stutters:
Yeah.
John_Epperson:
willing to throw money at it and speculate in hopes that they can make money later from somebody else, right? And that's caused a lot of sourness, as well as a bunch of people had a lot more money than they did before. And I think the same thing is going on with Web3. There are people hoping to, there are people that are genuinely interested in the technology, which is what I think that we're trying to discuss here right now.
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
John_Epperson:
And there are people who are causing all sorts of issues around it because they're hoping to profit off of everything that's going on in one way or the other. Some of them are willing to put work in in order to profit. And whatever. great. But the people who are open to leech off of other people, obvious, I think most of us think they should go away.
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep.
John_Epperson:
I think so. So in the same. So with all that kind of like said, like that's how I feel about like the NFT question. I think it's the same kind of question that we have here. I think it's a
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
John_Epperson:
super cool technology once it's ready or whatever. I don't think it's ready yet. I feel like web three is kind of sort of in the same space, but I think it's like a lot more direct, to be asked questions over the next few years of like, hey, you're making this project, can you do that in Web3? And it's probably going to sound that stupid, right? And I'm going to be like, what is it that you really want? Like, why do you want Web3? The same thing that
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
John_Epperson:
I do when somebody today tells me, hey, can you use this technology? I want you to do that on React, or I want you to do that in this. And I'm like, well, you hired me to be the expert. Why is it that you're thinking
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
John_Epperson:
that and like to make a decision together. I feel like it's going to be that.
Charles Max_Wood:
I agree.
John_Epperson:
kind of thing.
Charles Max_Wood:
I think it's interesting because we've spent a whole bunch of time talking about kind of this fundamental underlying technology on how we manage the data. And the other question that Dave brought up was effectively like wearables and things like that, which is more the interface, right? It's like what capabilities for interaction does it provide and how does Ruby fit into that? not just, okay, am I gonna use glasses? Am I gonna have some kind of wearable that allows me to interact with the world around me? But also, okay, if I'm in my home, does it interact with IOT, right? So I can turn the temperature up and down from my glasses in some way. I'm walking past a smart device that waters my plants or feeds my dog or whatever. going to give me an opportunity to interact there? And again, you know, how does a Ruby or other, you know, programming technology function there? Right. And then, you know, maybe it does back some data up onto the federated universe or the blockchain. But, you know, what does that look like? And is that an area that Ruby can get into? And the reason that I'm bringing it up is because we've seen things like Dragon Ruby, you have the capability of writing a mobile
Luke_Stutters:
Yep.
Charles Max_Wood:
app in Ruby, but it really hasn't gotten a ton of traction even within the Ruby community. And so I'm wondering, as we move to some of these other devices, are we gonna see some adoption of an M Ruby or Dragon Ruby or something else that's Ruby like, or are we going to be forced to essentially manage the server end of things kind of like we do now with the Rails? then the interfaces are all going to be written in something else. Mm-hmm. Ha ha!
Luke_Stutters:
Oh my god.
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
Luke_Stutters:
Hmm.
John_Epperson:
It's not actually that different in my experience with other
Charles Max_Wood:
React
John_Epperson:
languages.
Charles Max_Wood:
Native.
John_Epperson:
It's a little bit less in React Native, but it's the same problem
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah,
John_Epperson:
in React
Charles Max_Wood:
no
John_Epperson:
Native.
Charles Max_Wood:
it is. It totally is.
John_Epperson:
And so I think you're agreeing with me. Is that what you're saying, Chuck?
Charles Max_Wood:
I am.
John_Epperson:
Yeah, OK, yeah, it's really not that different in React Native.
Charles Max_Wood:
The main difference
John_Epperson:
You abstract a
Charles Max_Wood:
is
John_Epperson:
little more.
Charles Max_Wood:
that people have written a lot more of the abstractions, so you can get away with not. But yeah,
John_Epperson:
Yeah.
Charles Max_Wood:
if you need a native API and there's not some nice little wrapper for it, yeah, just prepare for the pain.
John_Epperson:
Oh, and all of their documentation is like, oh, you'll just be able to use React Native and you'll never have to write this stuff. There is like literally zero apps unless you're just writing
Charles Max_Wood:
You
John_Epperson:
like,
Charles Max_Wood:
can come pet
John_Epperson:
you
Charles Max_Wood:
my
John_Epperson:
know,
Charles Max_Wood:
unicorn when you're done.
John_Epperson:
yeah. There are like zero, oh thanks. There are like zero applications that don't need a native API. Like you
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep.
John_Epperson:
just, the moment that you touch anything, like you need a native API immediately. And the docs around how to eject and use non, is so difficult. And then the best, man, I just bitched for like 30 seconds more. Okay, so then what happens is Apple
Luke_Stutters:
Hahaha
John_Epperson:
changes something in their API. And because Facebook doesn't need it anymore and they don't care, they just say, we're not supporting this, but they don't announce that to anyone. You find out the day that Apple makes the non-revertible change that your app is broken, then in the next day or so, all these programmers kind of figure out what's going on. you all come up with workarounds, right? So now you're delivering a workaround app, which you then of course have to wait up to 24 hours for it to get released. So two days later, your users finally have a quote unquote working version of the app. And you know, now you're working on actually fixing it, right? Like, oh, it's such a nightmare.
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
John_Epperson:
My point is it's not any different anywhere else. I don't think that it's, I don't think it's a Ruby thing.
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, my point was that you can pull in wrappers around CocoaPods and stuff like that in React Native. And yeah, it'll hide a lot of that stuff from you so that you never have to touch the native API. But someone did. Right.
Luke_Stutters:
Hmm.
Charles Max_Wood:
And yeah, then when it stops working because of the reasons that John brought up, yeah, then you're stuck inventing a way to do it natively anyway.
John_Epperson:
My thoughts on why Dragon Ruby and Ruby Motion haven't taken off isn't so much that there's a problem with them. I think it's because most of the people, like not everyone that's doing Ruby is doing Rails, but such
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
John_Epperson:
a large portion of the community is doing Rails. And Rails,
Luke_Stutters:
Hmm.
John_Epperson:
I mean, when you think about it, it's a server client architecture, right? That's
Charles Max_Wood:
Alright.
John_Epperson:
the kind of stuff that we make in Rails. I do lots of Rails myself. that style of thinking doesn't translate as well to what a lot of the apps are doing. There are obviously lots of server client apps, but I think it just doesn't necessarily translate to how people are talking about apps. People want to do apps without a server, and then they end up making a server anyway, but they don't realize it is a server. But the things that people are talking about in that space are just different than the way that we think about doing things. And so I think that people doing Rails stuff are like, oh, I need to use a different technology. And to be frank, like, you know, it's a lot easier to hire somebody else that's not doing Ruby motion or Dragon Ruby, and they're more popular. And so, you know, there's, I think it's about, a lot of people think it's separated. And so we just kind of like roll with it.
Charles Max_Wood:
So does that mean we're just out of luck on my glasses? I'm not gonna have Ruby glasses,
John_Epperson:
Nah,
Charles Max_Wood:
Ruby
John_Epperson:
I
Charles Max_Wood:
colored
John_Epperson:
mean
Charles Max_Wood:
glasses.
John_Epperson:
if glasses come out, if glasses come out and a bunch of people that are doing ruby go do glasses stuff, then everyone will think that you have to use ruby to do glasses even though you could do it in Go or any other
Charles Max_Wood:
It's
John_Epperson:
language
Charles Max_Wood:
true.
John_Epperson:
and they'll all jump train and start doing ruby. Like I just think it's about like whoever sort of gets popular like, you know.
Luke_Stutters:
Having sat
John_Epperson:
It's like
Luke_Stutters:
in these
John_Epperson:
you can
Luke_Stutters:
things,
John_Epperson:
do data
Luke_Stutters:
we're
John_Epperson:
stuff
Luke_Stutters:
like...
John_Epperson:
in Ruby, but everyone thinks of R and Python.
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
Yeah, having said these things for like an extended period of time, one thing I can tell you in terms of trying to get information onto these devices is whether it's 2D or 3D, so the web has pretty much got 2D information covered, right? If you wanna get, if you've got a flat screen, you wanna get stuff up, the web is 100% the way to go. You can do anything you want, the way you go is covered. The big opportunity for change in that ecosystem, because as soon as you're doing a webpage, There's a webpage, doesn't matter what it is, lovely little rail site, away you go, okay? If as soon as it becomes 3D, and these displays are now capable of doing like actual 3D, as soon as the space becomes 3D and the information becomes kind of augmented reality, the web absolutely falls apart. And you see a lot of these weird kind of Unity game style interfaces coming through. And I'd say there's a great threat to the current information ecosystem if these devices are 3D and people want a true 3D display because that is not something the web does well at all and therefore it's not something that Ruby or Rails is doing very well.
Charles Max_Wood:
Right. My
John_Epperson:
That's
Charles Max_Wood:
question
John_Epperson:
a good point.
Charles Max_Wood:
is, is you, you do see a lot of this translated onto like canvas elements on the web and things like that. Right. But that's then using like a web GL and you can use unity on canvas elements, but you're not writing Ruby anymore. So, you know, is that kind of the direction we head in where we become polyglots for this stuff?
Luke_Stutters:
I'm not sure when I was working on it, what I was doing was I was creating virtual screens. So I had like
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
massive kind of 40 inch screens floating around. So I'd have like, I know a VS code window open over there, like physically up there above my head. And then I have another one. So I'd have my like view, webpage
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
view over there. So I'd have like four virtual monitors. And that's how I was using this technology, interacting with it. I'm just moving the panels
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
Luke_Stutters:
around to a convenient location, but it doesn't have to work that way You can display things in real 3d and as soon as you put that kind of augmented space Like for example something that shows you navigation when you're driving around The web doesn't do that at the moment. So because it doesn't do that I think there is a kind of opportunity there for a non web technology to move into these kind of displays
Charles Max_Wood:
I'm in
John_Epperson:
I
Charles Max_Wood:
the
John_Epperson:
mean,
Charles Max_Wood:
middle
John_Epperson:
Rails
Charles Max_Wood:
of rereading
John_Epperson:
wasn't.
Charles Max_Wood:
Ready Player One. I'm looking forward to it.
Luke_Stutters:
Ha!
John_Epperson:
If you think about it, like, Rails wasn't the first to the scene, right? Like,
Charles Max_Wood:
It's true.
John_Epperson:
it wasn't
Luke_Stutters:
Not at all.
John_Epperson:
the first, like, you know, website building technology that was out there. It came later and it polished stuff up, right? Which is
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
John_Epperson:
the reason why it became super popular is because it took, like, the mess that was out there of people tying various things together. And it was like, here, here's a great way to do it better. And boom, everyone's like, oh my gosh, this is so better. Right? you know, Ruby isn't the first one to the scene in the 3D space. It's also possible that Ruby or Rails, or Rails kind of thing, isn't the thing that makes the space better. And so it doesn't become the popular thing over there. It's also possible that someone comes out with 3D ERB and like, you know, we keep getting to use Rails, you know, I feel like I'm stretching it pretty
Luke_Stutters:
Right?
John_Epperson:
far here. Just roll with me, you know, but
Charles Max_Wood:
I'm looking
John_Epperson:
like,
Charles Max_Wood:
forward
John_Epperson:
you know,
Charles Max_Wood:
to
John_Epperson:
maybe,
Charles Max_Wood:
reality on rails.
Luke_Stutters:
Pretty good.
John_Epperson:
maybe we get those things, right? And current technologies just kind of move along with the space.
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
John_Epperson:
But my guess, personally, would be that the way that we build websites and the way that we build 3D technologies are likely to look very different.
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
John_Epperson:
And I don't think that that's a problem. Like, I don't know if any of you guys remember maker or whatever. So my
Luke_Stutters:
Yes, of course.
John_Epperson:
first actual, okay, my first introduction to Ruby was when one of the people on the hallway of the dorm that I lived in just came down to my room and was like, hey, you're a programmer, help me with this problem because it should be easy for you, right? And they were just trying to make an RPG and an RPG maker and it was like in Ruby and I had never seen Ruby before this. And basically what was it at the end of the day? that the program itself gave to you. And then you could write Ruby code to sort of like, you know, add on to it, right?
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
John_Epperson:
And when you're talking about Unity and a lot of these other things, that's what you're doing too. Like your, or the StarCraft 2 editor or like a lot of these things, right? They give you a lot of stuff. They're like, hey, you can make widgets and you can have the widgets do things and you can edit certain aspects of their behavior. And here's some scripting language, whatever it is, right? C-sharp or, you know, anything, choose to give you Lua, and then you write in that scripting language to edit something, some aspect of it. And I believe Unity is like C Sharp or something. I don't know. You actually could probably answer that question, since you apparently actually use it. But regardless, it's not Ruby. And maybe somebody comes up with an editor that does use Ruby. Who knows? Or we all learn a different language to do 3D stuff.
Charles Max_Wood:
Right. So my question is, because, you know, at the end of the day, what we're talking about, you know, this is a Ruby podcast, is there a way that we can, as a community, be setting ourselves up to be that thing that John's talking about, right? Where, you know, we are the lingua franca of, you know, stacking on top of Unity or, you know, we're the preferred of these particular problems.
John_Epperson:
We need 3D ERB. I need to be able to like have my Rails application generate a 3D space, but an insert
Luke_Stutters:
videos.
John_Epperson:
my stuff, right? With
Charles Max_Wood:
3D.TextField
John_Epperson:
ERB tags.
Luke_Stutters:
This
John_Epperson:
I don't,
Luke_Stutters:
is Firefox.
John_Epperson:
I don't.
Luke_Stutters:
Does Firefox
John_Epperson:
Go ahead.
Luke_Stutters:
still have that view where you can look at the HDR elements in 3D? Do you remember that one?
John_Epperson:
No.
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
Luke_Stutters:
3D file system, yeah
Charles Max_Wood:
That was high tech.
John_Epperson:
Yeah, it's a good thing it wasn't real, because I don't want to make that. Yet. I mean, maybe tomorrow. Okay, there's a lot of things that I would like to make. I just don't want to make it with the tools that I have today. That seems terrible.
Charles Max_Wood:
flyover interface for your iPhone.
John_Epperson:
Hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
Well, you can, like I said, there's FreeJS, you can do it. It's just really painful to do because you have to kind
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
Luke_Stutters:
of go through JavaScript to do it. So the
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
whole kind of, you know, server-side rendering kind of thing largely falls apart. I had a big win at work converting a colleague to the Rails 7 side. to hot wear and stimulus and we replaced like hundreds of lines of react code with like a stimulus controller and oh, it was wonderful, you know, and When you have an experience like that say we're gonna take all of this stuff. We're gonna throw it out We're gonna do this that feels like the future It feels like the future where you have a whole load of stuff that was really hard before Just leave this way you go, so that those the technology that'll win, right? going through yours. Say again? Ha ha ha!
Charles Max_Wood:
Dave wants to make as many people cry as possible.
John_Epperson:
So speaking about Web3,
Luke_Stutters:
free from
John_Epperson:
so
Luke_Stutters:
React.
John_Epperson:
let's ask the same
Charles Max_Wood:
Web3
John_Epperson:
question about
Charles Max_Wood:
Act
John_Epperson:
Web3. Yeah, like, so how would Ruby, for example, like work with Web3? And to be honest, like, I think one aspect of it that would matter would be like the database thing, like Luke was mentioning, like, to be honest, like I think that as people create, you know, One of them will be solid enough that someone will create an integration for it, and the other that we can use as a database
Charles Max_Wood:
Hm.
John_Epperson:
backend. Then the other aspect of it that I think will matter for us is going to be servers. I don't think that Web3 servers are really even remotely close to being ready. I'm not sure how to answer that once. But you just would wait till the server technology came out and then use that instead of whatever your current hosting is.
Charles Max_Wood:
..
John_Epperson:
Yep.
Luke_Stutters:
Hmm
John_Epperson:
Yep.
Charles Max_Wood:
Cough
John_Epperson:
I think you're hitting my point is I don't think that web applications like Rails applications, right? Are really gonna make web three. I think that websites quote unquote on web three are just gonna be static web pages for the most part. And if you go to the application side, I think they're gonna probably look like Chia and whatever the other first one that was on the Ethereum chain was or whatever, the cats one or whatever, right? I think they're probably all gonna look like that. you have to write basically another blockchain, so to speak, that's like an app blockchain, right? And so you're piggybacking on Ethereum or something that allows you to run functions basically on other people's computers. And that's your app, right? I think those apps will exist potentially. And I think that static page apps, right? Because then you could have a general client that reads a blockchain, right? right, and then display it could work. But I don't see Rails applications really existing on the blockchain itself.
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
John_Epperson:
That's my sense of things.
Charles Max_Wood:
The way that I kind of envision it, at least for the most part, is yeah, essentially what you're saying where, you know, you get an update off the blockchain, right, because you're talking to the other nodes. You apply the changes in the ledger to your own database, your own Web2 database, and then you effectively provide a Web2 client, right, where then you have the interactions and then whatever transactions you have to write to the blockchain. and put it back on.
John_Epperson:
Yeah,
Charles Max_Wood:
And so...
John_Epperson:
I mean, you would definitely have to make use of, you know, sort of the sidekick, right? Would be, your
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
John_Epperson:
sidekick queue would become the blockchain and you really wouldn't be able to do instant puts or instant posts, right? They
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
John_Epperson:
would have to become a job sort of on the blockchain, which would eventually change the site.
Charles Max_Wood:
Right. Or a block of data where you have a very simple understanding that you're just working off the ledger. Yeah. Anyway, we've been going for about 55 minutes. Is there anything else that anyone has a burning desire to bring up on this before we do picks?
Luke_Stutters:
Yeah, there's one more thing. So at the moment, I kind of pay for hosting. Okay, we're talking about decentralization. I pay a particular company for hosting, right? I'm sure you do. And there exist various systems out there like Terraform, which look to
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
kind of make it easier to move your hosting around. I do think that there's a strong possibility in the near future that that will be abstracted using a technology like Docker containers. so that you will be able to kind of containerize your app and then it will kind of go out there and Be hosted wherever
Charles Max_Wood:
Hmm.
Luke_Stutters:
and you won't really know where it is. I can see that being kind of viable and instead of the kind of ports being basically static within you know, how you set up a docker ports those then are more dynamic and The payment again is more dynamic. I can see that coming down in the medium term as like a tangible way that this could become a reality.
Charles Max_Wood:
That'd be interesting because then there's nothing that forces you into... sort of the infrastructure that we're used to. And I could then see if you're going to Dockerize and blockchainize your application, then I could actually conceivably run a local copy, right? And so I could have some app that effectively, when I pull up the web page, it launches my app, it launches the web page locally on its own, you know, container locally. pulls the data off of the ledger or something like that. I don't know exactly where that goes, but there are interesting possibilities with it.
John_Epperson:
that is super interesting. I think the only problem that I see with that, which is totally solvable, right, is that I can't think of any blockchains that can hold like layer sized chunks of data, right?
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
John_Epperson:
So it would be, you would need a blockchain that can hold a block of data that's gigabytes large or whatever. And I don't think there's any blockchains right now that hold that much in one block, but I'm sure that's solvable, so.
Dave_Kimura:
See
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah,
Dave_Kimura:
ya!
Charles Max_Wood:
or the parts that it has to hold are
John_Epperson:
Maybe.
Charles Max_Wood:
only the parts that are different, right? So then it's not gigabyte sizes, it's megabyte sizes or smaller.
John_Epperson:
Well, I have
Dave_Kimura:
Yeah.
John_Epperson:
some large layers in some of my containers or whatever that are
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
John_Epperson:
like mini gigs large, but yeah, so it would have to be a large size.
Charles Max_Wood:
Anyway. Alright, well let's
John_Epperson:
That's
Charles Max_Wood:
do
John_Epperson:
actually
Charles Max_Wood:
picks.
John_Epperson:
a really good thought. I didn't actually... So, sorry, I want to
Charles Max_Wood:
No,
John_Epperson:
jump
Charles Max_Wood:
go ahead.
John_Epperson:
onto it. Luke said really quick, I actually hadn't really thought of it that way. But yeah, if we create a browser that pulls container layers, right? Or some sort of equivalent kind of idea, off of a blockchain and then sort of spins it up locally and runs it, you could do more complex stuff.
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
John_Epperson:
All right, I'm done.
Charles Max_Wood:
All good. All right. Let's do picks. John, you were just talking. Keep talking. What are your picks?
John_Epperson:
Okay, so I pulled up Ruby Weekly today, and I was pleasantly surprised to find in it something that I actually use. And I could have sworn that I had this, I found it. Okay, had this tab open, because I was like, I'm gonna pick this today. So in Ruby Weekly, there was a thing on gem compare or whatever, which is this thing that allows you to kind of like use, you're basically using gem Yeah, you're using Ruby's gems or whatever to compare the diff between the old version of the gem and the new version of a gem. And I am in the middle of an upgrade project right now, and it's totally very useful to me. I think it's super awesome, and so I wanted to give it a plus one sort of. So that's really awesome, and y'all should check that out. So that's useful. So that's my one pick. Actually, hold on. Sorry, I just left that, and I need to keep it open. For my second pick, I have been eating a lot of chips and salsa lately and I don't live in Texas anymore and so I feel like getting good salsa is really hard. I live out in North Carolina and everyone just seems to like these sweet and sugary salsas and I'm like, I don't want any of that. I'm sure that the salsas that I've eaten have tons of sugar in them because I live in America and literally everything
Charles Max_Wood:
Ha
John_Epperson:
has
Charles Max_Wood:
ha.
John_Epperson:
tons of sugar in it. It doesn't, that's not like the main profile, the flavor, right? Like, so the salsas that I like, you know, like tastes like tomatoes and peppers and things like that, right? So, and they just probably have, you know, sweeteners in there and I just don't pay attention. But anyway, so I've been doing a lot of trying to find good salsas lately because they took away my really, really good salsa. And anyway, I found, I found one that I can like eat or whatever. And so I was just like, oh, let's talk about this. So I've just been doing like a lot of her des, which is like, whatever, that's what I found. So this is her des salsa. It's just better than the other terrible ones out there. That's what I got. So it's a great,
Charles Max_Wood:
to-
John_Epperson:
it's a great, amazing review.
Charles Max_Wood:
No, it's good stuff. Their salsa verde is my favorite.
John_Epperson:
Yeah, I actually got their salsa verde and I actually enjoyed it. So yeah, but mostly I've just been eating their house salsa.
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep.
John_Epperson:
just like salsa, cassetta or something like that. Good.
Charles Max_Wood:
Cool. Luke, what are your picks?
Luke_Stutters:
I've got boring pics after your delicious pics. So I've been watching this talk from RailsCore22 from Vladimir Dementyev, which is called the pitfalls of real timefication. And this is a kind of drill down into using the Hotwire Wirestyle stuff in Rails and kind of real life issues you get when you try to build. He takes a chat app, but I'm hitting a lot of the same issues in my projects and I'll be honest with you, it's not a great talk, alright? It's not particularly entertaining or, you know, but I'm picking it because the actual things he discussed in it are really, really great and I wish I'd watched it when I was building my little kind of real time front end thing. And my second pick, which I'm sure people picked before, is this book from Pragmatic Programmers called Agile Web Development Rail 7. I had a new team member who's from more kind of React JavaScript background. And I said, look, come and have a look at the stuff in Rails 7. Have come out and look at the stimulus stack. Come and have a look at what you can do without having an enormous kind of single page app and have really positive feedback from him about this book and the approach. So that's my second pick is the Agile Web Development Rails 7 book. And if anyone knows like a better kind of Rails 7 book, I'd be very grateful to hear about it.
Charles Max_Wood:
Cool. Dave, what are your picks?
Dave_Kimura:
So I have two picks. One is the Logitech MX Mechanical Keyboard. I recently picked one up and I really have been enjoying it. I got the clicky version and I really like it. It's pretty cool.
Charles Max_Wood:
Is that the official name or is it just loud?
Dave_Kimura:
It's the official name
Charles Max_Wood:
Okay.
Dave_Kimura:
clicky. They have clicky, tactile and linear. I think. Yeah.
Charles Max_Wood:
Okay.
Dave_Kimura:
So
John_Epperson:
Did
Dave_Kimura:
it's
John_Epperson:
it
Dave_Kimura:
basically.
John_Epperson:
say what?
Dave_Kimura:
What's that?
John_Epperson:
Did it say what the keys were?
Dave_Kimura:
So clicky, I think, is the MX Blues. And then the tactile quiet are Browns. And
John_Epperson:
Okay.
Dave_Kimura:
linear is the Reds, I think. So they're pretty cool.
John_Epperson:
Okay.
Dave_Kimura:
It's pretty cool. And then the second pick, I'm going to kind of take one of Chuck's. Kind of pick things here is a board game called Beat the Parents. I got it and played it with my kids. Essentially, you basically, it's a trivia game. challenge game that you get to play with the kids and it's parents versus kids. Kids have trivia questions, you know, aged at the kids. Parents have parent related trivia questions and the deal is you have to put something up for stake. So we played and I said that the kids can have two scoops of ice cream for dessert and they put up that they won't have any ice cream for dessert. So we scoots of ice cream but it's kind of fun.
Charles Max_Wood:
Nice. Looks like it's two to six players, 30 minute playtime. BoardGameGeek waits it at 1.2, which is a good kid game. All right, I'm going to throw out some picks. Or did you have something else?
Dave_Kimura:
No, I think that's it. I did play Dice Forge the other day with the kids, and they really enjoyed it too. So thanks for that suggestion.
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah. Yeah, I've enjoyed that game quite a bit. I'm gonna throw out another game pick. This one's called Antidote. And it starts out, you pull out one of the cards with an X on it, those are the poisons. And then you shuffle the rest of the poisons and syringes together so everybody gets two cards. And then you shuffle the antidotes together and you deal them out. They're all different colors and shapes. And what you do is you take turns deciding what's going to happen. So you can trade somebody an X card, or you can trade somebody any card, or you can have everybody pass a card to the left or to the right, or you can have everybody pass a card they know is not useful to the left or the right. Right? And then, or you can have them discard a card. And every time you discard a card, you discard the card. face up and unless it's a poison card or a syringe in which case you just card it face down and then somebody can use a syringe to grab it and put it in their hand. But effectively what you're trying to do is you're trying to have the highest numbered card of the correct antidote at the end of the game when everybody's down to one card. So anyway it's a lot of fun. It plays in about 30 minutes. seven players and board game geek weighted it at 1.6. So, you know, your pre-teens can play it and figure it out. You know, but you start watching, okay, somebody put down three, you know, blue poisons in their own beaker, so I'm gonna get rid of mine too. Or when I started, I started with two X cards. And so if I wind up trading X cards, trade this one so nobody has the information that they absolutely know that it's a card they can get rid of. Then they have to decide at the end of the game between what's actually not in anybody's hand and the one that I've kept in my hand the whole time until I discarded it at the end of the game. So anyway, it's stuff like that. You start playing some of those strategies, but it was fun. I played it with a couple buddies of mine. one of the other guys, 13 year old sons, and everybody played it just fine. It wasn't beyond them at all. So anyway, I'm gonna pick that. And then just wanna let folks know, I think we're a couple weeks out. We might just be one week out, I can't remember, on this show, but Rails Remote Conf website's up. DHH has confirmed for Monday at 8.30 on September 26th. If you want to speak, just go to the website, click on CFP. If you want to attend, then go ahead and buy one of the tickets. The way that we're structuring it is the first four days are talks, and then the last day is a workshop, and you can buy two days, which is the first two days, four days, which is all the talks, or you can get everything including the workshops. If you wanna do a workshop, let me know too, because I'm actually, the upgrade price on that ticket I'm splitting with the workshop instructors, so. Anyway, as we get more people involved in that, I'll let you all know. But that's what we're doing. And then the next conferences after that are JavaScript, Angular, and Top End Dev Summit, or Top End Devs Remote Conference, which is careers. It's how to level up and get a better job and stuff like that. So anyway, those are the things that I am working on. And then, yeah, I mentioned this. I've been listening to Ready Player One again. And I really enjoyed that book. It's one of my favorites. And so I'm going to pick that.
Luke_Stutters:
Is the book different from the movie?
Charles Max_Wood:
Yes. Yeah, the premise is the same, right, where they're doing the hunt for the Easter egg. They changed a few things in the movie that bother me. But I have to say it's a good movie. Ready Player 2. So Ernest Cline wrote a sequel to Ready Player 1. Don't bother. So, yeah,
Luke_Stutters:
Yeah.
Charles Max_Wood:
anyway. Yeah, that's all I have to say about that. It was a terrible book. But already Player One's awesome. So, anyway, those are my picks. We'll go ahead and wrap it up here. This was a fun chat, guys.
John_Epperson:
Yeah.
Charles Max_Wood:
Alright folks, till next time, Max out.